Overall: 29cm (11.5in) x 25cm (10in)
Oil on board. Full length portrait study of Morris James Hall, 6th (1st Warwickshire) Regiment of Foot, circa 1843, wearing line infantry regimental undress frock coat, standing in a landscape. Inscribed verso 'Major Hall / 6th Reg.t / by D. Cunliffe'
Daniel Cunliffe (1801-1871) was born in Lancashire and was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in 1823 to study painting. As a young man he received a commission from a wealthy London merchant to paint his wife’s portrait. Cunliffe and the merchant’s lady embarked on an affair, causing the merchant to sue the artist for ‘Criminal Conversation’. The judge ruled against Cunliffe and awarded the businessman £500 damages. Cunliffe immediately declared himself bankrupt and was sentenced to 10 months in prison. (Sun (London) 16.2.1831). On his release Cunliffe ran off with the merchant’s wife who was granddaughter of the 11th Baron Teynham. She had a child and they subsequently married.
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By the 1840s Cunliffe was living and working in Portsmouth where he produced several highly detailed paintings of military subjects, some of which are regarded as amongst the best military paintings of the period. These include ‘The Colours of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment (6th Regiment of Foot)’ now in the Fusilier Museum, Warwick. This painting depicts the colours, flintlocks, a soldier's haversack, a drum major's mace and sash, various musical instruments, three painted side drums and one painted bass drum, all surrounding a recumbent blackbuck (the Regimental Mascot) in a tropical Indian landscape. He also painted ‘The 6th (1st Royal Warwickshire) Regiment of Foot on Exercise While Stationed at Portsmouth’, now in the National Army Museum (NAM) and a portrait of an ‘Officer of the 6th Regiment of Foot’, circa 1843, also in the NAM.
Cunliffe is also noted for a series of paintings depicting actions of the 13th Regiment in the First Afghan War (1839-42), and for painting Scottish subjects (https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/daniel-cunliffe). For all his success, financial troubles were never far away and ‘Daniel Cunliffe, artist, Portsea, Hants’ was declared bankrupt for a second time in 1862.
Major Morris James Hall was commissioned Ensign in the 1st Battalion 6th (Warwickshire) Regiment of Foot. He became Captain 1836 and Major in 1842. He married Laura, youngest daughter of Colonel William Connolly in Dublin in 1846. He came home on leave from India in 1850 in the Vernon troopship via St Helena. During the voyage ‘only two men of the 25th Foot died’, together with ‘an insane soldier of the Madras European Regiment’.