DIRECTIONS
Continue along the pathway. A little further along, more or less opposite the chest tomb of John Campbell, go left past the small clump of bushes, behind which is the slanting, grey ledger tombstone of the artist Daniel Maclise (1806-1870).
DANIEL MACLISE was born in Cork, Ireland, and was of Scottish and Irish descent. He studied at Cork, before coming to London to study at the Royal Academy Schools, where he exhibited from 1829. Between 1835 and 1837 he began to make his name providing portraits of famous figures for Fraser’s Magazine. He became a close personal friend to Charles Dickens and it was Maclise who, in 1839 painted the full length portrait of the then 27-year-old author that can now be viewed in the National Portrait Gallery. Dickens described it as a ‘face of me, which all people say is astonishing;’ whilst William Makepeace Thackeray observed that ’a looking glass could not render a better facsimile…’ Only the right George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) demurred by deploring the ’keepsakey, impossible face.’ When Mclise died in April 1870 Dickens paid a moving tribute to him in what would prove to be his last speech (Dickens himself died in June 1870), given at the annual Royal Academy dinner. In that speech he said of Maclise that he was the ‘greatest and most modest of men.’ Interestingly, Maclise had been offered the Presidency of the Royal Academy in 1866 but had turned it down.
