William Maw Egley was born at Cirencester Place, Marylebone, Middlesex, on 2 October 1826 to a Quaker family, the son of William Egley and Sarah Maw. His father was a self-taught artist, largely a portrait painter and miniaturist. William Maw Egley was educated at Westminster School, London. He studied art under his father from the age of fourteen and by the age of fifteen was his father's assistant. Although he is best known as a painter of literary, historical, and genre subjects, early in his career he did book illustrations for works by authors like Shakespeare and Molière. Egley exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1843-98, at the British Institution from 1844-67, and the Society of British Artists from 1846-94. He also exhibited at the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, and at provincial centres like the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts, the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin. In 1847 Egley entered in the Westminster Hall Competition but failed to win a prize. He was married to his cousin Mary Anne "Polly" Hubbard on August 16, 1849 at All Saints Church in her home town of Norfolk. From 1843-55 he concentrated mainly on historical subjects or on subjects from literature or the theatre, especially from Shakespeare, Molière, or Tennyson. From about 1855-62 he primarily painted contemporary genre scenes, influenced by his friend William Powell Frith. Frith even hired Egley to add backgrounds to his own work. After this time Egley painted largely eighteenth-century costume pieces or historical pictures in the manner of Marcus Stone or G. D. Leslie. Egley worked in both oils and watercolours. He was also an art instructor. In 1873 he founded a drawing society for the instruction of female amateur artists. He was a prolific artist and from the 1840s until the end of the 1870s he did very well financially. In his later years, however, he had financial difficulties. When he died on 20 February 1916 he was living with relatives at 32 Chiswick Lane, Chiswick, Middlesex. His wife had predeceased him in 1883. — Dennis T. Lanigan
Works
Bibliography
Casteras, Susan. "William Maw Egley's The Talking Oak." Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts LXV, No. 4, 1990, 26-39.
Crowther, Paul. Awakening Beauty: The Crowther-Oblak Collection of Victorian Art. Exhibition catalogue. Ljubljana: National Gallery of Slovenia; Galway: Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, 2014.
Lanigan, Dennis and Douglas Schoenherr. A Dream of the Past. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. 95-97.
Maas, Jeremy. Victorian Painters. New York: Harrison House, 1969.
Strong, Roy. Recreating the Past. British History and the Victorian Painter. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1978.
Wood, Christopher. The Pre-Raphaelites. New York: Crescent Books, 1981, 65-66.
Wooten, Sarah. "William Maw Egley's The Lady of Shalott." Tennyson Research Bulletin VII, no. 3 (November 1999): 132-140.
Created 27 November 2014
Biography added 14 July 2024