Thomas James Mulvany

Brought up by a Catholic bishop following the early death of his parents, Mulvany trained at the Dublin Society Schools, where he won several awards. Soon after, he began exhibiting publicly, first at the Society of Artists of Ireland, and subsequently at the RHA. The Mulvanys proved to be a very significant artistic family. Thomas James’s older brother, John George, was an accomplished landscape painter and a founder member of the RHA, while his son George Francis Mulvany, also an artist, became the first Director of the National Gallery of Ireland. Mulvany himself was a gifted portraitist, having begun his career as a miniaturist, landscape and genre painter, and wrote pioneering biographical texts on seven contemporary Irish artists. Among his most important works were views, in both oils and watercolours, of several Irish provincial towns and buildings.