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painter and professional photographer, was born at Port Stewart, Northern Ireland, a great-nephew of Adam Clarke, preacher, Greek scholar and companion of Charles Wesley. Said to have studied painting in Belfast under a pupil of the British artist Edwin Landseer, Clarke was a professional horse and dog painter at Belfast before he migrated to Victoria with his wife, Rachel. They left from Liverpool (England) in January 1863 on board the Prince Alfred . Daniel may have worked in Melbourne after his arrival; one 'D. Clarke’, artist, is listed at 47 Victoria Street, Fitzroy in the Melbourne Directory for 1864. However, by the time the directory was published Clarke had been engaged by the Anglican Church to be supervisor of the Framlingham Native Settlement (after the government had withdrawn its support from this Aboriginal Reserve) and worked there for two and a half years. During this time he took photographs of the Aboriginal people of the settlement (the Warrnamabool Historical Society holds a few examples). Then he worked for many years as a portrait painter and photographer in Liebig Street, Warrnambool, also being an agent for the photographic firm Mendelsohns of Melbourne. He conducted private art classes, including teaching the nuns at the Warrnambool and Koroit Convents.

Clarke is known for his paintings of Tower Hill, a dramatic extinct volcanic lake and mountain site near Warrnambool, Victoria, which he first saw in about 1865 when gathering the local Aboriginal people together to settle them at Framlingham. Several virtually identical oil on academy board pictures are known (NLA, NGV, Warrnambool AG, Warrnambool Historical Society, Deutscher Fine Art). Although most are dated 1867, the year Clarke settled at Warrnambool and made his first Tower Hill painting, these Tower Hill pictures were actually executed much later. His earliest extant Tower Hill view (c.1870, Fisheries and Wildlife Reserve, Tower Hill) shows a heavily wooded area with Aborigines camped in traditional style around the lake, but most of these naive images include Aboriginal figures in European clothing standing passive in a desolate foreground among felled trees. Stumps and dead trees dominate the distant landscape, a view that Von Gué rard had depicted in unspoilt luxuriance in 1855 (as a commission from the local landowner and 'Protector of the Aborigines’, James Dawson). But when Clarke painted the scene, most of the area had been leased for grazing and the remainder designated a picnic area for Europeans.

Warrnambool Art Gallery holds several of Clarke’s large oil portraits of local worthies (one is dated 1885), along with one Queen Victoria. All are on paper laid on canvas and were evidently painted over enlarged photographs. As well, many Western District squatters employed him to paint portraits of their racehorses. His oil painting, Hopkins River Warrnambool, Vic. , was sold at Sotheby’s in November 1998, and he showed a view of Hopkins Falls in the Victorian Court at the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition. He is also said to have had a painting sent to the 1880 Paris Universal Exhibition. At the 1888-89 Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition, the Ladies’ Court (which was not restricted to women but encompassed amateurs and children) included no.187, Mouth of the River Hopkins by 'D. Clarke’. His oil painting At the Mouth of the River , dated 1879, was sold at Melbourne in 1981. A life-size portrait of Clarke’s son, dated 1884, remains with the family.

According to his granddaughter, Clarke was typically Irish – handsome, eloquent, argumentative, generous and improvident – and musical as well as artistic. When he remarried in 1873, he gave his age as thirty-five though actually forty. His second wife, Sarah Kate, was the daughter of William Hale who built some of the Henty homes in Portland – properties depicted by William Clarke with whom Daniel may have been connected. Clarke died in Skene Stree, Warrnambool, in 1918.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989