Weathering Then, Now, and Always

Abstract

What I appreciate most about James Barry's painting is this: no one else is affected by the weather, only Lear (<b>Fig. 23</b>). His hair is blown horizontal. The title of the image is King Lear Weeping Over the Dead Body of Cordelia. As with the conventions of romanticist painting, Barry has playfully turned emotion into gesture. On top of this, the mythical and religious aspects of this image have been neatly documented, but rarely is the material impossibility of the strangely targeted wind in the old King's white locks noted as contributing to the mythic significance of the tableau.⁷³ What happens when this aspect of the painting is centred in our attention, not as a simple romanticist trope but as a strange conjuring of the weather for poetic ends?