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sketcher and watercolourist, was born in India on 26 February 1806. Christened Amelia, but always known as Emily, she was the daughter of a Bengal civil servant, Henry Stone, and Mary, daughter of Dr William Roxburgh MD, botanist to the East India Company, author of the Flora Indica and superintendent of the Botanic Gardens near Calcutta. The climate of India took a heavy toll of British residents. In 1811 Emily and her older sister, Mary, were sent to England to be under the care of a guardian. Their mother, whose health had been seriously compromised, joined them in 1812 with her younger children, Sibella and Henry, and took them to Scotland where she had spent much of her girlhood, sending her girls to school at Edinburgh. Mary Stone died in 1814 and was buried in Greyfriars Churchyard, as was Emily’s grandfather, Dr Roxburgh, who left India a year later and died in 1815. It appears that Emily’s brother Henry also died at about this time.

Emily’s father, who had returned to the family banking firm of Stone & Co. in London, re-married and had a second family between 1820 and 1828. The family moved house several times before settling in the Gothic mansion of St Leonards at Stanmore. Some of the happiest times for young Emily were spent at St Leonards and at Gresford on the Welsh border and scenes of both places feature in her early drawing books. There are also sketches from her travels in the British Isles and in Europe, where she made an unusually daring tour with a group of young women in 1836.

Emily had firm opinions about education, particularly religious instruction. While living at Stanmore she taught part-time in a small school at Harrow Weald. Difficulties at home caused her to spend more time with her married sisters, and it was while staying with her younger sister, Sibella Norman, in 1838 that Emily met James Macarthur. Within months they married and she sailed with him for the colonies. Their arrival in New South Wales in March 1839 during one of the worst droughts ever recorded must have been a severe shock, but Emily applied herself with great energy to colonial life as the first mistress of the newly completed Camden Park. Here in 1840 her only child, Elizabeth , was born. Besides being wife and helpmate in her husband’s political career, Emily added her weight to many projects of the estate, including the wine and butter industries and the school which James’s brother, William Macarthur , had founded in 1838. Her sketches, diaries, notebooks, ledgers and other documents are an invaluable record of their lives from 1839 until her death on 27 November 1880.

All known work by Emily Macarthur consists of pen, pencil or watercolour drawings in sketchbooks in family collections. There are approximately five books of her early work, containing about 137 drawings and paintings of Britain and Europe. Later work includes such watercolour sketches as Camden 1859 (signed 'E.M. Fecit’) and Bellbird Creek Jany 27 1859 . From family correspondence discovered in the 1980s, it seems that the interior view of the library at Camden Park, previously attributed to Elizabeth and dated c.1865, may have been painted much earlier by Emily.

Writers:

MacArthur-Onslow, Annette

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

2011