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, the closest friend Charles Dickens had among artists, and the man who covered the walls of Parliament with the nation's history. He learned to draw on the streets of this city and in its art school, a few minutes' walk from where the tour goes.

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, drawing from the Canova casts that still stand in the Crawford. He filled sketchbooks with the people of the city. In 1825, when Walter Scott passed through Cork, the nineteen-year-old followed him into Bolster's bookshop on Patrick Street, sketched him on the spot, and had the drawing in the shop window as a print before Scott had left town. It sold so well that it made the teenager locally famous and paid his way to London. In 1827 he left for 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, now in the National Gallery in Dublin, 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 Meeting of Wellington and Blücher after Waterloo and The Death of Nelson, each forty-five feet long and among the largest works of their kind in Britain.

The Westminster murals nearly broke him. He painted them in a difficult new waterglass technique, on a scale few artists would attempt, and the years they took wore his health down. They survive as a record of Victorian Britain telling itself its own story, with a Cork hand behind every face. Dickens rated him one of the finest draughtsmen alive, and when Maclise died it was Dickens who stood up at the Royal Academy dinner and said so.

The Cork eye

Alongside the great machines he was a fine portraitist and illustrator, and his series of literary portraits for Fraser's Magazine caught a whole generation of writers in a few quick lines. He worked himself hard, turned down both a knighthood and the presidency of the Royal Academy, and died in London in 1870. He never lost the sharpness of eye that first sold a sketch of Walter Scott out of a shop window on Patrick Street. Cork keeps his memory in the Crawford, the gallery that grew out of the school where he began, and his work has hung in his own city ever since.

On the walk

We pass the Crawford, where the Cork School of Art trained Maclise, and the stretch of Patrick Street where a teenager sketched Walter Scott, and we tell the story of the shoemaker's son who painted the history of two nations.