sketcher, was born in Richmond, Van Diemen’s Land, on 16 March 1849, eldest daughter of Rev. Arthur Davenport, subsequently Anglican archdeacon of Hobart Town. Anna Maria Nixon was her godmother. Fanny’s diary, kept from 1860 to 1878, refers to drawing lessons with Rev. John Dixon in 1860, with John Carter Northcote from 23 August to 29 November 1862 and with Miss Blyth who was still 'offering to help me with my drawing’ on 6 September 1867: 'very kind as I do not now have lessons from her’. Like most art students at the time, Fanny sketched from nature and painted copies: 'Finished my painting of the Abbey’, she noted on 26 July 1862. Painting and sketching excursions are frequently mentioned. For instance, on 19 November 1862 'Mr. Northcote took us out sketching in the domain’, and three days later she was on her own taking 'a sketch from the burial ground’. One sketchbook containing views of the Ballarat and Windsor districts was painted on a trip to the mainland in 1874-75 (Archives Office of Tasmania).
Less typical of the subject matter sketched by colonial girls is Fanny’s small watercolour portrait of an Aboriginal woman dated November 1862, annotated: 'Wapperty, aged 60, Sister to the Queen of Oyster Cove’ (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery). It was presumably drawn on a family excursion of 3 November, a 'pleasure trip’ to celebrate the Prince of Wales’s twenty-first birthday. 'Papa, Bessie, Amy, Walter, Arthur and I went in the Culloden at 2 o’clock to Little Oyster Cove … Returned at 7 pm’, she noted in her diary. Wapperty was still living at Oyster Cove (she died on 12 August 1867) and Fanny’s sketch seems to have captured frankly and quite competently the passive yet sullen features of an old woman facing the inspection of yet another party of tourists and resenting her enforced role as model to a 13-year-old girl.
Fanny Davenport married Rev. G.W. Shoobridge on 30 October 1877 in Holy Trinity Church, Hobart Town. After he died, she married George Wood. She died at Hobart on 9 November 1933, aged eighty-four.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
Note: (Heritage biography)
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 1989
