Description
‘ROBIN HOOD ENTERTAINING RICHARD THE LIONHEART IN SHERWOOD FOREST’
Original – Oil on Canvas
Daniel Maclise (1806-1870)
Nottingham Castle Museum
Poster size 16.5″ x 24″ Landscape
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Beautiful poster of an original oil painting of Robin Hood Entertaining Richard The Lionheart in Sherwood Forest by Daniel Maclise , courtesy of Nottingham Castle Museum.
Poster size – 16.5″ x 24″ (42 x 62cm).
Image size – 13″ x 20.5″ (33 x 52cm).
This poster from Wollaton Hall Giftware depicts Daniel Maclise’s (1806-1870) large painting, entitled Robin Hood entertaining Richard the Lionheart in Sherwood Forest (1839), probably the most well-known interpretation of the legend, Robin Hood, on canvas. Versions of this colourful work of art have appeared on numerous book covers about the outlaw down the years.
Robin Hood, centre stage, is wearing a scarlet tunic. This is a direct reference to the ballad, Robin Hood and Queen Catherine. Maid Marian is seated in a bower, a reference to the May Games and her role as the Queen of the May. In the background you can just about make out the targets being moved closer; a reference to the Geste and how the targets were too far away for King Edward’s men. Little John stands on the left of the picture holding one of the king’s deer. Friar Tuck is seen slouching in front of an oak tree.
Daniel Maclise RA was an Irish history, literary and portrait painter, and illustrator, who worked for most of his life in London, England.
Career
A detail of the engraving of Maclise’s 1842 painting The Play-scene in Hamlet, portraying the moment when the guilt of Claudius is revealed.
Maclise exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy in 1829. Gradually he began to confine himself more exclusively to subject and historical pictures, varied occasionally by portraits – such as those of Lord Campbell, novelist Letitia Landon, Dickens, and other of his literary friends. In 1833, he exhibited two pictures which greatly increased his reputation, and in 1835 the Chivalric Vow of the Ladies and the Peacock procured his election as associate of the Academy, of which he became full member in 1840. The years that followed were occupied with a long series of figure pictures, deriving their subjects from history and tradition and from the works of Shakespeare, Goldsmith and Le Sage.
He also designed illustrations for several of Dickens’s Christmas books and other works. Between the years 1830 and 1836 he contributed to Fraser’s Magazine, under the pseudonym of Alfred Croquis, a remarkable series of portraits of the literary and other celebrities of the time – character studies, etched or lithographed in outline, and touched more or less with the emphasis of the caricaturist, which were afterwards published as the Maclise Portrait Gallery (1871). During the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament in London in 1834–1850 by Charles Barry, Maclise was commissioned in 1846 to paint murals in the House of Lords on such subjects as Justice and Chivalry.
The posters are sold unframed but would make a fantastic framed centrepiece
Thet are in excellent condition and have been carefully stored by Wollaton Hall Museum.
Posted/shipped in a protective tube.
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