M. A. Daly

When Andrew Matthew Daly was born in Cincinnati on 13 January 1860, the city inaugurated the Sketch Club, whose members included James Beard, Henry Mosler, and Alexander Wyant. The Civil War discouraged cultural activity and it seemed that an inordinate number of artists were leaving Cincinnati. At the McMicken School of Design, Daly studied under Thomas S. Noble and Vincent Nowottny. An excellent draftsman, he turned increasingly to portraits and figure subjects. Later he studied with Frank Duveneck whom he considered his inspiration. Duveneck brought a certain sophistication to Cincinnati after he returned home from Munich in late 1873. Yet his style was too progressive so he did not remain long, unlike Daly, who worked as an artist for the famous Rookwood Pottery Company from 1883 to 1903. After that, he became a director and chief designer for the United States Playing Card Company, where he remained involved for nearly thirty years. In addition, he participated in local art activities. In 1890 Daly helped found the Cincinnati Art Club. He executed numerous portraits and exhibited his landscapes and still-lifes regularly in local shows. One of the latter, dated 1889, shows Duveneck’s influence in the brushwork, a factor of his technique that would become increasingly impressionistic over the following years.

Daly and his wife, who also painted, liked to spend their vacations in the Canadian Rockies or in New England, where Daly painted some of his best impressionistic landscapes. His procedure was to paint plein-air studies to serve as models (esquisses) for larger works done in his home-studio. In later works Daly’s fine brushwork and brighter palette reflect certain tendencies toward impressionism, a side of his art frequently eclipsed by his achievement as a portraitist and his career as a pottery artist. Acquaintances censured him for making more than one version of a scene. Yet Daly became a leader of the Cincinnati Art Club. At the age of seventy-seven on 23 November 1937 he died at his easel in his home town.