Design and Art Australia Online

sketcher, army officer and pioneer, is best known for his Sketches in Australia , a volume of eighteen tinted lithographic views each preceded by a short description of the locality pictured and some historical background. Several are of Sydney Harbour, two include Aborigines, one shows the Lapstone Bridge at Emu Plains and another the La Perouse Monument at Botany Bay while the rest are landscapes, mostly from the Illawarra district. The views were published in England, drawn on stone by W. Spreat and printed at Spreat’s Lithographic Establishment in Exeter. They were issued in three parts and sold to subscribers for 5s as well as being issued bound in a volume. Although not dated, the attributed date is 1848. Westmacott’s earlier (also undated) volume of six plates, Sketches in New South Wales , put on the stone by W. Gauci and printed by C. Hullmandel, was probably that offered for sale in the Australian on 15 May 1838. (Hullmandel, a well-known London lithographic printer, produced the lithographs for Elizabeth and Augustus Prinsep 's Journal of a Voyage from Calcutta to Van Diemen’s Land in 1833.)

Captain Robert Marsh Westmacott, second son of the eminent English sculptor Sir Richard Westmacott RA, and Dorothy, née Wilkinson, joined the British Army in 1823 and served his military career as ensign, lieutenant (1825) and captain (1828) in the Royal Staff Corps. In 1825-28 he was stationed at Mauritius, a place depicted in some of his surviving sketches (National Library of Australia). In 1829-31 he was aide-de-camp to Governor Richard Bourke at Cape Colony, South Africa. He and his wife Louisa Marion Plummer, from Devon, were married a week before sailing and arrived at Sydney in December 1831, having accompanied Governor Bourke to New South Wales on board the Margaret . In 1832 Westmacott was transferred from the 98th to the 4th (King’s Own) Regiment. From 1832 until 1837 he again officially held the position of aide-de-camp to Bourke and with him travelled all over the colony.

Westmacott and his family lived first at Sydney, for a time at Liverpool, then in the Illawarra district. They had a son in 1834, another in 1836 and a daughter in 1845; a fourth child was born in England. In 1837 Westmacott announced his retirement from the army and his intention to settle in the colony. He purchased land from Cornelius O’Brien in a pleasant valley at North Bulli, building a house there which he named Sidmouth after his home town on the Channel coast of England, south-east of Exeter, Devon. There he primarily bred horses. Early in 1839 Rev. Richard Taylor wrote in his diary of visiting Captain Westmacott and his 'very beautiful’ wife at their 'pretty villa on the seashore’, noting that 'he sketches in great taste & having travelled in most parts of the world has a very great number of [sketches]’. In May Jane Franklin described him as 'the person perhaps we have liked best in our tour, kind, sincere, active, energetic, religious’, and regretted that despite Westmacott’s long service, Governor Bourke had left the colony without giving him anything.

Westmacott appears to have been active in public life. He was appointed a justice of the peace, was elected trustee of the Illawarra Steam Packet Company and was involved in a public meeting in Wollongong to consider the establishment of a bank. He acted as the first secretary of the Illawarra District Agricultural Society and was steward at various race meetings at Wollongong, Campbelltown and Homebush, where he raced his horses from time to time. Granted additional land by Governor Gipps in the Illawarra district without the usual coal reservations, he attempted to open a coalmine in 1840 in competition with the Australian Agricultural Company (which had sole mining rights over the whole of the colony) but nothing came of the project. In October 1841 he was declared bankrupt and his estate and effects at Bulli were assigned for the benefit of his creditors.

Westmacott is said to have discovered and surveyed a new road up the mountain above Bulli in 1844, which became known as Westmacott’s Pass before being renamed the Bulli Pass. He was living at Woodland, Illawarra, when appointed a commissioner of Crown lands in 1846. He lived briefly at Parramatta after his Thirroul and Austinmer properties were sold, then returned to England. Unable to find suitable employment, he returned to Sydney, arriving on 8 February 1851 to take up the position of superintendent of the Australian Agricultural Company at Stroud. This was, understandably, an unpopular appointment given his previous conflict with the company and the local management mounted a campaign to discredit him. It did not succeed and he moved to the company headquarters at Tahlee, Port Stephens, in March.

At the same time Westmacott was having domestic problems. On 21 April he published a notice in the Sydney Morning Herald forbidding anyone to be given credit on his account unless orders were signed by him; in May the 'very beautiful’ Mrs Westmacott scandalised colonial society by eloping with the captain of the Tartar , the ship which had brought them back to Sydney. Westmacott resigned his position on 2 June with the explanation that he was obliged to return to England on business and departed with his three younger children in the Mountstuart on 25 August. He arrived in England to learn that his eldest son, Robert Horatio, at school at Hastings, had just died. Westmacott did not return to Australia again, dying at Augusta Villa, Twickenham, on 10 May 1870 of 'Inflammation of the Stomach’ and 'Exhaustion’.

The National Library of Australia holds three volumes of Westmacott’s sketches and watercolours, all formerly in family possession. Drawings from New Zealand contains eleven pencil, pen, wash and watercolour sketches, Drawings of New South Wales, 1840-46 contains thirty-two pen, pencil and wash drawings and watercolour paintings, and Drawings of South America, Mauritius and Other Places has thirty sepia wash, pencil and watercolour sketches. The last contains views of Mauritius (1825-26), Brazil (1858), Lisbon, Marseilles and Abyssinia, some with added notations referring to literary or historical events connected with the localities.

An Album of Drawings and Watercolours of New South Wales 1832-51 (Mitchell Library PXA 1760) contains sketches formerly attributed to Conrad Martens but since attributed to Westmacott by Bernard Smith because of their similarity to those in one of the National Library’s volumes. They may also be compared with another Album of Drawings of Sydney containing seventeen sepia wash, ten pencil and two watercolour drawings attributed to Westmacott (Dixson Library PX53), also undated and unsigned, but titled. Three appear to be the originals of plates published in Westmacott’s Views of Australia (1838). The subjects in all these albums are mainly topographical, including views of Sydney and Port Jackson, Botany Bay, Darlinghurst and Double Bay, the Nepean River, Dapto and Woronora creeks, a house at Kiama, and Green Point and the Five Islands, Illawarra. From a comparison with the polished and urbane published views, it is obvious that their aesthetic quality was greatly improved by their translation into lithographs which conform to accepted topographical conventions of the day. The original drawings are doubtless more historically accurate and often have a literal, naive charm, but the excellence of technique seen in the lithographs is nowhere apparent.

Writers:

Proudfoot, Helen

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011