A Mountain Chieftain's Funeral

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Artist: Francis Danby (Irish, 1793–1861)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 14 × 21 3/4 inches (35.6 × 55.2 cm)
Museum: Yale Center for British Art
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

In 1849 the Irish painter Francis Danby exhibited a large canvas entitled A Mountain Chieftain’s Funeral in Olden Times at the British Institution. At the same exhibition, Danby’s rival, John Martin, showed a new version of his famous painting Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon (1816). Critics were quick to draw comparisons between the two artists’ careers.

Martin was undoubtedly the more famous of the two; nevertheless, one reviewer described Danby as following “hard on [Martin’s] heels.” The “extreme darkness, that seems at first sight to swallow up everything” in Danby’s painting would have called to mind for exhibition-goers the “darkness visible” of Martin’s celebrated The Deluge (shown to your right), painted fifteen years earlier. The Center’s Danby painting is a reduced version of—and may have been a study for—his British Institution picture.

Text: Yale Center for British Art.