Daniel Maclise - Reference

Painter, born in Cork, Co Cork, S Ireland. He trained at the Cork School of Art and at the school of the Royal Academy in London. He is noted for the frescoes in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords: ‘The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher’ (1861) and ‘The Death of Nelson’ (1864). He was also known as an illustrator of books for Tennyson and Dickens. His sketches of contemporaries in Fraser's Magazine (1830–8) were published in 1874 and 1883.

Daniel Maclise (1806 - April 25, 1870), Irish painter, was born in Cork, the son of a Highland soldier.

His education was of the plainest kind, but he was eager for culture, fond of reading, and anxious to become an artist. It was exceedingly popular, and the artist became celebrated enough to receive many commissions for portraits, which he executed, in pencil, with very careful treatment of detail and accessory.

Various influential friends perceived the genius and promise of the lad, and were anxious to furnish him with the means of studying in the metropolis;

In 1829 he exhibited for the first time in the Royal Academy. Gradually he began to confine himself more exclusively to subject and historical pictures, varied occasionally by portraits of Campbell, Miss Landon, Dickens, and other of his literary friends. The years that followed were occupied with a long series of figure pictures, deriving their subjects from history and tradition and from the works of Shakespeare, Goldsmith and Le Sage.

He also designed illustrations for several of Dickens's Christmas books and other works. Between the years 1830 and 1836 he contributed to Fraser's Magazine, under the pseudonym of Alfred Croquis, a remarkable series of portraits of the literary and other celebrities of the time character studies, etched or lithographed in outline, and touched more or less with the emphasis of the caricaturist, which were afterwards published as the Maclise Portrait Gallery (1871).

In 1858 Maclise commenced one of the two great monumental works of his life, the Meeting of Wellington and Blücher, on the walls of Westminster Palace.

The intense application which he gave to these great historic works, and various circumstances connected with the commission, had a serious effect on the artist's health.

His works are distinguished by powerful intellectual and imaginative qualities, but most of them are marred by harsh and dull coloring, by metallic hardness of surface and texture, and by frequent touches of the theatrical in the action and attitudes of the figures.

A memoir of Maclise, by his friend WJ O'Driscoll, was published in 1871.

Reference

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.