1816.] R. Barker-H. Barron-J. C. Barrow. It was the contemplation of the varied scene of beauty and grandeur on the Calton Hill, Edinburgh, that first led Barker to think of painting a panoramic view. About the year 1786 he painted a view of Edinburgh, which he exhibited as a panorama in London. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first person to whom he communicated his ideas on this subject, could not conceive the possibility of deviating from the proper angle without violating the laws of perspective, and therefore treated it as an extraordinary conception, but chimerical and impracticable. The president, however, became Convicted upon viewing what Mr. Barker first called La Nature à coup d'ail, which soon after obtained the title of Panorama, from the Greek way and węɑw. HUGH BARRON (portrait painter.) This painter, as the writer was informed by the late Mr. Tresham, was patronized by the late Duke of Cumberland when at Rome. Mr. Barron was a very gay man, and had it not been for the interference of the English consul, he would have been arrested by his tailor for debt. On the matter being more amicably settled, it was remarked by a brother artist, that Barron had disconcerted the measures of the tailor, who had been obliged to sheer off and give up his suit. Mr. Barron was a pupil to Sir Joshua Reynolds, but excelled more as a musician than as an artist. JOSEPH CHARLES BARROW (landscape painter.) Perhaps the following notice may cast some light upon the mysterious disappearance of a work of art long lost to the public. On the lamented death of the above-mentioned gentleman, a fine head of the late Alderman Boydell, and which was set as a seal, disappeared from the chain of the unfortunate artist. It was presented to him by Mr. Wickstead, the seal engraver, as a compliment for recommending him to the office of seal engraver, or for cutting a large seal for the Plate-Glass Company. Mr. Wick stead made Mr. Barrow an offer to cut him any subject he pleased; he chose the head of Alderman Boydell :-it was indeed a gem of art. A sulphur cast of it is to be seen at Mr. Tassie's; but the seal has never yet been recovered. JAMES BARRY (historical painter.) In one of the nocturnal and youthful frolics of this erratic artist, it is related that one winter's evening he entered an old, and as he thought it an uninha 133 bited house, situated in a narrow bye lane in the city of Cork. The house was without doors or windows, but curiosity induced him to enter; and after mounting a rotten stair-case, which conducted to empty rooms in different floors, he arrived at the garret, where he could just discern, by the glimmering of a few embers, two old and emaciated figures, broken down by age, disease, and want, sitting side by side, in the act, as far as their palsied efforts would permit, of tearing each others' faces-not a word being uttered by either, but with the most horrible grimaces that malice could cast on malice. They took no notice of his ' entrance, but proceeded in their deeds of mutual hate; which made such an impression on young Barry, that he ran down stairs, making two reflexions, which he said he had found verified through life: That men and all animals are malicious and cruel in proportion as they are impotent or feel bereft of power; and that poverty and age, two of the worst evils to which mankind can be subject, almost always aggravate the calamities inherent in them by evils of their own creating. The following anecdote is sufficiently illustrative of Barry's love for his art. He writes thus: "As to Leonardo da Vinci's picture of the Last Supper, which has made such a noise in the world, the account I have to give you about it is as follows:-When I came into the Refettorio, I found a scaffold erected, when on ascending I saw one-half of the picture covered by a great cloth. On examining the other part that was uncovered, I found the skin of colour, which composed the picture, to be all cracked into little squares of about the eighteenth of an inch over, which were for the most part in the edges loosened from the wall, and curling up: however, nothing was materially lost. I saw that the picture had been formerly repaired in some few places, yet as this was not amiss, and as the other parts were untouched, there was nothing to complain of. While I was examining this part of the picture, two gentlemen came upon the scaffold and drew aside the cloth which covered the other half, when, to my great horror and amazement, it was repainted. One of these men seemed to take great pains to show the vast improvement the picture was receiving, and the discourse so kindled my indignation that I was no longer master of myself. What, sir,' said I, is it possible that you do not perceive how this painter (if I can call 134 Anecdotes of James Barry. him a painter) has destroyed the picture in every part on which he has laid his stupid hands? Do not you see that this head is distorted and out of drawing, and that all his colouring is crude and wants accord? Do, sir, open your eyes, and compare it with the other half of the picture which is not yet buried under his cursed colours." He concluded by praying they would snatch this production of Leonardo from the hands of such a beast! [March 1, Barry has been heard to say, that at the time he commenced the pictures in the great room of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, he had but sixteen shillings in his pocket; and that in the prosecution of his labours, he had often, after painting all day, to sketch or engrave at night some design for the printsellers, which was to supply him with the means of his frugal subsistence. When he began these pictures, of course every arrangement was ordered to his Barry offered his picture of the Con- wishes, and what the Society did not version of the King of Cashel for a pre- do Barry took upon himself to dictate, mium to the Irish Academy. When the He shut himself up in the great room prize was adjudged to it, all eyes wan- every morning, nor would he suffer dered in quest of the author, till Barry even the secretary to enter. Mr. More no longer able to contain his joy, pub- frequently attempted it in the prosecu licly proclaimed his right. "It is my tion of the Society's affairs, but Barry picture," said Barry. Your picture! told him once for all, that if he did not impossible!-you paint this pieture "quit the place, he would kick him out, "Yes, I painted it."-"You? a mere boy!""Why do you doubt me?" Still his pretensions were treated with disdain, and he burst into tears. The spectacle was uncommon, and a pause ensued, during which a gentleman entered the room, thrust himself into the middle of the circle, and taking this raw boy by the arm, told the company he was the painter. Barry's friendship for Burke was owing to the following circumstance:-In some dispute on the arts as grounded in taste, Barry quoted an opinion in direct opposition to Burke, from an able but anonymous work which had then lately appeared; this was the celebrated Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, which Mr. Burke, who was playing with the subject and debating for victory, immediately condemned as a theatrical romance of no sufficient merit to be quoted as an authority. Barry, who had been so much captivated by it as to transcribe it throughout, doubly incensed at the injustice done to the work and the slight on his own judgment, fell into a rage in its defence, which Burke at length appeased by declaring himself the author. Barry once attempted a thorough reformation in his habits of licentiousness. He had been enticed by his companions several times to carousals at a tavern, and one night as he wandered home from one of these, a thought struck him of the frivolity and viciousness of thus spending his time. The fault he imagined lay in his money, and therefore without more ado, to avoid the morrow's temptation, he threw the whole of his wealth into the Liffy, and locked himself up with his favourite pursuits. "Sir," said he, "I bring in my twopenny loaf, my cheese, and my pot of porter, every morning, that I may not be interrupted until dusk, when I leave off." After this Mr. Secretary More always found the door locked against him. A few pence a-day was all that Barry allowed himself, at the time he was contracting for colours and materials a debt of several hundred pounds.-For these exertions the Society of Arts granted him two exhibitions; at different pe riods voted him 50 guineas, their gold medal, and again 200 guineas and a seat among them. The profits arising from the exhibitions amounted to 5031. 12s. Lord Romney presented him also with 1001.; and he received several minor pecuniary rewards from private individuals: in all about 7001. Barry lived in the greatest possible misery; and as he kept no servant, when he went to the Royal Academy, in the quality of professor of painting, he put the key of his door in his pocket, and wrote on the door with chalk, Gone to the Royal Academy. In the evening of one of his lectures, in pulling out his handkerchief, in which time had made some ravages, the key became entangled in its mazy folds, and was projected with considerable force into the front of the room, to the no small dismay of the circle of royal academicians. This event, sufficient to have finished the lecture of any other man for that evening, was, however, little regarded by Barry; after coolly desiring Charles, the porter, to pick it up and bring it to him, he proceeded with his dissertation. Two amateurs of art wishing to be introduced to the great Barry, patroled in 1816.] Biographical Account of Eberhard A. W. von Zimmermann. 135 vain for some time up and down Castlestreet, where he resided; till at length, after much explanation between them and an old apple-woman facing his house, their informant told them, she dared say it was the old quoiner over the way that they meant. There are many persons who remember him in a suit of dirty red, with his constant companion an old great coat on his arm; yet such were the charms of his conversation, that in a state of apparently insane mendicity, he has been seen walking arm in arm with two youthful beauties, women of fashion, who disdained not the ragged great coat for the soul which oft-times inhabited it. It is remarked as a singular circumstance, that though every honour was conferred on the departed genius, not a single R. A. attended his funeral. So crazy indeed was Barry's appearance and residence, that it provoked a not unappropriate comparison from Mr. F, who when he saw him get up from sitting to Dance for his portrait, exclaimed, "Dat fellow looks like de door of his own house."-There was something sweet and agreeable in Barry's smiles, but his looks when roused by anger were truly ferocious. On the exhibition of some pictures by Rubens, the Duke of Queensberry and another nobleman ventured to insinuate that they were out of drawing; Barry answered that they knew nothing about it, and turned upon his heel. To the credit of Barry be it spoken, that he was never above rescinding an opinion which he had given too hastily. He once affirmed that a drawing about to be ballotted for a reward did not deserve it, yet, at the modest request of a young member, he once more went and looked at the picture, confessed that there was much truth in what he had urged, and voted for its being rewarded. His fondness for art was conspicuous in every thing; the most humble print was not beneath his notice. "Let me look at the cuts!" was a frequent expression of his when a book was presented to the Society with even the smallest attempt at embellishment; those he would inspect with all the apparent pleasure of a school-boy. MEMOIRS OF EMINENT PERSONS. BIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT OF EBERHARD AUGUSTUS WILLIAM VON ZIMMERMANN. NEARLY at the same hour in the sight of the 4th of July, 1815, in which the remains of the valiant descendant of the Guelphs, the lamented Duke of Brunswick, who died the death of a hero in the conflict of the 16th of June, were deposited by the side of the ancestor of his illustrious house, Henry the Lion, under the choir of the ancient church of St. Blaise, one of the most faithful servants of the dynasty of Brunswick Wolfenbüttel, the privy counsellor of state EBERHARD AUGUSTUS WILLIAM VON ZIMMERMANN yielded up his spirit in his 73d year-an age which the frequent attacks of disease and severe strokes of fortune had left him no prospect of attaining. On the overthrow of the kingdom of Westphalia, (erected by Napoleon, as it were, merely for a freak, and denominated by its founder himself une plaisanterie de royaume,) by the battle of Leipzig, this worthy veteran, who since 1766 had been professor of natural philosophy at the Collegium Carolinum, at Brunswick, which frequently numbered twenty British youths among its pupils who had witnessed the highest prosperity of this seminary under the Abbé Jerusalem, and its shameful dissolation under the debauched Jeromeenjoyed the satisfaction he could scarcely have ventured to hope for, of being again associated in the direction of it with ESCHENBURG, Helwig, EMPERIUS, and other teachers. His merits in the extensive field of geography, anthropology, and zoology, are great; and though he may not stand in the foremost rank of those who deserve the name of inventors and creators in his science,-to which character, however, he might have aspired, had he but concentrated his powers into one focus,--he certainly deserves the first place in the second class, among those who can work up with masterly skill what has already been discovered, and re-produce it in a more useful and attractive form. It is, however, to be regretted that he should have struck upon the same rock with many other German scholars, who are induced by gain to multiply their literary engagements to an extent that cannot fail to 136 Biographical Account of Eberhard A. W. von Zimmermann. [March 1, prove injurious to their reputation. In deed, in an early part of his career, as the learned EBELING once publicly stated, he employed in his literary speculations a great number of assistants, raw students and others, whose imperfect works with all their defects were charged to his account alone. It is like wise to be lamented that, owing to the abundant influx of new ideas, which he immediately pursued, he was prevented from bringing to maturity, though he never lost sight of, two great works upon which he had been engaged for forty years an entirely new Geographical History of Man and the Brute Creation, and a General Exposition of the Importance of the Discoveries in the Great Ocean, since Anson's time, in respect to Geology, Natural History, and Anthropology. By these he would indisputably have inscribed his name upon the pillars of the temple of Fame. Born on the 17th of August, 1743, at Uelzen, in the district of Celle, where his father, the respected author of a work On the Sepulchral Urns of the ancient Germans, was superintendent, he eagerly profited at an early age, by the means of instruction which the university of Göttingen afforded, and then repaired to that of Leyden. During his residence at the former, he gained the commendation of HOLMANN and other mathematicians and natural philosophers, and distinguished himself by a probationary essay On the Analysis of Curves, and a Meteorological Tour in the Harz. At Leyden he first conceived that idea which was ever afterwards uppermost in all his literary labours, to describe the animal creation, commencing with man himself, according to the regions inhabited by each species, and keeping in view their respective migrations and varieties. There too be published his Specimen Zoologia geographica, in 1777. The outline here marked out was extended and filled up in a comprehensive work in three volumes, his Geographical History of Man and such Quadrupeds as are spread over the World in general, which appeared between 1778, and 1783, accompanied with a zoological map of the world. With his own means which he wholly devoted to the sciences, and seconded by the liberality of the house of Brunswick, to which he ever continued most warmly attached, he made several journies to England, Italy, and France, and every where formed the most agreeable connections with the principal cultivators of natural history and anthropology. He paid three visits to England, which country had the strongest attractions for him, and where he early gained the confidence of the venerable President of the Royal Society, Sir JOSEPH BANKS. In 1787, he published in London his Political Survey of the Present State of Europe, with sixteen Statistical Tables which were extremely welcome to the British gazetteers, There too he established those communi cations through which he received without delay every thing remarkable in natural philosophy and geography, that ap peared in the British islands, and in the United States of America, and was thus enabled to translate and prepare notices of every novelty in those departments for his own geographical journal, and for Forster's Magazine of Travels. In that capital also he became acquainted with Mr. WILLIAM SMELLIE, the learned bookseller of Edinburgh whose Philosophy of Natural History, ZIMMERMANN clothed quite con amore in a German dress, and accompanied with notes, which were afterwards translated into English. Fruits of his journey to Italy appeared partly at Paris in his work On the Molfetta in Apulia (1789) and partly at a later period in his General Survey of Italy, (Weimar, 1797,) which contains much interesting matter relative to the natural history of the kingdom of Naples. He was at Paris in 1789, just at the eventful period when the fire was first kindled beneath the magic cauldron of the Revolution. There in the very centre and seat of the natural sciences, he projected his Geographical Annals, in which his friend BROUSSONET, and other geographers and naturalists of Paris, promised him the most active assistance. Dissatisfied with these Annals, which were continued for three years, but could not maintain their ground together with ZACH's Geographical Ephemerides, he established, in conjunction with the unassuming and industrious Professor BRUNS, of Helmstädt, a Geographical Repository. The terrific spectacle of the volcano of the French Revolution made a deep impression upon the warm imagination and susceptible mind of ZIMMERMANN, who shared on this subject the sentiments of his sovereign, and who predicted, long before it was suspected by many whose good-nature blinded their judgment, that Germany would not escape the torrents of lava which it threw out. He was ennobled by the Emperor 1816.] Biographical Account of Eberhard A. W. von Zimmermann. 137 Leopold, and to gratify that monarch translated ECHERNY's Letters from an Inhabitant of Paris to his Friends in Switzerland and England, to the 4th of April, 1791. Brunswick was then the rendezvous of several emigrants of distinction, and thus the collision of the aristocratic and democratic parties there produced many a spark which served more and more to strengthen ZIMMERMANN's convictions that nothing but the maintenance of the throne of the Bourbons could save France and give security to Europe; and these sentiments he boldly avowed in a variety of tracts and papers, to which he always affixed his name. He expressed himself most strongly in a distinct Address of a Patriotic German to his Countrymen on the Approach of Peace, which appeared in 1795, and was violently attacked by writers of a different way of thinking. It was on this occasion that he wrote as follows to a friend at Weimar, on the subject of anonymous attacks and criticisms in the literary journals: "It is wonderfully clever, indeed, to shoot out of a thicket with poisoned arrows, like the lurking Malay, at an honest man as he quietly passes along the open road." The French Revolution, which so speedily followed the American, and which was even prepared by the latter, naturally led the reflecting mind to a comparison of both, and to a consideration of the difference of their courses, arising from the total dissimilarity of the two countries and their inhabitants. ZIMMERMANN, intimately acquainted with the new republic, from being constantly engaged in preparing for the press the most important modern travels in North America, and from an uninterrupted correspondence with Boston and New York; and baving also a thorough knowledge, by means of the Duke of Brunswick and those around him, of the most secret springs, and of the ringleaders in the atrocities of the French Revolution, undertook to draw a parallel between the two, at first in his France and the United States of North America, (Berlin, 1795,) in which those countries were considered only in a geographical and statistical point of view. It was not till six years afterwards that he completed the comparison in one of his best written and most elaborate works, intitaled: General Survey of France from Francis I. to Louis XVI. and of the United States of North America, (Bruns wick, 1800,) in two volumes. He there NEW MONTHLY MAG.-No. 26. adduces substantial evidence that monarchical France had, if not the form, at least the essence of a constitution, and that the steady valour of the ancient French nobility was never equalled by the flashes of the modern republicans in the frenzy of the Revolution; that the French Revolution was not to be compared with that of America, where the old form of government was only improved and consolidated, whereas the grand motive for that of France was robbery and plunder, by which social order must be infallibly destroyed. From all persons of upright principles, this excellent work, which was dedicated to the Emperor Paul, experienced the most flattering reception. The author was appointed a privy counsellor by his sovereign, and released from his academical functions at the Carolinum. Nowithstanding this tendency to politics, ZIMMERMANN still kept his favourite pursuits in view, and in order to bring before the public in a clear and pleasing manner the results of the sciences of geography and anthropology during the 18th century, he projected his Geographical Pocket-book, indisputably one of the most instructive, comprehensive, and meritorious performances of the kind, both in regard to matter and manner, that not Germany only, but civilized Europe possesses, and which throws the compilations of a MALTE BRUN, a MAVOR, and others, completely into the shade. It is a real panorama of the world, composed of the choicest materials, and painted by the hand of a master in the most agreeable colours; of incalculable utility for the diffusion of correct notions respecting the state of mankind in the different regions of the globe, as it is illustrated with appropriate engravings and maps, and possesses all the recommendations requisite for gaining the favour even of frivolous novel-readers. This pleasing annual publication comprized, from 1802 to 1813, a great part of the known world. Commencing with Greenland, the author proceeds to North America, descends with the Mississippi to Florida and Louisiana; then traversing the countries bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, he comes to South America, describes Brasil, and, assisted by the illustrious Humboldt, treats with particular attention of the regions contiguous to the chain of the Andes. An instructive view is then taken of Guinea and the Negro coast, but the rest of Africa is reserved for future illustration, which it must now receive (if at all) from another VOL. V. T |