Cecil Maguire (20 January 1930 – 7 May 2020) was an Irish landscape and figure painter. His work appears in such collections as those at the UN headquarters in New York and the

Ulster Museum The Ulster Museum, located in the Botanic Gardens in Belfast, has around 8,000 square metres (90,000 sq. ft.) of public display space, featuring material from the collections of fine art and applied art, archaeology, ethnography, treasure ...

in Belfast.

Biography

Maguire was born in

Lurgan Lurgan () is a town in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, near the southern shore of Lough Neagh. Lurgan is about south-west of Belfast and is linked to the city by both the M1 motorway and the Belfast–Dublin railway line. It had a population ...

, County Armagh. He graduated from

Queen's University Belfast , mottoeng = For so much, what shall we give back? , top_free_label = , top_free = , top_free_label1 = , top_free1 = , top_free_label2 = , top_free2 = , established = , closed = , type = Public research university , parent = ...

in 1951 and took up an English teaching post in Lurgan College. He was an inspirational teacher, influencing, among others, the later historian,

D. G. Boyce David George Boyce (1942–2020), also known as George Boyce,Profile
at Swansea University

. At the school he met Mona Ryan whom he married. They had three daughters. His parents-in-law introduced him to the Ulster painter,

Maurice Wilks Maurice Fernand Cary Wilks (19 August 19048 September 1963) was a British automotive and aeronautical engineer, and by the time of his death in 1963, was the chairman of the Rover Company, a British car manufacturer. He was the founder of the ...

. He accompanied Wilks on painting trips to Cushendun and the Antrim coast. He subsequently took evening art classes and joined the Lurgan Arts Club. He became a member of the

Royal Ulster Academy The Royal Ulster Academy (RUA) has existed in one form or another since 1879. It started life then, as The Belfast Ramblers' Sketching Club drawn from the staff of Marcus Ward & Co who held their first show in Ward's Library on Botanic Avenue in 18 ...

in 1974. The academy awarded him the RUA Gold Medal in 1974 and the RUA Perpetual Gold Medal in 1993. In 1981, he retired from teaching to concentrate on painting and travelling. He spent a great part of each year in Roundstone, Connemara. He died in Belfast in 2020. In 2002 a book on Maguire's work, ''Cecil Maguire: towards a retrospective'', was published by gallery owner, Martin Davison.

References

1930 births 2020 deaths Irish painters People from Lurgan Members of the Royal Ulster Academy Painters from Northern Ireland 20th-century Irish painters Irish male painters Irish male artists 21st-century Irish painters 20th-century Irish male artists {{Ireland-artist-stub