Richard Dagley

Richard Dagley (29 January 1761 – 1 April 1841)

Life 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. mostly genre pictures 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 His Death's Doings (1826) was a meditation on death, 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".

A portrait in pastel of Dagley by John Raphael Smith survives.

Publications Gems Selected from the Antique (1804). "Flim-Flams! or the Life and Errors of my Uncle, and the Amours of my Aunt, with Illustrations and Obscurities, by Messrs. Tag, Rag, and Bobtail (1805). In fact by Isaac D'Israeli. Takings; or the Life of a Collegian (1821). Poem by Thomas Gaspey, with 26 etchings from designs by Dagley. 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.