John Mulvany

John Mulvany (c. 1839 – 1906) was an Irish artist best known as an artist of the American West who painted the first large (11ftx21ft) image of General Custer’s defeat by the Oglala Sioux Indians at Little Big Horn in 1876. Mulvany’s painting Custer’s Last Rally, was finished in 1881. In Ireland, he is known for The Battle of Aughrim, painted in 1885 and exhibited in Dublin in 2010.

Mulvany also recorded the American Civil War on canvas as well as maintaining a career as a portrait painter throughout his life.

Mulvany was born in Diralagh, County Meath, Ireland c. 1839 to tenant farmers, Francis Lee and Thomas Mulvany. When he immigrated to New York City in 1851 at the age of 12, he was old enough to have witnessed and grasped the horrors of the Irish Famine. He worked as a tow boy on the Erie Canal and came to the attention of Professor Juan Wandersford at the National Academy of Design in New York City. In 1859 Mulvany enrolled in classes there. before he went to Washington, D.C. to work for Mathew Brady by 1863.

Mulvany never served in the army but may have worked as a sketch artist for a Chicago newspaper. Mulvany’s later Civil War paintings were praised for their realism - paintings such as Sheridan’s Ride at Winchester, 1896McPherson and Revenge, 1889,Battle of Shiloh and The Death of General Mulligan.

After the Civil War, Mulvany worked for Samuel B. Fassett, a leading photographer in Chicago. He submitted paintings to exhibitions in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. Mulvany found a patron in St. Louis, Samuel B. Coale, who provided terms for him to study in Europe where he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. studying with Alexander von Wagner, De Kaiser and Carl Theodor von Piloty, then with Jean-Léon Gerome in Paris. He also spent time in Antwerp studying Rembrandts.

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