Maclise, DANIEL

Maclise, DANIEL, painter, the son of a Highland soldier named M'Leish, was born at Cork in January 1806 (not 1811) and baptised 2d February, entered the school of the Royal Academy, London, in 1828, soon exhibited at the Academy, and in 1833 made himself famous by his 'All-Hallow Eve.' His later pictures are many of them familiar by engraving—such as 'The Banquet Scene in Macbeth' and 'Scene from Twelfth Night' (1840), 'Play Scene in Hamlet' (1842), and his design of 'Shakespeare's Seven Ages' (1848), 'The Gross of Green Spectacles' (1850), 'Caxton's Printing-office' (1851). The frescoes—each 45 feet long and 12 feet high—in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords, depicting 'The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher on the Evening of the Battle of Waterloo' and 'The Death of Nelson at Trafalgar,' were admitted to be the finest mural paintings hitherto executed in Britain. Numerous good engravings of them are current. The most noteworthy pictures exhibited by Maclise, after the completion of these great works, were 'Othello,' 'Desdemona,' and 'Ophelia' (1867), 'The Sleep of Duncan' and 'Madeline after Prayer' (1868), 'King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid' (1869), 'The Earls of Desmond and Ormond,' posthumously exhibited in 1870, in which year he died on 1st April. The sketches by him of his contemporaries, published in Fraser's Magazine during 1830-38, were republished in 1874 and 1883. See the Memoir by O'Driscoll (1871).