Читать книгу A Companion to Australian Art - Группа авторов - Страница 44

Richard Neville

Early Australian art is often seen as being at war with the country: the landscape was alienating and confronting, its population of convicts deliberately hidden from view, its natural history simply too upside down and weird to be truthfully depicted, and the whole aesthetic of the country was so remarkably different that artists simply couldn’t see it properly, resorting instead to the pictorial tropes they brought with them from Europe.

Of course the story is much more complicated, and in some respects, much simpler than this. Colonial artists, once the colony settled after the confusion of its establishment, were subject to market forces, and the whims and interests of clients, like any artist in any provincial European town.

Indeed the trajectory of art in the early colony can perhaps be broadly defined in three distinct phases. The first phase, in the difficult first decade of the colony, is one of documentation, when the most significant impetus for artists – either officers, or employed by officers – was to record the astonishing natural history and curious Indigenous people they encountered. The emphasis in this decade was on producing extensive inventories of images: of plants, birds, animals, Aboriginal people, and landscapes. Emphatically documentary, often limited in art knowledge, and compositionally naïve, this list making was rarely systematic, but rather was driven by the shock of the new, and an underlying enthusiasm to record, for European collectors, what was encountered in NSW.

The second phase – roughly the first three decades of the nineteenth century – reflects the more settled nature of the colony, but also alludes to its unique circumstances. The enthusiasm for collection and documentation had waned significantly by 1800, by which time Europeans felt that the colony’s future and security had been established, and the sense of raw excitement about its difference had abated. Elizabeth Macarthur’s comment is pertinent to this change:

On my first landing everything was new to me, every Bird, every Insect, Flower, &c in short all was novelty around me, and was noticed with a degree of eager curiosity, and perturbation, that after a while subsided into calmness.¹

During this period images of natural history, indigenous people and topographical views still accounted for the majority of local commissions. But these were made by professional artists, and often explicitly described as souvenirs for people returning to Europe. Richard Read Senior’s advertisement in the Sydney Gazette of 17 February 1821 epitomizes this period. He begged leave “to inform Captains of Ships, and other Gentlemen, that he has on Sale, some very superior Views of various parts of New Holland, together with Drawings of Birds, Flowers, Native Figures.”

There was thus a significant difference between the enthusiastic amateur artists of the first decade of colonization and the increasing professionalization of the artists’ community from around 1800, enhanced, ironically, by the transportation of so many artists and craftsmen: John Eyre, Richard Browne, Richard Read Senior, Joseph Lycett, Walter Preston, Francis Greenway, John Austin, John Lancashire and Samuel Clayton all arrived in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.

The third phase of artistic activity coincides with the increase in free emigration into the colony from the mid-1820s. In 1825 the population of NSW was about 36 000. By 1851 the population had increased more than fivefold to about 179 000–117 000 of those were free emigrants who arrived in the colony between 1831 and 1850. Such an influx significantly impacted the way the colony saw itself. No longer did it want to emphasize its difference through its curious natural history – rather colonists celebrated its conformity to European paradigms, a “new Britannia in another world” as William Charles Wentworth so succinctly described it.²

None of these particular visions represented a consistent and united vision of how the colonists themselves interpreted the landscape: attitudes to NSW, its natural environment, its society and its potential were very much shaped by the context of individual colonists. The early anxieties about its sustainability and permanence – the embryo of the notion that the settlement was some kind of hell, or fatal shore – was in the famines of the early 1790s. Surgeon General John White’s initial assessment of the “badness of the country” had within a few years evolved to the idea that it would soon be independent of England. White attributed his change of heart to making his first assessment “when hunger was very pressing.”³

The famines exacerbated another fundamental issue with European perceptions of the colony: its very raison d’être as a settlement for criminals. As David Collins wrote in 1798, “From the disposition to crimes and the incorrigible characters of the major part of the colonists … the word ‘Botany Bay’ became a term of reproach that was indiscriminately cast on every one who resided in New South Wales.”⁴ It was a persistent theme, neatly encapsulated nearly 30 years later in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine review of Peter Cunningham’s Two years in New South Wales, which was published in 1827. The review noted that colonial writers were “considerably mistaken [in] the nature of the interest with which the colony is regarded in the mother country.” Stories of successful settlements, Blackwood’s claimed, were nowhere as engaging as the tales of the “most murderous, monstrous, debased, burglarious, brutifed, larcenous, felonious, and pickpocketous set of scoundrels that ever trod the earth.” Indeed “ninety-nine out of a hundred” English people, when asked to describe NSW, would “think only of ropes, gibbets, arson, burglary, kangaroos, George Barrington and Governor Macquarie.” ⁵

When presenting NSW to England, the need to prove that it could successfully develop and grow into a English town worthy of the Empire, or maybe even ultimately a Southern Empire itself, in spite of its penal origins, was a dominating concern for colonists. Convicts themselves rarely appear in colonial art, and nor are their interests reflected. Rather colonists commissioned imagery which documented the success of their enterprise, and demonstrated the colony’s evolution into a flourishing British settlement.

***

In 1794 Thomas Palmer wrote of NSW:

To the philosophic mind, it is a land of wonder and delight. To him it is a new creation; the beasts, the fish, the birds, the reptiles, the plants, the trees, the flowers are all new. So beautiful and grotesque that no naturalist would believe the most faithful drawing, and it requires uncommon skill to class them.⁶

The natural bounty of the colony was evident from the time Europeans first landed on the east coast. When HM Bark Endeavour sailed into Botany Bay in April 1770 its crew were taken with its botanical riches and abundant fauna. Attempts to engage with Aboriginal people, however, proved impossible, and Captain Cook and his companions could only observe them from a distance. Despite the Endeavour traveling with artists on board, few drawings from Botany Bay have survived, possibly because of the shortness of their stay, and the generally unremarkable topography they encountered. Sydney Parkinson’s Two of the Natives of New Holland, Advancing to Combat, illustrating the vigorous challenge of the two men to the landing of the English, is the sole published image from the Endeavour’s visit to Botany Bay. It was an incident which Cook, Joseph Banks, and Parkinson all recorded in some detail. Tupaia, a high priest from Raiatea who joined the Endeavour at Tahiti, made a basic drawing of Aboriginal people in bark canoes (now in the British Library).⁷ Sydney Parkinson’s legacy was his botanical drawings, which he did not live to see completed. Cook called the bay Botany Bay to honor the “great quantity of new plants etc” collected by the expedition.⁸

When the First Fleet landed at Botany Bay in January 1788, there were no visual records to prepare the colonists for what they might find. Disappointed with what they did discover, which seemed unsuitable for settlement, Governor Arthur Phillip noted that Captain Cook’s inadequate textual description reflected the brevity of his visit, and the fact that he had no premonition of the significance of his visit to the future colonization of the country.⁹ Yet it was possible to separate the disappointment with the conditions of settlement from the pleasure in nature: Palmer’s exuberance reflects the not uncommon surprise and enjoyment of colonists with the natural history they now lived amongst.

Colonists were quick to begin drawing their new environment. On 11 February 1788 the Lady Penrhyn’s surgeon, Arthur Bowes Smyth noted in his diary that he had “etch’d the likeness” of a Xanthorrhoea [grass tree], which he confidently described as “no very bad resemblance of it.”¹⁰ It is unclear if the surviving drawing, A View of the Tree at Botany Bay, w^h yields y^e yellow Balsam, & of a Wigwam,¹¹is the original or a copy, or indeed made later as an illustration for the journal, but its frieze-like composition and unskilled drafting strongly speak of enthusiasm for recording the novelty of the things the colonists were seeing, but within a limited technical vocabulary. A companion drawing, Kangooroo, is simply a copy of George Stubbs’ engraving in John Hawkesworth’s Account of the Voyages in the Southern Hemisphere, and Bowes Smyth notes that “This Animal is so well discribed, & so excellent an engraving is given of it in Capt. Cook’s Voyages that I shall not say any thing of it here.”¹²

Bowes Smyth’s enthusiasm for collecting natural history specimens and indigenous material culture was typical of his colleagues. Bowes Smyth sought out curiosities at every port he visited, and much of the four months the Lady Penryhn was in Port Jackson Bowes Smyth spent acquiring specimens and artefacts which were intended to be re-distributed in Europe. Drawings, natural history specimens and Aboriginal artefacts were common exports to Europe from the very first. This frenzy for collecting was equally a reflection of the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment pursuit of rational knowledge about the natural world, and an enthusiasm for a much less cerebral celebration of the diversity of God’s creation.

Specimens were either tokens of diplomacy, given strategically to European benefactors and patrons, or profitably sold to collectors. Collectors like John White, the Surgeon-General of the colony, enthusiastically fed specimens and drawings to friends, colleagues and patrons in Europe. These specimens were then engraved in London for his illustrated Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales, published in London in 1790. This was one of the first printed accounts of the colony, with a strong focus on natural history, based in turn on collections he himself had sent back to London.

Given this impetus of documentation it is surprising that of all the trades which came out with the First Fleet, artists do not seem to have been amongst them. This oversight was to the detriment of Thomas Watling, a professional artist who was denied a remission of his sentence for his role in foiling a mutiny because, in part as an “ingenious artist”, he would be an “acquisition to the new Colony at Botany Bay.”¹³ However before Watling arrived in Sydney in 1792, a lively and prolific community of artists, most with only basic skills, was already active.

These artists, some identifiable but most not, created substantial records of natural history, landscapes, and portraits of Aboriginal people and illustrated accounts of their material culture and cultural practice. The emphasis of nearly all these projects was the extensive – though hardly comprehensive – documentation of birds, plants and people, responding in part to the demands of European collectors for curious and exotic specimens. Often inexpertly executed and composed with what is now seen as a charming disregard for any artistic or genre conventions, these collections were not informed by taxonomic rigor, but were rather omnivorous assemblages of things that could be easily located around the settlement. Despite the challenges to their reliability, these drawings were scrutinized seriously: Mrs. Macarthur, looking at views of Norfolk Island in 1791, noted that “the Island has a most charming picturesque appearance from the drawings I have seen, and what I have heard corresponds with it.”¹⁴

In April 1790 Governor Phillip told Sir Joseph Banks that he had commissioned “drawings of all the flowering shrubs in this Country”, an intriguing, and now lost, commission.¹⁵ Other significant commissions followed. Bernard Smith coined the term Port Jackson Painter to describe artists, whose identities have remained elusive, working in Sydney from 1788 to the mid-1790s.¹⁶ Smith used the term particularly to describe the artists of the collection of the nearly 500 drawings, now in the Natural History Museum, London, and known as the Watling Collection, after its sole identifiable artist, the convict Thomas Watling.

The genealogies of these drawings are opaque. Drawings were made in NSW, and then taken to Europe, where they were eagerly examined, discussed, and frequently copied and distributed widely amongst natural history networks. Their surprising physical presence – their comparatively large size, high degree of finish and often lengthy descriptive titles – make it clear they were conceived as records of a major historical event. The abundance of interconnected drawings implies a collegiate spirit amongst colonial artists, a community of interest, and an enthusiastic sharing of information and drawings.

The State Library of NSW holds a collection of the work of another group of artists collectively known as the Sydney Bird Painter, whose work was copied by the Port Jackson Painter.¹⁷ In 2011 the Library acquired the six volumes of the Earl of Derby collection, comprising 745 watercolors of Australian plants birds and fishes.¹⁸ Three of these volumes comprise English copies of drawings in the Watling collection. The other three volumes, by unknown artists, were compiled in NSW.

Common to all these collections is an inability to capture the living form of the specimens they depict, and little sense that any field observation informs their work. Body shape poorly recorded or just plain wrong: it is more than likely that artists were working from dead specimens or animal skins. Generally compositions reflect the typical format of English natural history illustration – a single specimen centered in the middle of the page, perhaps on a generic landform or branch, largely devoid of any context. Indeed the prominent English ornithologist, John Latham, who was an enthusiastic recipient of many colonial drawings, complained that they were not annotated with supporting information such as size, habitat, or behaviors, “which had the Painter been at all versed in ornithology, he could not have failed to have remarked in writing.”¹⁹ Latham, however, still valued drawings of any description which he could retrieve from NSW, and was often confident enough to use these drawings as the basis of his published descriptions of them.

Drawings which seem have no obvious connections are curiously interlinked. Why is it, for instance, that the extraordinary watercolors of volume 4 of the Earl of Derby’s collections, with their oversized specimens located in miniaturized, carefully executed, landscapes, share these backgrounds – albeit rendered with far less care and detail – with some of Thomas Watling’s own watercolors? This unknown artist’s Sooty Tern is a version of Watling’s New Holland Tern: how could Watling have copied this drawing unless it was also done in Sydney?²⁰ The striking Hawkesbury Duck, by the same unknown artist, is an eccentrically composed image of discordant scales, whose careful execution belies any evidence of any observation of a live specimen: its unusual formulation betrays the artist’s lack of familiarity with either natural history illustration or the conventions of landscape painting (Figure 4.1).

FIGURE 4.1. Hawkesbury Duck. For details please see Table 4.1.

Table 4.1 Figures in this chapter.

Call no.	Artist	Title	Details	Citation	File no.
PXD 1098/4 f.87	Artist unknown	Hawkesbury Duck	1790s. Watercolor on paper. 37.1 × 50.1 cm. In volume 4, Zoology of N[ew] Holland, of AB Lambert’s Earl of Derby collection.	Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW	FL345387
SV/143	George William Evans	A view near Grose Head, New South Wales, 1809	1809. Watercolor on paper. 27.6 × 37 cm.	Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW	FL3314317
DL Pd 27	Charles Rodius	Neddy Noora/Shoalhaven/Shoalhaven Tribe	1834. Lithograph, with white highlights. 29.2 × 23.3 cm	Dixson Library, State Library of NSW	FL8801266
DG 37	George Edwards Peacock	Port Jackson. N.S.W. view in Double Bay	1847. Oil on board. 23.5 × 33.5 cm	Dixson Galleries, State Library of NSW	FL395

On the other hand, the work of the Sydney Bird Painter, in all its technical finesse and precision, is strongly reminiscent of Indian natural history illustration. Yet it is by no means clear that these drawings were made in India, and the fact that they are copied by the Port Jackson Painters (losing or changing detail, as in Chinese whispers, with each copy), could suggest Sydney origins. And even with such technical dexterity, the Sydney Bird Painter also failed with the depiction of living forms, seemingly sabotaged by working with reconstituted skins rather than live birds. It was not that early colonists were so perplexed by Australian natural history that they could not draw it properly, but rather that they were at the limits of their experience and talent, and were using as their models poorly prepared specimens.

Midshipman George Raper’s drawings suggest the spontaneous and unstructured approach of colonial artists to their work. Closely observed and carefully rendered, yet flawed in their overall realization of the form and living shape of his subjects, his drawings often placed an animal next to a plant, with no obvious relationship between the two apart from their capacity to create strikingly graphic compositions. Raper titled his drawings generically: his watercolor of a kookaburra is simply Bird and Flowers of Port Jackson (Natural History Museum, London). These seem to be the work of a man whose enjoyment of natural history was about surface appearances, rather than a passion for science.

Of all the colonial artists, Thomas Watling was the most competent. Born in Scotland in 1762, Watling received enough training as an artist to articulate picturesque theory and confidently compose an image. In 1789 he was sentenced to 14 years transportation for forgery. Unhappy with his assignment to the “haughty despot”, John White, he compiled (in part by plagiarizing from a book about the United States) a small pamphlet which outlined his views on the pictorial potential of NSW, described his life in the colony, and announced a proposed publication of views of it.²¹ On the one hand Watling commended the luxuriant and flattering appearance of NSW, while on the other he complained of its scarcity of picturesque features such as bold rising hills or happily opposed off-scapes. If given the freedom to select and combine elements of its landscape – in other words engage his artistic imagination – he asserted he could have created satisfying works of art rather than the mere topographical records demanded of him by White.²²

There is no doubt that Watling’s landscapes and portraits were considerably more sophisticated than those of the Port Jackson Painter, or George Raper. Watling’s control of perspective and scale mean that his drawings, such as the Natural History Museum’s A Partial-View of New South Wales, Facing to the North-West, present an ordered view of the settlement, within the formula of a conventional topographical drawing. By contrast the Port Jackson Painter’s busy landscapes, such as A View of Sydney Cove – Port Jackson March 7th 1792, threw an abundance of inconsistently scaled detail haphazardly across the page, although the irregularity was perhaps a more honest representation of the settlement than Watling’s neat composition.

In the foregrounds of both these images are Aboriginal people, whose presence is a reminder of the persistence of Aboriginal culture in NSW. Aboriginal people, who were a source of constant fascination to Europeans, were in part all the more intriguing because of their withdrawal from contact with them until September 1790. It was only the negotiations between the two communities which followed the spearing of Governor Phillip on 7 September at Manly Cove that re-established contact. The pressures on the Gadigal people since the First Fleet arrived were intense, rapid and devastating. The smallpox that swept across Sydney Harbour in early 1789 decimated them. Land and resources, for thousands of years occupied uncontested, were suddenly alienated. Spears, implements and canoes were stolen as souvenirs. The naval officer Daniel Southwell concluded that it must be a “heavy loss to these people when deprived [of their implements]; and there is much reason to conclude that the rage for curiosity; and the unjust methods made use of to obtain [souvenirs]” was a significant cause of the conflict between the two cultures.²³

European responses to the Aboriginal peoples were complex and contradictory, but underlying nearly every interaction was an implicit belief in the inherent superiority of Christian European civilization and culture, and therefore the unthinking acceptance and endorsement of the inevitable alienation of Aboriginal land by Europeans without compensation or negotiation.

Contact between the colonists and the local people was resumed in late 1790 and the surviving drawings, mostly by the Port Jackson Painters, are from this period. About 15%, or 70 drawings, of the Watling collection are indigenous subjects but, unlike natural history drawings, they do not seem to have been copied, circulated or published in Europe.

The limitations of the Port Jackson Painters’ talents meant that their portraits lacked a pictorial language to create conventionally composed images. Formulaic landscapes, sparsely vegetated, often situated by water, and skies of soft evening light predominate: again these are not backgrounds created from original observation but are dropped in from what appears to be a bank of templates. Their elaborate descriptive titles and framing, in most cases, with formal ink wash borders or roundels suggest that the watercolors were to be treated more seriously than on-the-spot sketches. A portrait such as Balloderree (which must date after September 1790 but before his death in December 1791) matches David Collins’ assessment of him as a fine young man. Ballooderry’s strong torso, with its elegant markings, and his direct gaze create a sympathetic image, and it would seem that the artist has responded to a subject sitting in front of him.²⁴

It is clear, however, that these are documentary illustrations rather conventional portraiture. The Port Jackson Painter captured general characteristics rather than attempting summations of personal character. Lengthy titles, named individuals, depictions of customs such as hunting and fishing, and an emphasis on material culture and tools and implements, reflect general colonial conversations about Aboriginal people, and can be matched to what was being written in journals and diaries. These were illustrations of a people being documented from a position of curiosity, power and authority. It was certainly not a dialogue or conversation. Carefully observed, but awkwardly executed, these images with their inexpertly rendered facial profiles and over-sized eyes, brought the same compromised gaze to the Eora, that the Port Jackson Painter brought to the colony’s natural history.

Two similar but not identical watercolors of the spearing of Governor Phillip in September 1790 illuminate some of these issues.²⁵ The drawings closely align to the description of the immediate aftermath of the incident provided by Watkin Tench.²⁶ Aboriginal men are fleeing into the bush, Phillip stands on the shore with Captain Waterhouse, attempting to extract the spear in his shoulder, and the only gun which worked has been fired. David Collins noted that the colonists had four guns with them: four guns are shown in the watercolors. These watercolors have a sense of being recreations of events of great local significance: they are minor history paintings no doubt composed from the stories later recounted by the participants.

Tench hoped that the rapprochement which emerged after the spearing of Phillip would lead to deeper understanding between the two cultures noting that “We gradually continued henceforth to gain knowledge of their customs and policy:– the only knowledge which can lead to a just estimate of national character.”²⁷ Thomas Watling’s watercolors and pencil drawings, which date from late 1792, are as already been noted, more sophisticated than those of the Port Jackson Painter. His fluency with the basics of orthodox pictorial language mean that his portraits are much more conventional in their structure and realization: indeed Watling rarely diverted his practice to depicting customary activities or material culture. Yet despite Watling’s putative realism, his portrait of Colebee, whose face was “very thickly imprinted with the marks” of smallpox, reveals no evidence of the disease.²⁸ Watling’s own views on Aboriginal people, which were not sympathetic, are not evident in these portraits, which reflect instead the sentiments of his employer, John White.

The frontispiece to the second volume of Collins’s An account of the English colony … (1802), A Night Scene in the Neighbourhood of Sydney, probably also based on drawings by Watling, is a romantic depiction of a group of Aborigines peaceably enjoying themselves by the light of the moon. In his preface to the volume, Collins wrote, “It were to be wished, that they never had been seen in any other state than … in the happy and peaceable exercise of their freedom and amusements.” Watling’s more literate compositions locate Aboriginal people within the language of European painting, recalling genre images of the picturesque rural poor by artists like Richard Westall and Francis Wheatley while at the same time playing on the nostalgia of dispossession.

***

By 1800, as colonists expanded across the Cumberland Plains, occupied the Hawkesbury, and began pushing into the Hunter, the intense curiosity of the 1790s had dissipated significantly, reflecting the assumption that the colony was no longer an experiment, but rather a permanent and evolving settlement, and an increasingly valuable asset to the Empire, with an explicitly British character. When the merchant Richard Jones was asked in 1819 if it would be apparent to a visitor that Sydney was a convict town, he replied “No … if he kept from the Rock part of the town … he would rather regard himself as in some country town in England…”²⁹

From 1800 onwards art was largely commissioned from professional artists, who had arrived in the colony either as convicts or as free settlers. Colonists now looked for images by professional artists, which documented the progress and development of the colony, and its various satellite towns. Ironically there were most probably more artists in early nineteenth century Sydney than in comparable English towns. In the early 1800s convicts such as John Eyre, John Austin, Samuel Clayton, Joseph Lycett, Richard Browne, Philip Slaeger, Richard Read (Senior) and Francis Greenway were all working in the colony. They were competing with free artists such as John William Lewin, Richard Read (Junior) and George William Evans.

It was only well-appointed exploration voyages, like those of Nicolas Baudin’s Géographe or Matthew Flinders’ Investigator expeditions, that were supported by professional artists such as Ferdinand Bauer, William Westall, Nicolas-Martin Petit or Charles Lesueur, pursuing a discipline of comprehensive and systematic documentation, consciously compiled in conjunction with naturalists. The audiences for these works were European savants, intent on describing and naming the flora, fauna, peoples and landforms within European knowledge systems, and had little intersection with colonial experience.

Colonists could see beautiful or picturesque landscapes in NSW: early writers regularly commented on its picturesque vistas, or compared expanses of open country to a gentleman’s park, one of the highest accolades that could be bestowed upon a view. But colonial patrons were rarely interested in the picturesque, or the sublime. Instead they wanted art to celebrate the bricks and mortar of colonial progress, and a topographical aesthetic perfectly matched their purpose.

The topographical draughtsman, it was said, looked to capture “Every absurdity, as well as beauty [of a view so that a drawing of it hands] down to posterity that local and particular truth, which it is expressly his business and purpose to transmit.”³⁰ A topographical image was essentially about conveying specific information about a particular place, and it remained the dominant aesthetic for colonial landscape painting for the next three decades. It was a familiar pictorial language for colonists, who were conversant with it through the ubiquitous sets of topographical views of cities, towns, estates and counties which were readily available throughout England.

Other agendas also help circumscribe the making of colonial art: in a society in which convicts, class and authority were considered dangerously combustible, art was required to be compliant. The publisher Absalom West asked for, and was given, Governor Macquarie’s approval for a series of views he proposed to publish in 1814.³¹ While this publication did not eventuate, the fact that the Governor’s assent was sought suggests that colonial art was, at least in part, in the service of government.

Ironically it was the military who rebelled and their celebrations of the overthrow of Governor Bligh on 26 January 1808 quickly co-opted local artists: celebratory cartoons were drawn on walls inside public houses and pub signs erected outside, effigies burnt, buildings illuminated, and a small libellous watercolor drawing depicting Bligh being pulled from underneath a bed – the implication was entirely about cowardice – was publicly displayed in a house, perhaps the first time a work of art was presented for public exhibition in the colony.³² Such images only appeared in a time of unrest or tension: once the rebels themselves were in control these images disappeared.

Literal topographical views of the colony’s various settlements were offered by nearly all colonial artists. The focus on these views was largely on government buildings, such as St. Philips, First Government House at the head of Sydney Cove, or the Commissariat Building, all clear evidence of the progress of civil society in NSW. The neat and tidy Sydney in John Eyre’s c.1806 View of Sydney From the West Side of the Cove (Mitchell Library) seems a perfect antidote to the idea that the colony was a den of iniquity. The watercolor is both a comparatively faithful record of the town’s infrastructure and general topography, and a celebration, through its lush, green ambience, of its conformity to English towns.

Colonial artists very rarely tackled the landscape as a subject in of itself. George William Evans’s A View Near Grose Head, of 1809 (State Library of NSW), is one of the few images from this period to be simply about a landscape, with no evidence of European improvement, and which takes its compositional cues from increasingly fashionable prints of scenes of dramatic and picturesque raw nature (Figure 4.2).The watercolor may well have been commissioned by Lieut-Governor William Paterson, who had discovered the Grose River in 1793, and who returned to England in 1810 with a collection of images which documented his colonial career.

FIGURE 4.2. A view near Grose Head, New South Wales, 1809. For details please see Table 4.1.

Eyre was also a contributor to the 24 images of Absalom West’s Views in New South Wales, which West (a publisher rather than artist) issued between 1812 and 1814. John Lewin, and convict artists Richard Browne and Philip Slaeger also contributed plates for the publication, which traversed all the major sites of colonial development (with an emphasis on Sydney), and acknowledges the colony’s foundation history with the inclusion of a view of Botany Bay. The Sydney Gazette that noted that the prints were taken “off at a press constructed by a workman who had never before seen such a machine,” and were engraved by a “person who had many years been out of his profession.”³³

The bold clouds, the thick networks of engraved lines, the modest ambitions of the compositions, and the formulaic framing and staffage, of these plates, all typical of late eighteenth-century topographical views, confirm how easily the colony could slip into the familiar aesthetic of English imagery. Captain James Wallis, Commandant of the Newcastle settlement between 1816 and 1818, employed a similar aesthetic in his series of twelve views, which were engraved at Newcastle (allegedly on copper intended for the bottom of ships). Although Wallis claimed authorship of the views in the legends printed beneath them, at least six of them were in fact after drawings by Joseph Lycett (an indication in itself of the problematic status of a convict artist in the colony).³⁴ These line-engravings, which again concentrated on the colony’s major settlements, also embraced the ubiquitous and universal visual language of the British Empire. In the letterpress which was published with the London edition of the plates, An Historical account of the colony of New South Wales of 1821, Wallis affirmed that the plates were both a contemporary record of the colony and a document of history:

To those who are fond of tracing the progress of countries, and watching the advance of associated industry and ingenuity, these faithful representations of the incipient state of a Colony, which is in all probability destined … to become the mistress of the Southern Hemisphere … cannot but be particularly gratifying… [the engravings] offer the most striking proof of the unparalleled progress of this Colony … These glorious triumphs of colonization.³⁵

In 1820 Governor Macquarie sent Earl Bathurst a watercolor of Sydney by Lycett, which he described as “extremely correct” image, noting that he had not previously been able to get views “Painted to my satisfaction or Sufficiently well executed.”³⁶ For Macquarie these drawings were a more effective and immediate measurement of the success of his regime than any memorandum he could write to Bathurst. Macquarie also earlier sent Earl Bathurst more than ten large and elaborate watercolors, by John Lewin, of previously unknown birds, animals and plants brought back from John Oxley’s expeditions into the interior of the colony.³⁷ Illustrations of natural history curiosities were, for Macquarie, equally relevant as arguments for colonial progress and substance, with the added lustre, too, that such interesting natural history specimens were discovered by an expedition he had initiated.

It is perhaps surprising that Macquarie did not exploit John Lewin’s series of watercolors made on the Governor’s triumphal march across the Blue Mountains in 1815, given the significance of the Bathurst Plains to the future of the colony. Lewin’s vision, shaped by his training as a natural history illustrator, was determinedly literal, despite the selection of views in the 15 surviving watercolors being decided by Macquarie’s enthusiasm for dramatic or picturesque vistas or views encountered on the expedition. Lewin’s capacity to capture the form and texture of the bush the expedition passed through could not be rivalled by other colonial artists at the time. Yet when the French expedition artist, Alphonese Pellion published in 1822 his view of Cox’s Pass, Passage de Cox dans les Montagnes-Bleues, creates an image of picturesque grandeur. By contrast, Lewin’s plain watercolor of the road does not celebrate the achievement of its construction in the same way that Pellion does. It is a much more modest image with little sense of the drama of the road, and is more aligned to his training as an illustrator.³⁸

Intriguingly, Macquarie’s most significant act of patronage involved Government House which he appears to have had decorated with paintings of Aboriginal people and natural history specimens. An 1815 visitor described its interior as “spacious and well fitt’d up with drawings of full length representations of the original Natives & their Customs, likewise representations in full size of different kinds of Fish and Birds peculiar to the Country.”³⁹ The centerpiece was unquestionably Lewin’s 15 feet by 18 feet painting of a corrobboree [Aboriginal dance ceremony], painted in 1812 (now lost), which according to Macquarie hung in the dining room. Its ambition was rhetorical rather than ethnographic (although the figures were said to be from life), with a design which was “symbolical of the Christian religion inviting [Aboriginal people] to happiness.” The design reflected the Macquaries’ belief in the importance of Christianity in resolving the purported disadvantage of Aboriginal people: “calm Religion’s genuine Voice” pouring “into darken’d Minds her lucid Rays” as Michael Massey Robinson put it, in his Ode for the Queen’s Birth Day, 1811, which was a possible inspiration for the composition.⁴⁰ Displaying Aboriginal “primitiveness” within the epicenter of colonial administration was an implicit contrast to the opportunities offered by Christianity and colonization: these paintings illustrated the base from which English civilization would lift them.

Corroborees intrigued Europeans. The dramatic plate Corrobborree or Dance of the Natives of New South Wales – in Wallis’s An historical account of the colony of NSW – was a savage counterpoint to the triumphs of civilization. Wallis noted that “the beauty of the scenery, the pleasing reflection of the light from the fire round which they dance, the grotesque and singular appearance of the savages, and their wild notes of festivity” contrasted with anything ever witnessed in “civilized society”.⁴¹ This plate, and its large companion oil, Corrobboree at Newcastle (Dixson Galleries), were both the work of Lycett. While the oil is explicitly romantic with its cloudy moonlight over Nobby’s Head, trees illuminated from below by the many fires, and allusions to the work of Lycett’s fellow English Midlander artist Joseph Wright of Derby, it is also thoroughly documentary, recording in detail various dances and ceremonies, even if some would not have been performed near others or even publicly. Lycett was a careful observer, whose watercolors, prints and paintings of Awabakal culture are well detailed. Indeed Shane Frost argues that Lycett’s major series of 20 watercolors largely of Newcastle, now known as the Lycett Album (National Library of Australia), must have been created with the co-operation of the Awabakal people, given his apparently easy access to their ceremonies and traditional cultural practices.⁴²

However for most of the early decades of the nineteenth century, Aboriginal people were moved to the margins of images, or in canoes on the harbor, but now rarely, unless painted by exploring expedition artists framing them as ethnographic objects, in the center of images as subjects in their own right. Their apparent absence is perhaps an inverse reaction to the violence and conflict on the boundaries of European expansion. Judge Barron Field described this de-centering in the 1820s as giving a “locality to the land, [whose] honest naked simplicity affords a relief to the eye from the hypocritical lour of the yellow-clad convict”.⁴³ The 1790s interest in portraits of individuals, and documentation of traditional life, did not carry on into the nineteenth century.

It was really only in the late 1810s that images of Aboriginal people became commercially available through convict artist Richard Browne. Browne had been sent to Newcastle in 1811, and returned to Sydney in 1817. During his time in Newcastle he made a series of portraits of mainly Awabakal and Worimi people. These portraits appear to verge on caricature, which is how they were often read, but they also focused on the careful delineation of material culture. They present as a mixture of ethnography and caricature, which was in part exacerbated by Browne’s limited capacity for figure drawing. Essentially a purveyor of tourist pictures, Browne maintained a stock range of about ten images of Aboriginal people, as well as animals like kangaroos and emus, from which patrons could select copies: multiples of these now held in collections around the world. These were either images of generic curiosity, similar to the many plate books illustrating exotic native costumes published in Europe in the nineteenth century, fetishizing the difference, or illustrations with a moral or social purpose: the missionary William Walker Browne, for example, sent Browne’s Bruair to colleagues in London as a “representation of female wretchedness” that required their support.⁴⁴

The first free artist to migrate to New South Wales was the 30-year-old natural history illustrator and printmaker John William Lewin, who set out for NSW, according to his brother, so that his illustrations could be drawn “on the spot, and not from dry specimens, or notes still more abstruse.”⁴⁵ Lewin arrived in Sydney in 1800 and died in the town in 1819. He noted that his first challenge was that “everything was contrary to known knowledge in England.”⁴⁶

Perhaps it was this difficulty that propelled Lewin’s sudden stylistic development. Within months of arriving in Sydney his insects and birds are depicted in their natural environments, and composed dynamically, with the supporting foliage – often laid down in bold diagonals – occupying the page to its edges. Vegetation is as carefully detailed as the subject itself. His White-naped honeyeater (NLA) of 1800, with the xanthorrhoea flower bisecting the middle of the page from top to bottom, is nothing like his previous and more conventional European work, and was an entirely original design solution. It was a truly significant break with the traditions in which he had been trained, and anticipates the work of artists like John James Audubon or John Gould.

Lewin’s ambition was to publish illustrated natural history books, and his first years in NSW were spent preparing Prodromus Entomology; or, a natural history of the lepidopterous insects of New South Wales (London, 1805) and Birds of New Holland (London, 1808), neither of which did well in a European market depressed by the Napoleonic wars: and indeed copies of Birds of New Holland were probably destroyed in transit from London to Sydney. His third attempt at publishing, Birds of New South Wales, was printed in Sydney in 1813 by the Government Printer, George Howe. This edition, the first illustrated book published in Australia, was compiled from rejected plates from Birds of New Holland, and only thirteen copies have survived. Its basic text betrays Lewin’s inability to write the new language of science, but the dynamic quality of its plates, and the specificity of his observations, reveals his strength as a natural history illustrator.

By 1810, Lewin seems to have abandoned any idea of serial publishing or illustration. Instead he turned in part (he also offered art classes, opened a general store, and ran a public house) to larger scale watercolors of well-known exotic or curious plants and animals, designed to be hung on a wall rather than to sit in a portfolio. Subjects included platypuses, Gymea lilies, waratahs [small trees], swamp lilies and brush turkeys: but they were “more for Show, than for Correctness”, as one contemporary described them, and were perfectly suited to colonists more interested in curiosity than science.⁴⁷

Perhaps the most splendid celebration of colonial natural history were Captain James Wallis’s two Collector’s Chests (both now held in the State Library of NSW). Wallis commissioned the chests, and strategically gifted one to Governor Macquarie. The chests, decorated with painted panels, were inspired by military campaign furniture. Stuffed with locally collected birds, insects, shells and coral, the specimens were carefully arranged in spectacularly colorful patterns in specially-built drawers. The paintings on panels of the chests, mainly views of and around the settlement of Newcastle, were executed by Joseph Lycett. The largest painting, on the two flaps of the uppermost internal box, depict an arrangement of local fish, arranged very much like a still life portrait of dead game, such as one might see in any number of English country houses.⁴⁸ Lewin had also painted Fish Catch at Dawes Point (Art Gallery of South Australia), a similar, though larger and independent image, probably made around the same time. These celebrations of natural history were very much part of the cultural colonization of NSW, in which nature was co-opted into a representation of the colony as engagingly exotic and ultimately desirable country.

For Wallis, the Chests encapsulated his Newcastle experiences: in a brief memoir of his time at the settlement, Wallis reflected on his pleasure in living at Newcastle, his friendship with Burigon, the leader of the local Awabakal people, and his delight in fishing and kangaroo hunting – very much the pursuits of an English gentleman. Wallis recalled the thrill of the chase, the accumulation of trophies, and the brotherhood of the hunt, although in this case the companions “ministering to my pleasures” were “an honest and brave Scotch Sergeant” and the “King of Newcastle”, Burigon. Lycett perhaps included these two men in his Inner View of Newcastle, ca.1818 (Newcastle Art Gallery), as a kind of biographical signature for Wallis, who remembered Burigon “with more kindly feelings than I do of many of my own color, kindred & nation,” a sentiment which suggests the complexity of indigenous relations, given Wallis’s complicity in the Appin massacre of 1816.⁴⁹

By the 1820s, it seems that the inventiveness and ambition of the sorts of unique responses to colonial life typified by Wallis’s patronage had dissipated, becoming more conventional and contemporary. Colonists, for example, were early adopters of the idea of the panorama. In 1820 Alexander Riley, merchant and substantial landholder, argued that

… it has long been a subject of our consideration in this Country that a Panorama exhibited in London of the Town of Sydney and surrounding Scenery would create much public interest and ultimately be of service to the Colony…⁵⁰

When Robert Burford’s panorama of Sydney was launched in London, in 1828, after drawings made by Augustus Earle, colonists were clear about its value as a political and economic manifesto, and as a prominent investment prospectus. The South East Asian Register of October 1827 offered “the thanks of the community, as their political friend.” Panoramas were read by contemporaries as a short-hand for mimetic truthfulness, yet the ambiguity of Sydney’s origins persistently undermined that authority. The Times, of 28 December 1828, wondered how Burford’s panorama of Sydney could illustrate one of the “finest spots in the universe” when by a “by a strange inconsistency” it was also the receptacle “of the very dregs of society.”

The three plates of Major James Taylor’s aquatint panorama [The Town of Sydney, New South Wales], published in London in 1821, took Sydney into the nineteenth century world of the fashionably toned aquatint. Taylor’s busy composition, full of anecdote and detail, celebrated the success of a military town. The very masculine world depicted (there are only two women in the three prints) centers on the Military Hospital (now the SH Ervin Gallery on Observatory Hill). Behind the Hospital, bathed in a golden light symbolic of the town’s virtue, is Sydney itself. Those troubling convicts are present, but are working productively, or sleeping compliantly, in the margins, just like rural laborers in English fields. This was all reassuring evidence of the conformity of Sydney to the idea of a typical English town, where criminals and the lower classes knew their place.

On the other hand, Joseph Lycett’s best known work, Views in Australia, issued in London in parts between 1824 and 1825 illustrated both NSW and Tasmania in 50 plates. It is unclear how much involvement Lycett actually had in its creation or direction in London: its subject matter suggests that the Riley family, who had proposed a panorama in 1820, possibly helped shape its content, as three of their properties are illustrated. Views in Australia celebrated the colony’s potential for pastoral development, the growth and sophistication of its built infrastructure and the beauty of its landscapes. This coalition of interests was unique but, like the Taylor panorama, was very much designed to promote the colony as a valuable addition to the Empire, and a potential site of investment. That Views in Australia now included images chosen for their inherent beauty, rather than any productive or utilitarian purpose, and for their ability to conform to the aesthetics of desirable European landscapes indicates, too, how colonization was not only the physical subjugation of the landscape, but its intellectual and imaginative occupation as well.⁵¹

The 1820s was a transitional decade for NSW, in which its sense of self-identity and belief crystallized into certainty that the colony would soon be a free and independent member of the British Empire. The emphasis on curious natural history dissipated. By the end of the 1820s, the portrait painter Richard Read Junior, who arrived in 1819 and at first advertised landscapes, natural history drawings and Indigenous portraits, had limited his oeuvre virtually exclusively to European portraiture.

The most interesting colonial artist of this period, Augustus Earle, arrived in Sydney in late 1825. An English-trained and well-traveled flâneur of peripheral cultures, Earle’s insightful observations of the peoples and places he encountered on his travels suggest his deep curiosity in people and their lives, which manifested itself in boldly designed and composed watercolors. Earle’s enjoyment in the documentation of everyday life, from bushranging to views of towns and landscapes always prominently inhabited by people, was a marked break with the conventional formality of depictions of the colony up until that time.

In the three years Earle spent in Sydney his portraits were commissioned by the colonial elite. Subjects included Governor Thomas Brisbane and the leading colonial official Captain John Piper and his wife (Piper argued for his own family’s social pre-eminence by commissioning his portraits at the same size as the Governor’s). Earle opened Sydney’s first gallery, taught art and published the first pictorial lithographs in Australia. While his formal oil portraits lack character, his watercolors were sensitive and finely observed. His portrait, for example, of Desmond (National Library of Australia), an Awabakal or Worimi man, is perhaps one of the finest early nineteenth century colonial portraits, deeply imbued with life and insight.

Few other colonial artists tackled the subject of convicts quite as directly as Earle in his lithograph A Government Jail Gang N.S. Wales, published in London in 1830. The lithograph was in part inspired by ubiquitous illustrations of street portraits of the urban poor and their unusual occupations.⁵² The exaggerated criminal physiognomy of Earle’s convicts locates them squarely within contemporary representations of the English underclass.

Earle’s records of Aboriginal life could be either richly and sympathetically observed, like his exceptional portrait of Desmond, or tough, as with Natives of N.S. Wales as Seen on the Streets of Sydney, also published in London. In text describing this plate Earle attributes the circumstances of Aboriginal people to “the Whites locating so much [of their] land [which] has destroyed their hunting grounds and means of subsistence.”⁵³ Earle well may have intended a dig at colonists by setting this view of Aboriginal dissolution outside a European pub, but most of his audience would have read the image in the context of English street literature and robust graphic art, which dissolved the issues of urban poverty into grotesque or picturesque subject matter.

Earle, always quick to capitalize on commercial opportunities, issued a single lithograph (based on an oil painting now in the National Library of Australia) of Bungaree in August 1826, the first portrait lithograph published in Australia. Bungaree was the best known indigenous person in Sydney – indeed more portraits were made of him than any other individual in the first half of the nineteenth century – who was considered both an entertaining novelty and, unsettlingly for Europeans, a leader of his people and a skilled negotiator with colonists. Again Earle positions Bungaree in the familiar visage of an urban underclass: his extravagant gesture and ragged clothes corresponds to those of popular press images of London beggars. Yet Earle does not ridicule Bungaree. His perceptive observation of Bungaree’s face retrieves his humanity.

Colonists read Earle’s presence in the colony as evidence of its emerging cultural maturity. “The fine arts,” said the Sydney Gazette, “may seem a misnomer for foul arts, when applied to this Colony. … Forty years is a period in which Britons can work wonders. The Muses and Graces are not inimical to our Southern Climes…”⁵⁴ Earle in many ways marked a transition in colonial art, from illustrations of the exotic to expressions of urban society like any town in England.

The capacity to commission a work of art expanded significantly in the 1830s as artists and artisans arrived in the colony, keen to exploit the new markets emerging as a result of the rapid growth of its population. These markets were now looking, too, for the sorts of popular imagery found in any English town: images of celebrities or murderers, disasters, new buildings or major sporting events. John Gardiner Austin, a entrepreneurial lithographer and publisher, brought presses and capital to Sydney when he emigrated to Sydney in 1834: he quickly commissioned local artists, like Charles Rodius and Robert Russell, to publish with him. Conrad Martens, a landscape artist, arrived in 1835, William Nicholas arrived in 1836, as did lithographer and profile artist, William Fernyhough. Maurice Felton, a talented portrait painter, arrived in Sydney in 1839, and found an immediate market for his work. Watercolor landscape painter John Skinner Prout brought his family to Sydney in 1840. Increasingly, too, artists whose training was entirely colonial began producing work. Samuel Elyard, Frederick Garling, Edwin Winstanely and Thomas Balcombe, for example, all arrived in Australia as boys and must have learned their craft in the colony.

But the money was not in landscape painting, the indicator by which the success of colonial art is now often judged: in May 1847 John Rae attributed some of John Skinner Prout’s financial difficulties to his being a landscape painter:

William Nicholas [a watercolor portrait painter] has more work than he can possibly manage . He is making at the rate of from £500 to £600 a year … Our vanity too favours the portrait painter. We willingly pay for our likeness when we would not think of laying out money for a beautiful landscape.⁵⁵

Rae’s sentiments were echoed in Heads of the People, a locally-published illustrated magazine (1847–1848) which modeled itself on an earlier English magazine of the same name, known for its humorous portraits of all classes of society – in the Sydney version watercolor portrait painter William Nicholas contributed lithographic pen sketches of Sydney identities, from the Governor to publicans, artists, teachers and civil servants. Heads of the People claimed that with local patrons “self predominates in the orders given for portraits, ships, and ‘my horse’, and ‘my house’ . . vanity pays for these at a reasonable rate.”⁵⁶

Local artists addressed local needs. Fine art could be sourced from local auction houses which imported paintings into the colony, along with reproductive engravings of modern British artists: indeed these were the kinds of images that graced the walls of most middle-class homes in Sydney, rather than locally created art. The catalogues to the Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts exhibitions of 1847 and 1849 reveal substantial collections of putative old masters, the majority of whose attributions were sceptically appraised by contemporary reviewers. Nonetheless the moral virtue of art continued to be asserted by colonists, who argued that these exhibitions showed:

that notwithstanding their distance from the centre of refinement, and science, and art … the sons of Britain still carry with them the tastes and the habits of their fathers, preserve their paintings like household gods … and it will show our friends in the other hemisphere, more than our largest amount of exports and imports, that our city has advanced with a giant’s strides to the proud position with she holds as the Queen of the Southern Seas – the metropolis of a new world.⁵⁷

Yet it was to landscape painting that the greatest importance and moral value were ascribed. The Australian, for instance, was delighted to note in July 1835 that Conrad Martens had recently arrived in Sydney and that his abilities were “first rate. He is wandering, we are informed, in search of the picturesque.”⁵⁸ Martens was a gentleman artist who found a ready market amongst the colonial elite for his sophisticated images: as Elizabeth Ellis notes, his client base was largely comprised of landowners, senior government officials and merchants, while his subjects were concentrated on mountain wildernesses, Sydney Harbour, houses within landscapes and views from his South Pacific voyages.⁵⁹

The success of Martens, before the recession of the early 1840s bankrupted many of his patrons, was the consequence of his aligning his work to the interests of colonists who wanted to see their landholdings or properties ennobled by the overlay of a patina of the picturesque. Martens, however, did not see himself as deliberating obfuscating the truth: rather he genuinely considered his work a truthful response to nature, which was built upon a foundation of accurate observation of Australian topography and vegetation. His 1837 watercolor View of Trevallyn, a property in the upper-Hunter, exemplifies this approach. Commissioned by its pastoralist owner George Townshend, the watercolor centers on the Trevallyn homestead. Trevallyn is depicted through a readily recognizable formula, commonly used for English estate portraiture, to signify productive and valuable landscapes, and easily decoded by Townshend’s peers.

John Skinner Prout, only four years younger than Martens, was another landscape artist who sought to improve his circumstances by emigrating to Sydney (with his large family) in 1840. Prout’s style was more modern than Martens’, being higher toned and lighter, but like Martens, he painted the harbor and scenes of the interior of NSW. Unlike Martens, Prout was entrepreneurial and active in Sydney’s nascent art community. He lectured on art to the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Art, tried to initiate an art exhibition, published single prints, and launched an important series of lithographic views of Sydney, called Sydney Illustrated (1842–1844). Prout did not encroach upon Martens’ clients: instead his audience was the town’s middle-class immigrants who wanted to see their urban experience reflected in imagery they purchased.

Sydney Illustrated was a shared venture with John Rae, a public servant, amateur artist, and art critic, who wrote its letter press. Rae described Sydney Illustrated as a “faithful representation of the varied and beautiful scenery which nature has scattered around the metropolis of New South Wales,” and confessed that the Harbour was the “chief object of illustration.”⁶⁰ Although the beauty of the harbor had been recognized from the first days of the colony, the sophisticated picturesque vision of Prout and Martens, with predictable techniques and motifs, demonstrated a comfortable familiarity with the harbor and its foreshores, in contrast with the earlier emphasis on the moral virtue of the town’s government, military and civic buildings, centered around Sydney Cove.

There is no attempt to create a sense of the exotic. Gone is the procession of “typical” vegetation across the foregrounds of earlier views. This was replaced with fences, goats, and broken gateposts, part of an international idiom found in views published around the world. In many ways the 14 plates of Sydney Illustrated reflects the broad reality – allowing of course for regional differences – of most English towns. Sydney was, said Rae, “a miniature copy of the English metropolis” where one spoke English with English people who behaved as English people should. Visitors looked for a prison, but beheld a palace.⁶¹ For Rae, the real significance of Sydney Illustrated work was clear. It documented the transformation of Sydney “not by magic, but by the magical influence of European enterprise, into a large and populous commercial city – the queen of the southern seas.”⁶²

Unfortunately Prout’s enterprise and energy were not enough to support him in Sydney and in January 1844 he moved to Tasmania in the “hope of bettering his fortune.”⁶³ Hobart was no more conducive to business than Sydney, and in 1848, Prout returned with his family to London.

The prolific George Edwards Peacock similarly illustrated the harbor as a place of urban pleasure and beauty. A convict who arrived in Sydney in 1837, Peacock developed a niche in house portraits, but he also painted high-toned, jewel-like portraits of the harbor such as his 1847 Port Jackson. N.S.W. View in Double Bay (Dixson Galleries) (Figure 4.3). By the 1840s Sydney represented itself through the pleasurable beauty of its harbor and its villas, as much as it did through the quality of its public buildings or churches.

FIGURE 4.3. Neddy Noora/Shoalhaven/Shoalhaven Tribe. For details please see Table 4.1.

Intriguingly, the stationer, printer and engraver, James Grocott, wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald in May 1847 to claim that in the previous three years he had sold 957 pictures, of which 830 had been of colonial origin.⁶⁴ The majority of these were probably watercolors, such as the Mitchell Library’s The Assault and Capture or Kawati’s Pah or Shipping Horses, both of which have printed labels affixed to their bottom edge, sourcing them to “JT Grocott. Printseller” of 476 George Street.⁶⁵ These images were not cast in the sophisticated language of a Martens or Prout, but rather service a local demand for images of record for events which sat outside the accepted range of subjects generally considered suitable for art. Grocott, however, also promoted local artists through art unions or lotteries. The leading artists of his third Art Union are now barely remembered. Thomas Balcombe’s Two Australian Stockmen on Horseback was the main prize, while his Australian Aboriginal was also offered. Henry Robinson Smith’s Punt at Penrith and First Love were also on the prize list. Peacock contributed a view of Buttermere Lake, while Joseph Dennis’s prize work was Lot and his family leaving Sodom. Balcombe’s Aboriginal in Pursuit of Game, although apparently ineligible for the art union itself, was singled out, described as the “best colonial painting that has come under our notice.”⁶⁶

Colonial artists turned colonial life into art: rarely high art – that was imported – but always relevant to colonists. Remembering the local boxers Ned Chalker and George Hough, John Benson Martin recalled “their portraits by [John] Carmichael, [Charles] Rodius, and Tom Balcombe, figured in all the principal hotels in Sydney.”⁶⁷ These were the sorts of commissions a contemporary art theoretician would have rejected as unworthy subjects, but which were bread and butter to provincial artists.

Portraiture sustained many artists. As the British artist Benjamin Robert Haydon noted in 1817, portraiture was “one of the staple manufactures of the empire. Wherever the British settle, wherever they colonize, they carry and will ever carry trial by jury, horse-racing, and portrait-painting.”⁶⁸ When an art exhibition was held in Parramatta in 1847, it was calculated that one eighth of the 400 entries were portraits, and of those nine tenths were of “parties unknown.” The Sydney Morning Herald further calculated that the majority of these were by William Griffith, a Parramatta-based artist who was known for beautifully executed crayon portraits in the “French style.” The Herald described them as “admirable likenesses” but regretted that Griffith did not employ himself more honorably by pursuing more refined genres of art.⁶⁹ His earlier Portrait Club, based in Parramatta’s Australian Arms Hotel and which facilitated clients paying for their portraits by instalments, is, however, an indication of the reality of making a living as an artist.⁷⁰

The sophistication of Maurice Felton, however, who arrived in Sydney in 1839 and died there in 1842, appealed to Sydney’s leading families. Felton was well-patronized during his brief time in Sydney, in part because of his ability to impart a dynastic gravitas to his paintings. The Sydney Herald saw his work as evidence that the colony was moving beyond its “money-getting and money-loving character” to the conspicuous cultivation of the arts.⁷¹ Richard Read Junior, on the other hand, prolifically attended to the needs of the middle and lower middle classes. His simple watercolor portraits concentrated as much on the materiality of dress and its detail, as the subject’s face: no doubt these appealed to Sydney’s urban audiences who preferred (and could only afford) simple statements of success rather than the more complex and rhetorical portraiture of Felton.

Joseph Backler, a convict portrait painter, appealed to another and quite distinct market, working almost exclusively with successful tradesmen, publicans and farmers. Backler, who was one of the nineteenth century’s most prolific oil painters, developed a style of robust realism in his portraiture in the mid-1840s, which left viewers in little doubt of the class position of his subjects. Viewers would have known that a middle-class person, familiar with the improving potential of portraiture, would not have agreed to be so honestly depicted. For many of Backler’s clients, however, these were probably the first portraits their families had ever commissioned.

While the opportunities colonists had to commission art expanded significantly during the 1830s and 1840s, so too did the range of locally produced prints and lithographs responding to local events. For many colonists, the local print culture was their principal source of contact with colonial artists. In part prints were an easy way to explain colonial topography and towns to a European audience – reviews of views invariably suggested that they “might form an acceptable present to family and friends at home” – equally many were made for the increasingly urbanized colonists, who rarely saw Aboriginal people, had never gone upcountry or visited a goldfield, or who were keen for a print of a sensational murderer, local dignitary, new church or caricature of a current political situation. Indeed when the Australian Sporting Magazine presented its readers in January 1851 with an engraving of a bush scene, A Squatters Head station, which was “drawn from nature”, it hoped it would “as a delineation of scenery not generally known to our town subscribers, be deemed an acceptable addition to our list of local illustrations.”⁷²

Colonial printmakers took familiar English provincial practices and translated them into local circumstances. The four lithographs of The Five Dock Grand Steeple Chase, produced by Thomas Balcombe and Edward Winstanley in 1844, were modeled on popular English sporting prints, and its composition, although allegedly an eyewitness account, owed more to the English artist Henry Alken’s popular series of four aquatints The First Steeple Chase on Record of 1803, than it did to the actual observation of the race itself.

Printmakers did of course respond to unique local circumstances. Aboriginal people remained a constant interest to Sydneysiders, despite their lack of visibility to most people. The idea of Aboriginal people as emblematic of Australia, and its pre-colonization past, was persistent. There was a sense of widespread curiosity about their customs and culture, and an interest in locating them within a hierarchy of human achievement and considering their capacity to be “civilized”. Most Europeans viewed Aboriginal people with either outright hostility or a sense of obligation to convert them and bring them into the folds of the Church and civilization. Newspapers regularly reported on the issues of frontier conflict, while most books about the colonies included substantial descriptions of Aboriginal lives and customs, of vastly varying degrees of reliability.

But both Charles Rodius, a well-trained and accomplished convict artist, and William Fernyhough, a lithographer and profile artist, saw the marketability of images of Aboriginal people, and published portrait series in the mid-1830s. Rodius’s seven lithographic portraits, issued in 1834, were skilful, sensitive images, and very much counter to prevailing prejudices about the dissoluteness of Aboriginal lives. Neddy Noora’s neat clothing and careful grooming, for instance, was evidence of a capacity for refinement (Figure 4.4). It was said that these views were “much sought for by travellers”.⁷³ William Fernyhough, on the other hand, compiled A series of twelve profile portraits of the Aborigines of New South Wales, which was published in 1836. Fernyhough’s full length portraits were much less sympathetic drawings than Rodius’s, with the subjects dressed in rags, and faces shown in dehumanizing silhouette. Though never explicitly stated, it is likely that Fernyhough’s silhouettes would have been carefully scrutinized by adherents of the pseudo-science of phrenology, who argued that the shape of a person’s skull determined their cognitive and moral capacities. A leading phrenological theorist, George Coombs, declared for example that “New Hollanders, cannot, with their present brains, adopt European civilization.”⁷⁴ Yet the lithographs were also reviewed positively. The Sydney Times declared them “entitled to praise as being for the most part striking profile likenesses of our sable townsmen and are well executed. They will form a pretty present to friends in England, as characteristic of this country.”⁷⁵ The number of copies of these publications which have survived suggests that colonists valued them. Their success also reinforces the diversity of colonial visual representations, and the points at which most colonists engaged with colonial artists.

FIGURE 4.4. Port Jackson. N.S.W. view in Double Bay. For details please see Table 4.1.

The arc of colonial art across the first 60 or so years of colonization is a thus complex narrative, reflecting the heterogenous nature of colonial experience. From the discoveries of the first artists, to the emergence of an urban imagery reflecting the rapid growth of British provincial society, visual culture in NSW was shaped as much by the circumstances of the establishment of the colony as by the capacity of its artists. It is, ultimately, the story of how an ancient land became Australia.