Painting

Always on the lookout for those rare early paintings of Brisbane, Kevin Lambkin located a highly accomplished oil of a Brisbane River scene at auction in Sydney in 2024. The painting was simply signed ‘Huston’, a name unknown to Kevin and to the painting’s Sydney auction cataloguer who suggested a New Zealand artist. The 1930s style of the painting’s original frame was a starting point for an intensive search of Trove. ‘Huston’ was Wyclif Emmanuel Huston, a highly talented youth from a dairy farm on Queensland’s Darling Downs whose art was much acclaimed in Queensland in the 1930s. His promising future, however, was interrupted by the war and after army service and moving to Melbourne his name virtually disappears from the record of Australian artists. Was he, as art historian the late Glenn Cooke suggested, yet another artistic casualty of World War II?

Early Queensland artworks have interested Dr Kevin Lambkin over many years. He would occasionally see at auctions and antique shops attractive watercolours of unidentified rural homesteads signed ‘F Whitehouse’. Whitehouse was one of those obscure artists about whom very little was recorded, although the State Library of Queensland held his intriguing portrait of a First Nations Australian man from Booubyjan Station in south-east Queensland. The question of who he was and his work as an artist in Queensland, however, came to the fore in February 2025, when Kevin located a large oil painting of the BrisbaneRiver valley town of Esk, signed by Whitehouse and dated 1927. The size and ambition of the painting of the township, and the perceptiveness of the painting of the Booubyjan man, encouraged him to explore and tell Whitehouse’s story.

In the August 2020 issue of Australiana, we wrote an article on the amateur watercolourist, James Coutts Crawford (1817–1889), an Englishman who visited Australia in 1845–46 and rented ‘ForestLodge’, an early colonial house in Glebe... Later he moved to New Zealand, where he became sheriff of Wellington, dying in London on a visit ‘home’. In Glebe, he painted several local landscape scenes that included some early identifiable buildings as well as some in the country areas he visited. While these watercolours are not of great artistic merit, Coutts Crawford’s views and panoramas record and complement the early colonial history of one of Sydney’s oldest suburbs. In June this year we alerted that more of his watercolours were in an upcoming Melbourne auction sale.

Unusually for an artist, Ada Whitingnee Cherry (1859 –1953) was a celebrated success in her lifetime.1In 1900, the first time she submitted a portrait miniature to the Royal Academy in London, it was hung ‘onthe line’ – a small work needs to be exhibited at eye level. Remarkable for a‘colonial’, a female, a first submission, and the first Tasmanian-born artist tobe exhibited at the RA! The same year, Ada exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Hibernian and the Paris Salon to considerable acclaim.

Ken Orchard, James Ashton, Artist of the Fleurieu Coast. Royal South Australian Society ofArts, Adelaide 2025. Soft cover,95 pages 29 x 21 cm. Exhibitioncatalogue, all paintings and objectsillustrated, chronology, bibliography.$30, available only at the RSASA,Institute Building,North Terrace, Adelaide.

The Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth) visited Australia to open our new Commonwealth Parliament in Canberra in 1927. On their royal tour, the Duke and Duchess briefly stopped at Castlemaine station in April 1927, met by an enthusiastic crowd.

Vida Lahey is a well-regarded Queensland artist who exhibited in 33 solo exhibitions beginning in 1902. More recent interest in women artists rekindled interest in her works. Glenn Cooke reveals a project to document Lahey’s output and seeks the help of collectors in this task.

Leading colonial artist? Or leading early 19th-century British artist working in the colony of Van Diemen’s Land? Clearly the latter. Ron Radford, John Glover, Patterdale Farm and the Revelation of the Australian Landscape reveals how John Glover (1767–1849), a leading artist in the British watercolour movement of the 1790s – c 1815, relocated to the Antipodes aged 64 in 1831 and found a new vision, provoked by the piercing Tasmanian light, the Tasmanian landscape and charismatic subject matter.

Brisbane painter and art teacher Mary E. Jones has escaped recognition for 130 years. She would not be alone in that fate: over time, many aspiring painters and their works disappear from history. Timothy Roberts reveals some details about Miss Jones’s career and her impact as a woman artist in Brisbane between 1887 and 1891, as well as her major career achievement – organising the first exhibition of works by women artists in Queensland.

Paintings on gum leaves are a unique Australian tradition, which began in the 1850s or 1860s and still continues today. The earliest practitioner recorded is Arthur William Eustace (1820–1907), who was born in England and arrived in Victoria with his family in 1851. He found work as a shepherd near Chiltern in northern Victoria. While minding sheep, he took with him a box of oil paints and paint brushes, and painted bush scenes on the oval gum leaves of red and white box trees found locally.

English painter John Glover once owned two Italian landscapes by the French painter known as Claude Lorrain. Claude's work prompted artists and tourists to view landscape in terms of art, so they would often look at 'Picturesque' scenery reflected in a tinted convex mirror known as a ‘Claude glass’, simulating the golden hue of old varnish. Glover used such a tool and owned two paintings by Claude, which influenced the way he painted; they are now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Glynnis Stevenson looks at the two Claude paintings that Glover owned in England, comparing the Claudes with several copies of them Glover executed in England and later in Tasmania.

Artists in early Australia were usually trained in Britain and Europe in the Classical tradition going back to ancient Greece and Rome. David Hansen explores the possibility that, in the composition of his paintings created in Van Diemen’s Land, Benjamin Duterrau was influenced by Renaissance and Classical models he had seen in London.

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, workshop and guild traditions were based on the principle of emulation, with apprentices learning by copying the works of their masters. In painting, the practice was gradually regularised and systematised in the curricula of emergent national academies of art, beginning at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, and in Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s program at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris.

A small watercolour painting reveals remarkable similarities between the 1919 pandemic and that of our times.

Between arriving in Hobart Town as a convict on 3 August 1831 and the last evidence of his residing in Van Diemen’s Land in 1847, Meshach Stevens painted a very competent copy of a famous print after William John Huggins titled Northern Whale Fishery, published in London in 1829 (plate 1).1 For almost a century, Stevens’ painting has been in the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, acquired in 1927 from the collection of photographer John Watt Beattie (1859–1930).

John Roy Eldershaw (1892–1973) was a landscape artist who worked primarily in watercolours. During his lifetime, he was proclaimed to be ‘destined to leave unmistakable footprints in the sands of time’. In 1973 Sir Erik Langker, the arts administrator and influential member of the Sydney arts establishment, believed Eldershaw posthumously ‘would be remembered as one of Australia’s most outstanding painters’.

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794–1847) was early colonial Australia’s most sophisticated and glamourising portraitist. The current exhibition, Paradise Lost – Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) features 40 works by Wainewright together with contextual works by Blake, Fuseli, von Holst and a raft of Old Master prints known to have been in Wainewright’s collection.

Dr Erickson concludes her story of the professional women artists who commenced working in Western Australia before World War I. All were born in South Australia or England, coming to Western Australia later, most as young adults and often with other family members. Their careers began in the heady years of the women’s movement, when women won the right to vote, and middle-class women began to take their place working in professions other than homemaking. Some continued working well into the 20th century.

Continuing our story of the women artists working in Western Australia before World War I, we will now turn to three ‘Angels’ who came, saw and conquered, but did not stay. They were all single, peripatetic, somewhat bohemian and left their mark in several societies. Marie Anne Tuck (1866–1947); Florence Ada Fuller (1867–1946); Artist-painter-decorator Kathleen Laetitia O’Connor, known as Kate, was born in 1876 at Hokitika in New Zealand to engineer Charles Yelverton O’Connorand his wife Susan Laetitia; Daisy Walder.

This darling little painting came into the possession of a friend – a friend with a very good eye. It came with no provenance, but it has since revealed a South Australian story. This is a tale of changing fortunes, one that spans the scope of Victorian society from servant, Cambridge scholar, muleteer, gardener and aristocrat. As with any Victorian drama, along the way there is tragedy, triumph and tension – a horrifying snake incident and an embarrassment. Above all, the house in the painting tells of colonial hope and mettle.

The State Library of New South Wales recently purchased a rare original ornithological watercolour by Elizabeth Gould (1804–1841), formerly in the collection of the late James Fairfax AC. This adds to the collection of manuscript letters and other original materials the Library has acquired relating to this important illustrator, one closely linked to Australia through her work with her husband John, as well as through her family. David Hansen tells the story of the artist and the work.

In 1832, John Gould produced A Century of birds from the Himalaya Mountains, the plates ‘drawn from nature and on stone by E. Gould’, and five years later, five volumes on the birds of Europe with 448 lithographic plates, most by Elizabeth Gould with 68 by Edward Lear. The bird specimens his brothers- in-law in NSW sent to him formed the core of a publication on Australian birds he began to issue in 1837–38, with plates by his wife, but discontinued when he resolved that their next project should be to produce a magnum opus on The Birds of Australia. The couple decided to undertake a voyage to Australia.

Mostly out of self-interest, we love to help people enhance their research skills, and thus advance knowledge of Australiana. Almost everyone will recognise themselves in this story. Art historian Stephen Scheding had lots of information on artists but needed to organise it, so he created an archive. Then he made his research material available to others via a free searchable archive on the internet at 'artresearch.com.au' Here’s how he did it, and how you can contribute.

Sometimes it is easy to find information about an artist in reference works. Sometimes information can be readily found through internet resources. Stephen Marshall, looking at wider issues of art appreciation, chose as an example William Young, who painted many watercolours around Sydney and NSW from the 1920s to 1940s in a conservative style. He found that researching Young was not easy, and although Stephen discovered some biographical data about him, Young remains elusive as a person.

Continuing our story of the women artists who worked in Western Australia,1 we examine the careers of those who exhibited in the Paris and Glasgow international exhibitions at the turn of the century – when Western Australia was in the midst of a Gold Rush. While Lady Forrest’s work was exhibited in a separate space, others who exhibited there together were Mrs J. S. Anderson, Dircksey Cowan, May Creeth, Annie Dorrington, Etta Finnerty, Gertrude E. Ford, May Gibbs, Mrs E. Hardey of Geraldton and Mr W. C. Thomas of Albany (plate 1). May Creeth and her sister Helen have already been covered in earlier articles2 so we will briefly mention her and concentrate on what we know of the other women who exhibited in Paris and Glasgow.

Dublin-born William Paul Dowling (c 1822–1877) worked in London as a draftsman and artist before his Irish Nationalist political activities led to his being transported to Van Diemen’s Land for sedition. Here, the Irish Catholic convict established a reputation as a portrait artist, gradually adapting to the new technology of photography. For the first time, Robert Stevens combines a look at his life, well documented through the many letters he wrote home, with an analysis of his art and photography, to reveal the story of this talented Irish patriot who made a new life in Tasmania.

The authors are seeking to locate a number of watercolours painted by amateur artist James Coutts Crawford, who lived in Australia in the late 1830s and 1840s, especially his views of early settlement on the Glebe peninsula. Then an Arcadian rural retreat, Glebe is now a densely settled inner Sydney suburb, but retains the picturesque water views that attracted Crawford the artist.

Dr Dorothy Erickson begins a new series of articles on Western Australian art, exploring the production and themes adopted by women artists in the 19th century, and putting their work into its social and artistic context.

In 2018, Dr Andrew Montana restored William Joseph Williams (1851–1918) as the artist responsible for the late 19th-century painted decoration in South Australia at Ayers House, the Museum of Economic Botany, Rigby’s bookshop, Trew’s South Australian Club Hotel and probably Para Para.1 Now the artist’s grandson Graham Williams adds a new and personal perspective, based on his family’s recollections of W. J. Williams. He illustrates some of his “lost” paintings, after the family serendipitously re-discovered a stash of them in a wardrobe put up for auction.

Among many contributions to the first "Virtual Show and Tell" was a portrait of a young boy. The owner asked who the artist might be, so the compilers flicked it to me to ask whom we should consult. It turned out to be a fascinating research project, and I want to share the process with readers.

Victorian collector and president of the Victorian branch Robert Stevens distils his passion for the works of convict artists in Australia, many of whom were transported for adapting their skills to forgery. A wide variety of works from public and private collections illustrate the range of their interests.

The Harry Gentle Resource Centre, Griffith University has welcomed specialist in Australian art heritage, decorative arts and material culture to 1945 and contributor to Australiana Timothy Roberts as the centre’s 2019 Visiting Fellow. The centre was established by Griffith University in 2016 following a generous legacy left by Robert (Harry) Gentle, a signal master during the Second World War, public servant and, in his retirement, graduate of the University in 1984. The centre aims to facilitate access to published and unpublished information for the period up to the 1850s, and to collate an inventory of the diversity and claims on country that made up the early colonial period. Tim’s project, Picturing the North: Representing Queensland before 1859, is the first major exploration of the art and artists of pre-separation Queensland.

Charles Rodius began his prolific art career in Paris and London. Convicted of thefts in 1829, he was transported to Sydney, where the convict artist produced landscapes, portraits of leading Sydney settlers as well as notable portraits of Aboriginal people, many translated into lithographs. Rodius had a good singing voice. From 1839, aged about 37, he began to suffer a series of strokes that severely affected his ability to draw. To compete with the new technique of popular, cheap but generally unsympathetic photographic portraits, in 1850 he travelled through NSW and Victoria offering his emotive hand-drawn portraits. Robert Stevens analyses his career in more detail than previously, alongside a selection of images from his large output.

Dr Gary Morgan’s research into a recently re-discovered Tasmanian miniature, reported here for the first time, identifies – partly by using new facial recognition technology – that it is a memento of a Tasmanian colonial family, as well as shedding new light on the technique of the artist, Ludwig Becker.

Gold Rush craftsmen and artists brought their European traditions with them in the mid-19th century, just as George de Nemes (György Nemes) brought his techniques, Hungarian folk art tradition, conceptions of what art should be, fantasies and recollections of totalitarian regimes under the Fascists and Communists in the mid- 20th century. Here he was accepted by artists in Melbourne, where he developed his own style of flamboyant, primitive art that drew on his international experiences, as well as making pottery. Rob La Nauze gives us the first account of his struggle to be an artist and outlines his contribution to Australian art.

Recently rediscovered information pertaining to the life of Australian painter and art teacher Rose Blakemore has enriched our understanding of four portrait miniatures in the Queensland Art Gallery’s collection.

In 2002, Therese Mulford and Robyn Lake co-authored an article on the shadowy painter Frederick Strange (c 1807-1873),1 best known as a painter of landscapes and portraits in Tasmania.2 Some of his works were recently showcased in an exhibition, The Enigmatic Mr Strange, at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery;3 his 1859 view of Launceston is a typical detailed topographical study (plate 1). This sequel provides poignant new information about his life in Tasmania, which deepens the mystery as to his origins.

John White was born at Drumaran, County Fermanagh in north-western Ireland about 1756 – not England as is sometimes claimed.1 He entered the Royal Navy as a surgeon’s mate in 1778 and rose to naval surgeon; in this capacity he was appointed to serve as surgeon on the transport Charlotte in the First Fleet, which left Portsmouth for New South Wales in 1787.

Edmund Edgar Bult (alias Edmund Edgar, c 1804–after 1852), a talented and respectable young London engraver cum cat burglar, ransacked the house of a young lady, only to be apprehended by a police constable while making his getaway. HRH Frederick Duke of York was among those who supported a plea for clemency, and his death sentence was commuted to transportation for life. On arrival in Sydney he was immediately employed as an engraver by the artist Augustus Earle, then by the engraver John Carmichael. He became an art teacher and accomplished portrait painter.

Miguel Mackinlay (1894–1959) arrived in Western Australia as a child in 1906 and trained as an artist. He sailed for London in 1914 and was caught up fighting and sketching in the Great War. Dorothy Erickson concludes her three-part series on the painter who settled in England after the war and never returned to Australia.

London jeweller's apprentice James Walsh, convicted of theft and forgery, drew on the walls of Fremantle Gaol images of European art, perhaps taken from his own treasured artist's sketchbook. After his release from gaol, his later subjects were taken from his surroundings: landscapes and the fringe-dwelling Indigenous people of Western Australia.

For a brief period in the late 1880s, Robert Ferry Thwaites (1833–1917) exhibited and sold paintings in Melbourne alongside such artists as Frederick McCubbin, Eugene von Guérard, Tom Roberts and Minnie Boyd. Thwaites had led an adventurous life before taking up painting in his fifties, but since his death has faded from view.

In 2012, the very substantial archive of the late Leslie Nicholl Walford AM (1927–2012) was acquired by the Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection. Walford was one of the most influential interior designers in Australia, especially in society circles in Sydney. He was widely known through his weekly newspaper columns for the Sun-Herald, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sunday Telegraph, running from 1967 to 1984.

The artist Miguel Mackinlay/McKinlay has been variously described as Spanish, Scottish and Australian and all three descriptions are partially correct. Born in the province of Guadalajara in Spain to a Spanish mother and Scottish father, he arrived in Western Australia as a ten year old and undertook his major art training there. On moving to London to further his career, he mixed and exhibited with Australians in his early years. However, marrying a Londoner, he stayed and enjoyed considerable success as an artist and illustrator. Most of his family remained in Western Australia and we still like to think of him as West Australian.

For someone who worked in Tasmania, Victoria, Queensland, NSW and Western Australia between the late 1870s and his death, the prolific scene painter and artist John Campbell (1855–1924) deserves to be better known. Dianne Byrne reveals a number of impressive watercolours which are mostly portraits of the houses of prominent Queenslanders, painted during his brief residence in Brisbane c 1887–1890.

The works of Elizabeth Hudspeth are largely unknown, like those of many early Australian women artists. Robert Stevens remedies this, and illustrates some of her works which have been rarely or never published nor seen. Her sketches of some early Tasmanian buildings, which have since been destroyed, may be the only record of them.

It is timely to showcase the lively drawings of an Australian on the Western Front in the Great War 100 years ago. Although the young man fought in those terrible trenches, most of his images have a quiet dignity. Only in the heat of a battle in which he was wounded, do you feel the horror of it all; his frantic charcoal marks leave an indelible impression of conflict. Miguel Mackinlay went on to become the ‘talk of the town’ being ‘hung on the line’ at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions in the competitive art world of early 1930s London. He never returned to Australia.

The much-loved artist Margaret Olley is commemorated in the Tweed Regional Art Gallery at Murwillumbah, which established the Margaret Olley Art Centre and displays some of her paintings and her re-created studio. Glenn Cooke is adding his personal tribute to Olley, in the form of an illustrated database of Olley’s art.

The John Oxley Library at the State Library of Queensland has added a portrait of Lord Lamington, Queensland’s eighth governor, to its collection of historical works of art.

Samuel Thomas Gill died melodramatically, aged 62, on the steps on the Melbourne Post Office at half past four on Wednesday 27 October 1880. A policeman recorded that he “was in a most filthy state and covered with vermin” while a search of the pockets found pills which identified him. An autopsy revealed that he had died of heart disease, and noted that he “was in the habit of drinking to excess”. No-one wrote an obituary. Professor Grishin believes that “STG” was neglected partly because of his perceived alcoholism, and here aims to rehabilitate the reputation of the artist whose output exceeds 2,700 recorded items.

Edinburgh-born John Carmichael arrived in Sydney in 1825, living and working there for over 30 years producing landscapes, portraits, maps, billheads, musical scores, illustrations and some of Australia’s first postage stamps. His works provide a revealing and valuable record of life and times in colonial Sydney. Until now, the published details of Carmichael’s life have been fragmentary. Confusion surrounds his name, his age and education, whether he came free or as a convict, if he was deaf, how many times he married, the number of his children and the distressing circumstances of the last months of his life. This new account of Carmichael’s life illustrates a few of his many works, which can be found in the National Gallery of Australia, National Library of Australia, State Library of NSW, State Library of Victoria, the National Library of New Zealand and private collections. In 2011, the British Library reproduced Select views of Sydney, New South Wales. Drawn and engraved by John Carmichael.1

A collection of flower paintings by Adrian Feint, belonging to his friend and fishing companion Les Godden, came to light last year when they were sold at auction. Catriona Quinn researches the background of this collection, the work of Adrian Feint and his artistic friendships.

This soft-paste porcelain mug, 8.7 cm high and 9 cm diameter, is painted in overglaze enamels on a Wedgwood “Barlaston” blank dated 1947. Feint’s choice of this Wedgwood form, together with the incorporation of the date 1947 and the letters J F as key elements in the design, suggests an awareness of the notable commemorative and other mugs that English artist Eric Ravilious (1903–42) designed for Wedgwood in the late 1930s.1

Author Stephen Marshall is to be congratulated on writing this carefully compiled compendium of (William) Blamire Young’s watercolours, for while in his own words he is a passionate art lover, he modestly refutes being an expert on art history. Nevertheless, over 650 pages he has assembled an impressive catalogue of Young’s known paintings together with their provenance where known, details of the collections in which they are held and where they were originally put up for sale – a useful addition as many of Young’s paintings, as the author notes, are undated.

Another of the talented women artists who came to the colony of Western Australia was Annie Purnell. She was not a professional artist, but the “Angel in the House” for her bachelor brother, the Anglican minister the Reverend Robert Purnell. As was typical of gentlewomen of the time, she would have been trained in the gentle arts of watercolour and embroidery. Unlike some other unmarried gentlewomen she had no need to become a governess to pass on the skills she would have learnt from her own governess. This is the story of a work of hers now in Government House in Western Australia.

There are many fine artists who barely rate a mention in the history of Australian art, so it was gratifying to read a long overdue biography of Charles Lloyd Jones (1878–1958). Jones is best known today as the Managing Director of David Jones department store during its boom times in the first half of the last century. While his leadership of DJ’s is certainly of interest, it is his close involvement with the visual arts that deserves to be better known.

Hilda Rix Nicholas was one of Australia’s most successful international artists. When she returned to Australia in 1918, she brought her magnificent paintings infused with post- impressionist light and colour to a generation of young Australian artists, yet her triumphant homecoming had been marred by the loss of her sister, mother and husband. Here, Julie Petersen focuses on her period of recuperation, while living in Sydney’s leafy Mosman.

Two years ago, we published a watercolour by John Rider Roberts that is especially important as a visual record of Robert Fowler’s industrial pottery, bottle and pipe works at Camperdown in Sydney’s inner west. As manufacturing in Australia is replaced by service industries, such manufacturing sites are being obliterated and redeveloped for housing, just as this one has recently been. Michel Reymond follows up with a look at some of the other works by this surveyor-artist, who recorded landscapes that have now disappeared, and was well regarded in his time.

Scottish immigrant David Reid was a plumber and gasfitter who worked in Sydney’s inner western suburb of Newtown. He enriched his life by taking up painting and etching, mostly of pastoral scenes, and by participating in the life of the artistic community.