painter, did an oil painting, Melbourne from the South Bank of the Yarra 1840 (LT). Signed 'Nellie McGlinn’, it is a copy of a drawing of Batman’s Hill, Melbourne by G.H. Haydon and was probably made after the print published in the Australasian Sketcher in 1875. It was certainly made decades after its ostensible date of 1840. We know very little about McGlinn apart from the fact that she was a student at Melbourne’s National Gallery Schools in 1877-79, but this alone suggests that her naïve view of early Melbourne would not have been made before then. It seems most likely to have been done about 1880 when nostalgic views of the past became extremely popular. Perhaps it was a souvenir 'historic view’, commissioned when Batman’s Hill was levelled to become the site of the Spencer Street Railway Yards.
There are two main types of retrospective oil paintings of pioneer life, those done by professional artists to meet public demand and those made, often by women artists, to convert memories and sketches with strong personal associations into more permanent and prominent objects for their own or their families’ walls. Being independent of market forces, the latter could be done at any time, and the two groups could have common subjects. For instance, the unknown Emma Scammelle also painted a general impersonal naïve vista of goldfields’ life retrospectively, just as Elizabeth Shepherd and Louisa Green-Emmott did. (Deutscher Fine Art had her oil painting of mining activities at Golden Point, Ballarat 1852 for sale in 1984.) As with McGlinn, we lack knowledge of any personal associations with the subject and both paintings could belong in either cam
But McGlinn clearly had ambitions to be a professional painter, and a specific commission, exhibition or the hope of a sale was the most common reason why professionals developed old sketches into oil paintings. By the early 1880s some Victorians who had made their pile enjoyed having a sanitised, sparkling new view of the old bark hut or rude village on the drawing-room walls of their expensive new homes. Large views of early Melbourne were especially popular and J.A. Panton (father of Alice Panton ), Robert Russell and other male artists turned early sketches of Melbourne into oil paintings then (sometimes basing their oils on their own early sketches). Eugen von Guérard had made only pencil and watercolour sketches when actually on the Ballarat goldfields in the 1850s, but he used them in 1884 to paint a large oil commissioned to celebrate the opening of the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Ballarat in the Early Times; As It Appeared in the Summer of 1853-54 . In Tasmania Haughton Forrest turned modest early colonial watercolour sketches, drawings and prints by Elizabeth Ommaney , Mary Denison , Geoffrey Mundy and other amateurs into oil paintings for the entrepreneurial J.W. Beattie to sell and to convert into lantern-slides for lectures about historic Van Diemen’s Land. McGlinn’s work certainly looks as if it belongs within this context of monumentalising 'primitive’ myths of origin, though it is most unusual to find a woman there.
