Jeremiah Meyer, Portrait of Denis Daly, ca. 1780

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “Jeremiah Meyer, Portrait of Denis Daly, ca. 1780,” catalogue entry in Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan, The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, vol. 1, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.2232.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “Jeremiah Meyer, Portrait of Denis Daly, ca. 1780,” catalogue entry. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan. The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, vol. 1, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.2232.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

This miniature by Jeremiah Meyer depicts the Irish statesman and landowner Denis Daly (1747–1791). Its close resemblance to other portraits of Daly, including a painting attributed to Sir Joshua Reynolds (English, 1723–1792) with a provenance dating back to Denis Daly’s son, James Daly, Lord Dunsandle, enables us to identify the sitter with confidence.¹ Meyer’s portrait was probably painted around 1780. At that time, Daly was actively consolidating his family’s financial and political interests in County Galway, and in Ireland more broadly, and establishing his political career, beginning with his appointment as Galway’s mayor in 1772. Here, Daly is formally dressed in a green velvet jacket, white vest, and heavily powdered hair, attire suitable for a political role.

Daly inherited substantial properties across Ireland, particularly the Daly ancestral home, Carrownakelly Castle, but around the time this miniature was painted, in the 1780s, he built Dunsandle House in the modern taste.² Ruinous expenses related to this building project and other excesses—including a duel he fought and won in 1775—did not overshadow his character and renown as a brilliant politician.³ Daly’s friend Henry Grattan described him as “an individual singularly gifted. Born a man of family, of integrity, of courage and of talent, he possessed much understanding and great foresight. . . . There were men who possessed more diligence and information, but he surpassed them all in talent.”⁴

Daly’s fortunes were restored upon his marriage to an heiress, Lady Henrietta Maxwell (ca. 1761–1852), in 1780. It is possible this miniature was painted to commemorate their wedding, but if a companion miniature was painted of Maxwell, its whereabouts are unknown. Daly’s portraits by Reynolds and Hugh Douglas Hamilton (Irish, ca. 1739–1808) in the National Gallery of Ireland support Grattan’s testimony that Daly was also “handsome, of a pleasing and agreeable address, and so excellent a manner that by it he conciliated everybody.”⁵

Meyer’s subtle use of hatching and careful detail in his depiction of Daly’s features and clothing exemplify his technical achievements in the delicate art of painting in watercolor on ivory, a notoriously difficult medium in which the oily surface repelled water. In this miniature, Meyer painted so thinly on the ivory, with light and luminous washes, that the vertical grain of the ivory is clearly visible. Unfortunately, this miniature, like many works by Meyer, is heavily faded. It also bears evidence of having been retouched soon after its making.⁶ The addition of robber baron hair to the case, and a later engraving on the case identifying the sitter, suggest that the case was paired with the miniature later or doctored in preparation for sale around the turn of the twentieth century.

Notes

1. Attributed to Sir Joshua Reynolds and Studio, Portrait of Denis Daly (1747–1791), three-quarter-length, in a brown coat, buff striped waistcoat and brown breeches, leaning on a pedestal, with his tricorn hat, in a landscape, n.d., oil on canvas, 50 x 40 in. (127 x 101.5 cm), sold at Christie’s, London, May 22, 2012, lot 34. Denis Daly is not to be confused with his similarly named cousin, Denis Bowes Daly (ca. 1745–1821), of whom no portraits are known.

2. Dunsandle, once widely considered the finest eighteenth-century house in County Galway, is sadly now a ruin. The vestiges of its beautiful neoclassical plasterwork are documented in Robert O’Byrne, “Dun and Dusted,” The Irish Aesthete (blog), December 9, 2013, https://theirishaesthete.com/2013/12/09/dun-and-dusted/.

3. James Kelly, “Daly, Denis (1747–1791), politician,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, January 3, 2008, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/7070.

4. Henry Grattan, Memoirs of the Life and Times of the Rt. Hon. Henry Grattan, Esq., M.P. (London: Henry Colburn, 1849), 1:290.

5. Grattan, Memoirs, 1:290; Hugh Douglas Hamilton, Denis Daly of Dunsandle, 1770s, pastel and graphite on paper, 9 7/16 x 7 7/8 in. (24 x 20 cm), National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, (NGI.6993)[http://onlinecollection.nationalgallery.ie/objects/10123/denis-daly-of-dunsandle-17471791--mp].

6. Carol Aiken, conservation treatment report, 2018, Nelson-Atkins curatorial files.

Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, by 1958;

Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1958.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 55, p. 22, (repro.), as Unknown Man.