sketcher (?) and farmer, was born in England, fourth {fifth?} and youngest surviving son of Rev. John Burdett Wittenoom and his first wife Mary, née Teasdale. He accompanied his father and brothers to the Swan River settlement (WA) on board the Wanstead , arriving at Fremantle on 30 January 1830. He left Fremantle on 11 April 1837 in the Shepherd for school in England but was back in Western Australia by 1840. On 30 March 1853 he married Sarah Elizabeth Harding in Perth; they settled on a property east of York and had four children. Following the death from measles of his wife and youngest son in 1861, Wittenoom left for England in December. He returned to Western Australia in the Robert Morrison on 5 December 1863. Annie Fletcher Moore became his second wife at Perth on 25 February 1865; they had one daughter. After his brother’s death Charles inherited the family property, Gwambygine, at Beverley. He was honorary secretary of the York Agricultural Society in 1857 and on the York Board of Education in 1861. He died at Perth on 10 July 1866, aged forty-two.
Charles Wittenoom is only known as an artist because J. Henshall’s lithographic views of Perth and Fremantle in Nathaniel Ogle’s influential The Colony of Western Australia: A Manual for Emigrants (London 1839) were said to have been taken from sketches by C.D. Wittenoom Esquire, who is assumed to have been Charles. The watercolours for the book, which include View from the Court House, Arthur’s Head, Fremantle (Mitchell Library) and Sketch of St George’s Terrace, Perth (private collection, on loan to Art Gallery of Western Australia in late 1990s), must either date from before April 1837 – when Charles left for England – or have been drawn in London. The former is most probable since they appear topographically correct (and differ in details from the engravings), but they seem far too sophisticated for even the most talented youngster. The artist was far more likely to have been Charles’s uncle Charles Dirck Wittenoom , particularly since an 1832 sketch attributed to J.B. Wittenoom is clearly by the same hand.
- Writers:
- Chapman, Barbara
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 1989
