The Royal Society of Arts in the Adelphi features a series of murals entitled The Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture. These were painted between 1777 and 1784 by James Barry. Barry received no recompense for his work, though the Society did provide him with canvas, paints and models.

Blake admired Barry's grand, heroic canvases, which depicted historical or poetic subjects. Indeed there are clear similarities between Barry's King Lear (in King Lear Weeping Over the Dead Body of Cordelia in Tate Britain), and Blake's numerous bearded prophets and deities (Urizen, London, The Ancient of Days).

Barry was Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy while Blake was studying there. He was, however, expelled in 1799 for his attacks on other members (particularly the memory of Reynolds, whom Blake also loathed) and went on to die in poverty in 1806.

Blake felt great kinship with Barry, an outsider, who, like him, stubbornly refused to truckle to the fashions of the time and was consequently ostracized for refusing to be 'passive and polite and a virtuous ass'.

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