which should serve at once as his own monument, and as a vindication of bis country against the aspersions of metaphysical drivellers (Winckelman and others), who had asserted its utter incapacity for the historical branch of the fine arts.—A design was however formed of decorating St. Paul's Cathedral, with the works of our most eminent painters and sculptors, and Barry was to have been employed on the subject of, "The Jews rejecting Christ when Pilate entreats his release;" but the scheme was discouraged, and its probable success can now be only a subject of speculation.
The year after his return, he exhibited his picture of Adam and Eve, and in the year following, his Venus Anadyomene; this picture is unquestionably, in all that relates to form and character, an exquisite personification of female grace and beauty. In 1775, he published an Inquiry into the real and imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of Arts in England; this work is equally valuable for its research, its acuteness, and its patriotism but Barry hastened to the practical proof, that neither fog nor frost can repress the aspirations of genius. He proposed to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, to paint gratuitously, a series of pictures, allegorically illustrating the culture and progress of human knowledge, which now decorate the great room of the Society; he persisted in this great work amidst poverty and privation[1], and completed it in seven years. Whatever may be its deficiencies in colour and execution, it exhibits a mastery of design, a grasp of thought, and a sublimity of conception; with such an appropriation of those powers to the purposes of ethical utility, as secures to the Author a triple wreath of immortality as an artist, a philanthropist, and a philosopher. In a country like England, when an individual was found who had devoted himself to a protracted martyrdom, in an attempt to add the last gem to her diadem, to crown her pre-eminence in literature and
- ↑ Subsisting the greater part of the time on bread and apples.
