“Death of General Wolfe,” in which the British and French soldiers are represented in very primitive costumes, was considered as a falling-off from his great style of art. His fondness for Greek costume was assigned by his admirers as the cause of his reluctance to paint portraits. His failure to go on with a portrait of Burke which he had begun caused a misunderstanding with his early patron. The difference between them is said to have been widened by Burke’s growing intimacy with Sir Joshua Reynolds, and by Barry’s feeling some little jealousy of the fame and fortune of his rival “in a humbler walk of the art.” About the same time he painted a pair of classical subjects, Mercury inventing the lyre, and Narcissus looking at himself in the water, the last suggested to him by Burke. He also painted a historical picture of Chiron and Achilles, and another of the story of Stratonice, for which last the duke of Richmond gave him a hundred guineas. In 1773 it was proposed to decorate the interior of St Paul’s with historical and sacred subjects; but the plan fell to the ground, from not meeting with the concurrence of the bishop of London and the archbishop of Canterbury. Barry was much mortified at the failure, for he had in anticipation fixed upon the subject he intended to paint—the rejection of Christ by the Jews when Pilate proposes his release. In 1773 he published An Inquiry into the real and imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of the Arts in England, vindicating the capacity of the English for the fine arts and tracing their slow progress hitherto to the Reformation, to political and civil dissensions, and lastly to the general direction of the public mind to mechanics, manufactures and commerce. In 1774 a proposal was made through Valentine Green to Reynolds, West, Cipriani, Barry, and other artists to ornament the great room of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in the Adelphi with historical and allegorical paintings. This proposal was at the time rejected by the artists themselves; but in 1777 Barry made an offer to paint the whole on condition of being allowed the choice of his subjects, and being paid by the society the expenses of canvas, paints and models. His offer was accepted, and he finished the series of pictures at the end of seven years to the entire satisfaction of the members of the society, who granted him two exhibitions, and at different periods voted him 50 guineas, their gold medal and 200 guineas. Of the six paintings making up the series, only one, that of the Olympic Games, shows any artistic power.
Soon after his return from the continent Barry had been chosen a member of the Royal Academy; and in 1782 he was appointed professor of painting in the room of Mr Penny with a salary of £30 a year. Among other things, he insisted on the necessity of purchasing a collection of pictures by the best masters as models for the students, and proposed several of those in the Orleans collection. This recommendation was not relished, and in 1799 Barry was expelled from the academy, soon after the appearance of his Letter to the Dilettanti Society, a very amusing but eccentric publication, full of enthusiasm for his art and at the same time of contempt for the living professors of it. After the loss of his salary, a subscription was set on foot by the earl of Buchan to relieve him from his difficulties, and to settle him in a larger house to finish his picture of Pandora. The subscription amounted to £1000, with which an annuity was bought, but on the 6th of February 1806 he was seized with illness and died on the 22nd of the same month. On the 14th of March his remains were interred in St Paul’s.
As an artist, Barry was more distinguished for the strength of his conceptions, and for his resolute and persistent determination to apply himself only to great subjects, than for his skill in designing or for beauty in his colouring. His drawing is rarely good, his colouring frequently wretched. He was extremely impulsive and unequal; sometimes morose, sometimes sociable and urbane; jealous of his contemporaries, and yet capable of pronouncing a splendid eulogy on Reynolds.
BARRY, SIR REDMOND (1813–1880), British colonial judge, son of Major-General H. G. Barry, of Ballyclough, Co. Cork, was educated at a military school in Kent, and at Trinity College, Dublin, and was called to the Irish bar in 1838. He emigrated to Australia, and after a short stay at Sydney went to Melbourne, with which city he was ever afterwards closely identified. After practising his profession for some years, he became commissioner of the court of requests, and after the creation in 1851 of the colony of Victoria, out of the Port Phillip district of New South Wales, was the first solicitor-general with a seat in the legislative and executive councils. Subsequently he held the offices of judge of the Supreme Court, acting chief-justice and administrator of the government. He represented Victoria at the London International Exhibition of 1862 and at the Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876. He was knighted in 1860 and was created K.C.M.G. in 1877. Sir Redmond Barry was the first person in Victoria to take an interest in higher education, and induced the local government to expend large sums of money upon that object. He was the founder of the university of Melbourne (1853), of which he was the first chancellor, was president of the Melbourne public library (1854), national gallery and museum, and was one of the first to foster the volunteer movement in Australia. To his exertions is due the prosperity of the two institutions with which his memory is identified.
BARRY, SPRANGER (1719–1777), British actor, was born in Dublin on the 23rd of November 1719, the son of a silversmith, to whose business he was brought up. His first appearance on the stage was at the Smock Alley theatre on the 5th of February 1744, and his engagement at once increased its prosperity. His first London appearance was made in 1746 as Othello at Drury Lane. Here his talents were speedily recognized, and in Hamlet and Macbeth he alternated with Garrick, arousing the latter’s jealousy by his success as Romeo. This resulted in his leaving Drury Lane for Covent Garden in 1750, accompanied by Mrs Cibber, his Juliet. Both houses now at once put on Romeo and Juliet for a series of rival performances, and Barry’s impersonation was preferred by the critics to Garrick’s. In 1758 Barry built the Crow Street theatre, Dublin, and later a new theatre in Cork, but he was not successful as a manager and returned to London to play at the Haymarket, then under the management of Foote. As his second wife, he married in 1768 the actress Mrs Dancer (1734–1801), and he and Mrs Barry played under Garrick’s management, Barry appearing in 1767, after ten years’ absence from the stage, in Othello, his greatest part. In 1774 they both moved to Covent Garden, where Barry remained until his death on the 10th of January 1777. He was a singularly handsome man, with the advantage of height which Garrick lacked.
His second wife, Ann Street Barry, was born in Bath in 1734, the daughter of an apothecary. Early in life she married an actor of the name of Dancer, and it was as Mrs Dancer that she made her first recorded appearance in 1758 as Cordelia to Spranger Barry’s Lear at the Crow Street theatre. During the next nine years she played all the leading tragic parts, but without any great success, and it was not until she came to Drury Lane with Barry that her reputation advanced to the high point at which it afterwards stood. After his death, she remained at Covent Garden and married a man much younger than herself, named Crawford, being first billed as Mrs Crawford in 1778. Her last appearance is said to have been as Lady Randolph in Douglas at Covent Garden in 1798. This part, and that of Desdemona, were among her great impersonations; in both she was considered by some critics superior to Mrs Siddons, who expressed her fear of her in one of her letters. She died on the 29th of November 1801 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
BARRY, an urban district and seaport of Glamorganshire, Wales, on the Bristol Channel, 153 m. by rail from London and 8 m. S.W. from Cardiff. Its station is a terminus on the Barry railway, which starts at Hafod in the Rhondda Valley, where it joins the Taff Vale railway, having also junctions with the same line for Aberdare and Merthyr at Treforest, and for Cardiff and Penarth at Cogan, and with the Great Western main line at Peterstone and St Fagans. A branch from the main line at Tyn-y-caeau connects with the Rhymney railway, the London & North-Western railway, and the Brecon & Merthyr railway. The Vale of Glamorgan railway (which is worked by
