Portrait of a Young Girl Standing by a Pedestal

The artist was born and spent much of his life in Liverpool. Apprenticed to Alexander Mosses as a wood engraver, he was a precocious talent and taught himself to paint in oils at night, by candlelight. Strong effects of light and shadow are frequently present in his works, as here. In its relation of the figure to the landscape or to props such as the urn, this is a conventional portrait, but the girl’s high colour and her everyday, informal costume, together with Daniels’s spirited application of paint across the whole surface, give it great zest.