William Harrison Ainsworth (1805–1882)

This 1834 portrait of William Harrison Ainsworth captures the historical novelist at the beginning of a literary career that would make him one of the most popular authors of the Victorian era. Ainsworth's novels — Rookwood, Jack Sheppard, The Tower of London — combined historical spectacle with romanticized criminals in a sensational formula that found enormous popular audiences. Maclise's portrait of the young Ainsworth, executed before the major novels that established his fame, documents the literary aspirant before success. Maclise moved within the same literary social world as Ainsworth, and his portraits of writers collectively preserve a visual record of the interconnected metropolitan literary culture of the 1830s.

The portrait presents the young novelist with Maclise's characteristic directness and precision, the confident pose and careful rendering of features suggesting both the sitter's ambition and the painter's keen eye for personality.