A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
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