watercolourist, sketcher and miner, was born in Southampton, England, third son of George Darvall and Eliza, née Aberdein. The Darvalls, a London family of Huguenot origin, later lived in Honiton, Devonshire. Charles’s father possessed considerable drawing ability and an older brother, Henry Darvall, was a prominent English painter and Royal Academician. After some early art training, Charles entered the designing-room of Stone & Kemp, London silk manufacturers, where he was remained from 1848 to 1853. Then he was engaged in clerical work, until 1857 when he migrated to the Australian goldfields. He reached Melbourne in the Maidstone in January 1858 and almost immediately proceeded to Beechworth where his brother Alfred was golddigging and a cousin, William H.C. Darvall, was town clerk. Several years were spent mining in the Beechworth district and at nearby Chiltern where for a time Darvall also ran a store. At Beechworth in 1860 he married Emma Thomas, who died in 1862; the following year, at Williamstown, he married Julia Scott. The child of the first marriage died in infancy, but there were eight children of the second marriage one of whom, Mary Aberdein Darvall, was also a painter. The Australian artist Henry Lancelot Darvall was a nephew.
It is likely that Darvall began conducting art or drawing classes at Beechworth in the 1860s. In December 1876 he was granted a licence to teach drawing in Victorian schools. He moved to Sandhurst (Bendigo) in 1878 and was appointed drawing master at the Sandhurst School of Art and Design (later the Bendigo School of Mines) in March 1879. As well as conducting life classes and teaching landscape painting there he taught drawing in local government schools. He was deprived of his post in December 1880, probably through being uncertificated, and began private classes. However, he was reappointed the following year. In 1887 he became a certificated teacher of drawing and continued teaching at the school until retiring in 1892, possibly on account of failing eyesight. He died at Bendigo in 1924 and is buried in the Eaglehawk Cemetery.
Darvall was a skilled watercolourist in the English landscape tradition. He painted mainly land and seascapes and often worked in sepia. As a teacher he exercised considerable influence on the local art scene in its formative years. Before coming to Australia he exhibited a domestic scene in London in 1855 and designed many of the commissions for Honiton lace undertaken by his mother, lace-maker to Queen Victoria. In later years he executed some very fine illuminated addresses. He is represented in the Bendigo Art Gallery by two watercolours ( At Ravenswood and Prospector’s Hut ); another mining landscape is held by the Bendigo Historical Society. Most of his other paintings, together with several sketchbooks and lace designs, remain with the Darvall family.
- Writers:
- Cusack, Frank
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
