Home Subjects

With Merry Christmas in the Baron’s Hall (National Gallery of Ireland) from 1838, the Irish artist Daniel Maclise participated in one of the Victorian era’s most ambitious cultural projects: the construction of Christmas. As we have noted previously at Home Subjects during the festive season, domesticity, the historic interior, and the invention of tradition played a central role in the creation of “ancient” Christmas customs in the nineteenth century.  What makes this painting particularly fascinating is how it reveals the circular process of tradition-making, where literature inspires art, which then becomes accepted as historical truth.

Maclise’s painting was directly inspired by Walter Scott’s epic poem Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field, published in 1808.  The six narrative cantos recount a tale of love and betrayal against the backdrop of the Battle of Flodden Field, fought in 1513, with each canto preceded by an introductory epistle addressed to Scott’s friends.  These letters discuss an array of topics: his own life, shared memories, politics, and social issues.  The introduction to Canto VI, addressed to the English book collector Richard Heber (1773-1833), finds Scott writing from Mertoun House on the River Tweed in the Scottish Borders, now owned by the Duke of Sutherland.  The oldest part of the house dates to 1567.  Experiencing this evocative surrounding in December prompts Scott to muse upon “Christmas merry” in the sixteenth century:

And well our Christian sires of old

Loved when the year its course had roll’d

And brought blithe Christmas back again,

With all his hospitable train.

Scott goes on to describe a joyous hall set with a feast:

Then open’d wide the Baron’s hall

To vassal, tenant, serf and all…

The hall was dress’d with holly green…

Then was brought in the lusty brawn…

Then the grim boar’s head frown’d on high.

Scott’s poem was reprinted throughout the nineteenth century, and by the end of the century, the introductory epistle to Canto VI was retitled “Christmas in the Olden Time” and widely anthologized.  Maclise took direct inspiration from Scott’s poem, but his connection to the author, and the early nineteenth century creation of Christmas traditions, goes even deeper.

Maclise’s biographer Justin O’Driscoll notes that as an art student in Cork, Maclise “had read Shakespeare and Milton, Spencer and Chaucer, as well as many of the modern English poets and dramatists—history and romances, tales of chivalry and legends of his own land . . . the lectures of Reynolds, Fuseli, Barry, and Opie.”   Maclise’s reading list of “modern” authors included Sir Walter Scott, whom Maclise had a chance to meet during the author’s August 1825 tour of Ireland.  One of the artist’s first successes was his portrait of Scott from this visit.  The teenage Maclise created a pencil sketch and then commissioned a lithograph from his drawing in an edition of 500, and it sold out quickly.  This gambit added to Maclise’s local fame as a portrait artist and paved the way for his eventual move to London and study at the Royal Academy.  There, he soon entered the circle of William Maginn and Fraser’s Magazine and embarked on a prolific career as an illustrator.

Maclise exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy in 1829, and throughout the 1830s, he built his reputation as a painter of historical and literary genre scenes. Work such as The Chivalric Vow of the Ladies of the Peacock (1835) suggests many of Maclise’s interests and innovations as a painter.  First, the subject matter: drawn from Scott’s popular Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805).  Yet the painting nevertheless combines that reference with the Medieval epic poem “Vows of the Peacock” by Jacques de Longuyon.  Like the banqueting scene in Merry Christmas from three years later, this subject deploys the architectural characteristics of the medieval hall—a large fireplace to the left in both painting and a raised dais at the center underneath a rounded archway—to frame the scene in a theatrical manner.

The layout of space and recession of figures in both paintings is not unlike that achieved in early nineteenth century theatrical productions, a world with which Maclise was very familiar.  A close friend to Charles Dickens and the actor and theater manager William Charles Macready, Maclise would exhibit a number of paintings throughout the 1840s with subjects drawn from Shakespeare and Oliver Goldsmith, among others.

Like his earlier “chivalric vow” painting, Merry Christmas in the Baron’s Hall layers source upon source, interpretation upon interpretation.  Although it draws on Scott’s romanticized and largely invented a “medieval” Christmas from 1808, Maclise adds his own literary text.  When he exhibited the work at the Royal Academy at the summer exhibition of 1838, he included a detailed description of various moments within the painting in the catalogue, focused on the presentation of the boar’s head by the Lord of Misrule, inspired by a quotation from the fifteenth-century Christmas carol known as “the Boar’s Head Carol:” “The boar’s head in hand bring I / With garlands gay and rosemary:  / I pray you all sing merrily.”  In the painting, a dandified Lord of Misrule, wearing gold brocade silk and a hat adorned with a peacock feature, recites the carol and his companion, a figure resplendent in red silk with a bright green sash, presents the boar’s head.  They are accompanied by pages and musicians, yet very few of the revelers take any notice of this entrance.  Maclise organizes the composition into three groups that radiate out from the boar’s head (four, if you include the musicians that accompany the head): a “good old English gentleman,” his family and guests seated around a table in the background; a group of young men and women playing a game of keep-away called ‘Hunt the Slipper’ (a game mentioned in Scott’s poem) on the left; a group of “mummers and vassals” on the right caught between performing and feasting.

Maclise added to these layers by writing his own lengthy poem about the scene, entitled “Christmas Revels, an Epic Rhapsody in Twelve Duans,” part of which is reprinted in the Royal Academy catalogue.  Perhaps Maclise wanted to signal his Irishness by using the archaic term duan, a poem or song in Gaelic Irish and Scottish.  Yet, as Benjamin Casey of Maynooth University has pointed out, Maclise’s painting reveals more about his admiration for Scott than any Irish tradition. It appeared under Maclise’s pseudonym “Alfred Croquis,Esq.” in Fraser’s Magazine not in December but in May 1838, when the Royal Academy exhibition opened.  This dual approach allowed the painting and poem (quoted and referenced in the RA catalogue) to work in tandem.  While the poem is not exactly a description of the painting, key moments direct the reader to features of the painting.  For example, duan III describes members of the group of “mummers and vassals,” detailing a pantomime performance of St. George battling the dragon that end with the actors feasting together:

Lifting too oft a foaming flagon

Is not decorous in a Dragon

But now he sets him at the table

To eat and drink while he is able,–

Folds up his tail, thrusts forth his head,

And asks of St. George to be fed;

For mark how Christmas old feuds ends,

The Dragon and St. George are friends.

In the painting, we find a smiling St. George, still in full armor, helpfully lifting a flagon to the mouth of a ruddy face that appears between the jaws of a green dragon costume.  The poem and the painting enrich each other, creating a complete sensory world.

Soon after Maclise exhibited this work, his friend John Forster introduced him to Charles Dickens.  While Dickens would famously promote the intimate, sentimental family Christmas in “A Christmas Carol” five years later, Maclise’s vision looked backward to Scott’s model of communal celebration.  Where Dickens emphasized bourgeois domesticity and family warmth, Maclise romanticized feudal hospitality and collective revelry.  He has absorbed Scott’s lesson that tradition could be manufactured through artistic conviction and compelling storytelling.  The romantic vision of the past evident in both poem and painting dissolved social hierarchies in seasonal joy.

The Baron’s Hall itself deserves close attention as a study in domestic architecture and social choreography. It is unknown if Maclise based the architecture on a specific example, such as the hall at Penshurst Place, with a Baron’s Hall completed in the 1340s (the minstrel gallery was added in the sixteenth century).  Maclise presents a grand medieval space where decoration and spatial arrangement reveal as much as they conceal. Holly and ivy festoon the walls, connecting the indoor celebration to the natural world outside—details taken directly from Scott’s descriptions. The boar’s head, carried in procession, anchors the feast in supposedly ancient tradition. Yet architecture performs a subtle social function that contradicts an egalitarian fantasy. Maclise’s Baron sits removed in the background, physically separated from his guests even during this supposedly democratic celebration. His elevated position includes the clear sight lines that allow him to observe without participating.  The careful arrangement places revelry at a distance.

The Baron’s Hall is not a real place but an idealized space where contradictions could be visually reconciled, if never truly resolved—where ancient and modern, hierarchy and equality, could coexist in artistic harmony.