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(b Middlesex, c. 1760; d New South Wales, 1804).

Australian architect of English birth. He was probably no more than a master-builder’s assistant by 1785 when he was sentenced to transportation. In January 1788 he arrived with the first fleet in the new colony of New South Wales at Port Jackson, Sydney, and as an experienced brickmaker he was immediately put in charge of the brickworks at Brickfield Hill, producing the first bricks for the colony three months after arrival. He became Australia’s first architect when Governor Arthur Phillip put him in charge of permanent building projects, including the first Government House (completed 1789; destr.), erected on a hill overlooking Sydney Cove. This two-storey building was the first in the colony to have architectural pretensions; built of brick with stone dressings and a hipped roof, it had glazed sash windows brought from England and a projecting gabled frontispiece, the central doorway surrounded by glazed sidelights and a semicircular fanlight. Although simple, the building embodied the principles of Georgian design in which Bloodworth was well grounded. Later extended and constantly under repair, it served as Government House for 56 years. Other buildings designed by Bloodworth in ...

Article

Christine Clark

(b London, 1767; d Hobart, Tasmania, July 11, 1851).

English painter, printmaker and sculptor, active in Australia. In London he exhibited six portraits at the Royal Academy (1817–23) and three genre paintings at the British Institution and engraved two colour plates for George Morland, before moving to Hobart, Tasmania, in 1832. At the Hobart Mechanics’ Institute in 1833 he delivered the first lecture in Australia on the subject of painting. In 1849 he contributed the paper ‘The School of Athens as it Assimilates with the Mechanics Institution’ to a series of seven lectures (later published) delivered at the Institute. Duterrau painted landscapes and portraits but is best known for his works depicting the Aborigines of Tasmania and their traditional way of life. He was very interested in the events that led to the exclusion of the Aborigines from Tasmania, and in a series of works begun in 1834 but not executed until the early 1840s he showed George Augustus Robinson under commission from the Governor of Tasmania to restore peace with them. ...

Article

Patrick Conner

(b Houghton-on-the-Hill, Leics, Feb 18, 1767; d Launceston, Tasmania, Dec 9, 1849).

English painter, active also in Australia. He was employed first as a schoolteacher at Appleby (Cumbria) and after 1794 as a drawing-master at Lichfield (Staffs), from where he sent drawings to London each year; on his occasional visits to the capital he received lessons from William Payne and was clearly influenced by him. In the 1790s he also began to practise in oils, some of which were exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1795 onwards. At the first exhibition of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours (April–June 1805) Glover’s pictures were priced more highly than those of any other exhibitor; he was elected President of the Society in 1807 and again in 1814–15. A typical watercolour is his Landscape with Waterfall (U. Manchester, Whitworth A.G.). As a painter of large landscapes in oils he appeared to many contemporaries as the chief rival to J. M. W. Turner—much to the irritation of John Constable. In palette and composition Glover remained conservative; among his characteristic mannerisms was the use of a split brush to paint sun-dappled foliage....

Article

Nadia Tscherny

(b London, Oct 28, 1744; d Brixham, Devon, March 6, 1797).

English painter. He first attended classes at William Shipley’s Academy in the Strand, London, and from 1758 to 1765 was apprenticed to Richard Wilson (about whom he published a short biographical essay in 1790). Hodges followed Wilson’s classical landscape style periodically throughout his career, but, particularly during his travels, he also occasionally abandoned it in favour of freer handling, bolder juxtapositions of colour and a more empirical response to the natural world.

In 1765 Hodges joined the Incorporated Society of Artists and became a regular exhibitor. The Pantheon, Oxford Street, London (Leeds, C.A.G.), an important early example of his interest in architecture and effects of natural light, was exhibited in 1772, as were some views of Switzerland and Germany made from a trip across the Alps the previous year. In 1772 he travelled as the official artist on Capt. James Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific. As the ...

Article

The Stone Age in New Zealand ended abruptly in 1769, when Captain James Cook’s Endeavour introduced iron artefacts to the culture of the indigenous Maori. Lucky individuals traded for tomahawks and nails; others less fortunate experienced being shot by devices that totally transcended the familiar wooden and stone weapons. These latter artefacts in turn proved desirable ‘curiosities’ for the European visitors, so that Cook-provenanced artefacts came to represent an ethnographic line drawn between an idealized ‘before’ and ‘after’ European contact—despite such ‘contact’ spanning decades, if not an entire century. Several preserved human heads were obtained on the voyages, inaugurating a macabre collecting craze for tattooed heads that reached its height in the 1820s before being outlawed in 1831. The work of artists such as Sydney Parkinson on Cook’s first voyage (e.g. A War Canoe of New Zealand, c. April 1770), William Hodges on the second, and John Webber on the third, together with other voyaging artists of the pre-colonial period, have been co-opted as the origins of a Pakeha (European settler) art history. The work of these travelling artists, especially portraits and documentation of ...

Article

Robert Smith

(b Dumfries, Sept 19, 1762; d before after ?1810, 1814).

Australian painter and draughtsman of Scottish birth. He was a coach painter in Glasgow in 1788, and a trade card designed by him announcing drawing lessons at ‘Watling’s Academy’ was brought forward as evidence of his artistic abilities at his trial for forgery in Dumfries in 1789. He was sentenced to 14 years’ transportation, but escaped the convict ship at Cape Town; he was eventually recaptured, and arrived at Port Jackson, New South Wales, in 1792 ( see Australia §III ). He was assigned to surgeon-general John White, an ardent natural history collector, who required him to depict the local topography, inhabitants, flora and fauna, for example Turquoise Parrot (1792; London, BM). Watling aspired to paint picturesque views of the colony and drafted a prospectus soliciting patronage from the British public, but nothing came of the project. His landscape drawings reveal only rudimentary ability, and he professed disappointment with the pictorial potential of the country. His ...

Article

Shearer West

English family of painters and illustrators . Richard Westall (b Hertford, 1765; d London, 4 Dec 1836) was apprenticed in 1799 to John Thompson, a heraldic engraver in London. The miniaturist John Alefounder (d 1795) advised Westall to take up painting, and in 1784 he exhibited a portrait drawing (untraced) at the Royal Academy. He became a student at the Royal Academy Schools in 1785, an ARA in 1792 and an RA in 1794. He exhibited over 300 works at the Royal Academy and 70 at the British Institution, including such large watercolours as Cassandra Prophesying the Fall of Troy (exh. London, RA 1796; London, V&A), which are painted in violent and sometimes excessive colours. Others, such as The Rosebud (1791; New Haven, CT, Yale Cent. Brit. A.), tend towards a Rococo prettiness. His principal expertise was book illustration. He was employed by John Boydell, Thomas Macklin and ...