botanical artist, arrived at Sydney in 1800 on board the Buffalo without her husband, John William Lewin , who had missed the ship, and immediately initiated a lawsuit to defend her honour against accusations of improper behaviour on the voyage out. (She was accused of having had an affair with the second mate.) John Lewin arrived soon after in the Minerva and supported his wife in her successful court case. Later Maria, as she was known, helped support the family (John and their son William, born c.1809) by running a tavern in Sydney called The Bunch of Grapes and a 'Universal Warehouse’ which sold 'a wide variety of goods…including tea, sugar, tobacco, rice, soap, various drapery goods and jackets and other wearing apparel’.
Like John, Maria Lewin coloured engravings and she apparently also did some of the drawings for John’s projected series of books. The eccentric convict John Grant, who greatly admired both Lewins, commented on Mrs Lewin’s charmingly painted pictures of the insects, birds and flowers her husband collected and asked Maria to draw him a cotton tree to send to his sister Matilda. After John died in 1819 Maria took William back to England where she arranged the publication of new editions of her husband’s Prodromus Entomology and The Birds , the 1822 edition of the latter having twenty-six instead of its former eighteen plates. In 1825 she was granted an annual pension of £50 from the New South Wales government.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
