Daniel Maclise

Biography

In 1825 Walter Scott, travelling in Ireland, appeared in one of the bookshops of Cork. A nineteen-year-old who saw him there made a surreptitious sketch of him and later reworked the drawing as a lithograph. The print sold well, and commissions for pencil portraits followed.

Maclise was born on 25 January 1806 in Cork. His father, Alexander, a Scotsman, had come to Ireland with the army and become a tanner and shoemaker. The boy’s schooling was of the plainest, but he read a great deal and wanted to be an artist. In 1820 his father placed him in Newenham’s Bank, where he worked for two years, and then he entered the Cork School of Art. Friends who recognised his ability offered him money for a journey to London. He refused the help, saved the money himself and arrived in the capital on 18 July 1827. There he made a sketch of the actor Charles John Kean; this too was lithographed and published, and he earned a good deal from it. In 1828 Maclise entered the schools of the Royal Academy of Arts and eventually won the highest prizes open to students. He first exhibited at the Academy in 1829.

He painted portraits all his life: Lord Campbell, the novelist Letitia Landon, Dickens (the portrait of 1839) and other literary acquaintances. But he turned more and more to subject pictures drawn from history, legend and the plays of Shakespeare, as well as the books of Goldsmith and Le Sage. After two works of 1833 that markedly raised his reputation, the picture “The Chivalric Vow of the Ladies and the Peacock” won him election as an associate of the Academy in 1835, and in 1840 he became a full Academician. From 1830 to 1836 a series of his portraits of literary and other celebrities appeared in Fraser’s Magazine under the pseudonym Alfred Croquis, outline drawings touched with caricature; they were published as a book, the “Maclise Portrait Gallery”, in 1871. He also drew illustrations for several of Dickens’s Christmas books.

One of his largest pictures, “The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife” (1854), takes an Irish subject: the Norman conqueror of Ireland marries the daughter of his Gaelic ally. The canvas is in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. It is said to reflect the artist’s nationalist feelings and his knowledge of ancient Irish civilisation; that is hard to check against documents.

During the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, in 1846 Maclise was commissioned to paint murals in the House of Lords on the subjects of Justice and Chivalry. In 1858 he began “The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher after the Battle of Waterloo”. It was started as a fresco, but the technique proved unmanageable and he wished to give up the commission. Prince Albert encouraged him, and Maclise studied the new method of water-glass painting in Berlin and carried out both “The Meeting” and its companion, “The Death of Nelson”, completed in 1864, in that medium. The murals have survived badly. For Halifax Town Hall, completed in 1863, he also made a wall painting by the grand staircase.

In 1857 he, together with Millais, Hunt and Rossetti, was commissioned to illustrate Tennyson’s poems for the publisher Moxon. Contemporaries sometimes place Maclise beside the Pre-Raphaelites, although by age he belonged to the previous generation. It seems to me that the link rests more on shared subjects than on manner.

He declined the offer of the presidency of the Royal Academy: in 1865 according to some accounts, in 1866 according to others.

Maclise died on 25 April 1870 at his home, 4 Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea. A year later a memoir by his friend William Justin O’Driscoll was published, and in 2008 the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork held a large exhibition of his work, “Daniel Maclise: Romancing the Past”.