Return to Menu

Thomas Barker - Aged 36 to his death

At the age of 36 he married Priscilla Jones, and moved to Sion Hill in Bath where his friend Sir Joseph Gandy designed him a classical house of elegant proportions built around a picture gallery. This he used for immensely popular preview parties - newspapers of the period reported strings of carriages waiting as the gentry visited Barker. On one side of his studio Thomas painted a fresco thirty feet long by twelve feet high depicting the massacre of the Greeks by the Turks on the Aegean island of Scios, reflecting the Greco-Turkish wars of the period.

After 1820 Barker's popularity gradually declined, partly because fashionable society was now following the Prince Regent to Brighton rather than visiting Bath, and partly because his style of painting became less popular. This led to a loss of income, which was accompanied by a decline in his health - he had never been strong - and in that of his wife. By the time of his death he had been forced to sell Sion Hill, and was living off a government pension of £100 a year. He died having reached eighty years of age in the winter of 1847 and is buried in Weston Churchyard near Bath.

Other tutorials