Thomas Barber the portrait painter 1 - early life and first marriage

 His birth and family background

Traditionally Barber was born in Nottingham on 28 March 1771.

Ivan Mitford-Barberton, “Barbers of the Peak,” Oxford, 1934, p.17.  This author was Thomas Barber's great-grandson. The exact date may have been a family memory. Redgrave (below) says Barber was 75 when he died in 1843, if this were true he would have been born in 1768 - several writers have followed that. But the announcement of his death in the Derby Mercury (27 September 1843) states he was in his seventy-third year, meaning that he was seventy-two.

Again traditionally his father, also Thomas, was the well-to-do owner of a spinning-mill and a descendant of an old Derbyshire family.

Mitford-Barberton, p.6.

However there were plenty of other people called Barber round and about, including some evidently gentry or wealthy families.

Notably a family of gentry colliery owners at, or who lived near, Greasley. In about 1822 the Nottingham Subscription Library seems to have had four members called Barber, three of whom were called Thomas!

I am afraid Barber's great-grandson wanted an upper-class ancestry which he did not actually have! 

Added this at Christmas 2021:- By chance, very recently, I spotted this note in my Gale Ecco reproduction edition of the 1754 List of Burgesses and Freeholders of Nottingham.  The copy scanned for this edition had a great many notes in manuscript, some of which seem to have been written on additional (unnumbered) pages inserted, notes perhaps for record-keeping purposes, certainly by someone with local knowledge! On printed page 4 is given the name of Joseph Barber, baker of Petergate, a burgess and voter in 1754, and opposite that on a blank page, in the same hand as many other notes:- “Joseph Barber lived at the corner house of St.Peter's church yard – his son a Shoe maker lived in the same house, whose son Thomas became so eminent as a Portrait Painter.” 

Thomas Barber senior is described as a shoemaker in August 1762 in the marriage bond, and again in his will, made in 1775. He and his wife were married in St. Peter's church in Nottingham, his bride being a young widow who had married a “currier” four years earlier.

Blagg, T. M. (ed.) 'Abstracts of the Bonds and Allegations for Marriage Licences in the Archdeaconry Court of Nottingham, 1754-1770' Thoroton Society Record Series Vol X, 1947, p.118.

Nottinghamshire Archives ref. PR/NW. I hoped to be able to get a copy of the will before finalising this article. It might even prove not to be the artist's father!

Blagg, ibid p.58 (April 1758). Ann's maiden name was Abbot. Her age in 1758 was stated to be 27. The currier was called William Tomlin.

The (senior) Barbers' four eldest children – girls – were all baptised at Castle-Gate Independent, which I surmise was where the family worshipped most regularly.

Mitford-Barberton, p.7, also Family Search site.

The baptism of Thomas, apparently the youngest of the five children, has not been found but nothing found conflicts with the tradition of his being born in 1771.

Education and early life

Thomas Barber's early education remains a blank page, and the tradition that he displayed such talent in painting that he was packed off to the Royal Academy in 1786 – aged about fifteen - must be treated with suspicion.

Heather Williams' 1981 Nottingham University Thesis on Nottingham Artists devotes over 50 pages (pp. 242-294) to a very careful study of the Barbers' work and lives (father Thomas and sons Tom and Alfred). Williams admits to having been heavily reliant on Mitford-Barberton for family details. To me it seems her work is strong on the portraits themselves and useful as regards her notes from some of the newspapers early in Barber's career, as I have not been able to get some of these from the British Newspaper Archives (BNA) and the Nottingham City Library is not open.

There was a school at the RA, but it seems misleading to imply that Barber studied there under Sir Thomas Lawrence. Lawrence (not yet a knight, of course) was only two years Barber's senior, and himself a Royal Academy student at that sort of date.

Information from notes on National Gallery website. There seems to be no mention of Barber in D.E.Williams' Life and Correspondence of Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1831. Nor in Sandby's History of the Royal Academy. One of the published statements about this – only a newspaper article in fact - even gets Lawrence's first name wrong. As to other possible associates, Richard Bonington was three years older than Barber, and a close look at his career might hint at possible associations. Also Elias Needham (?1766-1800?), a portrait painter from Chesterfield with London and Sheffield experience, was briefly based in Hounds Gate in Nottingham in about 1797.

I wondered whether Barber has been muddled up with a young Academician of that time named John Thomas Barber.

.....who would later call himself Barber Beaumont (no known relation to author).

Barber's father had died when he was five and I believe that Mrs Barber lived near St. Peter's church (see inserted information above). The girls grew up and in due course all married – all at St Peter's. I don't think that Castle-Gate Independent was able to conduct marriages, so these weddings were in the established church. This may mask the fact that the husbands may also have been non-conformists.

St.Peter's Churchyard. A later house perhaps very near where
the Barbers lived.

Barber's mother is, I surmise, the Mrs Barber who was buried in 1803 at Castle-gate beneath a stone which had been placed two years earlier for one of her grandchildren who had died in infancy.

A story was published in December 1846 in the Nottingham Review - a reminiscence from an anonymous correspondent about “the Infidel Thomas Paine.” The correspondent said that when he was a child, he [Paine] lived in St Peter's churchyard, at the second house from Peter-gate and that [the correspondent] “often heard Mrs Barber, the mother of the celebrated painter, name him” [not in a good light] and that “Mrs Barber frequently got up in the night to save his wife from his fury.”

See Mitford-Barberton, pp.6-7. Elizabeth Barber married John White in 1788 (I think that this is not the father of the poet Henry Kirke White). Ann married Samuel Harris in 1785 (he a Quaker, I think). Sarah married William Tunney in 1792 (there was a Wesleyan minister of that name). Mary married Robert Beeby in 1793. The Beebys appear to have remained in Nottingham. Mitford-Barberton notes that Robert Beeby's brother John studied portrait-painting for a time under Thomas Barber and painted portraits of Hugh and Ann Atherstone which were in his (Mr Mitford-Barberton's) possession.

The burial register (Nottingham University, part of collection ref. CU) states that a Beeby child was buried in 1801 and that Mrs Barber's place of burial was marked by Mr Beeby's stone.

Marriage and Moravians

Thomas Barber's own marriage took place at St Nicholas' church, Nottingham, in June 1795.

Parish Register; Mitford-Barberton p.8. It was by licence but I have not found that.

His wife Mary Atherstone came from Brewhouse Yard at the foot of the castle rock,

Having once been part of the Castle, Brewhouse Yard was not part of any of the Nottingham parishes. It became something of a centre for Non-conformists. See for example Bethany Marsh's article “Wealthy Women, Bankers, and Cloth-Workers; the lives of the nonconformist families of Brewhouse Yard, Nottingham, 1650-1750” in East Midlands History & Heritage Magazine, Issue 6, January 2018.

..... where meetings of the Moravian church (the United Brethren) took place, served by a Minister from the Moravian settlement at Ockbrook, half way between Nottingham and Derby.

In his Diary covering the early 1750s John Ockershausen wrote of coming over to Nottingham from Ockbrook. See John Ockershausen's Ockbrook Diary: The first three years of a Derbyshire Moravian Community 1750-1753, by Roger H. Martin, in Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society, Vol. 29 (1996), pp. 1-22. The History of Nottingham which was printed in 1807 by J[Jonathan] Dunn states, on page 35, that “the Moravians have their place of worship in Brewhouse-yard.”

This was perhaps the start of Barber's long relationship with the Moravians. Ivan Mitford-Barberton said (p.19) that Barber himself was not a member of that church, but Mary certainly was, and so was Barber's second wife. So equally were some of the people he would paint in later years.

Mary was one of the numerous children of Hugh Atherstone, a [?silk-] dyer who may have been wealthy some years, but not others.

London Gazette, several entries as to his bankruptcy, including one in 1793. Leicester Chronicle 24 May 1817 contains notice of a forthcoming sale by Mr E B Robinson by order of the Executors of the late Mr Hugh Atherstone, of the whole household furnishings including “four valuable paintings, of large dimensions, on sacred subjects,” trading utensils (detailed) “proper for conducting the Dying Business on a large scale,” and a six horse power steam engine… all which could be shown by Mr H. Atherstone junior, on the premises [at Brewhouse Yard]. Hugh Atherstone had been buried at Ockbrook (Mitford-Barberton p.187). Apparently the Atherstones of Nottingham were suppliers of “brown lake” to artists (NPG resource British Artists' Suppliers).

At least one of her brothers had been educated at the Moravian school at Fulneck near Bradford,

Edwin Atherstone 1788-1872 was born at Brewhouse Yard and educated at Fulneck (see The Corvey Poets Project at the University of Nebraska). He must have been Mary Barber's brother.

and perhaps Mary herself was at school there too, as girls' education was catered for by the Moravians. Perhaps even Thomas Barber had been there: it was said from about 1785 that "a few children of parents who, without entirely connecting themselves with our Church, yet kept up an intimate acquaintance with it, had been already admitted to our schools.”

Simeon Rayner, History & Antiquities of Pudsey, (1887) p.249. The quote seems to come from Bishop G. Traneker (d.1802).

Barber children 

Thomas and Mary Barber had nine children over the next fifteen or more years.  The eldest, Thomas, is said to have been baptised in January 1797 at the Wesleyan chapel, which I think at that time was in the Hockley district of Nottingham. The next seven children were baptised at Castle-Gate between 1799 and 1809.

Baptism dates etc are from the Family Search Site and the information is generally consistent with information in Mr Mitford-Barberton's book though he entirely omits the daughter Marianne who was baptised on 27 Nov. 1809, the same day as her brother Alfred. There had been an earlier Alfred, who must have died between 1805-1809 aged three or less, and I do not think that the second Alfred (1809-1884) and Marianne were necessarily twins. However perhaps she also died in infancy.

The Minister at Castle Gate was Richard Alliott.

c.1769-1840, Minister there for almost fifty years, one of several people Thomas Barber knew who were founder members of the Nottingham Subscription Library (Bromley House). Barber was to paint a portrait of Mr Alliott, much later.

Six (or five) of those children survived beyond infancy so that by 1809 there were seven  (or six) children, after which, a gap of four years until the last one, Frederick, who was baptised in Derby.

Standard Hill

I do not yet know where the Barbers lived for the first fifteen or so years of their marriage. He had a house at Standard-Hill near Nottingham Castle but that can only mean after about 1808, when the land there was sold off by the castle's owner the Duke of Newcastle.

.....in 32 Lots, one of which was bought by Robert Goodacre for his school: F. Arthur Wadsworth, Transactions of the Thoroton Society, vol.45, p.65. See also J. Holland Walker, An itinerary of Nottingham: Standard Hill and Postern Street, Transactions of the Thoroton Society, 32 (1928) (from nottshistory.org). Standard-hill was an area of about five acres comprising a church *St.James's”, the gardens of the General Infirmary, and “four handsome streets,” namely King-street, Charles-street, Standard-street, and Hill-street (see James Orange, History & Antiquities of Nottingham (1840) vol. 1 pp.485-6)...Also see the Smith & Wild map of Nottingham, about 1820. St James's church, Standard-hill, whose minister c.1834 was Rev. John Burnett Stewart [or Stuart], should be distinguished from St.James's chapel. St.James's street, where the minister was John Wild.

..... to be continued.