SIR, The exhibition of the work of Daniel Maclise which took place recently at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, included a number of works previously unrecorded in the literature on the artist and which have only recently been added to his œuvre. One of these can be shown to be the work of another artist. 

The painting in question was exhibited in Cork as Lady in a printer’s workshop and dated to ‘c.1850’ (P. Murray, ed.: exh. cat. Daniel Maclise 1806–1870: Romancing the Past, Cork (Crawford Art Gallery) 2008–09, pp.136–37; here Fig.42). All the catalogue entries lack scholarly apparatus but some details of its provenance can be given. It came to light in 1991 in a sale at Sotheby’s, New York (17th October 1991; lot 87), and was later with the Gorry Gallery, Dublin (exh. cat. Irish Paintings, Dublin 1992; no.8). Although it has none of the technical features and visual qual­ities which are usually associated with Maclise, it does bear in the lower-left corner, immediately above the arched opening of the footstool, a signature, ‘d maclise’, a form found with minor variations in several autograph works. The subject-matter corresponds a little to Maclise’s Caxton’s printing office in the Almonry at Westminster (Knebworth House; exh. Royal Academy of Arts 1851; no.67).

Be that as it may, the painting is in fact a work by Henry Courtney Selous, which was exhibited at the British Institution (BI) in 1850 as no.388 under the title The first impression: Guttemberg [sic] shewing to his wife his first experiment in printing from moveable types, supposed to have been the Bible printed in 1450–60. The dimensions of that work when shown at the BI were given as 4' 8" by 6' 1", that is 142 by 185 cm. The work exhibited in Cork as by Maclise has dimensions of 102 by 142 cm. This discrepancy can be explained since the BI dimensions included the width of the frame; the present frame is about 20 cm. wide. In any case the identification of the painting as a work by Selous is made irrefutable by the existence of a woodblock engraving of it (Fig.43) in which the engraver has simplified a few details. This was published in 1850 in the Illustrated London News as a work by Selous; the attribution is confirmed in contemporary reviews (e.g. ‘Exhibition of the British Institution’, Illustrated London News (9th February 1850), supplement, p.98; ‘Fine Arts. British Institution’, Athenæum 1163 (9th February 1850), p.185; and ‘The British Institution. Exhi­bition – 1850’, Art Journal 12 (March 1850), p.91). 

In the light of this information the other ‘new’ works by Maclise deserve careful assessment.