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'To his untiring energy and to the munificence of Sir Maziere Brady [Lord Chancellor of Ireland] and a few other Dublin citizens interested in art, the National Gallery of Ireland owes its existence". Thus wrote Walter Strickland in A Dictionary of Irish Artists (1913) about the painter George Francis Mulvany, who died 150 years ago on February 6th. Mulvany was the gallery's first director and is probably more significant in Irish art history for that reason than for the quality of his own artistic output.
It is no surprise that the Dublin-born Mulvany became a painter because he grew up in an artistic household. His father, Thomas James Mulvany, was a noted painter, especially of large landscapes. He also wrote a number of insightful articles on Irish artists, edited a Life of Gandon and planned a "Biography of Irish Art", which didn't come to fruition.
He and his brother, John George, were among the first members of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and he was keeper of the RHA from its inception in 1823 until his death in 1845. His son George Francis attended the newly founded academy schools and afterwards spent some time studying in Italy.
Success came early as he first exhibited work at the RHA when he was barely 18. Strickland wrote that “no young artist showed greater promise”; in 1830 he was elected an associate and five years later a full member of the RHA. Following his father’s death, he was elected to succeed him as keeper of the RHA. He exhibited there from 1827 up to the time of his death and sent works to the London Royal Academy in 1836 and 1839.
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He produced a large body of work – mainly portraits and a few subject paintings – during his career. We have seen Strickland’s reference above to his early promise as a young artist but the art historian’s overall assessment of Mulvany’s corpus is less than flattering. “Though his portraits were occasionally good, his work was, as a rule, commonplace and feeble in execution and unpleasantly brown in colour.”
Other art historians have been more damning in their comments. In The Painters of Ireland (1978), Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin wrote that "his portraits are pedestrian in the extreme and in some cases, such as his Countess of Belmore, verge on the ludicrous. Their interest now lies in their sitters." They pointed out that he worked in crayons as well as oils "and even painted a few subject pictures, one of which, an ambitious attempt, The Village Orphans, survives in the National Gallery of Ireland and exhibits only too well his inability to paint figures".
Despite his limited ability, many of the foremost people of his day sat for him. Among his works in the National Gallery are portraits of Thomas Moore, Daniel O’Connell, the Young Irelanders William Smith O’Brien and Thomas Francis Meagher, and the novelist, dramatist and poet John Banim.
Strickland ascribed much of the credit for the establishment of the National Gallery to Mulvany and Sir Maziere Brady. It seems that the main impetus to its foundation was the Irish Industrial Exhibition of 1853, the moving force behind which was the famous engineer and Irish railway pioneer, William Dargan. A body called the Irish Institution was afterwards set up “for the promotion of art in Ireland by the formation of a permanent exhibition in Dublin, and eventually of a national gallery”.
Mulvany prominently promoted the aims of the Irish Institution. It raised money and within a year an act of parliament was passed and a government grant given to formally establish the gallery. Mulvany submitted architectural plans for the building but the Irish architect Francis Fowke, who designed the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, was called in to oversee the design.
In September 1862, Mulvany became the first director of the National Gallery of Ireland. A later director, Dr Thomas Bodkin, didn’t think much of the early paintings purchased for the gallery, commenting that they “were more remarkable for their size than for their authenticity”.
However, Walter Strickland took a much kinder view of Mulvany’s role. “Of much sound sense and ability and of pleasing manners, he was, considering the limited powers accorded to him by the board of governors, undoubtedly successful as a director. He possessed good judgement and, for the time, no inconsiderable knowledge of art, and he cannot be held wholly responsible for the mass of inferior pictures acquired for the gallery in its early days, which are now buried in its vaults.”