Maclise, Daniel

views updated May 14 2018

Maclise, Daniel (1806–70). Historical and portrait painter and caricaturist. Born in Cork, the son of a Scottish soldier, Maclise became a student of Cork Academy when it opened in 1822, and of the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1828. Between 1830 and 1838, Fraser's Magazine published a series of his character drawings of literary men of the day, under the pseudonym Alfred Croquis. One of these was of his friend Charles Dickens for whom he also did book illustrations. In 1840 he was elected RA but later declined the presidency and a knighthood. Between 1857 and 1866 he was occupied with his best-known work: two frescos for the royal gallery of the new House of Lords, Wellington and Blücher at Waterloo and The Death of Nelson, of which Rossetti said, ‘These are such “historical” pictures as the world perhaps had never seen before.’

June Cochrane

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