Design and Art Australia Online

sketcher, watercolourist, illuminator, decorator and garden designer, was born in Yorkshire, England, son of John Frederick and Mary Agnes Bateman, members of the Moravian Church. His mother was a member of the La Trobe family, leaders in the Moravian community, and Edward was a first cousin of the Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria, Charles Joseph La Trobe , and a nephew of the celebrated Anglo-American architect, Benjamin Latrobe (sic). One of his brothers, John Frederic, became a renowned hydrolics engineer; another, Christian Henry, was a well-known clergyman author.

Initially, Edward worked as an illustrator. His first known published drawings were chromolithographs of flowers to accompany poems by Mary Ann Bacon in an illuminated gift book, Flowers and their Kindred Thoughts (1848). It was followed in 1850 by a similar collaborative work, Fruits from the Garden and Field , then by a third volume on birds, Winged Thoughts , in 1851. All were published by Owen Jones, who produced the first and finest chromolithographic books issued in England. It is probable that under Jones’s direction he helped arrange and decorate the Fine Arts Court in the 1851 Great Exhibition.

During this period Bateman became closely acquainted with the London circle of Pre-Raphaelites – Thomas Woolner , Bernhard Smith , D.G. Rossetti and J.E. Millais. Indeed, his natural history illustrations possibly influenced the PRB – especially Millais – in their characteristic insistence on meticulous truth to nature. He also became intimate with the writers Mary and William Howitt and their children, including the painter Anna Mary Howitt to whom he became unofficially engaged. His house at Highgate, The Hermitage, was furnished with rustic furniture of his own design and manufacture as well as a collection of 'treasures of old china as would make an antiquarian rave’, Mrs Howitt wrote. Rossetti stayed there in spring 1852. In July Bateman boarded the Windsor with Woolner and Smith aiming to make their fortunes on the Australian goldfields. They were farewelled by Holman Hunt, Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown – an event inspiring Brown’s best-known painting, The Last of England (Tate Gallery).

William Howitt was already in Victoria and Bateman joined his party on the road to the diggings in November 1852. He drew views and flowers as they travelled. Charlton Howitt described their peregrinations:

“We are a very jolly company as we go travelling along through the wild woodlands of this country. First of all there is my father [William Howitt], then my cousin “Harry” [Edward], then Mr B [Bateman] the “Painter” who makes sketches as we go along, and lastly my brother Alfred and myself. If anybody could see us on our journey we would seem a queer looking, but picturesque set of folks … the governor often walks first in his broad hat and wide trousers; often the Painter walks beside him in his glazed cap, blue jumper and leather overalls which come up his thighs and with a courier pouch at his side for his sketching things, but just as often he is stalking ahead of everybody for he has a very long pair of legs and they seem to carry him involuntarily.”

Bateman sketched the McIvor diggings in June 1853 (one such sketch is in the National Library of Australia though it is believed to be undated) where, according to William Howitt, he was soon commissioned by eager diggers and tradespeople to draw 'tents, stores and places of business … not under five pounds per [small pencil] sketch’. The party returned to Melbourne in mid-1853 and the friendship soon came to an unhappy end. Bateman’s engagement to Anna Mary Howitt, then studying art in Munich, was broken off, and William Howitt published two books about their Australian adventures without their proposed illustrations. Bateman went back to the goldfields at the end of 1854, but the harsh conditions, flies, heat and appalling journeys proved intolerable and he again left for the city.

Extant tight and detailed topographical sketches, in pencil heightened with white, date from the 1850s and are rarely signed (LT). They include views of Governor La Trobe’s cottage, Jolimont, at East Melbourne, a similar set of Plenty Station northeast of Melbourne commissioned by the Bakewell family (c.1853-54, NGV) and a series made in the vicinity of Cape Schanck. Mrs Godfrey Howitt, a Bakewell sister and a sister-in-law of William Howitt, showed 'Sketches of Australian scenery and flowers, specimens of a forthcoming work entitled “The Bush Homes of Australia” by E.L. Bateman’ at the 1854 Melbourne Exhibition, although no such publication eventuated. In 1869 Bateman himself lent 'A Collection of Drawings [watercolours] from Nature’ to the Melbourne Public Library Exhibition.

The Victorian Government Botanist Ferdinand von Mueller commissioned some Australian botanical drawings from him. He also painted watercolour portraits and at least one still life: a finished watercolour of dead robins on a bed of flowers. He illuminated a children’s nonsense poem in a surviving manuscript book and provided the cover designs and lettering for Louisa Anne Meredith 's Some of My Bush Friends in Tasmania (vol.1, London, 1860) and Last Series: Bush Friends (London, 1891). He was probably also responsible for the binding designs of Meredith’s Loved, and Lost! (London, 1860) and Waratah Rhymes (London, 1891) issued by the same published. In the Victoria Court at the 1862 London International Exhibition Bateman showed 'Designs for woollen fabrics, introducing indigenous flowers and foliage’ and designs for shawls from Australian wool at the 1867 Paris Universal Exhibition.

A notable and very early example of Australian flora being used for decorative purposes – claimed as an innovation by Redmond Barry in both his 1861 and 1865 prefaces – is Bateman’s set of initial headings, tailpieces and titles for Melbourne Public Library catalogues from 1861, engraved on wood by Samuel Calvert (a full set of proofs and partial sets of the blocks are held, uncatalogued, in the SLV and NGV). The initial designs (A-Z) were re-used to introduce each chapter of The Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens (Melbourne, 2002).

Architectural designs for Barragunda, built at Cape Schanck in 1866 for Dr Godfrey Howitt’s daughter, and for Heronswood, built at Dromana in 1871 for Professor W.E. Hearn, have been attributed to Bateman. Although extremely informal, ruggedly picturesque stone houses in a neo-medieval style very much to Bateman’s taste, G.G. McCrae credited their design to the well-known Melbourne architectural firm of Reed & Barnes, for whom Bateman worked, and allowed him only the decoration. (He undoubtedly painted the passionflowers over a fireplace in Barragunda homestead – one of his few extant flora drawings is an undated watercolour of a trail of passionflowers (NGV), which are not, however, native to Australia – and he evidently laid out both gardens.) For Reed & Barnes he provided coloured stencil designs on the walls and ceiling of the Octagon, erected behind the Melbourne Public Library for the 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition. They included Australian motifs and were much admired. He also decorated a drawing room at Mountstuart House.

Bateman laid out the grounds of the University of Melbourne (c.1855-64) – one of his earliest commissions – and reputedly had a role in planning Melbourne’s Botanic, Treasury and Fitzroy Gardens. He landscaped the gardens of several large private estates, including Frederick Sargood’s Rippon Lea at Elsernwick in southeast Melbourne (from c.1868), with its famous fernery. (Although work did not start on the fernery until c.1874, Bateman is presumed to have planned it as part of his initial design.) In May 1867 he was engaged by John Moffat at a salary of £300 to landscape over 160 acres of Chatworth House in the Western District of Victoria but injured his hand so badly in a buggy accident on 13 September that he had to learn to write and draw with his left. After prolonged lawsuits over the accident, he left Australia at the end of 1869. He evidently took virtually all drawings with him. In 1879 he wrote to Georgiana McCrae that he was making copies of his Australian wildflower sketches for 'A Glasgow Merchant Prince’ (possibly A.B. Stewart whose garden at Ascog Hall on the Isle of Bute, including 'a magnificent sunken fernery’, Bateman almost certainly designed, according to Neale).

Bateman spent the rest of his life as landscape gardener to the Marquess of Bute at Rothesay, Scotland, where he died aged 82 on 30 December 1897.

Writers:

Thomas, Daniel

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989