Lily Attey Daff was a British-born designer and artist who worked in New Zealand and published watercolour paintings and line drawings of many native New Zealand birds and flowers.
Biography
Daff was born in Upton, London, on 16 March 1885. She took courses in drawing and painting at the London Polytechnic but was also known to have completed at least one course at King Edward Technical College in Dunedin. After her polytechnic training, Daff worked as an illustrator for Christmas card producer Raphael Tuck and Sons. Daff arrived in Otago in 1926 and obtained work with the GovernmentPublicity Department. Daff was the Officer in Charge of Exhibitions at Otago Museum, painting dioramas, reorganising and decorating the galleries, designing displays, posters, and producing guide-books. Daff was on staff at the museum for 12 years in total. Her obituary claims her chief contribution to scientific education was in the travelling cases which circulated throughout the museums of New Zealand, however now she is mostly known for her illustrations of New Zealand birds. Daff's line illustrations were considered by the Otago Daily Times to turn the newly published guide Introducing the Otago Museum into a "minor collector's item". In June 1932 Daff left Dunedin for Wellington, to fulfill a commission for the New Zealand Bird Protection Society to paint a series of pictures of New Zealand native birds. Daff illustrated Walter Oliver's book on New Zealand birds and Pérrine Moncrieff'sNew Zealand Birds and How to Identify Them. Her copies of drawings by J W Barnicoat are in the Hocken Collections, as are a painting of a takahe and other unfinished natural history studies. Daff also supplied hundreds of line drawings to illustrate research publications on ethnography, many of which can be seen online in the Journal of the Polynesian Society. The paintings Daff completed for the New Zealand Bird Protection Society have been published in books and as journal covers many times, and the original paintings are now in the Alexander Turnbull Library. Lily Attey Daff died on 3 May 1945. Her middle name, commonly spelled Atty, shows as Attey on her birth certificate.
Selected publications
Daff, Lily Attey, New Zealand birds: Twenty-four coloured illustrations of forest-inhabiting birds with descriptive letterpress. Wellington: New Zealand Native Bird Protection Society.
Daff, Lily Attey, and Falla, Robert Alexander, New Zealand birds : twenty-four coloured illustrations of birds of coast and ocean with descriptive letterpress. Wellington: Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand
Burton, Olga Pauline and Daff, Lily Attey, Stories of bird and bush. Auckland: Oswald-Sealy
Daff, Lily Attey, Introducing some of the more interesting exhibits in the Otago Museum. Dunedin: Otago Museum.