In 1965, twenty years after his death, an exhibition of his musical work was held at the Royal Festival Hall in London, which included all of the Radio Times composer portraits.
[2] Barrett's composer portraits attracted the attention of Percy Scholes and Hubert Foss, music editors at the Oxford University Press.
The composers depicted are: J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Byrd, Chopin, Elgar, Handel, Haydn, Liszt, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner.
There are his eartrumpets, his conversation books—in which any visitor would have to write what he wished to say—with a carpenter's pencil, letters, quill pens, a broken coffee cup, remnants of food and his candlesticks.
They are a speciality of the artist Oswald Barrett ('Batt' of the Radio Times), and represent years of research, study, and profound thought on his part.
He is an ardent music-lover and a deep student of the great masters, and his process has been to assemble (often by very prolonged correspondence with authorities in different parts of Europe) all the existing pictorial documents concerning those composers at different periods of their lives.
It is the conviction of all connected with this book that nothing of this sort previously seen has been so successful in achievement, and they gratefully record the fact that the frontispiece, a reproduction of an oil painting specially executed for the purpose, which they regard as the most revealing portrait of its subject in existence, is the artist's personal gift to the volume and testifies to his deep interest in it.