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portrait painter and professional photographer, worked in Victoria and Tasmania between 1850 and 1861. Nothing is known of his life before or after this time. In 1855, when testifying in a civil suit in Hobart Town brought by Frederick Frith , Hart stated that he was 'a portrait painter of twenty six or twenty eight years [experience]’. A portrait of Sir Francis Forbes (who died in 1841) signed by Hart (University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW) was apparently done in London. In 1849 Hart exhibited The Little Fyfe-Player at the British Institute from a London address and it apparently accompanied him to Australia, his painting of the same title being exhibited by G.E. Belcher at the Geelong Mechanics Institute in 1869. A Belcher descendant gave it back to the family and it remains with descendants, who also own a self-portrait and a portrait of his wife and child (there is some speculation the child is his daughter.)

Hart is first recorded in Melbourne at the end of 1850, when the Argus recommended that any of its readers who wished 'for a treat’ should call at Mr Harrison’s new shop in Collins Street

and inspect a most admirable portrait of an old friend [unidentified]... painted by Mr Hart, who intends practising his profession here, and to whom, while he can paint such portraits as these we wish all possible success.

He showed The Finding of Moses , Italian Peasant and nine portraits at the 1853 exhibition of the Victorian Fine Arts Society, of which he was a committee member. A local critic commented satirically that while The Finding of Moses was 'very effective, we must, however, blame the maid for her carelessness. In the catalogue we read, “And the maid was sent to fetch it”; but the maid certainly made a mistake, and instead of the Infant Moses, she brought Reynolds’ infant Hercules’. Of Italian Peasant the same critic commented that 'the mason who constructed the stonework in the background had very little notion of his trade’. The portraits were of Mr Condell, first mayor of Melbourne, members of parliament, family groups such as Portrait of Mrs. Symons and Children , and Mr. Justice Williams ; 'We do not like the dull heavy effect of most of them’, stated the Armchair . Nor did the Argus . In response, an advertisement was inserted in the Armchair on 3 September 1853: 'Portraits. Mr. Conway Hart is the best portrait painter in Melbourne, in spite of what the Argus may say. His studio is opposite the Criterion Hotel, Collins St.’

By February 1854, however, Hart’s studio was in Hobart Town. He had advertised his intended arrival some months previously, stating he was an artist of the London Royal Academy (unknown as an exhibitor, he presumably trained in the Academy Schools) and a member of the English Academy in Rome. Early in 1857 he was at Launceston and between these dates appears to have revisited Victoria. An oil portrait by 'Conway Hart, of Geelong’ was shown by Marcus Sievewright (presumably its subject) in the 1854 Melbourne Exhibition, together with several unsold pictures from the previous year shown by the artist himself. He had four paintings in the 1857 Geelong Mechanics Institute Exhibition. Portraits painted in Tasmania include those of Adye Douglas MHA, Captain and Mrs Samuel Horton of Ross, Mrs L. Douglass and Mary Morton Allport . In particular, Hart received a £300 commission to paint a 9-foot (2.74 m) canvas of Sir Richard Dry, speaker of the Tasmanian Legislative Council, which Dry presented to Parliament House in 1855.

Yet although Hart succeeded in gaining commissions critical acclaim eluded him, the main complaint consistently being his faulty draughtsmanship. In a review of the 1858 Victorian Society of Fine Arts Exhibition, for example, a writer in the Journal of Australasia said:

Mr Conway Hart … has a very clever trick – and trick it is – of coloring; but his pictures are positively painful to contemplate, from the utter absence of anything like drawing. If he confined himself to drawing angels, like Mrs Davitt [q.v.], perhaps we might confess to some ignorance of the anatomy of those personages and of the perspective effects of the atmosphere in which they dwell; but, as it is, we can only recommend Mr Hart to prosecute a severe course of study in figure drawing.

In 1860-61 Hart was working from a studio at 60 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, and apparently trying his hand at photography. He died in India.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989