After a public-school education in Kansas City, Missouri, Barse began his professional art training in 1877 at the Art Students' League of Chicago under John Vanderpoel. In 1878, he went to Paris where he passed five years in study with Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre at the Academie Julian, and with Alexandre Cabanel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
When Barse returned it was to Boston where he established himself as a painter of portraits and figures. It was his family's wish that the artist enter the cattle business, and he was in the Texas panhandle region around 1886, perhaps to learn about ranching. However, by 1887 he had moved to New York, where he remained only two years before moving again, this time to Italy.
The artist spent a total of six years living, for the most part, in Capri and Rome. There he became a good friend of Elihu Vedder and also met his future wife, Rosa Ferraro, whom he married in 1891. The Italian campagna made a great impression on Barse, and he soon added the study of landscape to his specialties of portraiture and ideal figure painting. The language of Italy also appealed to him, and an interest in Italian dialects developed into a lifelong hobby.
By the time of his return to New York, Barse was beginning to attract notice in the art world. He won an Academy Hallgarten Prize in 1895; the following year he was commissioned to paint a series of eight panels on the theme of literature for the Library of Congress. At this time, he was also teaching a life class at the Art Students League.
In 1904, he moved to Katonah, New York, where he lived quietly for the rest of his career. Barse exhibited regularly in Academy annuals until his death, which came at the age of seventy-six by suicide. The note he left to his adopted daughter explained simply that he had completed his work and wanted "to go to sleep".
