Sir MARTIN ARCHER, a portrait-painter, and president of the Royal Academy, was born in Dublin on the 23rd of December 1770. He was sprung from an old Irish family, and his father, while he exercised the trade of a merchant, regarded the profession of a painter as in no sense a fit occupation for a descendant of the Shees. Young Shee became, nevertheless, a student of art in the Dublin Society, and came early to London, where he was, in 1788 introduced to the notice of Sir Joshua Reynolds by the youth's illustrious friend and countryman Edmund Burke. Having entered as a student in the Royal Academy in 1789, he contributed the same year his first two pictures to the exhibition, the "Head of an Old Man" and "Portrait of a Gentleman." During the next ten years he steadily increased in practice, and was gradually gaining ground among the aristocracy, with whom his suavity and Sheerness, manners were a great recommendation. Lord Spencer was the first nobleman who honoured his studio with his portrait, and his example was soon followed by dukes and marquises in abundance. Lawrence, however, had an entire monopoly of the ladies. Shee was chosen an associate of the Royal Academy in 1798, shortly after the illustrious Flaxman, and in 1800 he was made a Royal Academician. He now removed to Romney's house in Cavendish Square, and set up as the legitimate successor of that artist. Shee continued to paint with great readiness of hand and fertility of invention, although his portraits were eclipsed by more than one of his contemporaries, and especially by Lawrence, Hoppner, Phillips, Jackson, and Raeburn. He had a fine eye for colour, but one of his most glaring defects was a deficiency in proportion. In 1805 he came out with a poem consisting of Rhymes on Art, and it was succeeded by a second part in 1809. Although Byron spoke well of it in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and invoked a place for "Shee and Genius" in the temple of fame, yet as nature had not originally conjoined these two, it is to be feared that even a poet's invocation could not materially affect their relations. Shee published another small volume of verses in 1814, entitled The Commemoration of Sir Joshua Reynolds and other Poems, but this effort did not greatly increase his fame. He now modified his theatrical experience by writing a tragedy called Alasco, of which the scene was laid in Poland. The play was accepted at Covent Garden, and in the fertile fancy of the poet the play had already gained for him a great dramatic fame, when Colman, the licenser, refused it his sanction, on the plea of its containing certain treasonable allusions, and Shee, in great wrath, resolved to make his appeal to the public. This violent threat he carried out in 1824; but unfortunately the public found other business to mind, and Alasco is still on the list of unacted dramas.

On the death of Lawrence in 1830, Shee was chosen President of the Royal Academy, more from a regard to his elegant addresses than for any artistic genius with which he was held to be endowed. Wilkie was a candidate, but he had little else than genius in his profession to recommend him, and of course Shee's fluency of speech and courtly address were of much more consequence in the academic chair than the reserved manner and undecided utterance of a much greater man. Shortly after Shee received the honour of knighthood. He continued to paint till 1846, and died five years afterwards, on the 13th of August 1850, in his eightieth year.