First Steps

This 1829 First Steps is an early work from the beginning of Daniel Maclise's career, depicting a tender domestic moment of a child learning to walk with the support of a watching family. The subject reflects the sentimental genre tradition that coexisted with Maclise's more ambitious historical and literary work throughout his career, and demonstrates his ability to invest even modest subjects with genuine feeling and technical skill. Maclise, an Irish-born painter who had come to London from Cork and quickly won notice at the Royal Academy, was still developing his signature style in 1829, combining close observation with an idealizing tendency inherited from his admiration for Raphael and the Italian masters. The intimate domestic subject, with its emphasis on childhood innocence and parental tenderness, was precisely the kind of work that appealed to the newly wealthy middle-class patrons who drove the Victorian art market. It anticipates the sentimental genre painting that would dominate mid-Victorian exhibition culture, though Maclise himself would pursue more ambitious historical and literary subjects as his reputation grew, leaving this early domestic mode behind.

The domestic scene is rendered with the precise drawing that characterized even Maclise's early work, the figures of parent and child composed with natural warmth and careful observation of physical movement.