watercolourist, natural historian, army officer and settler, was the only son of Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Hamilton Smith, an obsessive English natural history illustrator who copied drawings from artists all over the world, including Augustus Earle (Smith’s copies are in the Auckland Institute) as well as drawing from preserved specimens. As a young lieutenant in the British Army, 28th Regiment of Foot, his son C.F. Hamilton Smith reached Sydney in the convict ship Westmoreland on 15 July 1835. Later he took up a grant of land on the Hunter River, which he called Enghein.
Taught to draw by his father, Hamilton Smith was expected to help satisfy his father’s passion by collecting and describing natural history specimens. In his diary (ML), kept from 25 December 1833 at Wigan (England) until he disembarked, he wrote that before leaving home his father and sisters had supplied him with 'drawings of Fish and Views, for which I am bound to bring home numerous sketches in return’ (20 November 1834), so he was studying three numbers on fish from Griffith’s translation of Cuvier’s Animal Kingdom in preparation for the task. On 3 March 1835 he noted that John E. Gray of the British Museum (a relative of Bernhard Smith ) had 'kindly presented me with a book on taxidermy, with a view of encouraging me to collect specimens of natural history in N.S. Wales’. After his arrival, he also made watercolour views of local scenery.
Since his father’s collection, numbering over 15 000 sheets, included Australian views and natural history specimens, Charles Ferdinand undoubtedly sent specimens and sketches home for Colonel Hamilton Smith to copy and he certainly kept his father’s interests in mind. On 18 May 1846 he wrote to Ludwig Leichhardt requesting information about the Australian 'Buffaloe’ mentioned in Leichhardt’s journal, in order 'to add to a collection of drawings on Natural History, probably unequalled in point of numbers, and, I may say, execution, and still carried on, by my father’. Smith’s father died in 1859 and although Charles Hamilton Smith did not date his watercolours, most appear to have been done before then. Examples sold between 1969 and 1987 have mainly been of picturesque scenery in New South Wales, including Mossman’s Cave, Wellington Valley , Cox’s River Falls, Now Called Bathurst, Aspley River, NSW , Aborigines in the Cabbage Tree Forest, New South Wales , Valley of the Grose, New South Wales and Coxie’s [sic] Pass over Mt York Western Road to Bathurst Plains, NSW . C.F. Hamilton Smith spent the rest of his life in Australia, marrying a daughter of the surveyor William Harper and fathering six daughters and a son.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
