Titles

Only one title is known:

• 'Portrait of Robert Barr' (1920, Burroughs). 1
• 'Portrait of Robert Barr' (1980, YMSM). 2

Description

Portrait of Robert Barr, Detroit Institute of Arts

A portrait in vertical format. It shows the head of a man facing the viewer, very slightly turned to left. He has a droopy moustache and pointed beard. He wears a dark jacket over a white shirt or cravat, and a jaunty felt hat.

Sitter

Robert Barr, photograph

Robert Barr (1849-1912), journalist and writer, was born in Glasgow and educated in Toronto. He joined the staff of the Detroit Free Press in 1876 and settled in London in 1881. He and his wife Eva Bennett (Mrs Robert Barr) (d. ca 1919) had a daughter, Laura Charlotte Barr (Mrs Dodd) (1880-1949), who also posed to Whistler, for Portrait of Miss Laura Barr [YMSM 429].

Barr founded the Idler with Jerome K. Jerome in 1892. Whistler appears to have met Barr in the winter of 1894, when he brought his wife to London to see a doctor, who diagnosed her illness as cancer.

In 1894 Whistler made an etching of Barr wearing the same hat, Robert Barr [478]. This was not printed in Whistler's lifetime: the plate was discovered, bitten in and printed by Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) in 1908. 3