Maclise: The Irish Victorian (extract)

In 1838 the novelist Thackeray, who was also a practising art critic, set out humorously his order of merit for the leading artist of his day – English of course, or as he calls it, “the greatest school of painting of the greatest country of the modern world”. His list is as follows:

1. Baron Briggs (At the very least he is out and out the very best portrait painter of the set.)
2. Daniel, Prince Maclise (his royal highness’s pictures place him very near the throne indeed.)
3. Edwin Earl of Landseer
4. The Lord Charles of Landseer
5. The Duke of Etty
6. Archbishop Eastlake
7. His Majesty King Mulready

It is worth noting that the two men elevated to royal and princely rank are Irish: namely Mulready and Maclise. Mulready (honoured by bicentenary exhibitions in both the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the National Gallery of Ireland in the 1980s) was obviously closer to Thackeray’s tastes through his refined, rather small-scale art, which reconciles the mystical and pastoral intensity of Blake and Palmer with the mid-Victorian world of domestic genre.

Mulready is undoubtedly one of the genuine Little Masters of early Victorian art, but though he was born in Ennis, County Clare, there is very little in his paintings which lifts him out of his English context. His delicate, luminous colour and his technique of working on a white ground definitely influenced the Pre-Raphaelites, but he was a slow producer with a limited range. His very virginal nudes somehow drew the wrath of Ruskin, who wrote some particularly silly things about them (he called them “most abominable”). Maclise, on the other hand, the son of a Scottish soldier who had settled in Cork and whose real name was probably MacLish or MacLeish, played a role in developing national consciousness of his country – or rather of both his countries – which Mulready, the “native” Catholic, never dreamed of. Most English art historians and critics have tended to ignore this and continue to regard maclise as one of the most archetypically English of the early Victorians, but he cannot be understood if the Irish dimension in his art and mentality is ignored.

[Read much more detail on Maclise and his time in the Appletree Press title Irish Art 1930-1990 by Brian Fallon, published by Appletree Press.