cleared 503l. 2s. Barry also obtained profit from the engravings of these works, which he executed in a bold but unrefined manner. For these the price was six guineas a set. He printed and sold them himself. It is satisfactory to be able to add that his connection with the Society of Arts was unmarked by any of those quarrels which embittered his life. ‘The general tenour of this society's conduct in the carrying on of that work,’ he says in his ‘Letter to the Dilettanti Society,’ ‘has been great, exemplary, and really worthy the best age of civilised society.’ A full account of the pictures, which have been several times cleaned, is given in a pamphlet by H. Trueman Wood, secretary to the Society of Arts (1880). The society also possesses the plates of many etchings by Barry, including copies from the six pictures, with variations.
Barry's career as an artist practically ended with the completion of this great work. In continuation of it he offered to complete two pictures or designs, ‘George III delivering the Patents to the Judges of their Offices for life’ and ‘The Queen patronising Education at Windsor.’ He withdrew the offer when an objection was made to replacing the portraits previously occupying the intended spaces; and the only other picture on which he appears to have been engaged during the remainder of his life was ‘Pandora, or the Heathen Eve,’ an enormous and, according to report, a very unsuccessful work, which remained unfinished at his death.
In 1782 Barry was appointed professor of painting to the Royal Academy, an honour which proved disastrous to him. His enthusiasm for historic art was combined with a contempt for all those who followed what he deemed the lower branches of the profession, especially those who made a large profit, like Sir Joshua Reynolds, out of portrait painting. This feeling, already strongly expressed in his ‘Inquiry into the Real and Imaginary Obstructions,’ &c., of 1775, grew into something like a mania, and was stimulated by some observations of the president on his delay in preparing his lectures—a delay, it may be observed, pardonable on account of the great demands then made on his time and thought by his great work at the Society of Arts. ‘If,’ Barry is said to have retorted, clenching his fist at Sir Joshua, ‘I had no more to do in the course of my lectures than produce such poor mistaken stuff as your discourses, I should soon have them ready for reading.’ The pamphlet which Barry published in 1783 to explain his pictures in the Adelphi contained extravagant praise of his own work and sarcastic strictures on Sir Joshua and others; and when he began his lectures, which was in March 1784, he made them vehicles of invective against his brother academicians. So convinced did he become of the malignity of his enemies, that when he lost a sum of money which he had saved he did not hesitate to insinuate ‘that this robbery was not committed by mere thieves, but by some limbs of a motley, shameless combination, some of whom passed for my friends;’ and he told Southey that if he went out in the evening the academicians would waylay and murder him.
The ill-feeling between Sir Joshua and Barry did not, however, last for ever. When Reynolds quarrelled with the Academy, Barry took his part with vehemence, and ‘for several years,’ says Fryer, ‘before Sir Joshua's death this hostility had ceased.’ When this took place (1792), Barry came to the Academy and pronounced a glowing eulogium upon Reynolds as a man and an artist. But his war with the Academy went on, and his anger culminated in a letter to the Dilettanti Society, in which he loaded the academicians with accusations and insults. This was in 1799, and the Academy acted hastily. They caused charges of various kinds to be drawn up against Barry, and, without giving him any opportunity for defence, not only deprived him of his professor's chair, but expelled him from the Academy. Moreover, they obtained the sanction of the king to their proceedings. In vain Barry republished his letter, with an appendix, ‘respecting the matters lately agitated between the Academy and the professor of painting.’ Equally in vain he appealed to the king by a letter and petition, which were published in the ‘Morning Herald’ 3 Dec. 1799. His career was over.
He was now fifty-eight years of age, and few details are recorded of the last seven or eight years of his life. He had long lived a solitary life in Castle Street, Oxford Street, without a servant of any kind or a decent bed. His house was ruinous, and he was negligent in person and dress. At one time, after a severe illness, he is said by Southey to have ‘cast his slough,’ to have ‘appeared decently dressed, in his own grey hair, and mixed in such society as he liked.’ But in 1799 many of his old friends had passed away. Dr. Brocklesby, who introduced him to Dr. Johnson's Club at the Essex Head, was dead, and Dr. Johnson too. Burke also, whose friendship, though cooled, never seems to have failed, was dead also; and musing over his picture of ‘Pandora’ and the great series of designs on the ‘Progress of Theo-
