Daniel Maclise R.A. 1806-1870

Bought from the artist by John Wardell of Rathgar, Dublin, in 1869:

By descent until sold at Sotheby's, London, 10th November 1981, lot 2;

The Prudential Art Collection, Holborn Bars:

London, Christie's, 10th June 1999, lot 19;

Private collection

Athenaeum, no.2166, 1st May 1869, p.609;

Times, 10th May 1869, p.12;

Athenaeum, no. 2168, 15th May 1869, p.674;

Art Journal, 1869, pp. 66-7;

W. Justin O'Driscoll, A Memoir of Daniel Maclise, RA, 1871, pp. 219-23;

J. Dafforne, Pictures by Daniel Maclise, RA, 1873, pp. 48-9;

Daniel Maclise, exhibition catalogue, National Portrait Gallery, London and the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 1972, p. 18;

The Prudential Art Collection at Holborn Bars, not dated, pl. 38

‘Here may you read, Cophetua,

Though long time fancie-fed,

Compelled by the blinded boy

The beggar for to wed;

He that did lovers’ looks disdaine,

To do the same was glad and faine;

Or else he would himself have slaine,

In storie, as we read.

He saw her pass in modest grace,

Whiles in his tent he lay.

"Fill me a cup", the king he sayde,

"She shall be queen, this beggar-mayde,

If she’ll not say me nay"’. – Old Ballad

The subject from an old English ballad, of the African King Cophetua’s love for a beautiful beggar maid above all other women, who he vows to marry and make his Queen, was one which attracted many Victorian artists and resulted in several important paintings of the narrative. Daniel Maclise’s version, here presented is one of the most important of all versions and indeed the earliest known major interpretation of the romance. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1869, this was Maclise penultimate exhibit and demonstrates the experience and panache developed over a lifetime of painting.

The love story of King Cophetua and the nameless beggar maid, is mentioned by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet and Love’s Labour’s Lost and in more recent years was interpreted by Tennyson in a short two-stanza poem, ‘The Beggar Maid’. The famous volume of Tennyson’s works published by Edward Moxon in 1857 included an illustration of King Cophetua by William Holman Hunt and two pen and ink drawings by Maclise for the poem Morte d’Arthur. Although Tennyson’s version of the narrative clearly inspired Maclise he was also influenced by the more traditional ballad in which Cophetua spies the lovely beggar from his tent rather than from the window of his palace as Tennyson placed the scene. The black wine bearer hints at a North African site for the camp whereas the King, his guards and the beggar maid are clearly Caucasian. The oak tree, dandelions and brambles also do not conform to the idea that this is supposedly set in Africa. Maclise’s aim was to suggest an exotic location not recreate it and the fact that the landscape and figures are recognisably European, made the picture more accessible to the audience of the 1860s.

Perhaps the most famous version of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid is that by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1884 (versions at Tate Britain and Birmingham City Art Gallery), twelve years after Maclise's picture. Burne-Jones and to a certain extent Holman Hunt, treated the narrative in very different terms, making the romance between the King and the maid somewhat tense and obsessive as though Cophetua is unable to tear his gaze away from the lovely beggar who seems uncomfortable and slightly cornered. In comparison, Maclise's image is more natural, a moment in which the King's attention is arrested suddenly by the demure girl wandering past. Burne-Jones' King and beggar seem frozen or enshrined for eternity, with no world beyond their palace. Maclise's picture is more light-hearted and convivial, more consistent with the story which ends happily with the attainment of true love which defies materialism and hierarchy, than the melancholic yearning suggested by Burne-Jones. Maclise's King is absorbed wholly by the vision of loveliness sauntering elegantly by and is no longer conscious of the mouth-watering food or his horn being replenished with wine. Yet the scene is one of liveliness and jollity continuing around the two main protagonists, one of whom is lost in her own introspective thoughts and the other who has been engulfed in thoughts of another. Each figure and every element concentrates attention on the unfolding drama between the couple.

From the 1830s onwards, Maclise treated historical and literary drama with great force, in multi-figured compositions, particularly favouring subjects of feasting and entertainment as is evidenced in Robin Hood (sold Sotheby's, London, 28th November 2002, lot 20). Another picture which is comparable with King Cophetua is that of King Alfred in the Camp of the Danes (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852, where the composition is also arranged around the large central motif of a tent.

The feast laid before King Cophetua is beautifully painted, and displays Maclise wonderful ability to paint textures and surfaces, still lifes and closely studied detail, from the bristles of the boar’s head to the translucency of the strawberry jelly. The figures are painted with such attention to detail typical of Maclise, every sinew and graceful movement of limbs captured with sensitive grace and refinement.

W. Justin O’Driscoll, a great friend and fellow Irishman, in his memoir of Maclise, describes King Cophetua’s development at some length. The picture is first mentioned on the 17 June 1868 when Maclise wrote to John Wardell, a Dublin merchant who had expressed a wish to own Madeline after Prayer, an illustration to Keat’s ‘Eve of St Agnes’ that Maclise was exhibiting at that year’s Academy. Wardell was an important patron for Maclise’s and already possessed Spirit of Chivalry (Sheffield City Art Galleries), an easel version of a mural in the House of Lords. He owned a fine collection of modern British pictures and after his death thirteen of his pictures (not including Cophetua), were sold at Christie’s in May 1880. Among the pictures were major works by G. F. Watts and E. J. Poynter, as well as examples of Thomas Creswick, James Hayllar, Horatio McCulloch, Richard Redgrave, Frank Stone, William Cave Thomas, and others.

Madeline after Prayer was already sold, but Maclise told Wardell that he had been ‘engaged for some short time on a subject that will have one female figure, but there must be four or five men introduced: this last, and the necessity of the picture being something like six feet by four, might not, perhaps, deter you from adopting it in a year hence, if I can go on and prosper with it.’ Intrigued, Wardell asked Maclise for more details of this picture and the artist replied as follows: ‘The picture I have on my easel is one I have long wished to paint – King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid – see Old Ballad and Tennyson; but I choose to invent the scene, and figure to myself a young king, with a few retainers grouped about him, under a tent, and he, seeing her pass by, loves her – weds her (as I hope). It may be completed in April next year, for the first Exhibition which we expect will take place in the New R.A., Burlington House, and our centenary of existence. I shall daily with it, and care not to paint anything else in this year; but you shall only take the picture – if indeed, you think of it – on the express condition of your admiring it. I am living at Brighton, in charge of my sister and two nieces, for a month or so; but I grieve to say, in spite of sea and sunsets, my old habits lead me to shut out both, and convert ‘an eligible drawing-room facing the sea’ into an atelier'.

King Cophetua was painted partly in Brighton, where he was living with his younger sister Anna and her daughters and her husband. Anna’s husband Percival Weldon Banks, a barrister and man of letters who had frequently, like Maclise himself, contributed to Fraser’s Magazine, died in 1850, leaving Maclise financially responsible for his family. The figure of the beggar girl was modelled for by Rhoda Banks, Maclise’s niece and on the 10th of January 1869 he wrote to her, asking her to call on him ‘on Tuesday…., not later than twelve o’clock, that I may try to paint from you my Beggar Maid’.

The picture was completed after Maclise’s return to London, at his studio at 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea and delivered to Wardell who had decided to buy it, in Dublin. The picture was sent with a note by Maclise assuring Wardell that ‘my satisfaction is complete in thinking that, amid all the agitations of disestablishment and disendowment, Ireland can still give heed to the claims of art.’

Before the picture was sent to Dublin it was exhibited to great acclaim at the Academy, where it hung in the Great Room and was, according to O’Driscoll, ‘one of the gems of the exhibition.’ According to Tom Taylor in the Times, Maclise had ‘exhibited no picture for many years so harmonious in colour and so agreeable in general effect… That the figures are well grouped, vigorously drawn, with great command of foreshortening, and that all the accessories are painted with a singular precision and force, need hardly be said. The painter’s keenness of vision, causing him to see things with exceptional distinctness, may be at the bottom of (his) emphatic definition of objects.’ The Art Journal was also greatly impressed, the reviewer writing; ‘The drawing of the figures shows a master’s hand’, its critic wrote; and although he felt that ‘such a scene as here depicted may savour of the stage rather than of nature’, he added: ‘still on that account it may be scarcely the less pleasant to look upon, at least in a picture-gallery. The "beggar maid" is a lovely impersonation, perhaps too lovely to be real: her face is her fortune’.

F.G. Stevens, writing as art critic of the Athenaeum, thought that ‘Mr Maclise’s single picture may be ranked with the best he has wrought’. If he had a reservation, it was that the beggar maid herself embodied a contradiction: ‘the extreme cleanness and perfect raggedness of the damsel are not consistent characteristic elements of one subject.’ Nonetheless, Stephens admired the ‘finely-rendered action of modesty’ with which the girl ‘covers her breast from the eyes of the ardent king as he sits looking on her graceful form. His Majesty’s face is one of the aptest and handsomest of Mr. Maclise’s painting, as the drawing and colouring of the picture are to the artist’s honour’.