Daniel Maclise

Daniel Maclise drew the faces of an age. Born in Cork in 1806, the son of a shoemaker, he became one of the most celebrated painters in Victorian Britain, a friend of Dickens and the man who covered the walls of Parliament with the nation's history. He learned to draw on the streets and in the art school of his own city.

A Cork start

His father was a Scottish soldier who settled in Cork as a tanner and shoemaker. Daniel was put to work in a bank at fourteen, lasted two years, and left to study at the Cork School of Art. He filled sketchbooks with the people of the city. A drawing he made of Walter Scott, caught when the writer passed through Cork, sold so well in print that it made the teenager locally famous. In 1827 he left for London and the Royal Academy schools, where he swept the prizes.

The painter of history

Maclise made his name as a history painter, the grandest and most demanding kind. His vast Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife shows the Norman conquest of Ireland as a wedding over a field of the dead, a Cork man painting the moment his country changed hands. The British government chose him to decorate the new Palace of Westminster, and there he painted two enormous murals, The Death of Nelson and the meeting of Wellington and Blücher at Waterloo, among the largest works of their kind in Britain.

The Westminster murals nearly broke him. He painted them in a difficult new technique, on a scale few artists would attempt, and the strain wore down his health over the years they took. They survive as a record of Victorian Britain telling itself its own story, with a Cork hand behind every figure. His friend Charles Dickens rated him one of the finest draughtsmen he knew. Maclise had become the great history painter of the age almost by accident, a young man who came to London to draw portraits and ended up painting nations, and he never lost the Cork sharpness of eye that first sold a sketch of Walter Scott on the city's streets.

The Cork eye

Alongside the great machines he was a fine portraitist and illustrator, and his series of literary portraits caught a whole generation of writers in a few quick lines. He worked himself hard and died in London in 1870, having turned down both a knighthood and the presidency of the Royal Academy. Cork keeps his memory in the Crawford, the gallery that grew out of the school where he began, and where his work has hung in his own city.

On the walk

We pass the Crawford, where the Cork School of Art trained Maclise, and tell the story of the shoemaker's son who painted the history of two nations.