James Barry's Murals at the Royal Society of Arts

This is a great book. It does more than illuminate the past; it shines a light on our present way of thinking, and not just about culture. At the very least, anyone with an eye will want to look at it - it's a beautiful object. The illustrations will surprise many into wondering why it is they are seeing Cork-born James Barry's masterpieces for the first time. Part of the explanation is practical: the works are in the Great Room of the Royal Society of Arts in London and not easily accessible to the public. An increased demand for access, though it might create a problem for the RSA, would be a sign that William L Pressly's book has had an influence beyond the academy. It is impossible to describe in this space the complexity of the paintings. Even Pressly, with 396 pages at his disposal, leaves some doors half-opened. More remains to be said, for instance, about Barry's portrait of his patron and fellow Corkman Edmund Burke, a relationship that became tragic as Barry moved to the radical left. ~Brian Lynch, The Irish Times

Pressly's elucidation of Barry's intentions is absolutely convincing and magisterial. Pressly's erudition in locating Barry's literary and artistic sources is unfailing, and he has a profound understanding of the artist's creative processes. Perhaps it is this unswerving but, in these times, unfashionable commitment to "artistic intention" that explains the book's initial, scarcely credible vicissitudes at the hands of publishers; fortunately, on sight of the text the university press in Barry's home town had no qualms, and they are to be warmly congratulated on having lavished on the volume the production values that it fully deserves. Amid so much merely fashionable writing, this is proper art history, living in and recovering the past, enriching our understanding of the way artists thought in a way that very few recent books on 18th-century British art can claim to have done. ~Alex Kidson, The Art Newspaper

Pressly's beautifully designed and illustrated monograph is an important book for a specialized audience. Pressly (Univ. of Maryland) is the foremost authority on this late-18th-century British history painter, and Barry's mural "A Series of Pictures on Human Culture" is the artist's most significant work. Barry conceived his program, undertaken between 1777 and 1784, as a series of six paintings that would cover the four walls of the Society's Great Room on Adelphi Street in London. Three of the panels are devoted to classical life ("Orpheus," "A Grecian Harvest Home," and "Crowning the Victors at Olympus"), two focus on "aspects of contemporary England" ("The Modern World" and "The Distribution of Premiums in the Society of Arts"), and the sixth and largest is the series's culmination ("Elysium and Tartarus or the State of Final Retribution"). Altogether the panels form a complex iconographic program in which the painter credits classical civilization and Christianity as the underpinnings of Great Britain's modern mercantile culture. It was the painter's expectation that the mural would "promote public welfare and virtue," thereby creating, according to Pressly, a "new public art." Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate and research collections. ~CHOICE-S. Webster, emerita, Lehman College and the