George Daniell, 91, photographed celebrities

George Daniell, a renowned photographer who specialized in portraits of actors, artists and writers, died Saturday, Sept. 14, at Mount Desert Island Hospital from complications after a stroke. He was 91.

Daniell, who was also a painter, lived in Trenton for the last 42 years. He was best known for black-and-white photographs depicting celebrities, whom he encountered during several car trips across the United States and on journeys to Europe. He found a young Sophia Loren at a movie studio in Rome, Audrey Hepburn on the set of “War and Peace,” Tennessee Williams in Key West, Georgia O’Keeffe on her ranch in New Mexico, and W.H. Auden on the Italian Island of Ischia, which was one of Daniell’s own favorite places.

Often, Daniell traveled with his longtime companion, Stephen Dorland, a painter, who moved with him to Maine in 1960. From then until Dorland died in 1983, the two men always returned to Trenton, where they each painted in a salt-worn house that was also a private gallery for their art. Daniell, a devoted cook, enjoyed gourmet dinners, as well as music, film and literature.

A student of drawing at Yale and, later, at the Art Students League and the American People’s School, both in New York, Daniell concentrated on painting after moving to Maine. His style was loose in the manner of John Marin, whom he photographed in Cape Split, Nova Scotia, and in New Jersey. He often painted scenes from carefree, youthful years on Fire Island in New York and from coastal life in Maine. Watercolors of naked dancers on the beach and still lifes of lobster, fruit and flowers were among those Daniell prized the most.

“I will really miss George because he was always a true American aesthetic to me,” said Bruce Weber, the fashion photographer, who considers Daniell a significant influence on his own stylized work as well as on American photography in general. “His photographs were always an inspiration to me because of their romantic quality and because they were a record of a much more innocent time when we looked at sexuality with more open arms and eyes.”

Daniell was born in 1911 in Yonkers, N.Y. His twin, also a boy, died at birth, and Daniell was raised as an only child of a doting mother and remote father. He began taking photographs as a young teen, using a folding Kodak. At Yale, he applied his painter’s eye to photography and, after graduation, became a free-lance photographer in New York and in Europe.

A lifelong sufferer of respiratory allergies, Daniell fled the city in 1936 for Monhegan Island, where he photographed working fishermen and began a nearly 70-year association with the state. A collection of his vintage photographs of Monhegan were shown last fall in an exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art, where several of his works are part of the permanent collection. Daniell’s works are also represented in collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the University of Maine, and Bowdoin and Colby Colleges.

While Daniell’s photos appeared in Time and Life magazines, and in later years in Down East magazine, art critics and other photographers felt he never received the recognition he deserved as an artist. In the last 15 years, however, many friends and professionals advocated for Daniell, both as a painter and photographer. This resulted in several critically acclaimed exhibitions, including ones in New York City, as well as in galleries in Northeast Harbor, Southwest Harbor and Portland. Daniell had recently been interviewed by the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation in Santa Fe, N.M., because of his photos of and friendship with the painter. But his photos received an even wider audience through greeting cards published by Borealis Press in Surry.

“We’re talking about two George Daniells here,” said Carl Little, an arts writer in Somesville. “He was a photographer who did his greatest work in the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and early ’60s. He was also a watercolorist who bloomed when he wasn’t doing photography and still had creative impulses. There’s an enormous achievement there, and a lot of work is still to be uncovered. His photographic oeuvre is very important.”

Three weeks ago, Daniell was hospitalized for a stroke. Until that time and despite debilitation from an earlier stroke, he painted every day in a sunlit studio in a back room of his home, which he shared with Roy Oxley, his companion. In addition to Oxley, Daniell is survived by several cousins including Howard Lockwood and Phyllis Geiger, both of Florida, Isabelle Dourrie of Pennsylvania, and Nancy Whitcom of Massachusetts.

Daniell, whose artistic impulse extended to journals and short autobiographical sketches, wrote last year in a letter to a friend: “Art – writing, painting, music – is life with a little (no, a lot) of human warmth thrown in.”