William Mulready

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Choosing the Wedding Gown
illustrating ch 1 of Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith

William Mulready (April 1, 1786 – July 7, 1863) was an Irish genre painter living in London. He is best known for his romanticizing depictions of rural scenes.

William Mulready was born in Ennis, County Clare. Early in his life, in 1792, the family moved to London, where he was able to get an education and was taught painting well enough so that he was accepted at the Royal Academy School at the age of fourteen.

Though married he maintained a distinct interest in boys, which provoked the ruin of his marriage in the 1820s.^[1]

Many of his early pictures show landscapes, before he started to build a reputation as a genre painter from 1808 on, painting mostly everyday scenes from rural life. Besides this, he also illustrated books, including the first edition of Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare in 1807^[2]. His paintings were very popular in Victorian times. His first painting of importance, Returning from the Ale House, now in the Tate Gallery, London, under the title Fair Time, appeared in 1809.

Funerary monument, Kensal Green Cemetery, London

In 1815 he was elected a member of the Royal Academy. In the same year, he also was awarded the French "Légion d'honneur". Mulready's most important pictures are in the Victoria and Albert Museum and in the Tate Gallery. In the former are 33, among them Hampstead Heath (1806); Giving a Bite (1836); First Love (1839); The Sonnet (1839); Choosing the Wedding Gown (1846); and The Butt (Shooting a Cherry) (1848). In the latter are five, including a Snow Scene. In the National Gallery, Dublin, are Young Brother and The Toy Seller. His Wolf and the Lamb is in royal possession.

In 1840, Mulready designed the illustrations for the postal stationery, known as Mulready stationery were introduced at the same time as the Penny Black in May 1840, They were issued in two forms; one variant was precut to a diamond or lozenge shape and folded to form an envelope that could be held together by seal at the apex of the topmost flap; and lettersheets that were cut in rectangles, folded over and sealed or tucked in.

He died at the age of 77 in Bayswater, London and is buried in the nearby Kensal Green Cemetery where a monument to his memory was erected.