When he was eight years old, his father, a constable in the hills of Ireland and a troubadour in the surrounding towns, was killed while trying to save the life of another man. William then began to work in a local pottery to assist with the family's subsequent debts and existence. William's mother worked for women as a maid, and finally decided to take her two children, William and James, to America, with the financial help of several friends. In Trenton, New Jersey, she worked out of her home as housekeeper and maid, and William gained employment at the Trenton Potteries, doing some sketching when he had the time. He sketched long before he painted, and around twenty he began to paint seriously, most of his efforts being of rural scenes with a few attempts at portraits.
He and his wife raised six children -- Nellie, William, Kathleen, Florence, Casper, and Patricia. When Nellie was two, William and Florence, and her mother and father, rented a farm back of Titusville, N. J. Because of the desperate financial problems of the country, and the closing down of the Trenton Potteries, William was forced to go to West Virginia and work in the potteries there, while the balance of the family worked the farm. Many of William's paintings were done in the rural sections of Titusville, Hopewell, Lambertville, and Washington Crossing, Pa. (then called Taylorsville). In less than two years he was back to work in the Trenton Potteries. Throughout his years of painting, the need to provide for his family led to his scrimping and saving to purchase art supplies, and he was known to paint over earlier scenes with new ones to save the cost of new canvas.
An Artist's Legacy: Return to Main Page of Jim's Writings
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William Mulhern, born in the County
Fermanagh, Ireland, in 1875, of James and Frances (nee Bromley) Mulhern, began
his painting career somewhere around his twentieth year.
He taught at the Trenton Art School
in the evenings, and met established painters like George Bradshaw,
John Ward Stimson, Redfield, and Phelps Petty, from whom he
learned and who remained his friends and frequent visitors at
the Mulhern household for many years. 
His
painting finally took him to Philadelphia and New York art exhibits,
where several of his paintings were hung and received second prize
and honorable mention. Subsequently, a prominent newspaper in New
York offered him a job doing commercial art. This he refused.
