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Daniel Maclise (1806 - April 25, 1870),
Ireland|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. His father, however, placed him,
in 1820, in Newenham's Bank, where he remained for
two years, and then left to study in the Cork
school of art. In 1825 it happened that Sir Walter
Scott was travelling in Ireland, and young
Maclise, having seen him in a bookseller's shop,
made a surreptitious sketch of the great man,
which he afterwards lithographed. 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; but with rare independence he refused
all aid, and by careful economy saved a sufficient
sum to enable him to leave for London. There he
made a lucky hit by a sketch of Charles John
Kean|the younger Kean, which, like his portrait of
Scott, was lithographed and published. He entered
the Academy schools in 1828, and carried off the
highest prizes open to the students.

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 John
Campbell, 1st Lord Campbell|Campbell, Letitia
Elizabeth Landon|Miss Landon, Charles
Dickens|Dickens, and other of his literary
friends. In 1833 he exhibited two pictures which
greatly increased his reputation, and in 1835 the
"Chivalric Vow of the Ladies" and the "Peacock"
procured his election as associate of the Academy,
of which he became full member in 1840. 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
William Shakespeare|Shakespeare, Oliver
Goldsmith|Goldsmith and Alain René le Sage|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
Arthur Wellesly, 1st Duke of Wellington|Wellington
and Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher|Blücher, on
the walls of Westminster Palace. It was begun in
fresco, a process which proved unmanageable. The
artist wished to resign the task; but, encouraged
by Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence|Prince
Albert, he studied in Berlin the new method of
water-glass painting, and carried out the subject
and its companion, the "Death of Nelson", in that
medium, completing the latter painting in 1864.

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. He began to shun
the company in which he formerly delighted; his
old buoyancy of spirits was gone; and when, in
1865, the presidentship of the Academy was offered
to him he declined the honor. He died of acute
pneumonia on the 25th of April 1870.

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. His fame rests most
securely on his two greatest works at Westminster.

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

==Reference==
*1911