Caroline Louisa Daly


Caroline Louisa Daly was a Canadian artist born in Lower Canada, whose work is featured in one of eastern Canada's most prominent galleries. Her watercolours were misattributed to men until 2017, when historical researcher Paige Matthie established provenance through a public exhibition.

Life

Daly was born in Lower Canada on 6 December 1832 to Caroline Maria Gore and Sir Dominick Daly. She travelled extensively in her youth with her father, who was a colonial administrator, including five years on Prince Edward Island. His last posting was as Governor of South Australia, where he died in 1868. Her mother died in 1872.
In August 1866 Caroline and her sister Joanna were married in a double marriage: Joanna to John Souttar, and Caroline to Henry Hobhouse Turton. Turton was manager of the Savings Bank of South Australia and died in 1893. Caroline and Henry had two daughters, Caroline Mabel Turton and Violet Gore Turton. Daly died in Bournemouth, England, on 9 October 1893.

Watercolour painting

Daly's paintings have been exhibited by the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, and also are held by Library and Archives Canada and the Public Archives and Records Office of Prince Edward Island.
They feature a range of subjects including natural scenes, a beached whale, the interior of a cabin on a passenger ship, and images of the Prince Edward Island Government House in different seasons. In June 1863 she made a watercolour of the Government Cottage at Glenelg, South Australia. It was a summer residence of her father as governor of the state.
Her works are signed C. Daly or C. L. Daly and they were falsely attributed to others for years. In January 2017, the Confederation Centre Art Gallery opened an exhibition of six works entitled, Introducing Caroline Louisa Daly, which amended the incorrect attribution of her paintings to two men, John Corry Wilson Daly, the first mayor of Stratford, Ontario, and Charles L. Daly, an art instructor and clerk with the city of Toronto.
An investigation of the provenance of the paintings was spurred by a visit to the Confederation Centre by Daly's great grandson, Richard Jenkins. Paige Matthie, who curated the exhibit, discovered through her research that the attributions to the men were not well founded, and that one of them was not even known as a painter. Matthie comments that in an era of limited opportunities for Victorian women, "It is wonderful that Daly seized opportunities to try new things with her work, painting the interior of her ship's cabin on the voyage to Australia, or copying the work of male artists who were able to go into the wilderness to capture the sublime beauty of Canada."