Thomas Eyre Macklin (1867-1943)
Thomas Eyre Macklin RBA (1863-1943) was a British painter in oils and watercolour, illustrator, sculptor and designer of monuments, who signed his works T. Eyre Macklin or T.E. Macklin. After a promising career at various art schools, including the Royal Academy, in the late 19th century Macklin produced Romantic black-and-white illustrations for books, numerous landscapes, figurative paintings and civic portraits, all of which came to the attention of local newspapers in his native Newcastle upon Tyne. In the 20th century he concentrated on Art Deco monuments and other sculpture, his best-known works being the South African War Memorial in Newcastle, the Bangor Memorial, County Down, and the Land Wars Memorial at Auckland, New Zealand. According to Macklin, his ancestors were from County Donegal. He was the son of John Eyre Macklin, a soldier, journalist and landscape painter; both were Newcastle-born. Macklin married writer Alice Martha Alys Philpott and they had one child, but she later petitioned for divorce on the grounds of infidelity. He had bouts of illness during later life and died in Devon in 1943. Encouraged by his father, Macklin showed a remarkable aptitude for drawing from childhood, and devoted himself to art from the age of ten, being one of W. Cosens Way's students at the Newcastle School of Art, where he was one of the most successful pupils ... On one occasion he carried off the four head prizes of the year. Macklin was selling his pictures by the age of thirtee. In 1884 he moved from Newcastle to London to sketch antiques at the British Museum, and trained at Calderon's Art School until c.1887. After that, he studied at John Dawson Watson's studio. In 1887 he passed the Royal Academy Schools' entrance examinations at the age of 23 years. Macklin was lucky to be accepted at the Royal Academy. He had spent three months on a special drawing to be submitted to the examiners of the Academy, but it mysteriously disappeared. There was no time to search for it, and he spent another fourteen days reproducing it, with one hour to spare before the entrance assessment.] In 1888 he won a Royal Academy silver medal for the best copy of an oil painting. Throughout his training, Macklin was a diligent student. Macklin exhibited 17 works at the Royal Academy (RA) from 1889 and numerous others at other institutions.