The McArdle Scrapbooks > Introduction

The McArdle Scrapbooks - Introduction

Henry Arthur McArdle, born in 1836 in Belfast, Ireland, became interested in Texas history while researching his painting Lee at the Wilderness. Dawn at the Alamo and The Battle of San Jacinto, the best known of his surviving works, now hang in the Senate Chamber  of the Texas State Capitol and are the products of McArdle’s exhaustive research.

The two paintings attempt to depict as accurately as possible the persons, events, accoutrements, and settings of the events they portray. To do this, McArdle amassed a body of documents, photographs, maps, and personal recollections that would later be sold to the state along with the two canvases that now hang in the Texas Senate Chamber.

Although he had created the paintings with an eye to their being purchased by the state, McArdle had difficulty obtaining payment, even when he allowed them to be displayed in the Capitol building. In 1927, the 40th Texas Legislature approved $25,000 to purchase both paintings and the accumulated research materials—19 years after his death on February 16, 1908.

For downloadable images from the scrapbooks visit the Texas Digital Archive. 

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