MacIlwaine, John Bedell Stanford

MacIlwaine, John Bedell Stanford (1857–1945), landscape painter and inventor, was born 21 April 1857 in Dublin, the son of John S. MacIlwaine, a banker. He was educated at the High School, Harcourt St., before studying architecture under Thomas Drew (qv). He then attended the RHA schools, where he met Walter Osborne (qv), who painted his portrait in 1880, an oil-sketch later presented by MacIlwaine to Dublin's Municipal Gallery of Modern Art (latterly, the Hugh Lane). Osborne often visited him at his home in Stanford house, Foxrock, Co. Dublin, where he completed a portrait of MacIlwaine sitting with his dog in the garden (1892), one of his finest works (now in the NGI). MacIlwaine first exhibited at the RHA in 1879, a painting entitled ‘A woodland stream’, and throughout his career showed over 100 works there, many of them sketches from nature. An associate of the RHA from 1893, he was made RHA in 1911. Often painting in Wicklow, he showed ‘Cooldross, Kilcool, Co. Wicklow’ at the RHA in 1894. His Donegal landscapes exhibited at the RHA included ‘Bundoran’ (1881) and ‘Lough Fern, Co. Donegal’ (1906). One of his principal paintings, ‘Brittas mill’, hung at the RHA in 1913. His article ‘Notes on some discoveries of coins in Ireland’, reprinted in 1912 from the British Numismatic Journal, described the retrieval of silver coins in Dublin dating from the period of James II (qv). Keenly interested in submarine devices, MacIlwaine was an engineer for the Conan submarine fuse (see Walter Conan (qv)) from the initial to the final stages, and made the first accurate and reliable fuse for exploding depth charges (1913). He also invented the automatic airplane range-finder, and an adjustable submarine hopper. He published on art subjects and other interests, including gardening, poultry, and spiritism; his recreations included angling and shooting. In 1919 he moved to Annaghroe house, Caledon, Co. Tyrone. Anita Leslie (qv) in her autobiography The gilt and the gingerbread (1981) recounts that MacIlwaine, who frequently painted in the demesne of her ancestral home at Castle Leslie, Glaslough, Co. Monaghan, once began a view of Kelvey lake that supposedly was finished ‘by fairy hands’. A founding member of both the Irish Arts Club and the Imperial Three Arts Club, he served on the fine art committee of the Ulster pavilion at the Wembley exhibition (1924–5). He died 14 January 1945 at his home. His oil-on-board painting ‘Late summer’ (c.1900) is in the NGI.