18世紀アイルランド人画家ジェイムズ・バリーによる小品肖像画《ニュージェント博士像》とそこからの発展的逸脱 : パトロン・大陸遊学・アカデミー

This paper aims to clarify the talents and tastes of James Barry, R. A. (1741-1806), a Corkborn Irish Catholic “forgotten” painter, flourishing around the second half of the eighteenth century. We predominantly discuss his masterpiece portrait of Christopher Nugent, M. D., exhibited in 1773 at the London Royal Academy regarding the following points: 1) his patrons and mentors by the Burkes, 2) his continental Grand Tour in France and Italy, and 3) his evaluation at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
First, we explore the tripartite relationship among James Barry, Edmund Burke (1729-57), and Dr. Nugent (1698-1775). The sitter, old Nugent, was a famous Irish Catholic physician and Burke’s father-in-law. He was a member of the Burke family in London. They were all involved in the “Cork-Catholic connection.” Second, Edmund Burke had taken Barry to London from Ireland, and his Grand Tour was financially and mentally managed by Burke and his family in London, including Dr. Nugent. Third, after his seven-year-Grand Tour, Barry was appointed as a full Royal Academician in 1773 and exhibited a pair of the gentleman portraits of Dr. Nugent and Giuseppe Baretti, a learned Italian scholar in the same year. In the 1780s, Barry successfully received the professorship of painting at the Royal Academy and gave some lectures to students, which were not unsystematic, but extensive and illuminating to the young. Barry rejected the academic “grand manner” or “great style” established by the first R. A. president, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Unlike Reynolds, Barry finally pursued the unity of all aesthetical categories: beauty, grace, and the sublime, reflecting all the tastes of various people. Consequently, Barry was to have a relationship not only with Neo-classism, but also with Romanticism, employing social criticism with thorny satire. He became interested in large paintings such as “public art.”
We conclude that the portrait of Dr. Nugent is a small-sized and personal piece with skillful delicacy. The virtue of charity or mercifulness with the old scholar is crystallized on its surface by the painter’s brush. During Barry’s painter life, this small portrait was not overwhelming and epoch-making one like his other huge “public” paintings, but one of the most fascinating and moving ones in expressing his personal affections in the utmost skills that he had learned through his Grand Tour.