Born: 6 December 1832, Canada
Died: 9 October 1893
Country most active: Canada
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
For years, Canadian painter Caroline Louisa Daly’s works were misattributed to not one but two men. In 1969, nearly a century after she painted them, the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, purchased four pieces showing historical scenes of the town, signed “C.L. Daly” from a collector in Montreal. The seller claimed they were the work of John Corry Wilson Daly, a businessman and the first mayor of the Ontario town of Stratford. After a bit of—but clearly not enough—research, the gallery staff decided the paintings were really by Charles Daly, a municipal bureaucrat in Toronto who was also an artist and art teacher. Years later, when the gallery acquired two more pieces signed C.L. Daly, they were automatically attributed to Charles Daly as well. It was only in the 2010s, with the help of the Internet, that the discrepancies started showing. There is no indication of either male Daly having the middle initial L, nor that either had ever visited Prince Edward Island. Gallery registrar Paige Matthie was able to connect the pieces to Caroline based on various records and examples of her work in family files—nothing to indicate that she had ever been recognised publicly as a professional-level artist. This, combined with male-centric assumptions about who makes art, likely contributed to the misattributions, Matthie said. “I think it also comes down to what’s top of mind when you think of an artist. Most think of a male image,” she said. “Women were allowed to be subjects, the sitter. Although they were doing art in many forms, it just wasn’t taken seriously.”