Edward Thomas Daniell (6 June 1804 – 24 September 1842) 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.

In 1840, after resigning his curacy and leaving England for the Middle East, he travelled to Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and joined the explorer Sir Charles Fellows's archaeological expedition in Lycia (now in Turkey) as an illustrator.

[16] He retired and moved to the west of Norfolk,[18] but his health deteriorated and he died of cancer in 1806, leaving a young widow and infant son.

[19][note 3] He left his Dominican lands to her, and his Antigua estate to his adult son Earle, subject to him providing a guaranteed annual income of £300 to the family in Norfolk.

[26] In a letter to Linnell, he wrote: "I find that the examinations for which I am preparing next month require a closer application to my literary studies than I had imagined and that I must not attempt to 'serve two masters'.

[33] On 2 October 1832 Daniell was ordained in Norwich Cathedral as a deacon, and three days later was licensed as the curate of the parish church at Banham, a post he held for eighteen months.

[40] At some date after June 1840,[34] perhaps inspired by the Scottish painter David Roberts who had travelled to Egypt and the Holy Land to find landscapes to depict,[note 4] Daniell resigned his curacy and left England to tour the Near East.

[11] 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.

[45] 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.

[42] In Lycia he produced a series of watercolours, of which Laurence Binyon 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.

"[47] In March 1842, Fellows left for London on HMS Beacon, in order to obtain bigger ships for transporting the antiquities back to England.

[42] In June he left Rhodes to return to Lycia and rejoin Forbes and Spratt,[50] but he missed his ship – Monarch and Media had set sail the previous day – and was forced to amend his plans.

During the journey Daniell became feverishly ill with malaria,[55][56] contracted, according to Forbes and Spratt, "by lingering too long among the unhealthy marshes of the Pamphylian coast".

[55] He was forced back to Adalia after suffering a second attack of malaria,[57] and at Purdie's house dictated what was to be his last letter, which expressed his intentions to continue his work.

[58][note 6] He lost consciousness after sleeping whilst exposed to the heat of the day on the front terrace of Purdie's residence, and died a week later, on 24 September.

[60][note 7] The Norfolk historian Frederick Beecheno[62] wrote in 1889 that Daniell was "buried beneath an ancient granite column in the court of a Greek church in the centre of the town of Adalia".

[44] Forbes paid tribute to his friend Daniell, writing that his illness "destroyed a traveller whose talents, scholarship, and research would have made Lycia a bright spot on the map of Asia Minor, and whose manliness of character and kindness of heart endeared him to all who had the happiness of knowing him".

Daniell reprimanded them, saying "You are a pretty set of men to pretend to stand up for high art and to proclaim the Academy the fosterer of artistic talent, and yet allow such a picture to be rejected!

His biographer James Hamilton writes that he was "able to supply spiritual comfort that Turner required to help him fill the holes left by the deaths of his father and friends and to ease the fears of a naturally reflective man approaching old age".

[77] The historian Josephine Walpole, who believes Daniell's talent has yet to be properly recognised, has praised his ability to "create a sense of space, a feeling of heat or cold, of poverty or plenty, with apparent lack of effort".

[17][82][83] His watercolours draw from a deliberately limited palette, exemplified by the paintings from his tours of the Middle East, where he used sepia, ultramarine, brown pink and gamboge, with details emphasised using bistre, burnt sienna or white.

She notes how his delicate outlines and distinctively varied tones convey a sense of space and give an illusion of detail, citing Interior of Convent, Mount Sinai as a watercolour that expresses to her all that is best about Daniell's "understated artistry".

[55] Malcolm Salaman, writing in the 1910s, observed:[92] No etcher of this early English period evinced a truer and more subtle understanding and handling of the medium than Crome's pupil, the Rev.

E. T. Daniell, a very interesting artist of the Norwich School, whose plates, etched in the eighteen-twenties, are remarkable for genuine etcher's vision, expressive charm, and delicacy of craft.

His View of Whitlingham, full of light and air, proves him to be in the direct line of the masters.Martin Hardie asserted: "If only more proofs from his fine plates been made available for collectors and museums he would be more readily placed among the great etchers of the world.

[98] Thistlethwaite views the large drypoint etchings and Norfolk landscapes made after 1831 as being "supremely independent and for his time unique", once he had moved away from the traditional style of etchers like Geddes.

[93] He has described them as "full of interest and technical value, and at the same time curiously modern in their spirit", adding of him: "He reaches a very high level of refined thought and execution in his Borough Bridge.