In 1777 Barry was commissioned to begin work on a series of six murals for the Great Room of the Royal Society of Arts (still extant), a project that was not exhibited until 1783 and that was to preoccupy him in one way or another for much of the rest of his career. … This print is fairly close to the first painting in the series and shows Orpheus from Barry’s perspective, not “as a man with so many fingers operating on an instrument with so many strings, and surrounded with such auditors as trees, birds, and wild beasts; it has been my wish rather to represent him as he really was, the founder of Grecian theology, uniting in the same character, the legislator, the divine, the philosopher, and the poet, as well as the musician” (Works Edward Fryer, ed., The Works of James Barry, vol. 2, p. 234). Quite a few details here vary from those in the painting: Orpheus’s long hair has been replaced by a shock of strands at the front and the figures around him have been enlarged in closer proportion to his outsize figure in the painting. Most notably, however, the ethereal two-dimensionality of the painted scenes are transformed in this and in the other prints in the series by closely sculpted forms and dark areas of hatching.

from Bindman, No Cross, No Crown: Prints by James Barry from the Collection of William L. and Nancy Pressly (Notre Dame, 2016)