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,
