watercolourist and lithographer, was born in Devon and studied art with the Exeter painter and lithographer William Spreatt. Stopps came to Victoria in the early 1850s and worked on the goldfields at Sandhurst (Bendigo) and Ballarat. Employed as a lithographer by Campbell & Ferguson of Melbourne, he put ten of S.T. Gill 's lithographs on stone for Diggers and Diggings of Victoria As They Are in 1855 (Melbourne 1855), published by J.J. Blundell & Co. He was lithographing scenes on the goldfields as early as 1853 ( Puddling Machines on the Epsom Road, Looking towards Sandhurst and View of Sandhurst , LT). His lithograph Camp Buildings, Beechworth (c. 1855) in the Diggers book was stated to be after a daguerreotype by Acley & Rochlitz . In 1856 he exhibited four engravings of Bendigo scenes, also after photographs, in the Victorian Exhibition of Art at Melbourne. The views were possibly taken by Alexander Fox whose 1857 photographs of Bendigo were lithographed by Stopps for a number of illustrated letterheads: for instance a letter dated 9 March 1857 (LT) from John Lees at Kangaroo Flats, Bendigo to his wife was written on Stopps’s Pall Mall, Sandhurst, from View Point .
Stopps was listed in the Melbourne Directory for 1858-59 at 54 Collins Street, East Melbourne. In 1860, on the eve of his departure with the Burke and Wills expedition, Ludwig Becker bequeathed his lithographic table to him. Subsequently employed as an assistant lithographer in the Department of Crown Lands, Stopps was one of the professional witnesses called to give evidence before the parliamentary inquiry into the photolithographic process invented by J.W. Osborne . From 1864 to 1909 he was employed in the New South Wales Lands Department at Sydney, where he was considered a first-class lithographer. His most outstanding reproductive engravings are possibly his exquisite lithographs for Robert David Fitzgerald’s Australian Orchids (1875 92), work commemorated in the poem 'One Such Morning’ by Fitzgerald’s grandson D.F. FitzGerald ( Product , 1977).
Stopps also painted, sending a watercolour view, The Hermitage, North Kurrajong , to the 1870 Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition as an amateur. He was a judge for the lithographic section of the same exhibition. Earlier that year he had won a competition to design the Agricultural Society of NSW’s seal, which he described as a 'central figure allegorical of New South Wales, draped in rich robes, who with encouraging mien, holds aloft the wreaths for the victorious’. According to Nesta Griffiths, he lithographed programs for regattas on the Lane Cove River and produced numerous original caricatures of and for friends and neighbours. Stopps lived at Loombah in Hunter’s Hill from 1863 until his death on 18 September 1931. He had been blind since 1923.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
