Maurice MacGonigal was one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century Irish art, a landscape and portrait painter and teacher who served as President of the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1962 to 1977, succeeding fellow Olympian Sean Keating, and competed in the painting section of the arts competition at the 1948 London Olympic Games. From Ranelagh, Dublin, he was apprenticed at fifteen to the stained glass studio of his uncle Joshua Clarke, working alongside Harry Clarke before winning a Taylor scholarship to study at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art from 1923 to 1926, where his teachers included Sean Keating, Patrick Tuohy and James Sleator. As a young man he was an activist for Irish independence and was interned, an experience reflected in his 1923 watercolour Prisoners on the Roof, Kilmainham. A visit to the Aran Islands in 1924 began a lifelong engagement with the west of Ireland as a subject. He went on to become a teacher and professor at the same school, by then renamed the National College of Art, and produced paintings, stained glass, set designs, book illustrations, posters and murals throughout his career. A studio palette that once belonged to his teacher William Orpen was placed on his grave.
Arts
