Thomas Daniell

Thomas Daniell RA (1749 – 19 March 1840) was an English landscape painter. He spent seven years in India, accompanied by his nephew William, also an artist, and published several series of aquatints of the country.

Thomas Daniell was born in 1749 in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey. His father was the landlord of the Swan Inn at Chertsey (where he was later succeeded by Thomas' elder brother William and his wife Sarah). Thomas began his career apprenticed to an heraldic painter and worked at Maxwell's the coach painter in Queen Street before attending the Royal Academy Schools. Although he exhibited 30 works – mainly landscapes and floral pieces – at the Academy between 1772 and 1784, Daniell found it difficult to establish himself as a landscape painter in Britain. Like many other Europeans at that time, Daniell was drawn to India by stories of the wealth and fame that awaited travellers to the newly accessible East, and in 1784 he obtained permission from the East India Company to travel to Calcutta to work as an engraver, accompanied by his nephew, William Daniell, as his assistant.

Thomas and William Daniell sailed from Gravesend on 7 April 1785, arriving in Calcutta via Whampoa in China early in 1786. In July of that year, Daniell announced, in an advertisement in the Calcutta Chronicle, his intention to publish a set of views of the city. Executed in etching and aquatint and hand-coloured by local painters, the twelve plates were completed in late 1788. In November of that year Daniell wrote to Ozias Humphrey "I was obliged to stand Painter Engraver Copper-smith Printer and Printers Devil myself. It was a devilish undertaking but I was determined to see it through at all events."

On 3 September 1788, the Daniells set out on a tour of north-east India leaving Calcutta by boat along the River Ganges, travelling as far as Srinagar (in the District of Garwhal, Uttrakhand), where they arrived in May 1789. Thomas and his nephew spent 1790-1 in the town of Bhagalpur (now in the Indian state of Bihar) with the orientalist and amateur artist Samuel Davis, whom Thomas had first met during his apprenticeship in London. They made many stops on their return journey, not arriving back in Calcutta until February 1792.

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