Daniel Thomas Egerton

Egerton was born in England, most sources give the year as 1797, though the UK Government Art Collection and Encyclopedia.com give circa 1800, a discrepancy that remains unresolved in the standard references. He became a founding member of the Society of British Artists in London and exhibited there from 1824 to 1829, and again from 1838 to 1840. No formal art school training is documented in academic biographical sources; auction-house catalogue notes state he trained informally under the watercolorist Thomas Monro in London, a claim not corroborated by scholarly biography.

In the early 1830s Egerton traveled to Mexico, where he spent roughly five years painting its landscapes. He returned to London around 1836 to 1838 and exhibited his Mexican oils and watercolors, following that with the publication of Views in Mexico, a portfolio of twelve hand-colored lithographs issued in 1839 and 1840. He returned to Mexico in 1841 and settled in the village of Tacubaya, now part of Mexico City. On 27 April 1842, Egerton and his companion, whom Wikipedia names as Alice Edwards and the UK Government Art Collection names as Agnes Edwards, were attacked and killed in Tacubaya, according to those sources.

Egerton is treated in reference and auction literature primarily as a historically important documentarian rather than as a subject of sustained critical debate. Sotheby's cataloguing describes his lithograph portfolio Views in Mexico as his best-known work, and Christie's cataloguing notes that he trained under the watercolorist Thomas Monro and situates his Mexican compositions within the wider tradition of British landscape and travel painting of the period. Encyclopedia.com and the UK Government Art Collection both frame him as one of the first British traveling painters active in Mexico after its independence, a distinction that anchors most modern assessment of his work.

Egerton's market is thin and auction-led. No gallery or estate is documented as currently representing his work; his paintings, watercolors, and lithographs circulate almost entirely through auction houses such as Christie's, Sotheby's, and Bonhams, and through secondary-market dealers. His auction record is USD 384,000, set by The Ravine of the Desert (The Valley of Mexico) at Christie's New York on 28 November 2007. Reviewed auction databases show no later public sale exceeding that figure through mid-2026. MutualArt's aggregate profile references realized prices as high as roughly USD 478,000 for paintings, but that figure is not tied to a specific, dated sale that could be independently confirmed, so it is treated here as unverified rather than as a record.

Because no catalogue raisonne exists, authentication depends on museum provenance, auction house research, and comparison against the fixed, published set of Views in Mexico lithographs. Public sales are infrequent and the population of confirmed high-value results is small, so a single auction result, such as the 2007 Christie's record, should be read with the understanding that the underlying sample is limited. Collectors should also expect variation between market aggregator estimates and confirmed, dated sale records, and should verify any headline price against a specific, documented transaction before relying on it.