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| Daniel Maclise, The Birth of Chivalry (1845), ©museums, Sheffield |
The Crawford Gallery in Cork is to be congratulated on its major exhibition of the works of Daniel Maclise (1806–1870), one of Cork’s and indeed Ireland’s most remarkable historical painters, a man of whose talents they are rightly proud.[1] Yet Maclise is in many respects a very un-Irish artist and certainly not one who fits into the later Irish nationalist tradition of rebel Cork. Maclise was the son of a Presbyterian Scottish soldier who had settled in Cork and become a cobbler. The artist moved when a young man to London, where he enjoyed the patronage of Prince Albert and the friendship of Charles Dickens, whose books he illustrated. Indeed his best-known works, versions of which are in the Cork exhibition, were his frescoes The Death of Nelson and Wellington and Blücher (1858– 1864) for the Palace of Westminster, the Houses of Parliament. They celebrate Britain’s naval victory over the French at Trafalgar in 1805 followed by triumph at Waterloo in 1815, which for half a century allowed Britain to enjoy being the world’s first global superpower.
The battle scenes are powerful and imaginative and remarkable in their detail, but also over-theatrical as such records of imperial triumph tend to be. They are best seen close up, where you can admire the details adorning the musket of a red-coated marine on the Victory, a
