Details
WILLIAM DANIELL (1769-1837)
Autograph manuscript of a journal of travels in India, in four notebooks, each with a label on the upper cover inscribed, possibly in Daniell's autograph, 'No. 1 August 29th. 1788 to May 19th. 1789', 'No. 3 July 8 1789 to January 30 1790', 'No. 6 March 10 to 29 1792' and 'No. 7 April 9 to July 12 1792' , and three of them inscribed, in autograph, 'W Daniells Journal' or '[Journal of] W Daniell' with dates and places (No. 7, first two words obliterated by labe, No. 3 with dates only), together with rough sketches of an elephant, a landscape, a boat and a minaret on the endpapers of No.1, and of a torso and a profile on the inside upper cover of No.3, altogether approximately 312 pages, 4to, (220 x 167mm - 314 x 201mm), (a number of small marginal tears touching words in Nos 1 and 6, fragment torn from margin of one page in No. 1 with loss of a few words, waterstains on outer nine leaves of No.3, no effect on legibility), No. 1 in contemporary linen binding (slightly worn), Nos 3 and 7 in contemporary marbled paper (No. 3 worn and slightly soiled), No. 6 sewn in mid nineteenth-century paper.
AN IMPORTANT AND LARGELY UNPUBLISHED RECORD OF THE TRAVELS OF THOMAS AND WILLIAM DANIELL IN INDIA; THE ONLY SURVIVING MANUSCRIPTS OF THEIR INDIAN TOURS
The journals of William Daniell provide a detailed and substantial description of his sketching tours around both northern and southern India with his uncle Thomas ('Un') - the tours which formed the basis for their later publications, and beyond those, contributed to a whole British perception of India. The importance of this manuscript journal can be assessed by reference to other writings by the Daniells. These include the letterpress which accompanied the 144 aquatints of Oriental Scenery (published 1795-1808), the text of which, probably composed by Thomas, offers a commentary on the places and buildings depicted. Of a similar nature is the text accompanying the plates of A Picturesque Voyage to India by the Way of China (1810). The extensive text of the six volumes of the Oriental Annual (1834-9) was actually written by the Reverend Hobart Caunter, though in close collaboration with William Daniell and drawing on his memories of India. Fascinating as they are, in revealing the Daniells' considered ideas about India, all these texts were written after their return to England and lack the immediacy and diversity of information found in the present journal.
Other known primary sources include a letter written by Thomas Daniell to Ozias Humphrey on 7 November 1788 whilst he and William were travelling near Patna, published by Evan Cotton in Bengal Past and Present, and a letter from William to his mother, written at Bhagalpur on 30 July 1790, which survives in a paraphrase in Joseph Farington's diary. These letters give us glimpses of the Daniells' thoughts, movements and working methods while they were in India; but by comparison with the journal they are of course very brief, and in both cases the original manuscript is lost. The numbering of the four volumes of the journals indicates that there were originally at least another three volumes, but only these are known to survive. They are, in addition, substantially unpublished: the journals were unknown until 1932 when extracts, selected from these four volumes by Martin Hardie and Muriel Clayton, were published in Walker's Quarterly (nos 35-36) - a publication which has apparently formed the basis for all subsequent scholarship. However, sixty per cent remains unpublished, including numerous passages casting light on the methods and dating of their work.
The Daniells left England on 7 April 1785, when William was fifteen, and arrived in Calcutta via Canton early in 1786. For nearly two years they based themselves in the city and established themselves as engravers, publishing a series of twelve aquatints of views around Calcutta, and collecting funds for their projected travels through the subcontinent. On 29 August 1788 they set off on their first tour.
Volume one of the journal begins, concisely, 'Left our Garden house at Kiddipore, & slept on board the Pinnace'. The Daniells' first leg was from Calcutta to Cawnpore, travelling by boat up first the Hooghly river and then the Ganges, with relatively brief stops at Rajmahal, Monghyr, Ghazipur and Benares (Varanasi); at this stage they were chiefly reasearching, taking note of places 'to be looked at in coming down' on their return journey. They arrived in Cawnpore on 28 December 1788, and set off four days later overland, as part of an expedition to see the antiquities of Agra and Delhi. Shortly after leaving Agra, on 1 February, they encountered the Mahratta chief Sindia, and were given an audience, before continuing to Delhi, which they reached on 18 February. They stayed for more than a fortnight, sketching furiously. Immediately after their departure, on 11 March, Daniell records that a glimpse of the 'wonderfully Grand' Himalayas has 'made my Un. more induced to see Hurdwar [sic] than ever'. With this, they diverted northward, and reached Hardwar on 4 April, before continuing into the mountains to the town of Srinagar, where they arrived on 27 April, 'the first Europeans that had ever visited Srinagar' (underlined in the manuscript). They left three days later, and volume one ends with them in the little town of Bisauli, on their way back towards Cawnpore.
There is a gap of a month and a half, before volume three opens to find the Daniells installed with Colonel Martin, the patron of Zoffany, in Lucknow, working busily. They stayed there until the end of the monsoon, when, in late October, they set out down river in their 'Pinnace', stopping in Allahabad and arriving in Benares (Varanasi) a month later. After a further month's sketching in the area, they struck off south along the Son river and into the hills of Bihar, heading for the 'Sacred Cavern' at Gooput Benares, which they reached on 30 January 1790; at which point, with a wonderful description of the caves and the resident Brahmin, the volume ends.
The absence of volumes four and five leaves a gap of just over two years, time the Daniells spent in an extended stay with the artist Samuel Davis in Bhagalpur, before travelling back to Calcutta to work up and sell a large number of oil paintings.
Volume six, consisting only of four single leaves, with the script upside down on the verso, covers the Daniells' voyage from Calcutta to Madras on board the sloop Hastings.
Volume seven opens after a hiatus of eleven days with the Daniells leaving Madras for the interior, accompanied by an entourage of no fewer than 46: 'Our coolies & Bullocks rather untractable, a common case at the outset', records William. They travelled to Bangalore via Arcot and Amboor, and spent much of May in the hills to the south of Bangalore, sketching the hill forts recently vacated by Tipoo Sultan's troops. In late May they turned south, through Trisingur and Tritchinopoly, arriving in Madurai on 3 July. The last entry is on 12 July.
From Madurai, the Daniells returned to Madras, where they held another sale of pictures in February 1793. They then set off for Bombay by sea, reaching it in June 1793. With the outbreak of war between England and France scotching a plan to return home overland via Egypt, they eventually retraced their steps to Canton, where they joined Lord Macartney's returning embassy, and arrived in England in the autumn of 1794. Of the eight years the Daniells spent in India, these journals account for roughly a quarter - but they cover more than half of the time the Daniells spent on their sketching tours.
Although William Daniell was only eighteen when he began these journals, they demonstrate little youthful exuberance. The style is very simple and factual; the entries at times almost formulaic. Daniell describes the weather, records the temperature and distance travelled and gives a detailed description of the difficulties of the journey. There is usually a brief comment on the scenery, and any good subjects for sketching; a list of the villages or towns they have passed; and a record of what work the two are engaged in - sometimes no more than 'Un. and self employed as Yesterday'. In the evening a walk, and William, musket in hand, in unsuccessful pursuit of ducks, peacocks, parakeets and alligators.
Only occasionally does Daniell give way to flights of fancy, most delightfully in a description of an evening halt in the Himalayas: 'Our tent was pitched between two small rills on a beautifull knol, in the Evng. we found ourselves surrounded by a vast number of fire flies which together with purling streams made our Situation very agreeable'. But the particular attraction of the journal lies perhaps in the way that the exoticism of entries such as 'Crossed the Jumna abt 7 oC & breakfasted with Major Palmer in one of the Mosques in the Tage [Mahal]' shines irrepressibly through the plainness of the prose.
On the whole Daniell is more concerned with historical, antiquarian and even botanical notes than with a description of the condition of India as he witnessed it. Even so, the journals contain much that is of historical interest, and not only in the light it casts upon the life of two English travellers and their diversions at the houses of British residents (chiefly fives, billiards and nautches). There are a small number of passages of anthropological observation - most notably one of the Himalayan 'Hill Men': 'most of them carried a kind of crutch on which they rested their burdens when fatigued - these who came from the Snowy Mountns. seemed very intelligent men'; the description of the Brahmin at the 'Sacred Cavern' at Gooput Benares is equally attractive, written with a pleasant detached irony. Perhaps more important, however, are the accounts of the audience with Sindia, then probably the most powerful prince in India, and of the ascent into the Himalayas where, as William observes, they were 'the first Europeans that had ever visited Srinagar'. There are interesting descriptions of the condition and appearance of the great buildings of Fatehpur Sikri and the Delhi plain, and of the hill forts around Bangalore.
The particular importance of the full manuscript, however, is inevitably its contribution to the study of the Daniells as artists. It gives a detailed account of their itinerary, and is therefore extremely valuable for dating their work. It clarifies too their methods of work - and particularly the extent to which they shared the work on individual paintings and even drawings. In many cases the initial sketching in of the composition onto the canvas was performed by William. The next stage, which William calls dead colouring, that is the laying on of base colour, could be performed either by him or by Thomas; while the finishing was (at this stage) always done by Thomas.
An especially interesting series of entries relates to the second half of August 1789 - a section published only very fragmentarily in Walker's Quarterly; the deductions made here are much clearer from the original manuscript. The Daniells had suspended their travels (presumably because of the monsoon) and were staying in Lucknow, enjoying the hospitality of the European residents of the city, and working up old subjects into finished drawings and paintings. The entries for a number of consecutive days give a clear picture not only of the way in which they worked, but also of their amazing diligence. The entry for 17 August finds them both experimenting with copper plates, refining their techniques as engravers. On the following two days, William tells us that he continued with this whilst Thomas finished a view of a gateway in Anupshar and another of some ruins in Delhi, both of which 'I sketched in some time ago'. On the 20th they worked together on views of Lucknow, and subsequently William continued on this series whilst Thomas turned to finishing other oils. On the 23rd William 'began and dead coloured' a view of the Taj Mahal, whilst Thomas completed another oil. Thus they continued for a few days until Thomas, having finished a view of the Jantar Mantar in Delhi, took over the work on the Taj Mahal in order to complete the dead colouring; and William immediately began the sketching in of a quite different subject - a view of Hardwar - on another canvas, in between work on the drawings of another view of the Taj Mahal. The next day, the 28th, Thomas has taken command of the view of Hardwar to complete its dead colouring and William is focussing again on the Taj Mahal, though he also embarked on yet another composition, this time of Ramnagar. On the 29th Thomas 'dead coloured the View on a half length that I sketched in yesterday; myself dead colouring the Taj Mahal'. And so on.
The journals provide equally valuable background to the aesthetic of the Daniells, and to their attitude to India. It is interesting, in view of the paintings, that William's comments on the country in general concentrate on landscape and buildings rather than people; and his descriptive passages are notable for the insistent search for 'Picturesque Bits'. Equally significant is his concentration on the ruinous state of the country: not only are the buildings they see 'crumbling', 'inside ... entirely a Jungle', but even the banks of the Ganges are 'every moment tumbling in'. (It is worth noting in this connection the indication in the journal that the Daniells had with them on their travels a volume of prints of Claude - presumably the 1777 Earlom edition of the Liber Veritatis).
Another book of prints the Daniells kept with them was the work of William Hodges, whose engraved views of India had created the market which they were later to exploit so triumphantly. It is clear that the Daniells suffered from a refined sense of professional jealousy, which compelled them to seek out the exact places from which Hodges had taken his views, find out how inaccurate his prints were, and settle down to make their own sketches from the same spot; and William's scathing comments on Hodges' demerits form an enjoyable leitmotif in the journal - 'Compared Hodges view of the fort with the original & which like his others is exceedingly faulty', 'so very unlike that one would imagine he had taken it under full Sail'.
What the journals illuminate more than anything else, however, is the indomitable professionalism of the Daniells. Scarcely a day passes without them sketching or working up their drawings and paintings. The sheer robustness they display cannot fail to impress: they shrug off every danger and difficulty, from tigers to brickbats, from bandits to the ascent of hill forts. The journals see them enter the theatres of no fewer than three wars - the intermittent conflicts of the Mahratta chiefs around Delhi, the invasion of Srinagar by a neighbouring Rajah, and the aftermath of hostilities between the British and Tipoo Sultan around Bangalore. In their approach to Bangalore they pass returning convoys of the sick and wounded. They press on. Nowhere is their imperturbability more entertainingly illustrated than in the crisis in Srinagar, when the Daniells are advised to join the local populace in fleeing from the approaching army across the rope bridge. What can they do but respond by calmly settling down to sketch the scene 'with the fort & distant hills'? 'Making a view' was a great deal more important than anything else.
Provenance. Given what is already known about the dispersal of the Daniells' working material after their deaths, the provenance of the manuscript can be deduced from a typed label gummed to the cover of Volume 3, declaring it to be the property of Arthur Russell of Swallowfield Park, Reading. During their lifetimes the Daniells carefully preserved all the drawings they had made in India, as the invaluable source materials for their saleable paintings and prints, and the journal would have had a similar value to them. Though twenty years junior to his uncle, William predeceased him; and on his death in 1837 all such material in his hands evidently passed not to his children but to Thomas. When Thomas died in 1840, his drawings were acquired by his niece, Mary Ann Fuller. Within a few years, she sold a considerable collection of drawings to Sir Henry Russell (1783-1752). Russell had served as British Resident at Hyderabad in 1810, whilst his father (the first baronet and also Sir Henry) was Chief Justice at the Supreme Court in Calcutta. Swallowfield Park was this family's country house. From the label it is clear that the journal went by the same route as some of the drawings, and stayed at Swallowfield Park for a considerable time, since the Arthur Russell mentioned was acknowledged as the owner at the time of their partial publication in 1932. Their location between the 1930s and their subsequent purchase in the 1960s by Lord Rothermere is unknown. They have passed by descent to the present owner.
We would like to thank Giles Tillotson for his help in compiling this catalogue entry.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Evan Cotton. 'The Daniells in India', Bengal Past and Present, 1923, vol. XXXV, pp. 1-70.
Henry Caunter and William Daniell, The Oriental Annual, London, 1834-8, 5 vols.
Thomas and William Daniell, Oriental Scenery, London, 1795-1808, 6 vols.
Thomas and William Daniell, A Picturesque Voyage to India by the Way of China, London, 1810.
K. Garlick et al. (eds), The Diary of Joseph Farington, London, 16 vols.
Martin Hardy and Muriel Clayton. 'Thomas Daniell R.A.; William Daniell R.A.', Walker's Quarterly, 1932, nos 35-36, pp. 1-106.
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Autograph manuscript of a journal of travels in India, in four notebooks, each with a label on the upper cover inscribed, possibly in Daniell's autograph, 'N
AN IMPORTANT AND LARGELY UNPUBLISHED RECORD OF THE TRAVELS OF THOMAS AND WILLIAM DANIELL IN INDIA; THE ONLY SURVIVING MANUSCRIPTS OF THEIR INDIAN TOURS
The journals of William Daniell provide a detailed and substantial description of his sketching tours around both northern and southern India with his uncle Thomas ('Un') - the tours which formed the basis for their later publications, and beyond those, contributed to a whole British perception of India. The importance of this manuscript journal can be assessed by reference to other writings by the Daniells. These include the letterpress which accompanied the 144 aquatints of Oriental Scenery (published 1795-1808), the text of which, probably composed by Thomas, offers a commentary on the places and buildings depicted. Of a similar nature is the text accompanying the plates of A Picturesque Voyage to India by the Way of China (1810). The extensive text of the six volumes of the Oriental Annual (1834-9) was actually written by the Reverend Hobart Caunter, though in close collaboration with William Daniell and drawing on his memories of India. Fascinating as they are, in revealing the Daniells' considered ideas about India, all these texts were written after their return to England and lack the immediacy and diversity of information found in the present journal.
Other known primary sources include a letter written by Thomas Daniell to Ozias Humphrey on 7 November 1788 whilst he and William were travelling near Patna, published by Evan Cotton in Bengal Past and Present, and a letter from William to his mother, written at Bhagalpur on 30 July 1790, which survives in a paraphrase in Joseph Farington's diary. These letters give us glimpses of the Daniells' thoughts, movements and working methods while they were in India; but by comparison with the journal they are of course very brief, and in both cases the original manuscript is lost. The numbering of the four volumes of the journals indicates that there were originally at least another three volumes, but only these are known to survive. They are, in addition, substantially unpublished: the journals were unknown until 1932 when extracts, selected from these four volumes by Martin Hardie and Muriel Clayton, were published in Walker's Quarterly (nos 35-36) - a publication which has apparently formed the basis for all subsequent scholarship. However, sixty per cent remains unpublished, including numerous passages casting light on the methods and dating of their work.
The Daniells left England on 7 April 1785, when William was fifteen, and arrived in Calcutta via Canton early in 1786. For nearly two years they based themselves in the city and established themselves as engravers, publishing a series of twelve aquatints of views around Calcutta, and collecting funds for their projected travels through the subcontinent. On 29 August 1788 they set off on their first tour.
Volume one of the journal begins, concisely, 'Left our Garden house at Kiddipore, & slept on board the Pinnace'. The Daniells' first leg was from Calcutta to Cawnpore, travelling by boat up first the Hooghly river and then the Ganges, with relatively brief stops at Rajmahal, Monghyr, Ghazipur and Benares (Varanasi); at this stage they were chiefly reasearching, taking note of places 'to be looked at in coming down' on their return journey. They arrived in Cawnpore on 28 December 1788, and set off four days later overland, as part of an expedition to see the antiquities of Agra and Delhi. Shortly after leaving Agra, on 1 February, they encountered the Mahratta chief Sindia, and were given an audience, before continuing to Delhi, which they reached on 18 February. They stayed for more than a fortnight, sketching furiously. Immediately after their departure, on 11 March, Daniell records that a glimpse of the 'wonderfully Grand' Himalayas has 'made my Un. more induced to see Hurdwar [sic] than ever'. With this, they diverted northward, and reached Hardwar on 4 April, before continuing into the mountains to the town of Srinagar, where they arrived on 27 April, 'the first Europeans that had ever visited Srinagar' (underlined in the manuscript). They left three days later, and volume one ends with them in the little town of Bisauli, on their way back towards Cawnpore.
There is a gap of a month and a half, before volume three opens to find the Daniells installed with Colonel Martin, the patron of Zoffany, in Lucknow, working busily. They stayed there until the end of the monsoon, when, in late October, they set out down river in their 'Pinnace', stopping in Allahabad and arriving in Benares (Varanasi) a month later. After a further month's sketching in the area, they struck off south along the Son river and into the hills of Bihar, heading for the 'Sacred Cavern' at Gooput Benares, which they reached on 30 January 1790; at which point, with a wonderful description of the caves and the resident Brahmin, the volume ends.
The absence of volumes four and five leaves a gap of just over two years, time the Daniells spent in an extended stay with the artist Samuel Davis in Bhagalpur, before travelling back to Calcutta to work up and sell a large number of oil paintings.
Volume six, consisting only of four single leaves, with the script upside down on the verso, covers the Daniells' voyage from Calcutta to Madras on board the sloop Hastings.
Volume seven opens after a hiatus of eleven days with the Daniells leaving Madras for the interior, accompanied by an entourage of no fewer than 46: 'Our coolies & Bullocks rather untractable, a common case at the outset', records William. They travelled to Bangalore via Arcot and Amboor, and spent much of May in the hills to the south of Bangalore, sketching the hill forts recently vacated by Tipoo Sultan's troops. In late May they turned south, through Trisingur and Tritchinopoly, arriving in Madurai on 3 July. The last entry is on 12 July.
From Madurai, the Daniells returned to Madras, where they held another sale of pictures in February 1793. They then set off for Bombay by sea, reaching it in June 1793. With the outbreak of war between England and France scotching a plan to return home overland via Egypt, they eventually retraced their steps to Canton, where they joined Lord Macartney's returning embassy, and arrived in England in the autumn of 1794. Of the eight years the Daniells spent in India, these journals account for roughly a quarter - but they cover more than half of the time the Daniells spent on their sketching tours.
Although William Daniell was only eighteen when he began these journals, they demonstrate little youthful exuberance. The style is very simple and factual; the entries at times almost formulaic. Daniell describes the weather, records the temperature and distance travelled and gives a detailed description of the difficulties of the journey. There is usually a brief comment on the scenery, and any good subjects for sketching; a list of the villages or towns they have passed; and a record of what work the two are engaged in - sometimes no more than 'Un. and self employed as Yesterday'. In the evening a walk, and William, musket in hand, in unsuccessful pursuit of ducks, peacocks, parakeets and alligators.
Only occasionally does Daniell give way to flights of fancy, most delightfully in a description of an evening halt in the Himalayas: 'Our tent was pitched between two small rills on a beautifull knol, in the Evn
On the whole Daniell is more concerned with historical, antiquarian and even botanical notes than with a description of the condition of India as he witnessed it. Even so, the journals contain much that is of historical interest, and not only in the light it casts upon the life of two English travellers and their diversions at the houses of British residents (chiefly fives, billiards and nautches). There are a small number of passages of anthropological observation - most notably one of the Himalayan 'Hill Men': 'most of them carried a kind of crutch on which they rested their burdens when fatigued - these who came from the Snowy Mount
The particular importance of the full manuscript, however, is inevitably its contribution to the study of the Daniells as artists. It gives a detailed account of their itinerary, and is therefore extremely valuable for dating their work. It clarifies too their methods of work - and particularly the extent to which they shared the work on individual paintings and even drawings. In many cases the initial sketching in of the composition onto the canvas was performed by William. The next stage, which William calls dead colouring, that is the laying on of base colour, could be performed either by him or by Thomas; while the finishing was (at this stage) always done by Thomas.
An especially interesting series of entries relates to the second half of August 1789 - a section published only very fragmentarily in Walker's Quarterly; the deductions made here are much clearer from the original manuscript. The Daniells had suspended their travels (presumably because of the monsoon) and were staying in Lucknow, enjoying the hospitality of the European residents of the city, and working up old subjects into finished drawings and paintings. The entries for a number of consecutive days give a clear picture not only of the way in which they worked, but also of their amazing diligence. The entry for 17 August finds them both experimenting with copper plates, refining their techniques as engravers. On the following two days, William tells us that he continued with this whilst Thomas finished a view of a gateway in Anupshar and another of some ruins in Delhi, both of which 'I sketched in some time ago'. On the 20th they worked together on views of Lucknow, and subsequently William continued on this series whilst Thomas turned to finishing other oils. On the 23rd William 'began and dead coloured' a view of the Taj Mahal, whilst Thomas completed another oil. Thus they continued for a few days until Thomas, having finished a view of the Jantar Mantar in Delhi, took over the work on the Taj Mahal in order to complete the dead colouring; and William immediately began the sketching in of a quite different subject - a view of Hardwar - on another canvas, in between work on the drawings of another view of the Taj Mahal. The next day, the 28th, Thomas has taken command of the view of Hardwar to complete its dead colouring and William is focussing again on the Taj Mahal, though he also embarked on yet another composition, this time of Ramnagar. On the 29th Thomas 'dead coloured the View on a half length that I sketched in yesterday; myself dead colouring the Taj Mahal'. And so on.
The journals provide equally valuable background to the aesthetic of the Daniells, and to their attitude to India. It is interesting, in view of the paintings, that William's comments on the country in general concentrate on landscape and buildings rather than people; and his descriptive passages are notable for the insistent search for 'Picturesque Bits'. Equally significant is his concentration on the ruinous state of the country: not only are the buildings they see 'crumbling', 'inside ... entirely a Jungle', but even the banks of the Ganges are 'every moment tumbling in'. (It is worth noting in this connection the indication in the journal that the Daniells had with them on their travels a volume of prints of Claude - presumably the 1777 Earlom edition of the Liber Veritatis).
Another book of prints the Daniells kept with them was the work of William Hodges, whose engraved views of India had created the market which they were later to exploit so triumphantly. It is clear that the Daniells suffered from a refined sense of professional jealousy, which compelled them to seek out the exact places from which Hodges had taken his views, find out how inaccurate his prints were, and settle down to make their own sketches from the same spot; and William's scathing comments on Hodges' demerits form an enjoyable leitmotif in the journal - 'Compared Hodges view of the fort with the original & which like his others is exceedingly faulty', 'so very unlike that one would imagine he had taken it under full Sail'.
What the journals illuminate more than anything else, however, is the indomitable professionalism of the Daniells. Scarcely a day passes without them sketching or working up their drawings and paintings. The sheer robustness they display cannot fail to impress: they shrug off every danger and difficulty, from tigers to brickbats, from bandits to the ascent of hill forts. The journals see them enter the theatres of no fewer than three wars - the intermittent conflicts of the Mahratta chiefs around Delhi, the invasion of Srinagar by a neighbouring Rajah, and the aftermath of hostilities between the British and Tipoo Sultan around Bangalore. In their approach to Bangalore they pass returning convoys of the sick and wounded. They press on. Nowhere is their imperturbability more entertainingly illustrated than in the crisis in Srinagar, when the Daniells are advised to join the local populace in fleeing from the approaching army across the rope bridge. What can they do but respond by calmly settling down to sketch the scene 'with the fort & distant hills'? 'Making a view' was a great deal more important than anything else.
Provenance. Given what is already known about the dispersal of the Daniells' working material after their deaths, the provenance of the manuscript can be deduced from a typed label gummed to the cover of Volume 3, declaring it to be the property of Arthur Russell of Swallowfield Park, Reading. During their lifetimes the Daniells carefully preserved all the drawings they had made in India, as the invaluable source materials for their saleable paintings and prints, and the journal would have had a similar value to them. Though twenty years junior to his uncle, William predeceased him; and on his death in 1837 all such material in his hands evidently passed not to his children but to Thomas. When Thomas died in 1840, his drawings were acquired by his niece, Mary Ann Fuller. Within a few years, she sold a considerable collection of drawings to Sir Henry Russell (1783-1752). Russell had served as British Resident at Hyderabad in 1810, whilst his father (the first baronet and also Sir Henry) was Chief Justice at the Supreme Court in Calcutta. Swallowfield Park was this family's country house. From the label it is clear that the journal went by the same route as some of the drawings, and stayed at Swallowfield Park for a considerable time, since the Arthur Russell mentioned was acknowledged as the owner at the time of their partial publication in 1932. Their location between the 1930s and their subsequent purchase in the 1960s by Lord Rothermere is unknown. They have passed by descent to the present owner.
We would like to thank Giles Tillotson for his help in compiling this catalogue entry.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Evan Cotton. 'The Daniells in India', Bengal Past and Present, 1923, vol. XXXV, pp. 1-70.
Henry Caunter and William Daniell, The Oriental Annual, London, 1834-8, 5 vols.
Thomas and William Daniell, Oriental Scenery, London, 1795-1808, 6 vols.
Thomas and William Daniell, A Picturesque Voyage to India by the Way of China, London, 1810.
K. Garlick et al. (eds), The Diary of Joseph Farington, London, 16 vols.
Martin Hardy and Muriel Clayton. 'Thomas Daniell R.A.; William Daniell R.A.', Walker's Quarterly, 1932, nos 35-36, pp. 1-106.
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