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
