William Day
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Biography
Day was an accomplished amateur artist, who exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1782 and 1801 as an Honorary Exhibitor. The late Judy Egerton wrote an article about him in The Connoisseur, July 1970, pp. 176-185. It is not known for certain when Day met John Webber, the Swiss-born artist who is famous for accompanying Captain Cook on his last expedition to the South Seas between 1776 and 1780.
The Connoisseur article notes, without giving a source, that the friendship between the two artists “began about 1787”. Day and Webber were sketching together in the Wye valley in 1788, which is the first time that pairs of views by the two artists of the same subject are known to exist. Two watercolours by Webber of Chepstow Castle dated 1788, which are now in the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester (D.1900.12 & D.1970.77) (see Charles Nugent, British Watercolours in the Whitworth Art Gallery, 2003, p. 282) correspond to two watercolours by Day which were acquired by Chepstow Museum in 2012. They also made a sketching tour to Derbyshire together in 1789.
A family note lists Day’s interest in the following order:’ Geology, Minerology and Painting’ and he formed one of the earliest private collections of minerals in England. He always carried a bag for specimens on his sketching tours. His collection was carried on by his son William Day (1797-1849) and his grandson and passed to the Hampstead Central Library where it was destroyed by bombing during WWII.
