A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
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