The colourful life of Cork-born painter Daniel Maclise, who reinvented himself as a luminary of English Victorian art is celebrated in an exhibition which opens this week in Cork, writes Mary Leland

'ROMANCING the past," muses Tom Dunne as he considers the title of the exhibition at Cork's Crawford Municipal Art Gallery on the life and work of Daniel Maclise. "Romancing the past . . .", as if he'd never heard of Romancing the Stone. But I understand the inescapable lure of the title. Maclise was a romanticist, in thrall to images of medieval knight errantry on an epic and, almost certainly, illusory scale.

The effort to conceive the circumstances in which the Cork-born painter became a luminary of English Victorian art challenges all the Crawford's skill at reproduction. Romancing the past can also mean, in this case, inventing the past, a task which Maclise undertook with zeal and great success. When Bertie Ahern spoke as taoiseach in the Royal Gallery at Westminster, he was standing under the immense frescoes painted by an Irish artist, a coincidence Ahern, his speechwriters and the Irish media never noticed.

So in a way, the exhibition is going to be a matter of unmasking Maclise, a painter known to the majority of Irish people today only for the magnificence of his depiction of the Marriage of Aoife and Strongbow, painted in 1854 and now in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin.

That single frame (of which his watercolour version will be among the 200 items at the Crawford) has been read as indicating the artist's nationalism, but that, says Dunne, retired UCC professor of history, is not correct. "He lived and worked among people who were effortlessly both British and Irish at the same time." The most British of those people were, of course, his friends Benjamin Disraeli, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens and Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The most Irish of them were the rackety but erudite crew gathered around another Corkman William Maginn, editor of Fraser's Magazine.

The team of Peter Murray, Dawn Williams, Colleen O'Sullivan and researcher Debbie Gannon have gathered evidence from the Royal Collection, as well as India and South America to reveal Maclise as the most ambitious history painter of his time. Or at least to reveal him to Cork, which has never seen an exhibition of his work, although the National Gallery of Ireland mounted a shared exhibition with the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1972.

The evidence also acknowledges his acceptance among that extraordinary cluster of genius from William Makepeace Thackeray to Francis Sylvester Mahony, alias Fr Prout. If William Maginn's ramshackle love-life was tragic (he left letters from Laetitia Landon where Mrs Maginn could find them, leading to Landon's eventual suicide and Maginn's despairing retreat from London), Maclise complicated his own relationships by his affair with Lady Henrietta Sykes, mistress of Disraeli and provocatively medieval in the Maclise portrait of Sir Francis Sykes and his family.

"Maginn and Mahony were both sort of mad in a way," says Dunne. "Their writing was such a mixture of parody and satire - no wonder they disappeared from the Cork consciousness, they just didn't fit."

Immediately outside the Crawford, it is the future which is being invented. On Emmet Place, hoardings surrounding an enormous embryo retail and office complex are also wrapped like a shroud around an exquisite 18th-century house, once the home of wine-merchant and antiquarian Richard Sainthill.

In the days when the quayside commemorated Nelson instead of Emmet, the Crawford gallery was the Customs House for Cork.

In its later identity as The Royal Cork Institution, its attic stored the much-travelled Canova casts, originally a gift from Pius VII to England's Prince Regent. Opposite the gallery, Sainthill's attic housed Daniel Maclise. It's not entirely fanciful to imagine that from the oculus in Sainthill's gable, the young artist might have been able to look at the white forms of classical sculpture cast by Antonio Canova, rejected by the Royal Academy in London and brought to Cork by its MP, Lord Ennismore.

Whatever might be imagined, it's a fact that Daniel Maclise took time off from his job in Newenham's bank to study at the institution, to attend its anatomy lectures and even, on occasion, a dissection.

As ever, the Crawford's exhibition is based on known facts and is supported by a catalogue packed with expert analysis, provenance and history. It is true, for example, that this artist's London career, in fact the rest of his life, began with the visit to Cork of Sir Walter Scott in 1825.

Accompanied by Maria Edgeworth, Scott visited Bolster's bookshop on Patrick Street where, prompted by the watchful Sainthill, Maclise was able to make some quick but effective sketches of the writer.

One of these was exhibited in the shop window the next day, and admired and inscribed by Scott himself. Maclise then produced a lithograph of the sketch and sold 500 copies. On the strength of this coup, the artist opened a new studio and a business as a portrait painter. He also submitted a drawing to the Royal Academy in London which gained him entrance as a student. Aged 22, he left Cork for London supported by Sainthill's introductions and the endorsement of the London-based folklorist Thomas Crofton Croker and enrolled at the academy in 1827.

DESPITE THE SUCCESS of his commissions, he may have left relatively empty-handed because his means, since 1825, were always at the disposal of his parents and siblings. But he was not empty-headed, for his proficiency and application, and his sparkling, athletic and eager personality had won him many friends.

His fellow students in Cork had included the sculptor John Hogan and the short-lived and reclusive painter Samuel Forde, but he was also welcome at the homes of the Newenhams on Summerhill, the Morgans of Tivoli (where a ceiling had been painted by Samuel Forde), the Penroses of Woodhill and the architect Sir Thomas Deane.

There, he saw the work of such artists as James Barry, Nathaniel Grogan, John Butts and Angelica Kauffman among others, and heard accounts of continental ideas and methods from Cork's much-travelled elite.

In London, there was another elite altogether. The city was so exciting, the arts such an active and captivating environment, that Maclise turned down a visit to Paris as part of one of his numerous awards at the academy, preferring to remain at what he saw as the hub of his new world - no wonder, with guides such as Charles Dickens and John Forster.

This is the world which the Crawford will recreate for the Maclise exhibition, depicting a city and a time in which, Dunne says, "a huge essay on British history" was illuminated on the walls of the Houses of Parliament in London. Maclise had become part of an elaborate movement envisaging a certain kind of past, and by the 1840s the skill and beauty of his large-scale historical and nostalgic work earned him election to the Royal Academy (RA).

In 1857, he was one of six artists commissioned to carry out the frescoes at Westminster, The Crawford will instal a scaled-down reproduction of his two Royal Gallery paintings, depicting the death of Nelson and the meeting of Wellington and Blucher, huge crowded scenes originally measuring 48ft by 18ft.

"They would have been seen as a summary of the political dimensions of the medieval ideal, really the ideal to be aimed for by the English gentleman of the time, embodying a code of conduct, an empire really, the way that the English saw themselves," observes Dunne, chairman of the Maclise working group.

That Maclise should subscribe so whole-heartedly to that kind of Victorian wishful thinking is explained by his predilection for medievalism in all its artistic representations and, enthralled by Scott's novels, his relish for the glamour and eroticism of chivalry, real or imagined. Ranging from Ivanhoeto classical literature, from folklore to scenes from Shakespeare, his productions justify Dunne's belief that it's impossible to exaggerate how persuasive "the medieval thing, the dream culture" was in Britain.

Described by Carlyle as "a quiet, shy man with much brogue", Maclise was also prized as a book illustrator - another phase in his life that the Crawford will recapture. On the epic scale however, he was influenced as well as patronised by Prince Albert, adopting a German methodology for the frescoes on the advice of the prince, and then watching his work fading even as he painted it. The exhibition will include reproductions of the fresco notebooks kept by Maclise which include sketches by the prince himself, who commissioned several paintings as birthday presents for Queen Victoria.

Although she seems to have reciprocated in kind, those Royal Gallery frescoes were all that were completed of a proposed series which was discontinued on the death of Prince Albert. Discouraged and in poor health, Maclise began a gradual retreat from his world, which was by no means tired of him.

When he died from pneumonia at his home in Chelsea in 1870, his eulogy at the Royal Academy was delivered by Charles Dickens. "No artist . . . ever went to his rest, leaving a golden memory more pure from dross"

• Daniel Maclise (1806-1870): Romancing the Past, at the Crawford Gallery in Cork, will be opened by David Puttnam on Thursday and runs until Feb 14, 2009