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cartoonist, illustrator and scene-painter, was born in England, a son of the landscape and marine painter Alfred Clint (1807-83), who was president of the Incorporated Society of British Painters for some time, a grandson of the eminent 'painter of players’ George Clint ARA (1770-1839), a nephew of Raphael Clint and apparently a cousin of Scipio Clint . He came to Victoria about 1860 or earlier, presumably after gold even though he appears to have worked as both a theatrical scene-painter and cartoonist from the first. A lithograph cartoon by 'A.C.’ of the Governor’s Victorian tour in 1858, with all protagonists depicted as armoured knights (sold Deutscher), looks like his work despite being dated earlier than he is known to have been in the country.

Clint rather than A. C. Cooke was surely the monogrammist 'A.C.’ who worked on Ballarat Punch in 1867-69 under editor and illustrator C.A. Abbott . If so, he produced the livelier and more developed of its coarse but pungent cartoons. Examples of 1867 by 'A.C.’, then the major illustrator, include: 29 February (Maori tattoo joke), 9 March ('Blair versus Darwin’), 16 March (re loiterers on the Melbourne Post Office steps being banned), 30 March (Chirnsides cheating on his obligations under the Land Act, also boys asking their mother if they can go to the theatre to see Madame Celeste), 15 April (men laughing at two strange silhouettes of fashionable women), 27 April (small people crushed under a Roman siege engine of bad investments), 1 June (series of small vignettes of puns about mining terminology), 22 June (full page of caricatures of opera scenes from Semiramide , Faust , Lucia etc), 29 June (silhouette vignettes about a trip to Ballarat that ends up in prison), 13 July (jokes about English news, including Disraeli as a boxer and the Princess of Wales as a ballet dancer), 10 August (a miner as portrayed on stage by Mr W.M. Brown compared with a miner in reality, tired and worksoiled), 7 September (parody of phrenology – waiter reading heads so that diners don’t have to give him orders), 19 October (interior of Ballarat theatre with audience yelling advice to Hamlet actors), 26 October (train accident), 6 November (two urchins think they have spotted the Duke of Edinburgh), 7 December (Mr Punch welcomes the Duke – one of few existing cartoons about the royal visit. Most of the royal visit cartoons are lost in the State Library of Victoria copy, which has pages missing), 21 December (full page sheet of silhouettes showing Prince Alfred’s visit behind the scenes, with the prince collapsing with exhaustion in his private train, glad to be leaving Ballarat).

Examples by Clint in 1868 include: 4 January (a parody of Holman Hunt’s famous painting The Light of the World with a building society director looking for a honest man), 25 July (horse labelled 'Victoria’ baulking at fence marked 'revolution’), 15 August (Ballarat Volunteer Mounted Rifles swamped in their new greatcoats), 17 October ( A Fancy Sketch of the Can Can , i.e. male and female dancers made from tin cans), 24 October (nurse letting children fall out of the pram while kissing her boyfriend).

Caban says Alfred Clint contributed to the Adelaide edition of the Illustrated Melbourne Post before 1868 but it must have been from Melbourne (Caban 1983, 13). As a theatrical scene-painter, he began his Australian career at the Melbourne Theatre Royal in 1867 as assistant to John Hennings . Irvine says his first acknowledged work was some scenery for Walter Montgomery’s production of Antony and Cleopatra . For the 1867-68 Christmas pantomime at the Royal, Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, and Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary; or, Harlequin Piggy Wiggy, and the Good Child’s History of England , the advertisement stated that 'the new and magnificent scenery [was] designed and painted by Mr John Hennings, assisted by Messrs Clint and Little, &c.’

Towards the end of 1869, when Ballarat Punch was expiring, Clint moved to Sydney and was employed as scenic artist at the Prince of Wales Theatre. His first work was nine scenes for W.H. Hoskins’s production of The Tempest in October, including two 'working’ sea scenes (with waves rolling and crashing on a rocky shore) and the masque scene with mythological figures descending via a rainbow and a car drawn by peacocks. Sydney Punch (for which Clint was to work and may already have been working) particularly noted his contribution: 'Nor must Mr Clint be forgotten, who, from the ability he has displayed as the scenic artist, is to be congratulated for having established himself in the good opinion of the Sydney public’. On 4 March 1871, he presented a diorama at the Sydney School of Arts with the mechanist John Renno , the first part being scenes of the Franco-Prussian war, the second views of Sydney.

He moved to Adelaide to become chief cartoonist on two publications, the short-lived Mirror in 1873-74 and the Lantern from the first issue of 5 September 1874 until the end of 1875. Examples of his work for the latter include The new vision of judgement , lithograph (National Library of Australia [NLA] #S10480), Lantern 4, 26 September 1874. Clint was back in Sydney by 3 December 1875 when his first major cartoon, a conventional allegory, appeared in Sydney Punch and he remained on the paper until it closed in the 1880s. Cartoons he drew for it include Compulsory Education 1878 (ill. King 44), published 16 August 1879, 44. Alternating with E. Montagu Scott – and for a short time in 1875 with William Macleod (stepson of James Anderson ) – as chief cartoonist for the full-page political cartoon in each issue, Clint told William Moore 'that he and Scott used to discuss the subjects for the cartoons as they travelled by bus to Black Wattle Swamp, Glebe Point, where the editor, Mr Neville Montagu, resided. He added that their drawings were transferred on the stone, a much quicker process than wood-engraving’ (Moore ii, 108). Clint caricatured the cartoonist (and painter) Gustavus Wangenheim (identified by annotations in Clint scrapbook, State Library of New South Wales [SLNSW] Mitchell Library) for Sydney Punch 's 'People We Know’ series (December 1878) – which, Mahood claimed, is Australia’s first cartoon of a cartoonist (although she thought the figure was Monte Scott). Most of Clint’s Punch work was produced in the form of pen lithographs. He often used theatrical analogies in his cartoons, understandably.

Clint was briefly employed on the Sydney Bulletin (founded in January 1880), although he does not seem to have been one of the original cartoonists as was long thought. Dart says that his first Bulletin cartoon was published on 24 March 1883 ( Immigration ), others were published in April (e.g. 1 April, p.9) and he ceased work after Livingston Hopkins 's first cartoon was published on 24 May. Both Clint & Hop parodied the GPO carvings in 1883, Clint’s effort being published on 28 April, p.9.

Clint’s An electioneering puzzle was the cover of the Australian Workman on 2 June 1894. The Choice – Freetrade let loose! was the cover on 21 July (NLA plate 24615). The SLNSW has his original cartoon showing Chinese and Caucasian paupers coming in the back door of 'Australia’, which is being held open by two politicians, despite the 'whites only’ warning over the front (Dixson Galleries [DG] PXX 40).

In October 1879 Sydney Punch issued a grand chromolithographed supplementary folio sheet to celebrate the opening of the International Exhibition at the Garden Palace in Hyde Park. The drawing by Clint included a procession in which over 100 colonial identities could be recognised, together with representative citizens from the many participating nations. Clint excelled in such robust, crowded scenes. Some of his cartoons, often initialled 'A.C.’, show 'an ironic, slightly Teutonic sense of humour reminiscent of the German comic artist Wilhelm Busch’, writes Mahood.

He illustrated books such as Southerly Busters, by Ironbark (G.H. Gibson), published in 1878, and was also a fine artist. A founder of the Art Society of NSW (later the Royal Art Society), he sent 'eight or nine of those clever characteristic sketches of public men which he hits off so quickly and so well’ to its first exhibition in 1880. His painting, Near Mrs Macquarie’s Chair , 'a pretty and well-painted scene’, was shown in an 1890 art exhibition. This could be the oil on canvas Anniversary Regatta, Sydney Harbour – Picnic at Mrs Macquarie’s Chair (SLNSW DG, presented by Sir William Dixson in 1935), despite it being generally dated to c.1855 or c.1870 (when John Black Henderson , who actually worked in Sydney 1877-1903, supposedly did his lithograph after it). Ellis notes (p.7) that reproductions also appeared in the Sydney Mail of 30 January 1897 (when the painting was in the hands of John C. Lovell, 'furniture, warehousemen and fine art dealers’ of George Street, Sydney) and in the Anchor of 5 October 1911.

Clint painted landscapes and natural history studies as well as portraits of local 'men of mark’ (mainly in watercolour) for exhibition at least from his South Australian years. On 20 January 1877 he displayed a series of portraits at the Victoria Theatre, Sydney, providing a short address as each local personality was presented to the audience. Clint’s two lives again intersected during a season of Shakespeare at the Victoria in 1877-78 when he held an exhibition in the vestibule of 'some admirable life-sized watercolour paintings of sundry colonial notabilities’.

They really do “speak for themselves” in every sense of the word except a vocal one, and without being caricatures, at the same time have a humorous characteristic about them which renders them exceedingly amusing. It is needless to say that during the recesses in the drama they have attracted crowds of observers.

Clint continued his career as a scene-painter in Sydney, working in turn at the Royal Victoria, Criterion and Her Majesty’s, and at the Opera House. With Andrew Torning, he produced the six different tableaux in the transformation scene for Alpine Apples, or Harlequin Intelligence, or Swiss A, B, C , the 1876-77 Christmas pantomime at the Victoria, which was called 'a remarkable exhibition of the scenic and mechanical arts’. His efforts for the pantomime Amphibio, the Rhine Queen; or, Harlequin Sir Rupert at the Victoria for Christmas 1879-80 quite overwhelmed the Australasian 's critic: 'The scenery is in the truest sense gorgeous, and the transformation eminently lovely’. Theatre critics regularly praised Clint’s scenery at length, including the Sydney Morning Herald reviewer of George Rignold’s esteemed production of Julius Caesar at Her Majesty’s in 1889. William Moore notes that it was while he was painting the scenery for Rignold’s historic productions at His Majesty’s Theatre that he became associated with D.H. Souter as one of the Tribune cartoonists.

Clint and Owen provided the scenery for The Merry Wives of Windsor , which opened at Melbourne’s Theatre Royal on 19 September 1891. The following January, back at Sydney’s Royal, Clint alone was cited as scene-painter for the pantomime The Babes in the Wood . His many other theatrical efforts included the scenery for the first Australian production of George Darrell’s Transported for Life . Late in life he and his sons established one of Australia’s first scene-painting studios at Camperdown, NSW. Although his death certificate (possibly by mistake) stated he was unmarried, Clint had three sons: Alfred T. , George and Sydney Raphael Clint (c.1893-1930), all landscape painters, illustrators and theatrical artists like their father.

Alfred Clint died in Sydney on 20 November 1923. Some original cartoons, drawings and watercolours survive as well as hundreds of published illustrations. The Art Gallery of South Australia holds the original watercolours from two sets of his cartoons, numbers 1 and 2 of his Prominent South Australians (1874), and the watercolour Water Cresses (early 1870s).

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989