Edith Cleaves Barry
(1884-1969)

Self-portrait by Edith Cleaves Barry. Brick Store Museum Collection.

Edith Cleaves Barry—artist, world traveler and preservationist—was born in Boston on March 10, 1884, as the third of Charles Dummer Barry and Ida Morton Thompson’s four children. Barry spent most of her childhood in Montclair, New Jersey. Since Barry’s father was a partner in an import-export company with offices worldwide, the Barry children often accompanied their parents overseas and were instilled with deep appreciation for history, art and culture. By her seventeenth birthday, Edith had already crossed the ocean 24 times. She became a prolific correspondent, carefully recording her observations in diaries and letters to family and friends. These writings formed the basis for Barry’s artistic acumen.

Barry was educated in Montclair and in Providence, Rhode Island, and went on to study art in New York City, France, Italy, Africa and the Orient. Her work was first exhibited in Portland, Maine, and went on to be included in exhibitions at such institutions as the Corcoran Gallery (Washington, D.C.), the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Academy of Design (New York) and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (Philadelphia). Barry specialized in oil on canvas, but she also embraced engraving, sculpture, pen and ink and watercolor. The body of her work was portraits, usually of civic officials and executives of corporations, foundations and universities. Her paintings graced the walls of New York’s Soldiers and Sailors Club, the U.S. Post Office in Kennebunk (now the Kennebunk Police Station), Dartmouth College, the Dyer Library in Saco, Maine, and numerous schools and hospitals in New Jersey.

Barry moved to New York City in 1916 after beginning her professional career. Her studio was adjacent to the New York Public Library on 42 nd Street and overlooked Bryant Park. When Barry’s mother died in 1935, Barry sold the family’s Montclair home and set up dual residency, spending winters in New York City and summers in Kennebunk.

In 1936, Barry established The Brick Store Museum in downtown Kennebunk in a former dry goods store built in 1825 by her great-grandfather William Lord, a prominent ship owner and merchant. The museum quickly grew to encompass three adjacent buildings on Main Street, as well as a Greek Revival house at 4 Dane Street, complete with a barn and carriage stalls. The latter was known as the New Art Workshop dedicated to her parents in 1959.

Barry served as the Museum’s director, cultivating the museum into a regional history center and archives with a highly regarded repository of decorative and fine arts and material culture. She retired in 1948 to continue pursuing her artistic interests but remained on the Museum’s board of trustees. She maintained her Kennebunk home on Summer Street in the 1803 family estate known as the Taylor-Barry House.

Upon Barry’s death in Biddeford, Maine, in 1969, the Taylor-Barry House was bequeathed to The Brick Store Museum. The home was open to the public and interpreted as an historic house until its sale as a private residence with historic preservation restrictions in 2002.