Lot Essay
Lots 107-108 are works of great historical interest. Conceived on a monumental scale by a comparatively young and obviously ambitious artist, they document, on eye-witness evidence, incidents in one of the most traumatic and foolhardy episodes of the Victorian age, the Crimean War. They were exhibited to great acclaim in their day, and gained wide popularity through the medium of engravings. They have also been reproduced (in one version or another) in a number of more recent publications - on Victorian art, the Crimean campaign, or Florence Nightingale. The paintings themselves, however, have remained elusive; handed down in the family of the collector who purchased them from the artist, they have never been on the market, or even, so far as we know, exhibited.
In The Mission of Mercy, Florence Nightingale is seen in the Barrack Hospital at Scutari, the scene of her heroic endeavours to improve the medical treatment of the British Army engaged in the Crimea. She had gone out in October 1854, charged by the government with superintending the nursing of the hospital, which had been condemned as scandallously inadequate by William Howard Russell in his first-hand reports in The Times. She found conditions in the hospital so appalling that they were killing soldiers faster than the war itself; the most essential medical supplies were lacking, while the military authorities were hidebound by bureaucracy and often deliberately obstructive. In her biography of Miss Nightingale (1951), Cecil Woodham-Smith has described the horrors of the bitter winter of 1854-5, when the Army was being decimated on the heights above Sebastopol:
Day after day the sick poured in until the enormous building was entirely filled. The wards were full; the corridors were lined with men lying on the bare boards because the supply of bags stuffed with straw had given out. Chaos reigned. The doctors were unable even to examine each man. Mr Sabin, the head Chaplain, was told that men were a fortnight in the Barrack Hospital without seeing a surgeon. Yet the doctors, especially the older men, worked 'like lions' and were frequently on their feet for twenty-four hours at a time ...
The filth became indescribable. The men in the corridors lay on unwashed rotten floors crawling with vermin. As the Rev. Sidney Godolphin Osborne knelt to take down dying messages, his paper became covered thickly with lice. There were no pillows, no blankets; the men lay, with their heads on their boots, wrapped in the blanket or greatcoat stiff with blood and filth which had been their sole covering perhaps for more than a week. There were no screens or operating tables. Amputations had to be performed in the wards in full sight of the patients ...
And yet, despite all this, and a breakdown in her own health, by the time she returned to England in July 1856 Miss Nightingale had not only transformed the Barrack Hospital and nursing throughout the Crimea but laid the foundations for major reforms in army medical care.
The setting of the picture is the quadrangle of the Barrack Hospital, so called because it had been the barracks of the Turkish artillery before it was handed over to the British. On the right is the great gateway over which Miss Nightingale said the words 'Abandon hope all ye who enter here' should have been written, and in the distance can be seen the Bosphorus, with the gardens of the Seraglio on the near side and Constantinople glittering in the sunlight beyond, the skyline dominated by the Mosque of S. Sophia. Casualties are arriving, being helped up the steep slope which led from the rickety landing-stage to the hospital, and which itself meant martyrdom for wounded men; while around Miss Nightingale are gathered many of those who were associated with her work. Immediately on her left are her close friends Charles and Selina Bracebridge of Atherstone Hall, near Coventry. They had known her since 1846, taking her to Egypt and Greece in 1849-50 and enabling her to visit the pioneer nursing establishment at Kaiserswerth, near Berlin (an ambition long frustrated by her family), on the way home. In 1854 they accompanied her to Scutari, where for nine months they acted as her lieutenants. The tall bewhiskered figure on her right is Major Sillery, the Commandant of the hospital when she arrived, and a man almost incapacitated by red tape. He was so 'nervous and anxious, .... distressed and perplexed' by the lack of money and instructions that he was unable even to order the cleaning of the filthy lavatories. Still more ineffectual was Lord William Paulet who took over from Sillery in December 1854 and is seen standing to the right of the Bracebridges. As an officer of high rank and standing, much was expected of him, but he simply closed his eyes to the horrors, spending his time picnicking with Lady Stratford, the wife of the British Ambassador to Constantinople, on the shores of the Bosphorous. When Miss Nightingale, who, against great opposition, had succeeded in opening a small reading-room for convalescent soldiers, wished to appoint a schoolmaster to instruct those who were illiterate, Paulet absolutely refused to allow it, telling her that she was 'spoiling the brutes.' Not until General Sir Henry Storks took over from Lord William in September 1855 did she at last find an able and enthusiastic collaborator. Storks, who was later to sit on the Royal Sanitary Commission to enquire into the Health of the Army, set up under her supervision in 1857, is the figure on the right in the doorway on the far left of the picture.
Several of her medical assistants are also included. Dr (later Sir William) Linton, who was in charge of the Barrack Hospital from 1854, is on the far left besides Storks, while Dr Cruickshanks, another senior medical officer, kneels at the head of the soldier on the stretcher who is the centre of the whole group. He was one of the doctors who resented the arrival of Miss Nightingale and her nurses. As she wrote in January 1855, he 'volunteered to say that my best nurse, Mrs Roberts, dressed wounds and fractures more skilfully than any of the dressers or assistant surgeons. But that it was not a question of efficiency, nor of the comfort of the patients, but of the "regulations of the service."' Mrs Roberts herself kneels on the other side of the stretcher-case, offering him a drink. Trained at St. Thomas's Hospital, she irritated Miss Nightingale with her chatter but was her most reliable assistant, as well as nursing her devotedly when, exhausted by her exertions, she fell seriously ill at Balaclava in May 1855. Another close ally, Revd. Mother Mary Clare, the superior of the five Bermondsey nuns who joined the mission, stands further back, behind Dr Cruikshanks. This saintly and much-loved woman was an invaluable member of the team, not only nursing but running the extra diet kitchen which Miss Nightingale set up at Scutari and doing much to diffuse the religious squabbles which beset the mission. Among those who got caught up in the intrigues was Miss Tebbut, seen on the left near Linton and Storks. Having lent Keble's Christian Year to a patient, she was accused by the Evangelicals of circulating improper books in the wards. However, she was a good nurse and eventually became superintendent of the General Hospital, the second, smaller hospital at Scutari.
Two more figures in the picture have been identified. Standing in profile on the far left, in front of Linton and Storks, is Alexis Soyer, the famous chief of the Reform Club who was sent to Scutari by Lord Panmure, the Secretary for War, in March 1855. Though in manner and appearance a comic opera Frenchman, he was to become one of Miss Nightingale's staunchest friends and supporters, revolutionising the cooking at the Barrack Hospital and accompanying her when she went to the Crimea to inspect the hospitals there the following year. The party also included a boy named Robert Robinson, an invalided drummer from the 68th Light Infantry who constituted himself Miss Nightingale's 'man', delivering her letters and messages, accompanying her when she went out, and having charge of the famous lamp which she carried when she toured the wards at night. He is the small figure in a cap standing a few paces in front of Soyer, who described him as 'a regular enfant de troupe, full of wit and glee.'
Turkish men (including a Bashi-Bazouk), women, and a child, complete the group, and the artist shows himself looking through the window behind.
The fame of the subject makes it natural to assume that the picture was painted before Queen Victoria's First Visit to her Wounded Soldiers (lot 108), this being added later as a pendant (they are exactly the same size). Indeed as early as 1858 the Art Journal referred to The Mission of Mercy as 'the first of these subjects.' But in fact the opposite is true. Barrett witnessed the scene represented in Queen Victoria's First Visit on 3 March 1855 and exhibited the picture in the summer of 1856, dating it that year. He then set out for Scutari to gather material for the present picture, arriving by June when he made the watercolour drawing of Miss Nightingale which is now in the National Portrait Gallery (no.2939). He may well have gone with official blessing, the Art Journal describing him as having 'a studio in the hospital itself.'
These wounded, then, are not the poor souls who arrived in the terrible winter of 1854-5, although in a sense they symbolise them. For Barrett's object at Scutari was not to paint a specific scene that he witnessed, as in the case of Queen Victoria's First Visit to her Wounded Soldiers, but an image that would sum up and symbolise Miss Nightingale's 'mission of mercy'. It is true that the composition, as the Athenaeum observed, is 'unaffected and agreeable, an air of truthfulness pervades the whole scene.' Nevertheless, by comparison with that of Queen Victoria's First Visit, it is conventional and academic. There are echoes of Raphael's cartoon of Peter and John Healing the Lame Man at the Gate of the Temple, and that Barrett in fact had this in mind can hardly be doubted, the recumbent figure of the soldier and Miss Nightingale's hand outstretched as if blessing being clearly foreshadowed in Raphael's famous design. Together with Mrs Roberts's gesture of offering the soldier a cup, they create the effect of witnessing a Christian sacrament, and this is emphasised by the groups of onlookers, including a pointing soldier, who once again go back to the Raphael cartoons. The inclusion of infidel Turks is particularly significant in this context, as the art-critic of the Athenaeum came near to admitting when describing these figures: 'A Bashi-Bazouk, astounded in a stolid sort of way, occupies the left, and is balanced by a group of Turkish women on the right, who, by their eyes peering over the yashmaks, demonstrate a startled languor and mild wonder at the whole affair.'
The symbolic nature of the picture is further underlined by the fact that it is highly unlikely that all those represented could have been present at the same time. As already noted, they include three consecutive Commandants, and several who appear had probably left by the time Barrett arrived. The Bracebridges went as early as July 1855, Revd. Mother Mary Clare in April 1856. Miss Nightingale herself was absent from Scutari from 16 March 1856 to the end of June, inspecting other hospitals in the Crimea. Peace was declared on 29 April, and the last patient left Scutari on 16 July. Miss Nightingale finally departed on the 28th.
Barrett would not have begun work on the painting until he returned to London, and it is clear that its conception underwent radical changes at this stage. An oil sketch in the National Portrait Gallery (see references above) shows the composition essentially settled but many variations in the disposition of the figures. For instance, the Bracebridges (or, according to Graham Reynolds, loc. cit., Mrs Bracebridge and Soyer) appear to Miss Nightingale's right, while a soldier kneels in the place finally occupied by Mrs Roberts. We also know from a letter written by Barrett to Thomas Agnew on 3 July 1857 (loc. cit.) that he was having sittings from many of the participants; Lord William Paulet, the Bracebridges, Soyer, Miss Tebbut and others had all been to his Gower Street studio. That Florence Nightingale herself came seems unlikely since she was an invalid by this time, shunning publicity and overwhelmed with work on the Royal Sanitary Commission. Besides, as Cecil Woodham-Smith has written, 'she had a moral objection to having her likeness taken in any form. "I do not wish to be remembered when I am gone", she said. For the bust by (Sir John) Steell, now in the Royal United Services Institution, she gave only two sittings; and then only because it was to be paid for out of the proceeds of a fund raised by small subscriptions from the non-commissioned officers and men of the British Army.' Barrett had done well to secure the drawing he had made of her in June 1856, and this, with the possible addition of photographs, probably had to suffice. However, it seems to have served well enough. He told Agnew that Miss Nightingale's mother had called at his studio, studying the picture for half an hour and 'speaking in commendation of her daughter's portrait.'
The picture was finished by the summer of 1858, when it was exhibited with its companion by Leggatt's at their gallery in Cornhill. Meanwhile engravings of both pictures had been commissioned by Agnew's a firm which had cornered the market in images of the Crimean War. They were already promoting the photographs taken at the front by Roger Fenton, and had purchased two large paintings by Thomas Jones Barker, The Allied Generals before Sebastopol and General Williams and his Staff leaving Kars, touring them round the country and publishing engravings by C.G. Lewis. It was through the prints after Barrett's paintings - what the Art Journal called 'these really national engravings' - that the paintings were principally known. As the Sun put it in June 1856, referring to the mezzotint after Queen Victoria's First Visit to her Wounded Soldiers, 'it is destined, we doubt not, to be among the most popular pictures commemorative of the late war with Russia - a memorial to be hung up by many an English hearth, sacred as among the lares and penates of domestic art, generation after generation.' The engravings were accompanied by keys, identifying those represented and lending them maximum historical interest.
Barrett also painted small versions of both pictures. 'I have been working hard upon the reduced copy all the week', he told Agnew in his letter of July 1857 reporting progress on The Mission of Mercy. This was probably the version measuring 23½ x 35in. (59.5 x 89cm.) which was on the London art market in the early 1980s.
Of Barrett himself all too little is known. He was living in Brighton in 1851 but by 1854 he had moved to London, settling first in Bloomsbury, the bohemian quarter of the day, and later in Regent's Park. He exhibited seventeen pictures at the Royal Academy 1851-83, and twenty at the Royal Society of British Artists 1869-85, possibly ceasing to paint for the last twenty years of his life. His exhibited works embraced genre scenes, historical and literary subjects, and landscapes, while a portrait of the Birmingham philanthropist Joseph Sturge belongs to Brimingham Corporation. In 1872 he is recorded in Rome, and he must have visited Pompeii too, to judge from a group of Pompeiian subjects which he exhibited 1872-7. Today little of his work is known, and his Witt Library file is meagre. His two Crimean pictures are by far his most famous works, although they were not without parallels. He had exhibited a painting of The Meeting of Queen Victoria with the Royal Family of Orleans at the RA of 1851, and showed a Turkish subject, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Turkey, in 1858. Like a small picture of European Visitors by a Turkish Fountain, 1859, which was sold in these Rooms on 22 February 1985 (lot 114), this was no doubt based on material gathered during his visit to Scutari. Finally, the success of The Mission of Mercy seems to have inspired him to paint another picture celebrating the achievements of a great English woman reformer, Elizabeth Fry. Mrs Fry Reading to the Prisoners in Newgate was exhibited at 191 Piccadilly in 1861 and, like its predecessors, gained wide currency through engravings.
In The Mission of Mercy, Florence Nightingale is seen in the Barrack Hospital at Scutari, the scene of her heroic endeavours to improve the medical treatment of the British Army engaged in the Crimea. She had gone out in October 1854, charged by the government with superintending the nursing of the hospital, which had been condemned as scandallously inadequate by William Howard Russell in his first-hand reports in The Times. She found conditions in the hospital so appalling that they were killing soldiers faster than the war itself; the most essential medical supplies were lacking, while the military authorities were hidebound by bureaucracy and often deliberately obstructive. In her biography of Miss Nightingale (1951), Cecil Woodham-Smith has described the horrors of the bitter winter of 1854-5, when the Army was being decimated on the heights above Sebastopol:
Day after day the sick poured in until the enormous building was entirely filled. The wards were full; the corridors were lined with men lying on the bare boards because the supply of bags stuffed with straw had given out. Chaos reigned. The doctors were unable even to examine each man. Mr Sabin, the head Chaplain, was told that men were a fortnight in the Barrack Hospital without seeing a surgeon. Yet the doctors, especially the older men, worked 'like lions' and were frequently on their feet for twenty-four hours at a time ...
The filth became indescribable. The men in the corridors lay on unwashed rotten floors crawling with vermin. As the Rev. Sidney Godolphin Osborne knelt to take down dying messages, his paper became covered thickly with lice. There were no pillows, no blankets; the men lay, with their heads on their boots, wrapped in the blanket or greatcoat stiff with blood and filth which had been their sole covering perhaps for more than a week. There were no screens or operating tables. Amputations had to be performed in the wards in full sight of the patients ...
And yet, despite all this, and a breakdown in her own health, by the time she returned to England in July 1856 Miss Nightingale had not only transformed the Barrack Hospital and nursing throughout the Crimea but laid the foundations for major reforms in army medical care.
The setting of the picture is the quadrangle of the Barrack Hospital, so called because it had been the barracks of the Turkish artillery before it was handed over to the British. On the right is the great gateway over which Miss Nightingale said the words 'Abandon hope all ye who enter here' should have been written, and in the distance can be seen the Bosphorus, with the gardens of the Seraglio on the near side and Constantinople glittering in the sunlight beyond, the skyline dominated by the Mosque of S. Sophia. Casualties are arriving, being helped up the steep slope which led from the rickety landing-stage to the hospital, and which itself meant martyrdom for wounded men; while around Miss Nightingale are gathered many of those who were associated with her work. Immediately on her left are her close friends Charles and Selina Bracebridge of Atherstone Hall, near Coventry. They had known her since 1846, taking her to Egypt and Greece in 1849-50 and enabling her to visit the pioneer nursing establishment at Kaiserswerth, near Berlin (an ambition long frustrated by her family), on the way home. In 1854 they accompanied her to Scutari, where for nine months they acted as her lieutenants. The tall bewhiskered figure on her right is Major Sillery, the Commandant of the hospital when she arrived, and a man almost incapacitated by red tape. He was so 'nervous and anxious, .... distressed and perplexed' by the lack of money and instructions that he was unable even to order the cleaning of the filthy lavatories. Still more ineffectual was Lord William Paulet who took over from Sillery in December 1854 and is seen standing to the right of the Bracebridges. As an officer of high rank and standing, much was expected of him, but he simply closed his eyes to the horrors, spending his time picnicking with Lady Stratford, the wife of the British Ambassador to Constantinople, on the shores of the Bosphorous. When Miss Nightingale, who, against great opposition, had succeeded in opening a small reading-room for convalescent soldiers, wished to appoint a schoolmaster to instruct those who were illiterate, Paulet absolutely refused to allow it, telling her that she was 'spoiling the brutes.' Not until General Sir Henry Storks took over from Lord William in September 1855 did she at last find an able and enthusiastic collaborator. Storks, who was later to sit on the Royal Sanitary Commission to enquire into the Health of the Army, set up under her supervision in 1857, is the figure on the right in the doorway on the far left of the picture.
Several of her medical assistants are also included. Dr (later Sir William) Linton, who was in charge of the Barrack Hospital from 1854, is on the far left besides Storks, while Dr Cruickshanks, another senior medical officer, kneels at the head of the soldier on the stretcher who is the centre of the whole group. He was one of the doctors who resented the arrival of Miss Nightingale and her nurses. As she wrote in January 1855, he 'volunteered to say that my best nurse, Mrs Roberts, dressed wounds and fractures more skilfully than any of the dressers or assistant surgeons. But that it was not a question of efficiency, nor of the comfort of the patients, but of the "regulations of the service."' Mrs Roberts herself kneels on the other side of the stretcher-case, offering him a drink. Trained at St. Thomas's Hospital, she irritated Miss Nightingale with her chatter but was her most reliable assistant, as well as nursing her devotedly when, exhausted by her exertions, she fell seriously ill at Balaclava in May 1855. Another close ally, Revd. Mother Mary Clare, the superior of the five Bermondsey nuns who joined the mission, stands further back, behind Dr Cruikshanks. This saintly and much-loved woman was an invaluable member of the team, not only nursing but running the extra diet kitchen which Miss Nightingale set up at Scutari and doing much to diffuse the religious squabbles which beset the mission. Among those who got caught up in the intrigues was Miss Tebbut, seen on the left near Linton and Storks. Having lent Keble's Christian Year to a patient, she was accused by the Evangelicals of circulating improper books in the wards. However, she was a good nurse and eventually became superintendent of the General Hospital, the second, smaller hospital at Scutari.
Two more figures in the picture have been identified. Standing in profile on the far left, in front of Linton and Storks, is Alexis Soyer, the famous chief of the Reform Club who was sent to Scutari by Lord Panmure, the Secretary for War, in March 1855. Though in manner and appearance a comic opera Frenchman, he was to become one of Miss Nightingale's staunchest friends and supporters, revolutionising the cooking at the Barrack Hospital and accompanying her when she went to the Crimea to inspect the hospitals there the following year. The party also included a boy named Robert Robinson, an invalided drummer from the 68th Light Infantry who constituted himself Miss Nightingale's 'man', delivering her letters and messages, accompanying her when she went out, and having charge of the famous lamp which she carried when she toured the wards at night. He is the small figure in a cap standing a few paces in front of Soyer, who described him as 'a regular enfant de troupe, full of wit and glee.'
Turkish men (including a Bashi-Bazouk), women, and a child, complete the group, and the artist shows himself looking through the window behind.
The fame of the subject makes it natural to assume that the picture was painted before Queen Victoria's First Visit to her Wounded Soldiers (lot 108), this being added later as a pendant (they are exactly the same size). Indeed as early as 1858 the Art Journal referred to The Mission of Mercy as 'the first of these subjects.' But in fact the opposite is true. Barrett witnessed the scene represented in Queen Victoria's First Visit on 3 March 1855 and exhibited the picture in the summer of 1856, dating it that year. He then set out for Scutari to gather material for the present picture, arriving by June when he made the watercolour drawing of Miss Nightingale which is now in the National Portrait Gallery (no.2939). He may well have gone with official blessing, the Art Journal describing him as having 'a studio in the hospital itself.'
These wounded, then, are not the poor souls who arrived in the terrible winter of 1854-5, although in a sense they symbolise them. For Barrett's object at Scutari was not to paint a specific scene that he witnessed, as in the case of Queen Victoria's First Visit to her Wounded Soldiers, but an image that would sum up and symbolise Miss Nightingale's 'mission of mercy'. It is true that the composition, as the Athenaeum observed, is 'unaffected and agreeable, an air of truthfulness pervades the whole scene.' Nevertheless, by comparison with that of Queen Victoria's First Visit, it is conventional and academic. There are echoes of Raphael's cartoon of Peter and John Healing the Lame Man at the Gate of the Temple, and that Barrett in fact had this in mind can hardly be doubted, the recumbent figure of the soldier and Miss Nightingale's hand outstretched as if blessing being clearly foreshadowed in Raphael's famous design. Together with Mrs Roberts's gesture of offering the soldier a cup, they create the effect of witnessing a Christian sacrament, and this is emphasised by the groups of onlookers, including a pointing soldier, who once again go back to the Raphael cartoons. The inclusion of infidel Turks is particularly significant in this context, as the art-critic of the Athenaeum came near to admitting when describing these figures: 'A Bashi-Bazouk, astounded in a stolid sort of way, occupies the left, and is balanced by a group of Turkish women on the right, who, by their eyes peering over the yashmaks, demonstrate a startled languor and mild wonder at the whole affair.'
The symbolic nature of the picture is further underlined by the fact that it is highly unlikely that all those represented could have been present at the same time. As already noted, they include three consecutive Commandants, and several who appear had probably left by the time Barrett arrived. The Bracebridges went as early as July 1855, Revd. Mother Mary Clare in April 1856. Miss Nightingale herself was absent from Scutari from 16 March 1856 to the end of June, inspecting other hospitals in the Crimea. Peace was declared on 29 April, and the last patient left Scutari on 16 July. Miss Nightingale finally departed on the 28th.
Barrett would not have begun work on the painting until he returned to London, and it is clear that its conception underwent radical changes at this stage. An oil sketch in the National Portrait Gallery (see references above) shows the composition essentially settled but many variations in the disposition of the figures. For instance, the Bracebridges (or, according to Graham Reynolds, loc. cit., Mrs Bracebridge and Soyer) appear to Miss Nightingale's right, while a soldier kneels in the place finally occupied by Mrs Roberts. We also know from a letter written by Barrett to Thomas Agnew on 3 July 1857 (loc. cit.) that he was having sittings from many of the participants; Lord William Paulet, the Bracebridges, Soyer, Miss Tebbut and others had all been to his Gower Street studio. That Florence Nightingale herself came seems unlikely since she was an invalid by this time, shunning publicity and overwhelmed with work on the Royal Sanitary Commission. Besides, as Cecil Woodham-Smith has written, 'she had a moral objection to having her likeness taken in any form. "I do not wish to be remembered when I am gone", she said. For the bust by (Sir John) Steell, now in the Royal United Services Institution, she gave only two sittings; and then only because it was to be paid for out of the proceeds of a fund raised by small subscriptions from the non-commissioned officers and men of the British Army.' Barrett had done well to secure the drawing he had made of her in June 1856, and this, with the possible addition of photographs, probably had to suffice. However, it seems to have served well enough. He told Agnew that Miss Nightingale's mother had called at his studio, studying the picture for half an hour and 'speaking in commendation of her daughter's portrait.'
The picture was finished by the summer of 1858, when it was exhibited with its companion by Leggatt's at their gallery in Cornhill. Meanwhile engravings of both pictures had been commissioned by Agnew's a firm which had cornered the market in images of the Crimean War. They were already promoting the photographs taken at the front by Roger Fenton, and had purchased two large paintings by Thomas Jones Barker, The Allied Generals before Sebastopol and General Williams and his Staff leaving Kars, touring them round the country and publishing engravings by C.G. Lewis. It was through the prints after Barrett's paintings - what the Art Journal called 'these really national engravings' - that the paintings were principally known. As the Sun put it in June 1856, referring to the mezzotint after Queen Victoria's First Visit to her Wounded Soldiers, 'it is destined, we doubt not, to be among the most popular pictures commemorative of the late war with Russia - a memorial to be hung up by many an English hearth, sacred as among the lares and penates of domestic art, generation after generation.' The engravings were accompanied by keys, identifying those represented and lending them maximum historical interest.
Barrett also painted small versions of both pictures. 'I have been working hard upon the reduced copy all the week', he told Agnew in his letter of July 1857 reporting progress on The Mission of Mercy. This was probably the version measuring 23½ x 35in. (59.5 x 89cm.) which was on the London art market in the early 1980s.
Of Barrett himself all too little is known. He was living in Brighton in 1851 but by 1854 he had moved to London, settling first in Bloomsbury, the bohemian quarter of the day, and later in Regent's Park. He exhibited seventeen pictures at the Royal Academy 1851-83, and twenty at the Royal Society of British Artists 1869-85, possibly ceasing to paint for the last twenty years of his life. His exhibited works embraced genre scenes, historical and literary subjects, and landscapes, while a portrait of the Birmingham philanthropist Joseph Sturge belongs to Brimingham Corporation. In 1872 he is recorded in Rome, and he must have visited Pompeii too, to judge from a group of Pompeiian subjects which he exhibited 1872-7. Today little of his work is known, and his Witt Library file is meagre. His two Crimean pictures are by far his most famous works, although they were not without parallels. He had exhibited a painting of The Meeting of Queen Victoria with the Royal Family of Orleans at the RA of 1851, and showed a Turkish subject, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Turkey, in 1858. Like a small picture of European Visitors by a Turkish Fountain, 1859, which was sold in these Rooms on 22 February 1985 (lot 114), this was no doubt based on material gathered during his visit to Scutari. Finally, the success of The Mission of Mercy seems to have inspired him to paint another picture celebrating the achievements of a great English woman reformer, Elizabeth Fry. Mrs Fry Reading to the Prisoners in Newgate was exhibited at 191 Piccadilly in 1861 and, like its predecessors, gained wide currency through engravings.