William Daniell

William Daniell

Daniell was sixteen when he accompanied his uncle to India. On 17 July 1786, a few months after their arrival in

In September 1794 the Daniells returned to England. Over the period 1784 to 1794 William had kept a detailed diary of their travels. This is now in the British Library. After 1794 he no longer kept a diary and so we have no information in his own hand about the rest of his life. The Royal Academician, Joseph Farington, himself a landscape painter and topographical draughtsman, kept a diary from 1793 until he died in 1821.^[4][5][6] The Daniells were close friends of Farington. John Garvey has gone through the diary and extracted glimpses of William's private life and of his artistic work.^[7][8] The diaries are almost the only written record we have of the life of William Daniell.

In 1794, William and his uncle set up house at 37 Howland Street, Fitzroy Square. Their first priority was to publish a selection of their paintings of India. The views that were selected were made into aquatint, calling upon William's hard-earned skills in this delicate medium. Farington records in his diary that William Daniell had informed him that after his return to England he spent the next seven years working from six in the morning until midnight perfecting his aquatinting techniques.

Financial success

The Daniells' great work on India, Oriental Scenery, was published in six parts over the period 1795–1808.^[9] It comprised a total of 144 coloured aquatints and six uncoloured title-pages. The cost of a complete set was £210. The publication was a success, both artistically and financially. Thirty sets were sold to the East India Company, and a further order for eighteen copies was received. Thomas Sutton in his book The Daniells: Artists and Travellers (1954), quotes a glowing tribute to the work of the Daniells from the Calcutta Monthly magazine:

The execution of these drawings is indeed masterly; there is every reason to confide in the fidelity of the representations; and the effect produced by this rich and splendid display of oriental scenery is truly striking. In looking at it, one may almost feel the warmth of an Indian sky, the water seems to be in actual motion, and the animals, trees and plants are studies for the naturalist.

Further different versions of Indian scenes were published, and details can be found in Sutton's book, together with a detailed inventory of all the artistic output of Thomas, Samuel and William Daniell.^[10]

Oriental Scenery took its place among such revered works as James Stuart and Nicholas Revett's Antiquities of Athens (1762), Baron Denon's Voyage dans la basse et la haute Egypte (1802) and Robert Wood's Ruins of Palmyra (1753) and Ruins of Balbek (1757). It provided an entirely new vision of the Indian subcontinent that was to influence both decorative arts and British architectural design. Above all, it formed a popular vision in Britain of a romantic and picturesque India that to some extent persists.

Daniell's years after 1804 included making 72 etchings after

The original intention was to make a coastal trip by sea, but it became clear early on in the venture that this was not practicable, and most of the journey around the coast had to be made by road. The journey was completed in six separate trips, over the period 1813 to 1823. In the summer of 1813, Daniell and his companion, Richard Ayton, who was to write the accompanying text, covered the coast from Land's End to Holyhead. The following year in August they went from Holyhead to Kirkcudbright. Richard Ayton did not accompany Daniell on the rest of the journey, leaving Daniell to sketch the scenery and also write the text. Daniell's approach was to make pencil sketches of views that looked interesting, annotating them with details of colour and texture. The sketches included people and scenery. The transfer of the picture from paper to copper in the form of an aquatint plate required great artistic skill and dexterity. The process is very delicate.^[7] This was done on his return to London, as was the printing and colouring of the prints. Daniell must have had a very good visual memory of the places he had visited, as up to five years elapsed between the production of the sketches and the prints being completed.

In 1815, Daniell set out in May and travelled north to Wigtown. It is likely that he took the Mail Coach, a journey of 4 to 5 days. On his way north, he stopped at Edinburgh and took advice from many people there on the places to visit on the coast up and around the north of Scotland. The novelist Walter Scott not only advised Daniell on the places to visit in Scotland, but also provided him with material for inclusion in the accompanying text. Friends in Edinburgh were able to give Daniell letters of introduction to people who might be willing to provide hospitality to him on his journey. This was important, as there were few hostelries, and their quality generally not high.

During July and August 1815, Daniell journeyed around the islands of

A Voyage Round Great Britain was published by Longman in eight volumes over the period 1814 to 1825.[12]^[13][14][15] The complete set of eight volumes was priced at £60. The final number of prints included was 308. Garvey's book follows Daniell around part of the voyage, the Hebridean islands of Eigg, Rum, Skye and Raasay, locating the viewpoints included in his aquatint prints.

Over the period 1813 to 1825, in parallel with preparing the prints for the Voyage, Daniell was busy on other projects, which included paintings for the Academy Exhibitions. Many of the works exhibited were oil paintings of Scottish scenes. The artistic quality of the paintings and aquatints produced and published by Daniell for A Voyage Round Great Britain was considered to be very high. The atmospheric effects which he was able to convey in the aquatint medium were quite overwhelming. This was particularly true of his portrayal of ships and maritime scenery, as he had demonstrated in many earlier paintings and prints. In February 1822 after many years of endeavour, Daniell was finally elected an R.A. In the final ballot the voting was between John Constable and Daniell, the result being 11 to 17.

William produced a number of marine paintings. One, The Burning of the "Kent" is in the Museum of the Queen's Royal Surrey's, having been rediscovered after having disappeared for over a hundred years. It is an illustration of the dramatic loss of the East Indiaman Kent, and the rescue of some 550 survivors of her 650 crew and passengers.

His shipping scenes, such A Bird's-Eye View of the East India Dock at Blackwell (

Daniell's last great artistic work was produced between 1827 and 1830. Over this time he became interested in the scenery around Windsor. In 1827, 1828 and 1830, he exhibited a total of five oil paintings of Windsor Castle and its surroundings and two oil paintings of Virginia Water, at the Royal Academy Exhibitions. These were considered to be among his finest oil paintings, and according to Sutton, his view of the Long Walk at Windsor was generally acknowledged to be his masterpiece in oils. Daniell produced a set of 12 aquatints of the Windsor and Virginia water views. Sutton writes of this series:

These twelve prints are the finest aquatints ever made, standing alone at the highest possible peak: aquatint could go no further, and although attempts have been made by others to excel them, none succeeded. The prints were made in Daniell's usual way, engraved by himself from his own drawings, and published by himself at 14, Russell Place, Fitzroy Square. By this time he was a comparatively wealthy man, and one can imagine him lovingly and carefully tinting the plates, leisurely savouring their subtle beauties, unhampered by time or financial worry. We feel, in looking at these aquatints, that perhaps Daniell, with the philosophy of a much-travelled man, realised that in the cool greys and greens with which he "stained" his prints was the charm of his own land, more enduring than the exotic mystery of the Orient or the strange architecture of Hindistan.

Daniell worked right up to his death, on 16 August 1837 at Brecknock Terrace, Camden Town (now 135 St Pancras Way). The house is marked by a commemorative plaque. He submitted five pictures to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in that year.

The final twist in the story of A Voyage Round Great Britain, was the discovery, in 1962, of 306 of the original 308 Daniell copper plates, the location of which had not been known for more than 100 years. They are now the property of the Tate. It seems appropriate that of all the topographical books of the 19th century it should be copper plates for Daniell's Voyage Round Great Britain that have survived – they are a monument to his industry and his unsurpassed skill in handling the remarkable delicacy of the aquatint process.

Published works

Among his publications, engraved in aquatint, were:

• Voyage to India
• Zoography
• Animated Nature
• Views of London
• Views of
  Bootan
  , a work prepared from his uncle's sketches
• A Voyage Round Great Britain, which occupied him for several years.

Collections

Daniell is represented in the following collections, among others:

• 
  Sambhal Jama Masjid (1789). Wash drawing by Thomas Daniell and William Daniell
• 
  View of the Canton factories (c. 1805–10)
• 
  A man overboard. Drawing by Thomas Daniell & William Daniell (1810)
• 
  Slanes Castle, Aberdeenshire (c. 1822)
• 
  Windsor Castle from Brocas Meadow (1827)
• 
  Windsor from Eton (1827)
• 
  Long Walk, Windsor Park (1827)
• 
  Illustration from Interesting Selections from Animated Nature, 1809

References