Author: Shee, Martin Archer
Biography:
SHEE, Martin Archer (1769-1850: ODNB)
Shee was born in Dublin, the younger of two sons of Martin and Mary (Archer) Shee. His father was blind; his mother died while he was still an infant. His widowed aunt looked after the two boys, at first in Cookstown and then after 1781, when she remarried, back in Dublin. His father tutored him at first, but died in 1783. Shee, a Roman Catholic, continued his classical education for a year with the Dominicans and at the same time began to study drawing at the Royal Dublin Society, where he did so well that he was able to set himself up as a portrait painter from the age of fifteen. In 1788 he moved to London; in 1789 he exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time; in 1790 he entered the Academy Schools as a student. Between commissions from publishers and private clients he was able to make a living as an artist, though he spent much of his career in the shadow of his friend and contemporary Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830). (His self-portrait of 1794 is in the National Portrait Gallery.) In 1796 he married Mary Power of Youghal, Co. Cork; the couple had six children. He was made an Associate of the RA in 1798 and an Academician in 1800. He became actively involved in the internal affairs of the RA; after the death of Lawrence in 1830 he was elected President and held that title until his death, although in practice he had been forced by ill health to retire to Brighton in 1845. As a writer he published two novels as well as a tragedy that was rejected by the licenser and the poems about art that are in this bibliography. One of his sons wrote an official biography in two volumes (1860). He died in Brighton and is buried there. (ancestry.com 14 Sept. 2020; ODNB 14 Sept. 2020)