Private
Claude Francis Barry
(1883 - 1970)
ICI FactoryMidnight oils, (535), 1959
Private Collection
Claude Francis Barry (1883 - 1970)
Oil on canvas
Size:
Height – 160cm
Width – 172.7cm
Literature: Katie Campbell, Moon Behind Clouds: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Sir Claude Francis Barry, Jersey 1999, reproduced. p.77
Llewellyn, Sacha, and Paul Liss. Portrait of an Artist. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p.387.
Some of Barry’s wartime works reveal an uncharacteristic bleakness: the withered trees, the barren landscapes and leaning crosses of the ‘Monte Cassino’ suggests a sense of despair. In the conclusion of his treatise on painting, Barry, a life-long Pacifist, declared: ‘The last fifty years are the most terrible of which history has any record and many of those, myself included, who have lived through them have often wished that they had never been born’ (Claude Francis Barry, quoted in Katie Campbell,Moon Behind Clouds, Jersey 1999, p.74).
Barry had a particular fondness for Italy – it was only with reluctance that, at the start of the Second World War, he abandoned his studio in Milan and moved back to England to return to St Ives. The figures in this allegorical imaginative composition, dwarfed by the crucifixes, are of Barry and his wife
Much of Barry’s early life has been pieced together from letters found
in
his briefcase after his death. Also in the briefcase ‘ along with a
very
full passport and his battered old eye-shade ‘ was an unpublished
manuscript
on painting. This is the source of his quoted pronouncements
on life and
art.
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