James Richard Marquis RHA (1833 - 1885) Morning off Ireland's Eye - Lobster Fishing Oil on canvas, 88.5 x 134.5cm (34¾ x 53) Signed and dated 1865 Described by Walter Strickland with somewhat faint praise as enjoying ‘some reputation in his day as a painter …’, Marquis, the son of a Scottish builder of James Street East in Dublin entered the School of Landscape and Ornament at the Dublin Society Schools in 1847, winning a premium in 1852 and a medal the following year. William Laffan, in his entry on Marquis in Painting 1600 – 1900 (RIA, 2014) notes that his art conforms to the Victorian academic tradition and that his reasonably large oeuvre … demonstrates the quality and variety of his work. In an 1864 review in The Irish Times, the paper’s critic complimented Marquis, noting that he surpassed his peers, and that he possessed a more ‘distinctly marked and vigorous style’ and that his paintings could be ‘picked out at first sight without the aid of the catalogue’. The critic also observed ‘Of all the landscape painters who exhibit he is pre-eminent as a colourist, and it is for this reason, perhaps that he undertakes subjects which afford higher scope to an artist of his class …… Rare and brilliant sunsets, strange fantastic skies, dark swelling seas supply him with his inspiration’.