page_title: Edward Thomas Daniell
section_title: Tour of the Near East
hierarchical_section_title: Edward Thomas Daniell / Life / Tour of the Near East
context_page_description: Edward Thomas Daniell 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 toured Egypt, Palestine and Syria, met the explorer Sir Charles Fellows and joined his archaeological expedition in Lycia as an illustrator. He contracted malaria there and reached Adalia to recuperate, but died from a second attack of the disease.
context_section_description: 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. After moving on to Syria, 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, later commented on by the academic Laurence Binyon, who 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 E. T. Daniell, 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, Severis wrote: "The interplay of the blue sea and the sandy colour of the land—which is repeated successfully in the foreground of the picture—accentuates the distance between the viewer and the land while simultaneously increasing the desire to look more closely and attentively at the subject."
caption: Nablous, Jordan (1841), Yale Center for British Art
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