Edward Thomas Daniell (June 5, 1804 – September 24, 1842) was an English landscape painter and etcher associated with the Norwich School of artists.
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Daniell was born in London of a Norfolk family, but brought up in Norwich. He was taught drawing at the Norwich Grammar School by John Crome. His early etchings recall those of Crome but he soon came under the influence of J.M.W. Turner. In 1823, Daniell went up to Balliol College, Oxford. While at Oxford he became the friend of John Linnell, from whom he received some lessons in oil painting. He graduated from Oxford in 1828. The following year he travelled on the continent and etched and painted, returning to England in late 1830.
In 1832 he was ordained, and for a year and a half was curate at Banham, a Norfolk village. In 1834 he was appointed to the curacy of St. Martin's, North Audley Street in London. His house in Park Lane became a resort of painters that included John Linnell, J. M. W. Turner, David Roberts, William Dyce, Thomas Creswick, William Collins, Abraham Cooper, John Callcott Horsley, William Clarkson Stanfield and others. His house was described as a treasure-house of art that comprised works by some of the best painters of the day.[1]
In 1832 he exhibited, with the Norwich Society of Artists, a number of his own pictures of scenes in Italy, Switzerland and France. Inspired by the example of David Roberts, who had made a long trip to Egypt and the Holy Land to gather material, he set out to see the East in 1840. He was in Greece at the end of the year, crossed to Egypt early in 1841, travelled up the Nile to Nubia, then from Egypt to Palestine, and on to Syria, reaching Beirut in October.
In Smyrna he fell in with an English party on board H.M.S. Beacon, which had been sent by British Government to Lycia to bring home antiquities discovered by Sir Charles Fellows at Xanthos, for the British Museum. Daniell joined the expedition. When Fellows left, he remained behind to make a more thorough survey of the country, in company with Spratt, a lieutenant in the Navy, and Edward Forbes, a naturalist.
Daniell produced a series of sixty-four drawings, now in the British Museum, that picture the wanderings of the travellers from day to day. Their most striking feature is the air of space and magnitude conveyed and the fluid wash of sunlight in the region’s towering gorges and open valleys. While returning from Rhodes, he caught a fever. He recovered, but undertook a solitary expedition in Pamphylia and Pisidia at the hottest season of the year. He fell ill again at Adalia, and died there, September 24, 1842, He was thirty-eight.
Daniell's etchings are the most remarkable of his works. He developed a freedom of line that moved away from the example of his friend and teacher, Joseph Stannard of Norwich, towards that of Andrew Geddes and the Scottish etchers, whose work he probably saw while in Scotland in the summer of 1831. His later works excel in the use of drypoint. It has been said that he may claim, equally with Andrew Geddes, the honour of anticipating the revival of etching associated with the names of Francis Seymour Haden and J.M. Whistler.[2]