Orpheus Instructing a Savage People in Theology and the Arts of Social Life

James Barry

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A skilled and inventive etcher, Barry was also one of eighteenth-century London’s leading history painters. Born near Cork, the young artist traveled to Italy for five years of study with the support of the philosopher Edmund Burke, a fellow Irishman. Once back in London, Barry joined the Royal Academy and, from 1777 to 1782, painted a series of large canvases to adorn the new Great Room at the Society of Arts, near the Strand. This etching, the first of three compositions devoted to the rise of ancient Greek culture and civilization, shows Orpheus, the inventor of music, playing for a rapt audience of "primitive" Thracians as he points to heaven as his source of inspiration.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art