User:Cgwalkerinhistory/Edith Barry

Edith Cleaves Barry

Edith Cleaves Barry (1936 - 1969) was an American painter and founder of the Brick Store Museum in Kennebunk, Maine. Barry trained with well-known Impressionist artists Frederick Macmonnies and Frederick Frieseke in France in the early 20th Century. At her studio in New York City, she painted mostly portraits.

Early Life
Edith Cleaves Barry was born in Boston, Massachusetts on March 10, 1884. She was the third of four children born to Charles Dummer Barry and Ida Morton Thompson. The family grew up in Montclair, New Jersey on Fullerton Avenue. Barry had three siblings: her two older siblings were Charles Edward Barry (born in 1875), and Elizabeth Lord Barry (born in 1879); a younger sister, Julia Lord Barry, was born three years after Edith in 1887. The Barry family moved from their Boston home to Montclair, New Jersey, in 1891. Charles Barry was a partner at the import and export firm Henry Peabody & Co., based in New York City. As such, he often brought his family on trips abroad. The family spent summers in Kennebunk, Maine, where both Charles and Ida had originated. Their family home, the Taylor-Barry House, still stands at 22 Summer Street. The Barry family traveled either within the United States or abroad nearly every year in the early 1900s.

Edith Barry began her interest in art at a young age. In 1894, at the age of ten, she created a pencil drawing of her cousin, Olive Thompson. In 1899, fifteen-year-old Edith won a prize for the best portrait of George Washington from “A Page for Boys and Girls” in the New York Sunday Herald, edited by Douglas Zabriskie Doty. The winner received a picture of the Columbia, but the editor determined that Edith, “as a girl, might prefer something else,” and was awarded $1.00 for her work. Her interest in art was supplemented by traveling throughout the world.

She received a formal secondary education at Miss Wheeler’s School in Rhode Island from 1901 to 1904, studying under Miss Mary C. Wheeler and Miss Macomb. She met many lifelong friends at this institution, including Mary Remey (later Wadleigh), Frances Stetson, May Stirling, Grace Libby, Margaret Field, Alice Keeney, Miriam Eaton, Grace Gregory, Elise d’Este, Rose Bacon, Marjory Meacham, and Isabella Clark. After her graduation from Miss Wheeler’s School, Edith traveled to France in 1906 with Mary C. Wheeler and several other students to study art techniques abroad.

As Artist
Edith Barry traveled to France numerous times to study under several Impressionist masters: Frederick Macmonnies, most famous for his bronze sculptures; Richard Edward Miller, an Impressionist painter; and Frederick Frieseke, also an Impressionist painter. These three painters were Americans who lived in France.

Throughout her life, Barry produced landscape, still life, and portrait paintings. In addition, she painted a mural in the lobby of the Kennebunk, Maine, Post Office on a commission from the U.S. Treasury Department during the Great Depression. The subject of the mural was the “Arrival of first Regular Mail in Kennebunk from Falmouth, June 14, 1775.” Barry was paid in installments to the amount of $560.00. In 1942, Barry painted the mural that decorated the wall of the Soldiers and Sailors Club canteen in New York City with a mural of a garden featuring returning soldiers and sailors.

Edith Barry exhibited her work throughout the eastern seaboard. Of the many museums and galleries that featured her work, several continually exhibited her paintings: The Portland Society of Art in Portland, Maine; The Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts in Hartford, Connecticut; The Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, New Jersey; and the Ogunquit Art Center in Ogunquit, Maine. Barry also had her work exhibited at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York; the National Academy of Design in New York City; The Chicago Art Institute; and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

As Traveler
Barry returned to France often, once arriving in France in June 1914, six days before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the outbreak of World War I. She was stuck in France until her travel to England in September. Upon her return, Barry worked as a Lieutenant in the Camouflage Corps in New York City during the remainder of the war. Barry traveled during wartime and depressions, witnessed the effects of colonialism, saw new nations created, and read terrorists’ challenges to various countries she visited. However, there is no evidence that she ever visited Russia – a country which between 1900 and 1960 experienced many political and social transitions.

During her trips abroad with her family, Barry made endless sketches and took hundreds of photographs to document the culture she observed. Barry traveled at a time in which American and European economies were expanding; colonial boundaries shifted and influenced foreign cultures in Asia and Africa. The profuse amount of photographs and journals that Edith Barry created allows modern-day viewers a window into early 20th-Century foreign culture, travel, and even the prejudices that existed among American and European observers in the first half of the 20th Century. In the act of taking a photograph, Barry blended the reality of the culture standing before her with her own interpretations of what defined each foreign place. Today, her experiences are preserved through her images and words.

Later Life
New York City had been home to Edith Barry since 1916, where she had a studio adjacent to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, overlooking Bryant Park. When her mother died in 1935, Edith sold the family’s Montclair, New Jersey home, and set up dual residency to spend winters in New York City and summers in Kennebunk, Maine. The Barrys had a summer residence at 22 Summer Street, which would later be known as the Taylor – Barry House, built in 1803. Barry and her two remaining siblings, Julia and Charles, agreed to share the house on Summer Street, each paying a share of the taxes, and upkeep.

Sites of interest

 * The Brick Store Museum