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, Carmartenshire, 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. He enrolled at the Royal College in 1937. A fellow student there was the painter John Ward 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 consrantly, 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.'

Ward and Daly both enlisted in 1939 in the Royal Engineers, and after the war returned as students to the Royal College, sharing a London flat until Ward married in 1950. For many years, Daly supported himself by working as an art teacher, first at Wimbledon School of Art and later at St, Martin's. Ward has written of these early days: '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 ta;ll 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 who 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 has described the artist in his later years. 'Upright and over six feet tall, Daly was noticeable around Canterbury. When [John] Ward was painting the prortrait 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 many distinguished-looking people about nowadays.”'

Daly's artistic independence and determination 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 nieghbouring 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 besides 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 staes: '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 perpertory actress, in the 1950s Daly and Ward;s charlady. All these stusides uncondescendingly evoke the secret or occluded '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-upprogramme, 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.

Daly died in Canterbury on October 10^th 2001. In his obituary in The Independent, David Buckman wrote that 'A final refuge, for many years, was provided by the former businessman and painter Colin Georgem 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.'

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 civilization is fastidiousness'.