Edward Thomas Daniell (6 June 180424 September 1842) was an English artist known for his etchings and the landscape paintings he made during an expedition to the Middle East, including Lycia, part of modern-day Turkey. He is associated with the Norwich School of painters, a group of artists connected by location and personal and professional relationships, who were mainly inspired by the Norfolk countryside.
Born in London to wealthy parents, Daniell grew up and was educated in Norwich, where he was taught art by John Crome and Joseph Stannard. After graduating in classics at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1828, he was ordained as a curate at Banham in 1832 and appointed to a curacy at St. Mark's Church, London, in 1834. He became a patron of the arts, and an influential friend of the artist John Linnell. In 1840, after resigning his curacy and leaving England for the Middle East, he travelled to Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and joined the explorer Sir Charles Fellows's archaeological expedition in Lycia as an illustrator. He contracted malaria there and reached Adalia (now known as Antalya) intending to recuperate, but died from a second attack of the disease.
Daniell normally used a small number of colours for his watercolour paintings, mainly sepia, ultramarine, and gamboge. The distinctive style of his watercolours was influenced in part by Crome, and John Sell Cotman. As an etcher he was unsurpassed by the other Norwich artists in the use of drypoint, and he anticipated the modern revival of etching which began in the 1850s. His prints were made by his friend and neighbour Henry Ninham, whose technique he influenced. His paintings of the Near East may have been made with future works in mind.
Background
Edward Daniell was associated with the Norwich School of painters, a regional school of landscape painters who were connected personally or professionally. Though mainly inspired by the Norfolk countryside, many also depicted other landscapes, and coastal and urban scenes.
The school's most important artists were John Crome, Joseph Stannard, George Vincent, Robert Ladbrooke, James Stark, John Thirtle and John Sell Cotman, along with Cotman's sons Miles Edmund and John Joseph Cotman. The school was a unique phenomenon in the history of 19th-century British art: Norwich was the first English city outside London which had the right conditions for a provincial art movement. It had more locally born artists than any other similar city, and its theatrical, artistic, philosophical and musical cultures were cross-fertilised in a way that was unique outside the capital.
Life Early life and education
Edward Thomas Daniell was born on 6June 1804 at Charlotte Street in central London, to Sir Thomas Daniell, a retired attorney-general of Dominica, and his second wife Anne Drosier, the daughter of John Drosier of Rudham Grange, Norfolk. Sir Thomas' first wife, with whom he had a son Earle and a daughter Anne, died in London in 1792. Their daughter married John Holmes in Norfolk in 1802 and died in childbirth in 1805.John Jun. Holmes in "Bishop's transcripts for the Archdeaconry of Norfolk, 1686–1941", FamilySearch (John Jun. Holmes). Citing Bishop's transcripts for the Archdeaconry of Norfolk, 1686–1941. Her brother Earle was an officer in the 12th Dragoons by 1806.
Sir Thomas purchased land and slaves in the Leeward Islands, which were then part of the British Empire. His estates, including at Dickenson Bay on Antigua, had been bought in 1779 from the family of his first wife. He retired and moved to the west of Norfolk, but his health deteriorated and he died of cancer in 1806, leaving a young widow and infant son. He left his Dominican lands to her, and his Antigua estate to his adult son Earle, subject to him providing a guaranteed annual income of £300 to the family in Norfolk. Anne Daniell and her son moved to a house in St. Giles Street, Norwich. She died in 1836 aged 64, and was buried in the nave of St Mary Coslany.
Edward Daniell grew up with his mother in Norwich and was educated at Norwich Grammar School, where the drawing master was John Crome. He was involved in the art world at a young age; the brothers Thomas and Chambers Hall wrote to the artist John Linnell in 1822 about "our young friend Mr Daniells who accompanied us to your house last week and who wishes to possess a drawing".
On 9 December 1823, aged 19, Daniell went to Balliol College, Oxford to read classics. He graduated in November 1828,:* despite having neglected his studies in favour of art. In a letter to Linnell, he wrote: "I find that the examinations for which I am preparing next month require a closer application to my literary studies than I had imagined and that I must not attempt to 'serve two masters'." He was introduced to etching by Joseph Stannard, and during the holidays practiced at Stannard's studio in St. Giles Terrace, around the corner from his own house. He graduated with a Master of Arts on 25 May 1831.
Travels in Europe and Scotland
Daniell had the financial means to travel abroad to find subjects to paint, and during 1829 and 1830 he spent the months between his classics studies and his master's degree on a Grand Tour through France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, producing scenic oil paintings and watercolours that the art historian William Dickes described as "well-centred performances, painted with a fluid brush, and revealing a delicate appreciation of tone".
The route Daniell took during his eighteen months on the Continent is revealed by the order of his paintings. His travels through Switzerland are reminiscent of those of the artist James Pattison Cockburn, who published his Swiss Scenery in 1820. In Rome and Naples he met the artist Thomas Uwins, who wrote: "What a shoal of amateur artists we have got here!... there is a too come to judgement! second Daniel!, I have gotten more substantial criticism from this young man than from anyone since Havell was my messmate."
Daniell may also have visited Spain, as his etchings of the country were copied by the Norwich artist Henry Ninham, but there is no direct evidence he went there. It is possible he returned home in time for the funeral of Joseph Stannard, who died from tuberculosis on 7December 1830, aged33.
In the summer of 1832, Daniell went on a walking trip in Scotland, accompanied by two contemporaries from Oxford, George Denison and Edmund Walker Head. The trip provided him with subject material and influenced his use of drypoint etching, as he was able to study the work of etchers such as Andrew Geddes. In The Etchings of E. T. Daniell, Jane Thistlethwaite wrote that his Scottish scenes "testify in their subjects to his enthusiasm for the beauties of Scotland and in their technique to his almost certain acquaintance with the Scottish etchers".
Church career
On 2 October 1832 Daniell was ordained in Norwich Cathedral as a deacon, and three days later was licensed as the curate of the parish church at Banham, a post he held for eighteen months. Letters to John Linnell show he felt a need to increase his income during this period in his life. Little is known of his career as a Norfolk curate, but the Banham registers, all of which have been preserved, show he led an active life in the parish. He continued to etch at this time, and in Thistlethwaite's view whilst there produced his "loveliest and most sophisticated plates".
On 2 June 1833, Daniell was ordained to the priesthood, but continued as the curate at Banham until 1834. That year he was appointed to the curacy of St. Mark's, North Audley Street in London, and took rooms in Park Street, Mayfair. He also worked at St. George's Hospital but, as with his curacy at St. Mark's, no official records of his employment have survived. In a letter written in 1835 to his Oxford tutor Joseph Blanco White, Daniell wrote: "You probably, thought I was haranguing the plough-boys in Norfolk, and you find me among the Dons of Grosvenor Square, and having to preach (as I must) next Wednesday at St. George's, Hanover Square. I wish you would come and give me some assistance." In about 1836 he moved to rooms in Green Street, near Grosvenor Square and close to St. Mark's, living there until his departure for the Holy Land in 1840.
The outer shell of Norwich Castle's keep was refaced in Bath stone from 1834 to 1839, replicating the original blank arcading. Daniell was among those who strongly opposed the proposed refacing. Letters written from London show that he had not forgotten this contentious issue. He planned a plate of Ninham's drawing of the castle as a gesture of his opposition to the project, informing the antiquary Dawson Turner that "I have had a very beautiful drawing made of it, and I mean to etch it the size of the drawing." His etching of the old keep was never completed.
Tour of the Near East
At some date after June 1840, perhaps inspired by the Scottish painter David Roberts who had travelled to Egypt and the Holy Land to find landscapes to depict, Daniell resigned his curacy and left England to tour the Near East. He arrived in Corfu in September 1840. Although Roberts' paintings of the Middle East are thought to have compelled him to tour abroad, he had also been told of recent discoveries in Lycia (now part of modern Turkey) by the explorer Charles Fellows.
Daniell was in Athens by the end of the year, and sailed to Alexandria early in 1841. He travelled up the Nile to Nubia, and then from Egypt to Palestine, on a route that took him past Mount Sinai. He reached Beirut in October 1841.
He met Fellows in the Turkish city of Smyrna and joined his expedition, boarding HMS Beacon, a ship sent by the British Government to convey home antiquities recently discovered by Fellows at Xanthos. During the expedition 18 ancient cities were located. After spending the winter at Xanthos, Daniell chose to remain in Lycia to help survey the region, in company with Thomas Abel Brimage Spratt, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and the naturalist Edward Forbes. Spratt was responsible for researching the area's topography and Forbes its natural history; Daniell was to make records of any discoveries. In Lycia he produced a series of watercolours, of which Laurence Binyon said, "What strikes one most at first is the astonishing air of space and magnitude conveyed, the fluid wash of sunlight in these towering gorges and open valleys."
In March 1842, Fellows left for London on HMS Beacon, in order to obtain bigger ships for transporting the antiquities back to England. Daniell travelled to Selge, sketching and exploring its ruins. He made copies of inscriptions from monuments in Cibyratis, Pisidia and Pamphylia, and visited Sillyon, Marmara, Perga and Lyrbe. His original drawings are now lost, but they were later published in Travels in Lycia, Milyas, and the Cibyratis, in company with the Late , and his notes were transcribed (inaccurately) by Samuel Birch at the British Museum. Birch's collection contains a single page of Daniell's original manuscript.
The expedition arrived at Adalia (now known as Antalya) in April 1842. Spratt and Forbes left the city before Daniell, who travelled overland after meeting the Pasha. He then visited Cyprus and painted a watercolour of the island, possibly while anchored off shore. The author Rita Severis has compared his painting with the watercolours of Turner, whom he was known to admire. In her book on artistic representations of the island from 1700 to 1960, she wrote: "The interplay of the blue sea and the sandy colour of the landwhich is repeated successfully in the foreground of the pictureaccentuates the distance between the viewer and the land while simultaneously increasing the desire to look more closely and attentively at the subject."
Death