Home  Catalogue Jersey
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Though the Cornish Evening Post in its coverage of his farewell exhibition reported that Barry was moving to Paris, it was to Jersey that he went. Later he claimed he had chosen the island 'for the climate and the taxes'. By all accounts Barry had been poor since his early days with Doris. It is likely that he was financially dependent on the interest from a trust fund; if this is the case, his income would have been taxed less in Jersey than on the mainland or the Continent. In 1949 Barry's father died; while this doesn't seem to have altered his financial situation he did inherit the family title and thereafter he expected to be addressed as 'Sir Francis'.
On moving to Jersey, Barry and his wife settled in St. Helier. There they lived in a number of guest houses and private hotels. By this time Francis Barry seems to have given up etching for good: perhaps he lost heart after the wartime destruction of his plates, perhaps he simply couldn't find the large amount of floor space that etching demands, or the storage for acid, inks and prints. In any case he continued to paint. His pointillist technique features in the early Jersey works such as fireworks for The Queen's Visit, Paris, but he was moving towards a simpler style, using dark outlines, blocks of pure colour and sinuous, pared down shapes.
Women figure prominently in Barry's paintings of this period: triads posing as the three graces of Greek mythology, exuberant nudes, women in tantalizing poses called The Huntress or The Sphinx. Conspicuous among these are depictions of a woman called Doreen.
Doreen Durrell was the wife of a local doctor with whom Barry had a long affair; she appeared in his work as early as 1951 and friends report that by 1957 while his wife was dying of cancer in a nearby nursing home Barry was entertaining Doreen at London's Dorchester Hotel.
Barry's friends described Doreen as hard and manipulative: 'When Doreen wanted to go to Bayreuth she'd ring up Francis and the next thing you know they'd be off to Bayreuth for a week.' Several recalled how Doreen would reduce Barry to tears simply by criticizing his work. Whatever the intricacies of their relationship, Doreen was enormously important to Barry: he depicted her in oils, in ink, in pencil; in portraits clothed and naked, alone and with other women. While Jennifers, Beryls and Aileens figure in his works, Doreen is much the most prominent muse.
After Violet's death Barry gave Doreen a Barbara Hepworth painting that had been given to him by the artist herself; he also gave her several family heirlooms, to the intense annoyance of his offspring. In 1964 when drawing up his will, Barry bequeathed to Doreen two hundred pounds and any premium bonds he held. A year later he reduced Doreen's bequest to one hundred pounds. In 1969, the year before his death, he revoked all bequests to Doreen; clearly by that time the relationship had ended – with some acrimony, it would seem.
Sometime during his post-war years Barry's appreciation for alcohol became an addiction; by the 1960's he was consuming several bottles of Algerian wine and a bottle of brandy a day; he chain-smoked cheap cigars, depended on sleeping pills and always had several antacid tablets on hand. Despite his philandering, he was devastated by his wife's death. Always a loner, he became even more reclusive, moving from one hotel to another. One of these, The Leighton, he later described as: 'full of old people, 29 guests and one loo; the food was typical English food – boiled cabbage.'
He also spent more time in bars and music-halls, picking up drinks and company. One auspicious encounter took place in the Robin Hood, a rough St. Helier pub where Barry went to drink and Tom Skinner – a local artist – went to sketch the regulars. Skinner, flush with the triumph of having sold some work to Princess Margaret was keen to discuss his art. The two men began talking, friendship followed and Skinner became Barry's pupil.
Tom Skinner with his wife Pat had a farm at Les Frénes, St. John; in 1961 they took Barry in, renting him accommodation and studio space. Barry was to remain with the Skinners 'as part of the family', for the next seven years. In his final will Barry left all his works and his estate to Tom Skinner, with the hundred pounds and premium bonds he'd rescinded from Doreen going to Pat.
Pat Skinner described Barry as shy and canny, possessing a foul temper and wicked wit. She said he liked to shock and once walked into a pub and shouted, 'Where can I find a whore?' Jack Skinner, Tom's twin brother and an artist as well, remembered Barry as dignified and aristocratic: 'He had manners, he had that way with him. In a restaurant he wouldn't complain himself, he would whisper something in Tom's ear, and Tom would have to call the waiter over and tell him what was wrong. His hands were always scrupulously clean, yet you couldn't see across his studio for the cigarette smoke.'
It appears that the older Barry got the more eccentric he became. Reverting to the superstitions of his maternal Irish heritage Barry would never work on Friday the 13th. He greeted each new moon with three bows of veneration and resisted looking at a new moon through glass, for fear of invoking 'the green man'. Working in an airless room clogged with cigar smoke, he refused to open any windows lest microbes got in. Since he used bits of bread to erase the charcoal under-drawings on his canvasses, his studio soon became a haven for mice as well as germs. Left a pair of boots by a friend, Barry insisted on wearing them though they were several sizes too big. He worked in a suit with a collarless shirt and often his pyjamas peaked out from beneath. He also sported a hat so old there were three finger holes where he doffed it to the ladies.
Through the Skinners Barry was introduced to other local artists: the renowned etcher Edmund Blampied, the painters John More and Sir Francis Cooke. Though he stopped exhibiting with the Royal Academy in the early 1920's, to the end of his life Barry continued to show with the Royal Society of British Artists and the Paris Salon. One of his favourite rituals was the pilgrimage to the Salon each spring. When Violet died, Barry continued to visit the Salon on his own; when he moved in to Les Frénes, he went with fellow exhibitors Tom and Jack Skinner.
In the early 1960's Barry arranged an exhibition in St. Helier's Church House, a small gallery where local artists could mount their own shows. Although some of his most haunting etchings were on display, the exhibition was a critical failure and Barry sold nothing. In an interview several years later with the local newspaper Barry claimed that he had given up showing his works because the Jersey public wasn't interested. Shy and taciturn, he was clearly unsuited to promoting his work; he expressed disdain for agents and critics alike and refused to court public approval. Freed by his annuity – however meagre it may have been – from the necessity of pushing for sales, it is a wonder any of his late works reached the public domain at all.
In 1959 and 1960 Barry painted several oils of the ICI factory; his son, Rupert, was an executive with the company and probably arranged the permissions. In 1965 Barry and several other artists founded the Phoenix Group to exhibit at the Dinard Festival in France. By this time Barry was in his early eighties and travel was becoming difficult. Undaunted, he turned to his earlier art for inspiration, reworking old views, making new oils from previous etchings. He reduced his palette to a few, pure colours though his line remained firm and rhythmic to the very end.
In wasn't until 1968 when he was 85 years old, that Francis Barry finally stopped painting. Infirm and incapacitated, he was moved to a nursing home in Kent. After a tumultuous life, Francis Barry died peacefully in 1970, returning from a Sunday outing with his son. In 1974, after a posthumous exhibition in St. Helier's Barreau Art Gallery, Barry's remaining works went on tour to America.
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