Daniel Maclise: Romancing The Past
This is a ground-breaking monograph on one of Ireland's major 19th-century artist. The paintings, drawings and illustrations of Daniel Maclise bring to life scenes from history and literature, to transport viewers away from the commonplace realities into a world of romance and imagination.
Gifted with a vivid imagination, this Cork-born artist portrayed events from medieval or Renaissance history, and depicted in extraordinary detail the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Apart from his History paintings and portraits of contemporaries, Maclise's canvases are, for the most part, visualisations of episodes from the works of authors, notably Shakespeare, Goldsmith and Walter Scott, but he also drew from the Decameron and works by less well-known French and Italian writers.
As with a great deal of late Regency and early Victorian visual culture, the art of Daniel Maclise is both realist and escapist. His paintings are peopled with beautiful women, grotesque dwarves, fairies, kings, tyrants, wrestlers and lovers. Although escapist, they also provide a window into the psychology of the artist, who invested his work with much of his own imagination and sense of self.
Published by Crawford Art Gallery and Gandon Editions to coincide with the exhibition of the same name, 23rd October 2008 - 15th February 2009.
Author: Peter Murray
Format: Hardback
Size: 24 x 30 cm, 256 pages
Publisher: Gandon Editions, Crawford Municipal Art Gallery
ISBN: 9780948037665
