Richard Dagley (c.1761–1841)[1] was an English subject painter and illustrator.
Dagley was born on 3 December 1761 and baptised on 29 January 1762 at St Margaret's, Westminster, the son of Samuel Dagley, member of the Curriers' Company who died the following year, and his wife, Ann. He was educated at Christ's Hospital, from 1770 until 1777, when he was apprenticed to a jeweller and watchmaker, whose daughter, Elizabeth Cousen, he married on 2 November 1785 at St James's, Westminster. According to his obituary the couple had ten children, although only one, their daughter Elizabeth Frances Dagley (1788–1853), who became an author of children's books, survived into adulthood.
He exhibited irregularly at the Royal Academy between 1785 and 1833, showing a total of 60 works,[2] mostly genre pictures He was active in diverse artistic fields: he did some work enamelling watches and jewellery in collaboration with his friend Henry Bone, made several medals, painted watercolours, and spent some time as a drawing-master at a girls' school in Doncaster.
Dagley wrote art criticism for the Literary Gazette,[3] and published his first book, Gems Selected from the Antique, in 1804, with plates he had drawn and engraved himself. He published a drawing manual in 1818 and a second volume on gems in 1822, with poems by George Croly.
He produced some humorous illustrations for Isaac D'Israeli's Flim-Flams (1805) and a poem called Takings by Thomas Gaspey (1821), for which he wrote an introductory essay entitled 'Miscellaneous Observations on the Ludicrous in Art'. In a preface he noted:
... nearly twenty years since, while selecting and drawing from the casts of antique gems, for a publication that has since appeared, I was called upon to, make designs for the "Flim-Flams," a work of an entirely opposite character. Having never paid any attention to the ludicrous in art, it was rather in compliance with the wishes of the author of that work, than with any expectation of success that I produced my specimens. Their reception was favourable, and a hint from an ingenious friend on the use which might be made of the word "Taking," was a stimulus to further practice; of which you now see the result.[4]His Death's Doings (1826) was a meditation on death, prompted by the example of by Holbein's Dance of Death.[5] Dagley wrote "I have endeavoured to show the way a certain class of writing may be embellished without incurring the expense of those laboured and highly finished engravings which make a work prohibitively expensive".[6]
A portrait in pastel of Dagley by John Raphael Smith survives.[7]
Dagley died of influenza at his home, 5 Earl's Court Terrace, London, on 1 April 1841, and was buried at St Mary Abbots, Kensingtons.[6]
In 1822 Letitia Elizabeth Landon published three poems in the Literary Gazette based on his drawings. She further produced a poem on his Cupid and Swallows Flying from Winter[9] in her Poetical Sketches of Modern Pictures (The Troubadour, 1825). Later, she supplied a further four poems for Death’s Doings, 1827 edition. Felicia Hemans also provided two poems for Death’s Doings.