Claude Francis Barry

Sir Claude Francis Barry, 3rd Baronet (16 December 1884 – 25 October 1970), later calling himself Francis Barry, was a British etcher and painter in oils who often used a pointillist style or a limited palette of flat colours. Early life Claude Francis Barry was born in Kensington, London, the eldest son of Sir Edward Arthur Barry, 2nd Baronet, son of Sir Francis Tress Barry, who was awarded the Baronetcy in 1899 for his services to Queen Victoria as a diplomat after making a fortune from mining copper in Portugal. Barry was educated privately and then at Harrow School. On leaving Harrow in 1899 at the age of 16, he travelled in Italy with a tutor for almost a year. From 1900 Barry studied at Bournemouth Art College and then privately with Sir Alfred East, who was a friend of the family. In 1905 Barry followed East to Newlyn in Cornwall, where a colony of artists had been formed. There Barry also studied with the artist Stanhope Forbes. Barry later moved to St Ives, where another colony of artists had formed after Newlyn became too industrial, and he became involved in the St Ives Society of Artists. Barry was elected to the Royal Society of British Artists in 1906, when Alfred East was its President. Barry is believed to have been exempted from military service during the First World War for medical reasons but was drafted to do agricultural work. Career Barry went to live on the Continent in the early 1920s, probably in Menton, France and then in Bordighera and Milan in Italy. He travelled widely in France, Italy and Germany where he did many etchings with aquatint, mostly architectural in their subject matter. During this period he exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers. His etching plates were destroyed in Milan by a bomb in 1944. He returned to England during the Second World War and produced several large canvasses of London in the Blitz.