Was Daniel Maclise a proto-Nationalist painter? Peter Murray thinks not, in his assessment of the National Gallery’s recently restored masterpiece.
The recent conservation and cleaning of The Marriage of the Princess Aoife of Leinster with Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke (Strongbow) (1854) by Daniel Maclise, one of the treasures of the National Gallery of Ireland, has revealed a depth of colour and richness of detail that could hitherto only have been guessed at.
The painting’s narrative – the dynastic marriage of an Anglo-Norman baron, with the daughter of an Irish king, can be read as a metaphor for the cementing of what is now called the United Kingdom. Maclise was keenly aware of the Romantic view of a Gaelic civilization overwhelmed by the arrival of armour-clad barons, but his sympathies were equally weighted between Britain and Ireland. He viewed the overwhelming of Anglo-Saxon Britain in 1066, and the imposition of Norman rule in England and Wales, with the same dispassionate eye. In creating a composition that includes a large number of figures, Maclise managed to avoid the visual monotony that so often forms part of the depiction of ceremonial occasions. His painting shows the influence of Delacroix, David and Gericault, artists whose works he would have seen on a visit to Paris in 1830. It is also not dissimilar to paintings by English artists, notably William Powell Frith, whose large canvas, Ramsgate Sands, was also completed in 1854 and which was a popular hit at the Royal Academy exhibition that year.
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