sketcher, was born in Bowsden, Northumberland, on 9 September 1820, eldest child of Dr John Maule Hudspeth and Mary, née Lowrey. Dr and Mrs Hudspeth migrated to Van Diemen’s Land in the Minerva in 1822 leaving Elizabeth behind in the care of relations, including her grandfather Thomas Hudspeth. Some years later Elizabeth was sent to join the family at Bowsden, Jericho, Van Diemen’s Land (VDL), travelling in the care of Mr Barclay, a watchmaker, and his wife. During the voyage she fell and injured her knee and as a result, when she was 12, her father and Dr Robert Officer had to amputate her leg. The operation was performed without an anaesthetic, a bullet placed in her mouth to prevent her gnashing her teeth with the agony of the amputation. Elizabeth recovered from this horrifying experience and wore a cork leg for the rest of her life.
John Maule Hudspeth died on 5 August 1837 leaving Elizabeth, as the eldest child, taking on much family responsibility and it was probably at this time that her grandfather and her aunt, also Elizabeth Hudspeth, joined them in Van Diemen’s Land. In 1844 Elizabeth met Mary Braidwood Wilson, who after being orphaned in NSW had come to live with her uncle George Wilson at his property Mount Seymour, near Oatlands. The two young women became lifelong friends; Elizabeth was bridesmaid at Mary’s marriage to Stewart Mowle in May 1845 and most of what is known about Elizabeth Hudspeth is derived from their correspondence and from Mary’s diary.
Elizabeth Hudspeth had been sketching Tasmanian scenery for several years. She drew, in pencil or pen-and-ink, such views as Spectacle Island, Sorell, VDL and Messrs Grubb and Tyson’s Saw Mill Piper’s River , some being copied by Frederick Strange . After her mother died of consumption on 30 March 1853 and her brother John died (by poison, self-administered) aged 24 in July, Elizabeth, her aunt Elizabeth and her brother Frank determined to return to England. Elizabeth spent five weeks at the beginning of 1854 making a farewell visit to Mary Mowle at Twofold Bay, New South Wales, who found her friend 'much depressed in spirits & seemed almost stunned by the rapid succession of their domestic afflictions’. On 2 September Mary Mowle recorded in her diary, 'Sat outside with Elizabeth while she took a sketch of Mount Seymour for me’ as a memento.
Hudspeth sailed from Hobart Town in the Antipodes in March 1854. In journal letters to Mary Mowle written in 1854-55, Elizabeth described her visits to the tourist sights of London, to art galleries, the theatre, her relations with her married sisters, and her efforts to sell the lithographs she had made from her Australian drawings. She wrote to Mary from London that on 7 November she had visited the lithographers M. & N. Hanhart of Charlotte Street, leaving with them two of her sketches 'to be experimented upon with the view, if successful, of turning my drawings … towards some account’. On 23 February 1855 she paid Hanharts for the lithographs: 'an enormous sum & not at all likely to be liquidated by the sale of the impressions’. Print dealers proved reluctant to take them: 'one house only consented to take a few on trial, J.C. Heite Repository, Leaden-Hall Street’.
Although her drawings are competent views in the picturesque mode, their subjects were probably not exotic enough for the English market. Known examples include: Ben Lomond From Greenhill, Van Dieman’s [sic] Land ; View on the Derwent ; Boyd Town, Twofold Bay, Australia ; Eden, Twofold Bay, Australia ; and Custom House, Eden, Twofold Bay Australia (the Mowles’ home). Her pencil sketch of Rosedale at Campbell Town, showing the house after its remodelling by James Blackburn, was engraved on steel in England for the letterhead of John Leake (the owner), although the local press attributed it to John’s son Charles Henry Leake , who had ordered the engraving in London.
Elizabeth Hudspeth died on 29 May 1858 at Madeira in the Canary Isles where her brother Frank (later Canon of St David’s Cathedral, Hobart) had taken her for her health. Like her mother, she died of tuberculosis, the disease which killed her younger sisters, Mary and Catherine, that same year, aged 37.
- Writers:
- Clarke, Patricia
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 1989
