A subversive in the Royal Society

ART: BRIAN LYNCHreviews James Barry 1741-1806: History PainterEdited by Tom Dunne and William L Pressly, Ashgate, 268pp, £60

HIDDEN IN the heart of Protestant England’s official image of itself there is a subversive Roman Catholic message, which was planted there deliberately by an Irish republican. Anyone interested in the art and history of these islands will want to consider this claim.

The image is James Barry's enormous painting Crowning the Victors at Olympia(12.8m/42ft long), in the Great Room of the Royal Society of Arts in London. The other three walls of the room are also by Barry – the whole enterprise, executed between 1777 and 1784, was painted for no fee. The Olympia's concealed messages are convincingly decoded by William Pressly, whose 1981 biography helped rescue the Cork-born artist from the utter neglect into which he had fallen.

This fascinating collection of papers, presented at a conference hosted by the Crawford Arts Gallery and the Royal Society of Arts in 2006, further advances the cause of Barry as Britain’s greatest history painter. The estimation is not shared universally. Simon Schama, for example, described the Great Room as a “lamentable mishmash of allegory, history and fluvial landscape that topples over into unintended comedy”. Granted that Barry’s “grand, chaste, and severe style” sits awkwardly in the anti-heroic modern eye and, more tellingly, that his seriousness is an irony-free zone, the Schama view is, nonetheless, aesthetically blinkered. It is certainly at odds with the opinion of William Blake, who said of his colleague’s expulsion from the Royal Society that the “really industrious, virtuous and independent Barry has been driven out to make room for a pack of Idle Sycophants with whitlows on their fingers”.

The contemporary reader has to engage in considerable mental acrobatics to allow for the fact that Barry could ally himself to such red-hot radicals as Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft and Henry Fuseli (“painter in ordinary to the devil”) and at the same time be the protegé of Edmund Burke (who subsidised his five-year Grand Tour). Amongst many other bewilderments are Barry’s republican hatred of the French revolution, his patriotic support for the Act of Union, and his vehemently Catholic attack on the “odious confederacy of Jesuits and Ultramontane cardinals”.

Add to this salmagundi of apparent paradoxes a famously abrupt manner, a degree of paranoia and a willingness to call a spade a bloody shovel, it is hardly any wonder that Barry was regarded in his day rather as another Corkman, Roy Keane, is regarded in ours. Keane, though, is unlikely to be as knowledgeable about classical sport as Barry was: in the Olympiapainting he displays a great deal of arcane information about athletics, including a hint (identified by Peter Murray, the outstanding director of the Crawford Gallery) that one of the figures may be a transvestite trying to sneak into the all-male Olympic stadium.

More significantly, Pressly deciphers the painting as an anti-Protestant manifesto in which the classical world “forms a foundation for Christianity with the Roman Catholic Church . . . embodying the finest aspects of that tradition”. Had the Society understood that their premises were being used for such propaganda, the murals would have been torn down. But now, 200 years after Barry created his masterpiece, and thanks to Pressly’s scholarship, its message is being heard for the first time.

There are other revelations here of a more personal kind. Michael Phillips, for example, provides a moving account of a visit to Barry by the son of John Philpot Curran. The dying painter’s tumbledown house, off Regent Street, was constantly attacked by vandals, and in a broken window, protected by one of his own pictures, Barry had placed a pathetic notice offering a reward for the arrest of the offenders.

There are 14 contributors to this book and the standard of the essays is high. But it would be graceless not to single out Tom Dunne, a long-time champion of the artist, who writes absorbingly of the "Moral Art" of history painting. I was much taken by Daniel Guernsey's investigation of the influence on Barry of Bossuet and Joseph de Maistre – Isaiah Berlin would have found this essay intriguing. Martin Myrone, the author of a remarkable book, Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art 1750-1810, contributes a sharp analysis of Barry's espousal of the Sublime and suggests it was "predicated upon the ultimately violent presumption of the essential reality of gender".

Actually, whatever about gender, Barry was a curiously sexless artist, though his life-size double nude of Adam and Eve in our National Gallery is an image of sexual anxiety almost as affecting as it is absurd.

THE FINAL PAPER, BY DAVID ALLAN, illustrates how the Great Room has changed over the years – Irish Timesreaders can see how it looks now by viewing a 360-degree video of it on the Royal Society's website. Apart from the deplorable furniture and the fact that the room itself could do with being restored to its original state, Barry's paintings are coated in a thick layer of yellow varnish that should be removed. In the spirit of the Belfast Agreement, our Government might consider offering to subsidise the restoration, perhaps in return for the Great Room being made more accessible to the general public. As it is, hardly anyone in Ireland, or elsewhere for that matter, knows that lodged permanently in the heart of London is one of the greatest treasures of the Irish imagination.

Brian Lynch is researching a book on Barry’s contemporary, the Italian artist Vincenzo Valdré, who painted the ceiling of St Patricks Hall in Dublin Castle