The art of Daniel Maclise (1806–1870) engaged the most crucial historical, religious, political, and literary issues about national identity in Britain with a rigor and breadth scarcely rivaled in the history of nineteenth-century British art. His work covered diverse historical subjects, including intimate easel paintings devoted to courtly love and large governmental murals celebrating chivalry and the Battle of Waterloo. The attempt by contemporary art historians to revise the canon of nineteenth-century art has encouraged scholars to study Maclise, but such serious attention to his work is new. Until recently, the lack of scholarly engagement with Maclise has partially resulted from the modernist disdain for the historicist idiom of his work. Although this disdain bears ideological implications, reinforced by questions of taste, recent scholarship on Maclise has, nevertheless, attempted to integrate his art into the broader developments of nineteenth-century European culture.

The exhibition catalogue Daniel Maclise, 1806–1870: Romancing the Past, edited by Peter Murray, makes a significant contribution to the scholarly effort to rehabilitate Maclise’s stature in nineteenth-century European art. As John R. Bowen, Chairman of the Crawford Art Gallery, points out in the preface, the goal of the exhibition was to illuminate how Maclise’s art “represents part of a wider European heritage, drawing inspiration, as he did, from a range of sources, from [Paul] Delaroche’s paintings in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, to Boccaccio’s Decamaron” (7). However, the primary aim of the exhibition was to explore “the Irish dimension of Maclise’s work” (7). This emphasis “is of particular significance,” in Bowen’s view, because Maclise’s art, along with that of James Barry (1741–1806), evidences the vital contribution of what might be called “the ‘Genius of Cork’” in promoting high-minded history painting in Britain (7). Not insignificantly, the Crawford Art Gallery secured Cork’s international profile with the bi-centenary exhibition (2005–06) and symposium (2006) dedicated to Barry, including the catalogue, James Barry, 1741–1806: ‘The Great Historical Painter, ed. Tom Dunne (Cork: Crawford Art Gallery, 2005) (click here for review). Yet, the focus on the Irish dimension of Maclise’s work does not detract from exploring the artist’s attempt to give visual expression to the concepts and ideals of English and continental writers.

To this end, Daniel Maclise offers eleven essays with high-quality color images that examine the Irish and transnational aspects of Maclise’s oeuvre. In this effort, Murray and his team of scholars succeed in providing fresh insights into Maclise’s life and works. Murray’s introduction presents a concise overview of Maclise’s artistic career, contending that his works resist easy summary. Part of the difficulty in interpreting them lies in Maclise’s penchant for depicting historical subjects, whether of mythic harp players, medieval pageants, or the Battle of Waterloo, with an ironic mingling of optimism and despair. His paintings typically lack “clear heroes and villains,” evoking “a moral universe full of ambiguities” (12). Murray admits that when measured against “the superior intellectual capacity of Barry,” the heavy-handed focus on “the grander hypocrisies of his day” and “the strained jingoism of Maclise” seem to have undermined the moral complications of his work (17). Yet, contemporary artists still celebrated the ambiguous quality of his paintings in terms of what Dante Gabriel Rossetti referred to as Maclise’s “instincts . . . for poetic” imagination over antiquarian precision (11). Murray concludes that the suggestive power of Maclise’s blending of realism and fantasy “anticipates the Pre-Raphaelite movement . . . of the later nineteenth century” (11) and the folklorist fantasies of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien (17).

The second essay by Murray follows this overview into the more specific background and milieu of Maclise’s early life and artistic training in Cork. Murray insists that understanding Maclise’s early career from 1806–1827 is essential, for it “laid the foundation of an ambition that drove the artist for the next four decades” (21). Here, Murray sketches the impact of Cork’s economy and religious politics on the young Maclise, including both its Tory merchant families and Non-Conformist Protestants in promoting the fine arts. In their attempts “to lay claim to a noble cultural heritage” (21), these rich middle-class patrons supported Maclise as part of a larger goal to promote a political and cultural conservatism based on the writings of Edmund Burke, Sir Walter Scott, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Chaucer. This focus, in Murray’s view, is indicative of the “powerful cult of the medieval that swept Britain and Ireland during the Regency era [1811–20]” (21). Commercial expansion in Cork also encouraged the promotion of Neoclassicism in the Cork Society of Arts. The acquisition of plaster casts of the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoön impressed upon Maclise, reinforced by Barry’s example, the necessity of studying the antique to advance history painting in Britain. It was Barry’s murals in The Society of Arts (1777–84), most of all, that guided Maclise’s career path as seen in the careful steps he took “to achieve the fame and reputation that Barry enjoyed” (29). Indeed, as did Barry before him, Maclise saw no future in Ireland: artistic fame could only be achieved in London.

Despite his practice of history painting, Maclise embraced political illustration shortly after his arrival in London in 1827. The focus stemmed from his association with a London-based group of writers and Tory activists known as the Fraser Circle. Murray contends that through its journalistic quarterly, Fraser’s Magazine, the group represented “in retrospect a key element in the rise of the Tory party in England” during the 1830s (22). As Thomas McCarthy discusses in his essay, Maclise produced an anthology of political illustrations based on the writings of clubbish Corkmen, including those of William Maginn and Thomas Croker. Maclise’s image of these Fraserians (among others) seated about the round table expressed the religio-political fellowship of the group with its allusion to King Arthur’s hall at Camelot. McCarthy also stresses that popular illustration served to mythologize the folklorist tradition of Ireland. Such images would eventually extend Maclise’s popularity in the nineteenth century through the wide circulation of books by the Fraserians in the British Empire and America.

While McCarthy focuses on Maclise’s association with fellow Corkmen, Tom Dunne, the curatorial chair of the exhibition, broadens the scope of Maclise’s political identity. In his essays on the individual works in the catalogue, Dunne argues that “Maclise’s work . . . is far more intensely and mainstream ‘British’ than ‘Irish,’” while pointing to the problematic nature of using such categories (39). Indeed, Dunne deepens an understanding of the nuances of what he calls Maclise’s “dual identity” (39). His grasp of it is impressive, and his choice of source material is convincing and historically justified. The Act of Union of 1800 frames his discussion of Maclise’s dual identity, contending that the artist’s work reflected on several levels the “strong cross-community support” of the Union (40). According to Dunne, Maclise’s attempt to shape a British national identity “involved the reworkings and interminglings of the histories of its constituent parts—England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland—and Maclise was to play a major role in the contribution that painting made to that reimagining” (40).

A vital motif in this regard is the mythic harp. Dunne explores the historical complications of the motif in contrast to interpretations that reduce it to Maclise’s Irish identity. In this, Dunne, Fintan Cullen, and Leon Litvack repudiate the views of Nancy Weston and Nancy Levy that recurring Irish harps in Maclise’s work suggest an encoded rebelliousness against English institutions. Instead, these scholars contend that Maclise tacitly referenced the versatility of the harp as depicted in his paintings dedicated to British empire in Parliament and to personal evocations of sentimental romantic mythology (207). As for the latter inflection of the harp, Mary Jane Boland’s essay interprets Maclise’s The Origins of the Harp (1842) and illustrations to Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies (1846) as examples of the artist’s nostalgia for Ireland, images that represent “the pinnacle of romantic nationalism in art and song” (196). Although the lament for the Celtic past possesses nationalist overtones, Dunne, nevertheless, stresses that “the ‘Irish’ tradition that shaped Maclise was heavily ‘British’ and ‘Protestant,’” and that his dual identity “was one with which he was entirely comfortable” (40, 39).

While Dunne seeks to complicate Maclise’s British identity, Litvack exposes Maclise’s Irish background to the artist’s encounter with contemporary French and German art. The dead corpses in Maclise’s The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife (1854), for instance, demonstrate his exposure to Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819) and Gros’s Napoleonic battle paintings. Litvack suggests that Maclise’s own penchant for depicting human tragedy predisposed him to absorbing such weighty examples. Litvack explores not only the relevance of Delaroche’s Hemicycle (1841–42) to Maclise’s murals, but also explains how the medievalism of the German Nazarenes exerted a lasting influence on the parliamentary frescos, especially The Spirit of Chivalry (1847). According to Litvack, Maclise’s admiration for Friedrich Overbeck’s Triumph of Religion in the Arts (1832–40) exemplified his awareness of “the growing intellectual and cultural affinity and interchange that developed between England and Germany” in the nineteenth century (200). The mutualism between the two nations is evident in Maclise’s large fresco at Westminster, The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher (1861). Although the Nazarene’s technique of water-glass fresco painting created problems for him, it did not detour Maclise’s attempt “to match the Continentals in the increasing ambition of his projects . . . to inculcate or invent high art” (212).

John Turpin discusses how successfully Maclise negotiated “‘Britishness’ and the assertion of ‘Irishness’” within the confines of the Academy (158). He traces this aspect of Maclise’s career and popularity as an academic administrator and teacher in the mid-nineteenth century. The Royal Academy was also the locus in which Maclise exhibited popular Shakespearean themes during the 1840s. Cullen’s essay demonstrates the cosmopolitan scope of Maclise’s encounters with the Shakespearean theater in London and French art history. Although imbued with dramatic tension, Maclise’s Shakespearean images depart from the fantastical examples of Henry Fuseli as evidenced by Maclise’s “more earth-bound” treatment (173). This focus, in Cullen’s view, exemplifies Maclise’s “delight in historical detail” that seems to invite direct viewer participation with the paintings (177). She aptly compares the verisimilitude and seriousness of Maclise’s reflective stillness in Macbeth (1840) and Hamlet (1842) to that in Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833), a work Maclise greatly admired.

Although Dunne, Litvack, and Turpin focus on Maclise’s public identity, other essays do not lose sight of the artist’s intimate themes. Julian Campbell maintains that Maclise’s images of courtly love were shaped by various influences, including medieval literature and contemporary views of feminine beauty and fashion in Victorian England. As Campbell demonstrates, Maclise’s subject matter is wide-ranging in his depictions of loving couples based on King Arthur, Tristan and Isolde, Dante, and Shakespeare, to name a few. Maclise accentuated masculine and feminine distinctions through dress, hair, and gesture, including evocations of “Botticelli-like beauty and grace” in women (187). In this regard, although Campbell alludes to Maclise’s significance to the younger Pre-Raphaelite painters, it would have been useful to substantiate the claim by comparing his examples of courtly love to those of the Pre-Raphaelites. Such a comparison would have deepened the art-historical context of Maclise’s works and extended the catalogue’s primary aim of raising Maclise’s profile as a major artist in nineteenth-century Britain.

Even with this small caveat, Daniel Maclise offers innovative scholarship on the social, political, and religious dimensions of Maclise’s art within the wider context of nineteenth-century European art. In various ways, all the essays demonstrate very clearly how central issues of Irish and British identity were for an artist aspiring to revitalize high art in Britain, and they illuminate the wide-range of Maclise’s historical themes, media, and techniques within a European framework. This emphasis provides a valuable contribution to a historiography that has tended to marginalize Maclise’s historicist idiom. Daniel Maclise should challenge scholars of British art to link the rich themes and practices of Maclise to further explorations of the layers of meaning involved in historical image-making in the nineteenth century.