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portrait painter and Baptist minister, was born in County Down, Northern Ireland. His cousin Mitchell Henry, then Home Rule leader, was responsible for sending MacCormac to London to study painting at Leigh’s Academy where he is said to have won a gold medal for portraiture at a London exhibition. Two years later MacCormac decided to try his luck on the Victorian goldfields, coming to Melbourne in the Golden Age , a newly built New York steamship under the command of Captain Porter, whose portrait, painted by MacCormac, was mentioned in the Argus of 8 January 1854.

At the 1854 Melbourne Exhibition (preceding the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855), when living at 92 Collins Street, MacCormac showed Portrait of a Hindoo , framed by the local gilders Benjamin & Marks. Several years later he showed the same work in the 1857 Geelong Mechanics Institute Exhibition, at which time he stated that it had been 'painted from life’ – probably on the trip out, since other sketches drawn on the voyage and a Portrait of a Gentleman in Highland Costume were in the same exhibition.

MacCormac continued to exhibit oil portraits in Melbourne, including a self-portrait in a flowing cape and stylish hat in 1856. In 1857 he showed seven portraits, the subjects being the visiting English actor G.V. Brooke, the sculptor William Lorando Jones , four prominent Melbourne businessmen and Mrs Train, 'the Belle of Melbourne’. Seven portraits, including his self-portrait, were exhibited in 1860, together with a genre painting, Waiting for a Light . When reviewing the 1856 Victorian Exhibition of Art, the Argus of 18 December placed MacCormac’s Portrait of the Artist among the best portraits, despite some reservations: 'As likenesses Mr McCormac’s pictures are unexceptionable, but as works of art they are open to severe criticism on account of the hardness and rigidity of his style’.

During this period MacCormac changed his address several times, living in both Collins and Swanston Streets. In 1861 he exhibited a scene on the Yarra, his only known example of landscape painting. It was unfavourably reviewed. Victorian Suffering a Recovery , a narrative piece, was thought only marginally better, while the exhibition of an unfinished portrait of Captain Radcliffe was considered to have been an act of questionable judiciousness as far as the painter’s reputation was concerned. In December 1862 he showed The Death of Burke: King’s Last Look at Melbourne, which the Argus critic James Smith called 'crude and immature’. The Herald critic (29 December 1862) observed:

He has evidently laboured with the most commendable industry on his picture. His good intentions are very manifest. But he has not produced the result he wished and which the subject demanded. For Burke does not seem dead, and King does not seem sorry. The impression conveyed is, that Burke has taken more drink than he could carry, and that King is abusing him for having done so.

Soon afterwards MacCormac forsook painting to study law, then became disenchanted with it too and changed to theology. In 1866 he married Emily Mary Johnson, whom he had met on one of his many painting trips to Castlemaine where her father was a purveyor of goods to the goldmines. He was subsequently appointed Baptist pastor of the parish of Newstead on the Loddon River near Castlemaine, his address at the time of the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition where he exhibited A Whiff of the Pipe . This oil painting, depicting a bushman lighting his pipe with a taper, was again shown in Adelaide at the end of 1872 and at the 1873 London International Exhibition. But it probably did not signify a return to painting but was merely another showing of his picture called Waiting for a Light exhibited in 1860.

In 1868 MacCormac was appointed Baptist pastor of Moonta, a copper-mining town in South Australia. Despite his ministerial duties and small, damp manse he did continue to paint there, finding inspiration in the miners at the diggings. Two of the fourteen portraits he exhibited with the South Australian Society of Arts in 1870 were The Digger’s Rest and Old Chum . A Portrait of a South Australian Gold Digger was exhibited in the South Australian court of the London International Exhibition in 1873. Several 'capital characteristic studies of heads’, including 'a South Australian pioneer furnishing a face worth a thousand officials as a subject for an artist’s pencil – a face full of character and individualism’, were included in the Sydney International Exhibition in 1879.

After ten years of struggling with poor conditions, low salary, ill health and the loss of several children from infectious diseases MacCormac relinquished his ministry in 1880 and moved to Adelaide to work professionally as an artist. He opened a studio in Rundle Street where he received many commissions for portraits of civic and parliamentary dignitaries, including that of the explorer John McDouall Stuart (wearing the Founder’s medal of the Royal Geographical Society received for crossing Australia from south to north), which was said to have been the largest painting then in South Australia. Surviving portraits in Parliament House, Adelaide, include those of Sir John Cox Bray, Hon. George Charles Hawker, Sir Samuel Davenport and (Sir) Robert Richard Torrens. The city of Gawler (SA) also owns several MacCormac portraits such as those of Sir George Nott, James Martin and the explorer John McKinley. Others remain in South Australian churches and secular schools. The Art Gallery of South Australia’s collection includes portraits of John Howard Clark (1870s) and Sir Samuel Davenport (1894).

MacCormac continued to exhibit regularly into advanced old age, at intercolonial as well as local exhibitions, although several of the paintings he showed must have been painted years earlier or developed from earlier works. For instance, his portrait of Lady Rubens (Mrs Chevalier) , shown in 1898, clearly belonged to his Melbourne years when she partnered Nicholas Chevalier , as Rubens, to fancy-dress balls held in 1863 and 1867. King, the Survivor of the Burke and Wills Expedition subtitled 'The last look at his dead chief’ shown it at the Society of Arts in 1890 for sale at £150 was simply another showing of his Death of Burke shown in 1890. His portrait of Sir George Kingston for the House of Assembly was completed in June 1881 after Kingston had died at sea in November 1880. On 7 January 1899 the Adelaide Observer referred to MacCormac as 'the grand old man of South Australian art’ and claimed that among his many works he had painted portraits of all the past-presidents of the House of Assembly.

Emily Mary MacCormac died in 1897 and the bereaved Andrew wrote a book of poems, Via Crucis , which he dedicated to his friend Hallam, Lord Tennyson, governor of South Australia. Andrew MacCormac died in 1918 at the age of ninety-three. He was buried in the North Road Church of England Cemetery, Nailsworth. A granddaughter remembers his conversations about his Melbourne painter contemporaries, especially his frequent references to his friends Buvelot and Chevalier. Camroc Avenue in Prospect, South Australia is named after MacCormac – it is the last part of his name spelt backwards.

Writers:

Biven, Rachel
Kerr, JoanNote: Subsequent biographer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011