William Daniell - Early Life

Early Life

William Daniell was born in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey. His father was a bricklayer and owner of a public house called The Swan in near-by Chertsey. Daniell’s future was dramatically changed when he was sent to live with his uncle, the landscape artist Thomas Daniell (1749–1840), after his father's premature death in 1779. In 1784 William accompanied his uncle to India, who worked there as an engraver, acting as his assistant in preparing drawings and sketches. William’s brother Samuel Daniell (born 1775; died Ceylon, Dec. 1811) remained independent of his uncle and also became a topographical artist; he went to South Africa in 1801 and after his return to England published African Scenery and Animals (1804–5), a collection of aquatints. From 1806 he lived in Ceylon.

Daniell was fourteen when he accompanied his uncle to India. On arriving in Calcutta in 1786, Thomas Daniell published a proposal for engraving twelve views of the city. This seemed a promising idea, since Calcutta was rapidly expanding and its European inhabitants might be willing to buy engravings showing its latest buildings. Both he and William were inexperienced engravers and had to enlist the help of Indian craftsmen, but the set was completed in November 1788 and sold well. Thomas next began planning an ambitious tour of northern India, possibly inspired by the wealth of picturesque scenery indicated in William Hodges’s collection of aquatints, Select Views in India (1785–8). In August 1789, Thomas and William set off up-river past Murshidabad to Bhagalpur, where they stayed with Samuel Davis (?1756–1819), an employee of the East India Company and a skilled amateur artist. They continued on to Kanpur and then travelled overland to Delhi, visiting Agra, Fatehpur Sikri and Mathura on the way; the following April they made a pioneering tour to Srinagar and Garhwal in the Himalayas.