An early Irish protest against slavery

James Barry looked to allegory to embody an idea, and to expose a system of iniquity in a ground-breaking way, writes Luke Gibbons

In 1783, the Irish painter James Barry unveiled a monumental series of paintings, The Progress of Human Culture, at the Royal Society of Arts in London. Barry was no stranger to ambition, and his massive pictures charted the history of human civilisation but one left spectators at a loss for words - or rather, kind words. This was the fourth in the series, Commerce, or the Triumph of the Thames, perhaps the earliest representation of the abolitionist campaign against slavery on canvas.

Barry's Commerce portrayed the Thames in allegorical form as a river god, being swept along by a group of sea nymphs and tritons carrying products of British manufacture to distant regions of the globe. In front of the procession are four figures, representing Europe, Asia, Africa and America, furnishing their goods to meet the march of progress. These are all mythic figures, but in a major breach of contemporary taste, Barry also depicted the real-life personages of Sir Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh and Captain Cook wading in the sea alongside their fanciful counterparts.

Such famous historical figures had at least the merit of being seafarers, but it was the presence of the musician, Charles Burney, complete with musical instrument, that stretched poetic licence to its limit. "Dr Burney is not only swimming in his clothes," wrote Horace Walpole sarcastically, "but playing on a harpsichord, a new kind of water-music."

Simon Schama is not alone among present-day critics in his uncharitable conclusion that Barry's painting "is a lamentable mishmash of allegory, history, and fluvial landscape that topples over into unintended comedy".

Yet there is one notable exception to the absurd spectacle of bodies floating in the sea: that of a black slave, barely getting a look-in in the original painting but acquiring greater poignancy in the more heightened, engraved versions. As so often in Western art or literature, the presence of one black face is enough to reconfigure an entire work, or to throw into question everything around it.

There is a good reason why the African is struggling in the sea. In 1783 the horrors of slavery were brought home to the British public with the shocking revelation that 132 slaves were thrown overboard the slave ship Zong on its passage to America. The captain claimed a navigational error left the ship short of provisions, but the real reason turned out to be the collection of insurance.

As several historians have attested, the public outcry over this atrocity proved a turning point in perceptions of the slave trade, leading to Granville Sharpe's initiatives in founding of the first abolitionist societies. In a gloss written 10 years later on the first engraving of Commerce, Barry noted that the inclusion of the slave in his original painting struck a prophetic note, as it was executed before the rise of the abolition movement: "God be praised for it, the great and general attention that has been so recently turned to the African part of our trade, shews that this limb of my subject was not ill hit off, where the poor African himself, which is the commodity we have hitherto trafficked for, was represented manacled with a halter about his neck, throwing his eyes to heaven for relief."

While all the other figures are either overt personifications, or named historical figures, the slave inhabits a no-man's land between allegory and actuality. He is not named, and is thus a personification of sorts: yet his situation has a cruel, factual basis, as his body is literally immersed in the deadly backwash of the slave trade.

This ambiguity is caught in Barry's extended description of the figure in the engraving, for while the slave's capacity for physical suffering as an individual is noted, so also is his symbolic power to point beyond himself to an indictment of the slave trade in general. In Barry's own words: "The supplicating action of the poor negro slave, or more properly of enslaved Africa, the cord around his neck, the tear on his cheek, the iron manacles, and attached heavy chain on his wrists, with his hands clasped out and stretched for mercy, denote the agonies of his soul, and the feelings of the artist thus expressed, before the Abolition of Slavery became the subject of public investigation."

Mere sympathy for an individual might have elicited pity, but Barry looked to allegory to embody an idea, and to expose a wider system of iniquity. On this view, art played a key civic role in the public sphere, raising sentimental responses to the higher plane of justice and freedom. Painting did not just appeal to the eye: it also provided an incentive for action.

In the later versions of the picture, the title Commerce was dropped, as if the expansion of trade could no longer be equated with progress. Adam Smith and others had looked to free markets as the solution to slavery, but Barry's painting raised the possibility that commerce was implicated in slavery and colonialism from the outset.

At a forthcoming conference in Drumcondra, Barry's early protest will be acknowledged among other notable Irish contributions to the end of slavery. The painter's outspoken views did not endear him to the powers that be, however, in his known lifetime. In 1799, he was ignominiously expelled from the Royal Academy for unruly behaviour, peddling French republican ideas and consorting with the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Abolition 1807-2007 is at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, Feb 9-10