Frederic William Burton — Painter of Ireland's Favourite Painting

Irish Artist · 1816–1900

Frederic William Burton

The Clare-born master of Irish Romanticism — painter of the most beloved image in Irish art.

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Part of our full Irish Art Prints collection.

The Meeting on the Turret Stairs by Frederic William Burton

The Meeting on the Turret Stairs (1864) — voted Ireland's favourite painting.

The Story

In 2012 the Irish public was asked to name the nation's favourite painting. They passed over Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ, which came second. They chose a watercolour of two lovers on a spiral staircase, painted almost 150 years earlier by a man from a Co. Clare family whose right arm had been disabled since childhood. That painting is The Meeting on the Turret Stairs, and its maker was Frederic William Burton.

He was born on 8 April 1816 into a Co. Clare gentry family whose seat was Clifden House, Corofin — the third son of a landowner who was himself an amateur landscape painter. A childhood injury left Burton's right arm permanently disabled, and he worked left-handed. He trained at the Dublin Society Schools under Henry Brocas and Robert Lucius West, exhibited with the Royal Hibernian Academy at just sixteen, and was elected a full member by twenty-three. He never worked in oils; his entire reputation rests on watercolour and gouache, handled with a precision that rivalled the old masters.

Burton first made his name as a miniaturist and as a painter of Irish life. The Aran Fisherman's Drowned Child (1841) — a scene of raw grief in a west-of-Ireland cottage, its furnishings closer to the Claddagh than to Aran — announced him as an artist of real emotional power. Engraved for the Royal Irish Art Union in 1843, it became the most popular print that body ever issued. He visited Germany in 1842 and 1844 and settled there in 1851 as curator of the collection of Maximilian II of Bavaria, absorbing the discipline of the Munich and Nazarene schools, before settling in London in 1858.

Then, in 1864, he made his masterpiece. Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs takes its subject from a Danish ballad: a princess and her doomed bodyguard-lover steal a final moment on a stairway. He does not kiss her; he presses his lips to her arm. It is one of the great images of restrained desire in all of art. Because it is watercolour, the National Gallery of Ireland keeps it in dim light and shows it for two one-hour sessions a week, on Thursday mornings and Sunday afternoons — which has only deepened its mystique.

In 1874 Burton was appointed the third Director of the National Gallery in London, a post he held for twenty years — and, remarkably, he laid down his brushes entirely to do it. Under his directorship the Gallery acquired Leonardo's The Virgin of the Rocks, Hogarth's The Shrimp Girl, and Van Dyck's Equestrian Portrait of Charles I. He was knighted in 1884 and died at his home in Kensington on 16 March 1900. He is buried in the family plot at Mount Jerome, Dublin. His paintings remain among the most loved works this country has ever produced.

There is a life behind that one picture — the Aran journeys with George Petrie, the twenty years running London's National Gallery, and the fact that he never once worked in oil. It is told in Frederic William Burton: the man who stopped painting.

Timeline

  • 1816 — Born 8 April into a Co. Clare family seated at Clifden House, Corofin.
  • 1832 — Exhibits with the Royal Hibernian Academy at just sixteen.
  • 1837–39 — Elected ARHA, then full member of the RHA.
  • 1841 — Paints The Aran Fisherman's Drowned Child.
  • 1851–58 — Curator to Maximilian II of Bavaria in Munich; then settles in London.
  • 1864 — Paints The Meeting on the Turret Stairs.
  • 1874 — Appointed Director of the National Gallery, London; stops painting.
  • 1884 — Knighted.
  • 1900 — Dies 16 March in Kensington; buried at Mount Jerome, Dublin.
  • 2012 — The Meeting on the Turret Stairs voted Ireland's favourite painting.

Where He Painted

From the cliffs of Howth to the lakes of the west — click a pin to see the painting tied to each place.

Howth · Lough Corrib · Corca Dhuibhne — the Irish places he drew.

Featured Works

View all Burton prints

Collector's Guide

Begin, of course, with The Meeting on the Turret Stairs — the painting that defines him, and Ireland's favourite work of art. From there, explore his Irish landscapes, such as Cliffs at Howth and The Upper End of Lough Corrib. His figure and portrait studies, like Dreams, complete the picture of Ireland's finest Romantic watercolourist.

The Burton Lover's Gift Guide

Three ways into his world, at three price points.

Discover Similar Artists

John Lavery — Ireland's great society painter. · William Orpen — master portraitist of the same tradition. · Mainie Jellett — the modernist who came after.

Or browse the full Irish Art Prints collection.