Written by Mary S. Irwin Wood (Mrs. James S. Wood) Regent of Savannah Chapter, a descendent of Captain Andrew Barry and Kate Barry--from records and authenticated family traditions, and read at June meeting of the Savannah Chapter D. A. R. 1913, by her daughter Miss Rosalind Lawson Wood, by request sent to Elijah Clark Chapter D. A. R., Athens, Ga., to be read by Mrs. Augusta Wood DuBose, also a descendant of Kate Barry and her husband, Captain Andrew Barry. ART AND ARTISTS OF THE REVOLUTION. During the reign of George III, in the town of Boston, with only eighteen thousand inhabitants, there hung in the library of Harvard University a copy of "A Cardinal" by Van Dycke. The New England states were opposed to art as a principle, but showed signs of literary and artistic activity at this time. Exhibitions were unknown, the painters were "traveling artists" who went over the country painting portraits on sign boards, stage coaches, and fire engines, for practice and also a living. John Singleton Copeley, in Boston, was the only American artist who did meritorious work. Before he came under foreign influences, he wielded his brush with great dexterity, "The Death of the Earl of Chatham" in the National Gallery in London, being one of his famous pictures. The grouping of the portrait figures is skillfully arranged. To our art, the portraits he painted in Boston are of importance. The lesson thus taught led us into the interior of the royalist era, with carved furniture, showy curtains, peopled with well-to-do men and women, lavishly robed, that suggests the customs as well as the people of the Revolutionary period. Benjamin West, a contemporary of Copely, had nothing in common with the development of American art. He left at an early age for England, where he climbed the pinnacle of social, if not artistic success. He was a personal friend of the king, was employed as his historical painter, succeeding Sir Joshua Reynolds as president of the royal academy. One of his pictures quite noted was "Christ Rejected." "Death on the Pale Horse," the size of the canvas he used was 200 by 264 feet. His daring innovation of dressing the characters showed the costumes of the time and country in which they lived. It was his picturesque personality more than his art that attracts us to-day. In his native town, Philadelphia, it is said the Cherokee Indians taught him the secret of preparing color. This was the first city in the Union where opportunities for art growth and a moderate patronage presented themselves. Charles Wilson Peale, a man rather versatile, also a painter of some merit, established the first "Art Gallery," a museum of historical portraits, in his residence in Philadelphia.