Frederic William Burton: the man who stopped painting
In 1874 Frederic William Burton was appointed Director of the National Gallery in London. He was fifty-seven, at the height of his powers, and the maker of what would one day be voted Ireland's favourite painting. On taking the job he stopped painting. Not slowed down — stopped. The Gallery's own record of its directors puts it in one line: he was appointed in 1874 and ceased to paint entirely.
He held the post for twenty years, bought more than five hundred pictures for the nation, and died without going back to it.
Clare
Burton was born on 8 April 1816 into a Co. Clare gentry family whose seat was Clifden House, Corofin. He was the third son of a landowner who was himself a distinguished amateur landscape painter. Sources differ on where the birth itself took place — some put it in Co. Wicklow — but the Clare family is not in doubt.
A childhood injury left his right arm permanently disabled. He worked left-handed for the rest of his life, and a late photograph shows him keeping the right arm out of view.
The family moved to Dublin in 1826 and he trained at the Dublin Society Schools under Henry Brocas and Robert Lucius West, with miniature lessons from Samuel Lover. He first exhibited with the Royal Hibernian Academy at sixteen, was elected an associate at twenty-one and a full member at twenty-three.
Never once in oil
Burton worked in watercolour and gouache for his entire career. The National Gallery of Ireland states it flatly: no oils by him are known. This is not a modest miniaturist's preference — his Portrait of Mrs George Smith of 1873 is over a metre wide, in watercolour.
The reason appears to have been physical. He could not tolerate the smell of oil paint, or more likely the solvents that go with it, and avoided the medium altogether. It is probably part of why he is less famous than he should be: watercolour is fragile, and fragile pictures do not hang in the main room.
The west
In 1838 the antiquarian George Petrie took Burton to Connemara to record ruins and monuments, and between then and 1841 the two worked repeatedly in the west of Ireland. Burton became a founder member of the Irish Archaeological Society in 1840 and sat on the council of the Royal Irish Academy. The habit of exact recording — costume, furniture, the shape of a room — never left him.
It produced The Aran Fisherman's Drowned Child of 1841, now in the National Gallery of Ireland: parents gathered around a dead child, keeners beginning behind them. The Gallery notes that there is no record of Burton visiting Aran itself at that date, and that the interior is closer to the Claddagh in Galway than to the islands. Engraved for the Royal Irish Art Union in 1843, it became the most popular print that body ever issued — a pre-Famine image of Irish life, circulated at scale.
His Irish landscape drawings from these years are quieter and just as exact: Cliffs at Howth, The Upper End of Lough Corrib, the Kerry coast at Smerwick.
Munich
He visited Germany in 1842 and 1844 and settled there in 1851, salaried by Maximilian II of Bavaria as curator of the king's collection in Munich. Seven years of looking after other people's pictures — useful practice, as it turned out. The Nazarene painters gave his work a mystical cast that never quite left it. He left Germany in 1858 and set up in London, where he moved among the Pre-Raphaelites and shared their taste for pictures that tell a story.
1864
Then, in 1864, he made Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs — watercolour and gouache on paper, 95.5 by 60.8 centimetres, now NGI.2358.
The subject is a Danish ballad translated by Whitley Stokes in 1855. Hildebrand is the princess's bodyguard; her father sends her seven brothers to kill him. Burton chose the moment before the ending. He does not paint a kiss. The man presses his mouth to her forearm, and her face is turned away.
George Eliot saw what he had done: “The subject might have been made the most vulgar thing in the world — the artist has raised it to the highest pitch of refined emotion.”
Because it is watercolour, the National Gallery of Ireland keeps it in a light-protective cabinet and shows it for two one-hour sessions a week, on Thursday mornings and Sunday afternoons, with a queue. In 2012 it was voted Ireland's favourite painting in a public poll run by the Irish Times with RTÉ, taking 22% against 16% for Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ. President Michael D. Higgins announced the result on 24 May. Postcard sales rose 400% on the year before. We have told that painting's story in full in The Meeting on the Turret Stairs.
Trafalgar Square
Gladstone appointed him the third Director of the National Gallery in London on 20 February 1874, after Eastlake and Boxall. In twenty years he added over five hundred works.
Among them: Leonardo's The Virgin of the Rocks, bought in 1880 from the Earl of Suffolk for nine thousand guineas; Hogarth's The Shrimp Girl in 1884; Van Dyck's Equestrian Portrait of Charles I and Raphael's Ansidei Madonna from Blenheim in 1885; and in 1890 Holbein's The Ambassadors, from Longford Castle, for £55,000 — a government grant of £25,000 topped up by £10,000 each from three private men. Botticelli's Venus and Mars, Duccio's Annunciation, a Velázquez and a Vermeer came in on his watch too. He also oversaw the 1887 rebuilding that let the collection be hung by country for the first time.
He was knighted in 1884, resigned in March 1894, and died at his home in Kensington on 16 March 1900. He never married; he had been engaged to Mary Palliser, who died in 1879, and he raised his brother's orphaned children. He is buried in the family plot at Mount Jerome in Dublin.
Where to see him
The National Gallery of Ireland catalogues 176 objects by Burton, including the Turret Stairs, The Aran Fisherman's Drowned Child, A Venetian Courtesan and A Blind Girl at a Holy Well, acquired in 2020. Dreams is at the Yale Center for British Art. The 2017–18 retrospective at the National Gallery of Ireland, For the Love of Art, brought over seventy works together — the first serious look at him in a very long time.
The Frederic William Burton collection holds the Turret Stairs and the Irish landscape drawings as archival prints, framed or unframed, and the Frederic William Burton artist page maps the places he drew. Every print is open edition and made to order.