Jehan Daly

There are three letters from Jehan Daly to Ruth Borchard, all dated 1965 and sent from south-west London. In the first, he writes: ‘I would be pleased to let you have a self portrait, though at the moment I don't seem to be able to put my hands on any, though I have made any amount of them.’

The second letter reads, with typical self-deprecating humour: ‘I hope this little painting will interest you, it was painted when I was a student at the Royal College of Art just after the war and before the problem and frustrations of art made me grow bald.’ In the final letter, he remembers 'as a very young student discussing a book called five hundred self-portraits (I wonder if you know it) and how that has inspired me!' His self-portrait was bought by Ruth for 21 guineas.

Jehan Daly was born in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, Wales in 1918 to a French mother (hence the spelling of his first name – medieval French in origin – pronounced 'John') and an Irish-born father, the artist and art teacher William Edward Daly. As David Buckman has noted (in his Obituary of Jehan Daly in the Independent (23^rd October 2001), 'Daly spoke good French and in his youth was fond of staying with an aunt in France.' Jehan studied first at Kidderminster School of Art, where his father was Principle, then enrolled at the Royal College in 1937. A fellow student there was the painter John Ward (1917-2007) who recalled, in a catalogue Foreword for Daly's 1993 exhibition at London's Martyn Gregory Gallery, that they studied together under ‘Professor Gilbert Spencer, the brother of the great Stanley... [Jehan] drew constantly, providing he liked the model. He never painted in the still-life room, nor did he ever attempt work in the still-life class. He would only work at his own pace. He always managed to live in a quiet, undusted elegance. He has always been the most generous of men [...] But over his work he will brook no interference, no dictation, no compromise. He has sought neither honours nor wealth - I have not even dared to ask his views on this exhibition.’

In his Foreword to the catalogue for the exhibition 'John Ward and the East Kent School' (Maas Gallery, London, November 2017), Rupert Maas has written: ‘John met my father when he saw one of his own pictures in the Maas Gallery's window in the early '60s, and, flattered, introduced himself. It was the start of a long friendship. However, it was another dealer, Sir Jack Baer, who first put John Ward, his contemporary Jehan Daly, and his younger protégé, John Sergeant* [(1937-2010)] together in one sell-out exhibition at Hazlitt's in 1994. The three artists - Daly, his quiet drawings so careful, so poised, so admired by Ward, who was in turn so looked up to by Sergeant - complemented one another, but it was John's strength of character and clear thinking that bound them [...]After the Wards moved to Kent, his wife Alison ironically dubbed the little group of artists around them, ‘The East Kent School’ (at the instigation of Ken Reedie of the Canterbury Museum and Art Gallery, who adopted John Ward for Kent). These close friends, painters of intelligence and skill, shared a healthy mistrust for what they felt was the wrong turn contemporary art was taking [especially in the 1990s, the heyday of the Young British Artists collected by Charles Saatchi]. They were not militant, but the qualities these artists [Ward, Daly and Sergeant] embodied were at odds with the prevailing current in the art world.’

In his 2017 catalogue entry on Daly, Maas notes that John Ward remembered that Daly's teacher at the Royal College, ‘Gilbert Spencer [...] ‘had no influence on Jehan. Spencer recognised they were both oddities, and they got on because of that.’ Daly's taste ranged from the early Italians through to the then unfashionable Edward Burne-Jones and he and Ward shared a passion for the drawings of Ingres. Ward remarked, ‘No one ever really influenced Jehan and his remarkable work didn't change. I have early drawings made in France that are very mature that amaze me. He never did student things. Even at that stage, his work could go on the wall anywhere […] They need looking at very hard. With a stub of pencil he would sit and look, and look, and look, then make a couple of marks. There was not much there, but what was there was enormously telling, coming from a tremendous perception’. John Sergeant wrote of the way his understated pictures worked: ‘At first, I didn't recognise his strange, sensitive, quiet and small pictures as drawing. It gave me an enormous shock. John [Ward] explained them to me, because I was still too crude in my taste to see how remarkable and rare they were’.’

Buckman wrote that ‘On 17 October 1939, Daly and Ward enlisted in the Royal Engineers. The uncommissioned Daly made a good soldier, and was a fine shot. He served widely abroad in the Eighth Army [though] the Army was a challenge to Jehan, who was very patriotic, never minded a fight and would square up to anyone.’ In 1946 Daly and Ward returned as students to the Royal College, sharing a flat and a studio in Fulham until Ward married in 1950; then Daly lived alone there for 25 years. An undated oil painting by Daly, The Artist's Studio, shows a glimpse of a dark corner of an elegant, austere, tall-ceilinged, early 19^th century room - with bare floor boards and blind half-drawn - a kind of (unpeopled) self-portrait to the extent that it shows Daly's quotidian surroundings and the type of humble furniture, pictures and objects in simple array, which were characteristic subject matter of his compellingly uncluttered drawings.

His beautifully observed 1965 oil painting, The Cobbler's Shop (Collection: Northampton Museums and Art Gallery) is compositionally akin to his picture of The Artist's Studio in that it also shows a darkened room interior - in this case cramful of often surreal-seeming utiliarian and artisanal objects, though here with a rather mysterious human figure present, seen intently absorbed in his work; both pictures are notable for dramatically contrasting effects of window views of plain architectural facades in bright daylight.

For many years, Daly supported himself by working as an art teacher, first at Wimbledon School of Art and later at Saint Martin's School of Art. Maas notes that 'John Ward encouraged him to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1949 and 1950. He was successful in mixed shows at Wildenstein's and was given small solo exhibitions at Agnew's.'

Ward has written of Daly's early days as an artist in London: ‘Although impecunious, he appreciated the best in art and literature; unlike most of his contemporary artists, he would save up until he was able to go to Cork Street and order a first-rate suit in which, being a tall and well-built man, he presented a striking appearance.’

An air of studious, aloof refinement and relaxed dedication characterises Daly's small self-portrait, dated 1950. This work is perhaps one of the real surprises of the Borchard Collection, a picture whose superlative yet technically unshowy skill and fluency and reaches of perception may call to mind Elizabethan miniaturist portraits.

It may be the case that many self-portraits of men smoking a pipe possess, by their very nature, a guarded quality: perhaps the pipe serves as a kind of defensive emotional prop or shield. In Daly's self-portrait in profile, his visible eye is not at all prominently shown; it is partly occluded too by his rimless glasses. The sketchily drawn pipe and glasses are details contributing to an impression of the artist's abstracted, cerebral air. His withdrawn, sensitive mien is, paradoxically enough, evoked through the most stringently sensuous means. The pale, sallow skin, with its slightly flushed cheek, the fine brown hair (perhaps just starting to thin), nostril, ear and slightly agape, pipe-balancing mouth – all are painted with scrupulous objectivity. His dark jacket, an admixture of black and brown, and tie and white shirt, painted with keen asperity, are indicative of the 'quiet, undusted elegance' in which he managed to live. In terms of overall palette and the subject's rather melancholy, abstracted air, this self-portrait is truly a ‘brown study’.

David Buckman described the artist in his later years. ‘Upright and over six feet tall, Daly was noticeable around Canterbury. When [John] Ward was painting the portrait of the Chancellor of the University of Kent, Daly was mentioned: “Oh yes, I know of him,” said the sitter. “You don't forget when you see men like that. There are so few distinguished-looking people about nowadays.”’

Daly's determined artistic independence meant that he exhibited little over the years; his work has been collected by a few discerning patrons. He accomplished much figure drawing and painting, including portrayals of professional models, performing musicians and, in one instance, the eight children of a neighbouring dustman, but only rarely and reluctantly accepted portrait commissions (when he did, ‘the results’, says Ward, ‘were often superb’). From 1975, he lived in Kent.

Daly's crayon still-lifes of, say, a lemon on a saucer, or hot cross buns, or a walnut and nutcrackers, or a doll's house in a country house interior, capture the everyday with stunning precision and deceptive simplicity. Though intricately realistic, many of these pictures appear quite surreal in their curious juxtapositions, as in one drawing of a tall, bald, black doll in a long dress 'standing' alongside three plain wooden chairs, or as in a depiction of a tiny model steam engine set simply on a plate alongside a knife, a ruffled napkin forming the backdrop. At first sight, his paintings of the City of London, including Wren churches standing beside grassy or rubble-strewn bomb sites, appear tranquil, yet Daly's meticulous, unglossy realism gives them as eery quality.

The catalogue Introduction to his 1997 exhibition at the Martyn Gregory Gallery states: ‘At St. Martin's School of Art he often employed professional models, such as the elderly Antonelli, one of the last survivors of the Italian families who for many years offered their services to the London art schools; his father had sat to Leighton and Burne-Jones.' He made many crayon drawings of a bald, reserved and dignified Antonelli; Daisy Carter [an art college model] wearing a hat and fur-collared coat, and Ida Mackay, in her youth a repertory actress, in the 1950s Daly and Ward's charlady. All these studies uncondescendingly evoke the secret 'undusted elegance' of obscure, often working-class subjects; a moving parallel can be made with some of Gwen John's sketches.

‘Daly also sketched musicians as they performed at the Wigmore Hall, the Conway Hall (which he remembers as dingy and attended largely by impoverished musicians) [...] He also attended the concerts given by Stour Music, founded by the great counter-tenor Alfred Deller. John Ward was involved in this project from its inception, and the recitals of baroque music were accompanied by paintings by Ward, Daly and other artists. Daly was a conspicuous figure in the audience, since he used to peer at the musicians through a rolled-up programme, assessing their pictorial merits.’ His crayon double portrait drawing of A Busker (1960) playing the accordion on a bench, communicates the same kind of refined self-absorption as seen in his studies of professional cellists and violinists at the Conway Hall.

His paintings and chalk studies of single female figures and young girls –

such as an oil portrait of a young woman Joan Nicholson (a talented designer and embroiderer), her delicate face in profile illumined with sensitive audacity against the picture's otherwise dark and muted palette – are remarkable for both their psychological acuity and rarified tonal range.

Daly died in Canterbury on October 10^th 2001, David Buckman wrote that ‘A final refuge, for many years, was provided by the former businessman and painter Colin George, who had a spare lodge at Adisham, near Canterbury. George made this freely available plus a small pension, in return for pictures that Daly slowly and painstakingly produced [...]

‘Unwelcome events conspired to make Daly more reclusive. A bicycle he had been lent was stolen. He was burgled and furniture and a toy train he was drawing were taken. Arthritis decreased his mobility. This was hard for a man who had been a gifted sportsman, a passionate cricketer and rugby player. He continued keenly to watch cricket and football.’

Daly's perfectionist artistry belongs to an earlier age, yet he captures the here and now, the essence of often inextricably mundane and exotic ingredients of daily life, quite miraculously. In his work the spectator discerns ‘so much love and care’ (to adapt the words of the painter and writer Denton Welch writing in 1946 about beautifully wrought but mistakenly neglected works of art) that it ‘makes one think that civilization is fastidiousness’.

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 In his Obituary of John Sergeant in the Independent (24^th February 2010), Peyton Skipwith wrote: 'As a black-and-white draughtsman John Sergeant was supreme; he loved chiaroscuro and relied almost entirely on the tint of his carefully chosen Ingres papers to illumine and enrich the subtlety of his lustrous black charcoal drawings...

          'Although still life became his abiding love, he produced a remarkable series of   

          self-portraits, much in the manner of the 18th-century Irish artist Thomas Frye.

          He studied his own face with the same dispassionate rigour he applied to

          inanimate objects, and, through these, future generations will have the       

          pleasure  of knowing this gentle, eccentric, quizzical character.' 

…

Caption to image of oil painting Conversation at John Ward's by Paul Wyeth (1920-83); oil on canvas; 1953-54 (picture to be credited:  Courtesy of The Maas Gallery, London):

‘In the Chelsea studio on Glebe Place, where John Ward had moved in 1950, Jehan Daly stands in the foreground wearing a colourful waistcoat, and John Ward is seated in the chair reading. William, John Ward's son, has suggested that the figure in the background on the telephone is Edwin la Dell, Tom Horabin or Anthony Devas. William has also suggested that the painting on the easel was probably a Charles Mahoney, who taught John Ward at the RCA.’

(catalogue entry from 'John Ward and the East Kent School', The Maas Gallery, London, November 2017)

- Text by Philip Vann, updated and revised from the first edition of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, 2004