Pen and wash on laid paper, depicting a dancing boy playing a hurdy gurdy, 19.6 x 16.7 cm. Block of toning around the edges, scattered foxing and stains, overall fine. Provenance: Trim Bridge Galleries (printed label with artist, dates and medium, to verso of prior frame).

Barker exhibited at the Royal Academy and British Institution for almost fifty years, during which period he exhibited nearly one hundred pictures. He was a prolific artist who painted a wide range of subjects and was entirely self taught and when Barker's talents were in full vigour, no artist of his time had a greater hold on popular favor: his pictures of The Woodman, Old Tom (painted before he was seventeen years of age), and gypsy groups and rustic figures, were copied onto almost every possible material: Staffordshire pottery, Worcester china, Manchester cottons, and Glasgow linens. 

One of the first British artists to use Lithography as a print medium, Barker contributed two prints to Specimens of Polyautography, the first British publication of a collection of Lithographic plates, originally published by Philipp André in 1803. The British Museum holds a number of Barker's drawings and prints and there are six paintings in the collection of the Tate.