Biographies of 19th Century Irish Artists
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FAMOUS IRISH ARTISTS 18TH CENTURY PAINTERS 20TH CENTURY PAINTERS |
Selected Painters (L-R) (Born 1800-1899) For a COMPLETE list, see: 19th Century Irish Artists Matthew James Lawless
(History and Genre Painter) (1837-64) See also: 19th Century Artists A-G; Artists H-K; Artists S-Z |
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Matthew James Lawless (History and Genre Painter) (1837-64) Born in Dublin, the son of a well-to-do Catholic solicitor, he studied art in London under Francis Stephen Cary and James Mathews Leigh. He also trained at the Langham School in London. Persuaded by his father to focus on the more commercially rewarding activity of illustration, rather than picture painting, Lawless became a talented draughtsman and created illustrations for a range of periodicals, including Punch, London Society, and Once a Week. However, he also produced a range of fine oil paintings - mostly narrative and genre works, of which almost none have survived - which he exhibited each year between 1858 and 1863 at the Royal Academy, London. One of the few paintings that has survived, now hanging in the National Gallery of Ireland, is "The Sick Call." Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1863, the year before his death, and perhaps prompted by the experience of receiving the Catholic sacrament of Extreme Unction, its "absorbing narrative quality, subtle colours, architectural background, attention to detail and the excellent composition, mark The Sick Call as a minor masterpiece..." (Brian Kennedy: Irish Painting). It seems that Lawless was influenced by the polished wood panel paintings of the French artist Meissonier whom he met sometime in 1860, during a trip to Paris, although the vista is similar in style to views of 19th century Prague, or possibly the ancient Belgian city of Bruges, which Lawless may have visited. Reportedly, the figure of the priest was modelled on Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, an eminent London surgeon, who may have attended Lawless to help treat the consumption from he died at the tragically young age of 29. William Gibbs MacKenzie ARHA (Portrait/Landscape Painter) (1857-1924) Born in Belfast, MacKenzie trained at the Government School of Design, gaining a National Scholarship to study in London under Sir Edward Poynter, RA and at the Académie Julian in Paris. Such was the quality of his figure drawing that several of his drawings and paintings were purchased by the Authorities to be used as models in the Government Schools of Art. He began showing his works in 1889 with the Belfast Ramblers Sketching Club, and in Dublin at the Royal Hibernian Academy. In the early 1890s, he moved to London and showed at the Royal Academy. During this period he produced both portraits and landscapes in oils. In the early 1900s, he returned to Belfast and resumed exhibiting here and in Dublin. One of his most noted works is the large canvas (painted with Ernest E Taylor) commermorating the Proclamation of King Edward VII at the Old Town Hall, in 1901. In 1915 he was elected an Associate Academician of the Royal Hibernian Academy. He was also an active member of the Belfast Art Society and exhibited at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery. A loner with a great love of art, he found its commercial aspect somewhat difficult and uncomfortable. William Bingham McGuiness RHA (Cityscapes, Watercolours) (1849-1928) Born in Dublin, McGuiness was apprenticed to a Dublin architect who for some time had been exhibiting his architectural designs at the Royal Hibernian Academy. Whether this proved helpful or not to his pupil is unknown, but McGuiness began to take evening classes at the RHA and in due course took himself off to Dusseldorf to study watercolour painting. A relative of his Dublin employer happened to be the Irish Consul at Dusseldorf. In 1866, McGuiness began showing at the Royal Hibernian Academy - in all, exhibiting a total of more than 150 works over the following sixty years. In Dublin, he became actively involved in several artist groups, including the Dublin Sketching Club (of which he became President), the Water Colour Society of Ireland and the Belfast Art Society. He also travelled widely in Europe, painting in Westphalia, Hamburg, Normandy and Venice. In fact, one of his favourite occupations was painting views of old European cities. In later years he exhibited at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, the Royal Society of Artists in Birmingham, and at the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours and the Royal Academy in London. |
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Eugene J McSwiney (Portraiture and Landscape Art) (1866-1930) Born in Cork, the son of a leather merchant, Eugene Joseph McSwiney studied drawing and painting at the Cork School of Art, winning a series of awards for his figurative skills. In due course, he joined the staff of the (renamed) Crawford School of Art in the city, and also taught at several venues around the county. In 1890, he began showing at the Royal Hibernian Academy (eventually contributing more than 40 paintings) although this was interrupted for several years at the turn of the century, while he struggled to earn a living in Cork and London. Among his notable works, all of which were shown at the Royal Academy in London, were "Eventide" (1897) and "Ruins of Timoleague Abbey, County Cork" (1912). He died in South London at the age of 70. Examples of his work are in the Crawford Art Gallery. Flora Mitchell (Watercolour Views of Dublin, Cityscapes in Oils) (1890-1973) Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Mitchell moved with her family to Ireland as a result of the Sioux Indian Rising in the 1890s. She studied drawing and painting at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art developing a reputation for her sketches from life and her watercolours. After a period of voluntary work in Dublin during the First World War, she went to teach art in Canada but by the end of the 1920s, she was back in Dublin. In 1935 she began showing with the Water Colour Society of Ireland, which was her only showcase until the mid-1950s, when she began exhibiting at the Dublin Painters Gallery and the Royal Hibernian Academy. Her work encompassed drawings of Dublin landmarks, as well as cityscapes in oils and watercolour paintings. The latter was examplified by her excellent illustrated book, "Vanishing Dublin" (1966). She also produced some fine pencil sketches of London buildings. Examples of her works are in the National Gallery of Ireland, the Civic Museum, Dublin and the James Joyce Museum. Jeremiah Hodges Mulcahy ARHA (Landscapes) (1810-1889) Born in Limerick, the details of his early arts training (if any) are unknown. In 1842, he opened a School of Painting in Limerick with the aim of encouraging local talent, and remained in the city until 1862 when he moved to Dublin. He showed at the Limerick City Art Gallery and at the Royal Hibernian Academy during the period 1843-1878 and was elected an Associate Member in 1875. Henry Echlin Neill RUA (Lithographer and Landscape Artist) (1888-1981) Born in Belfast, H. Echlin Neill was educated at Willowfield National School, Woodstock Road, and received training at the Belfast School of Art before becoming an apprentice lithographic artist. In 1912, he was elected a member of the Belfast Art Society with whom he became a regular exhibitor. In 1929, he began showing at the Royal Hibernian Academy, and the following year he joined the Committee of the newly-formed Ulster Academy of Arts, where he was elected a full Academician in 1935. Seen primarily as a landscape and figurative artist, it wasn't until 1977 that he held his first solo show - at the Grendor Art Gallery, Hollywood, County Down. He was still teaching at the age of 89. Paul Nietsche (Still Life, Landscape Painting) (1885-1950) Born in Kiev to a large family, he attended the Imperial Art Academy in Odessa, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, before moving to Paris where he became friends with the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1940-1917), and in 1912 exhibited at the Paris Salon. Returning to Russia for the course of World War I, he later moved to Berlin and became friends with Dr Michael O'Brien, then an Irish postgraduate Gaelic scholar from Queen's University, who invited the artist to Belfast in 1926. A constant traveller, Nietsche divided his time between his studio in Berlin, painting activities in Yugoslavia and Belfast. He showed at the Ulster Art Club (1926) and at the Royal Hibernian Academy (1930). During the 1930s, he combined his work in Belfast with painting trips to Berlin, the South of France, Cornwall, New York and London, managing to exhibit and sell his paintings as he went. He had two solo shows at the Magee Gallery in Belfast (1936, 1939) where, after a short period of internment on the Isle of Man during World War II, he finally settled down, exhibiting at venues like Tyrone House and 55a Donegall Place during the late 1940s. As a painter he focused on still life painting and landscapes, becoming one of the most exotic and avant-garde artists in Belfast during the pre and post-war era. A fluent speaker in Russian, German, French and English, he also wrote poetry and short stories, and had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. Examples of his work can be seen in the Ulster Museum of Fine Arts and in the National Self-Portrait Collection in Limerick. |
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William Osborne (Animal Painter, Dogs, Horses) (1823-1901) One of the leading Irish animal painters, along with Thomas Robinson (1770-1810), George Nairn (1799-1850) and the great Michael Angelo Hayes (1820–1877), William Osborne was born in Dublin, initially working as a warehouseman until the age of 22, when he decided to train as an artist and joined the Royal Hibernian Academy School. Afterwards, he set up a studio in Pleasants Street in Dublin and, in 1851, began showing at the annual RHA exhibition - an experience he repeated in all but nine of the next fifty years. Elected an Associate of the RHA in 1854, he became a full Academician four years later. Osborne's forte was animal art, and developed a considerable reputation for his sympathetic paintings of dogs and horses, not least because of his deep knowledge of canine and equine anatomy. He was regularly commissioned by gentleman hunters to produce group portraits and individual studies of their prize animals, including bloodhounds, retrievers, setters, staghounds, terriers and greyhounds, many of which he exhibited, along with pictures of lions and tigers in Dublin Zoo. He continued painting throughout the 1880s, and died in Dublin, aged seventy-eight. His son, Walter Osborne, also an artist, became one of Ireland's greatest Impressionist style painters. Moila Powell (Miniaturist, Expressionist Artist) (1895-1994) Born in India, into an extended line of artists which includes Michelangelo, Moila Powell started as a miniaturist, painting portraits of Queen Victoria's grand-daughter - The Grand Duchess Vittoria of Russia - among others. After marrying Dr William Jackson Powell, an officer in the Indian Army, she lived for periods in India, England and Dublin. It was in Nagpur, India in 1930, that she met Norah McGuinness, forming the artistic relationship by which she has been remembered ever since. At the time, McGuinness was fleeing a broken marriage and had made her way to India via Paris, where she had spent some time studying under André L'Hôte. Powell herself travelled widely, taking extensive painting trips across the Continent, Canada, and Australia. During a long career, she showed in numerous galleries, including the Paris Salon, the Goupil Gallery and Wertheim Gallery, London, the Harborough Gallery in Leicestershire and the Duncalfe Galleries at Harrogate in North Yorkshire. Active until well into her 90s, she died in 1994 at the age of ninety-nine. Richard Rothwell RHA (Academic Portrait Artist) (1800-1868) Bborn in Athlone, Rothwell studied drawing and painting at the Royal Dublin Society's Schools where he won the silver medal for portrait art in 1820. Developing rapidly, such was his talent as a traditional portrait artist, that he was elected a full Member of the Royal Hibernian Academy at the age of 24. In 1829, after exhibiting several paintings at the RHA, he moved to London where he worked as a studio assistant to the eminent portraitist Sir Thomas Lawrence. When Lawrence died the following year, Rothwell, who had already completed many of his employer's unfinished canvases, took over his practice and seemed destined to succeed him as the leading portrait painter in Britain. However, notwithstanding his outstanding painterly skills, which he used on such luminaries as William Farren (1829), William Huskisson, MP (1830), William, 1st Viscount Beresford (1831), Victoria, Duchess of Kent (1832), and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1841), Rothwell lacked the flair of his predecessor, and suffered from an over-sensitive personality which was not helpful either to himself or his fellow professionals. Nonetheless, he exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy, the Paris Salon and (until 1866) at the RHA. Returning, somewhat jaded, to Dublin in the mid-1840s, he settled in Rathfarnham with his family, but the death of his daughter in about 1850 unsettled him considerably. As a result, for much of the remainder of his life, despite continuing hard work, he moved restlessly between Ireland, England the Continent and America. Examples of his work can be seen in Dublin at the National Gallery of Ireland. |
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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF VISUAL ARTISTS IN IRELAND |
