John Mulvany

John Mulvany was a wandering artist living in cities across the United States for a few years at a time before moving on. His life and art were defined by his nomadic existence, in which by chance or intention he was present or participated in several watershed moments in the nineteenth century.

Born in Ireland during the Great Famine, he immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1856. Mulvany began his artistic career as a messenger and model at the National Academy of Design in New York, where he enrolled as a student in 1859. In 1861 he moved to Chicago and began working as a photography colorist until the outbreak of the Civil War. There are conflicting reports of him either serving in the Union Army or traveling to the front lines as a civilian. 

After the war, Mulvany secured the patronage of wealthy members of the Irish community in Chicago in order to travel to Europe and study  in Munich, Antwerp, Paris, Amsterdam and The Hague. Returning to Chicago in 1871, Mulvaney lost all of his possessions in the Great Chicago Fire, prompting him to travel through the American West.

City directories place him in St. Louis in 1873, but also New York City and Cincinnati. In 1879 he settled in Kansas City, where he painted his best-known painting, Custer’s Last Rally. Measuring 11 by 20 feet, the painting documents the 1876 battle of Little Big Horn. Mulvaney exhibited the painting around the country to enthusiastic audiences, including Walt Whitman and Custer’s widow, who praised its verisimilitude.

Mulvaney left Kansas City -- and a debt of $450 for four years of unpaid room and board at the St. James Hotel -- to continue his wandering, living in Chicago, Omaha, Denver and Portland, before ultimately dying in New York in 1904 or 1906 after falling into the East River.