painter and art teacher, lived with his artist wife at Collingwood, Melbourne, in 1853-54. In 1853, as one of the organisers, he exhibited seven works with of the Victorian Fine Arts Society, including a landscape and a self-portrait painted in England many years earlier. (One critic commented, 'time has faded the picture more than the original’.) Five oil portraits, including one of the Hitchins’ daughter, were shown at the 1854 Melbourne Exhibition. A watercolour of a cockatoo by F. Hitchins was sold at Melbourne in May 1978.
In the mid-1850s the Hitchens were living in Sydney, but by 1859 they were teaching art at Maitland, New South Wales. Both exhibited paintings in the 1861 Industrial Exhibition at the Maitland School of Arts which were commended, while Mr Hitchins’s pupil, the future Maitland architect J.W. Pender, was awarded a certificate for a landscape drawing in pencil. Fortescue Hitchins, whose m é tier was portraiture, included portraits of Mr Griffin and Mr [E.C.] Close [q.v.] among his exhibits. In 1862 his portrait of Mr Gooch was described by the Maitland Ensign as 'a very true likeness… [which] fully displays the well-known skill of the artist’. The Mitchell Library holds four portraits by Hitchins, including a signed oil on canvas group portrait of Emma, Harriet and Fanny Samuell, daughters of the Sydney publican Edward Samuell (c.1857). His oil portrait of the wife of the West Maitland mayor William Henry Smith, Mariana Smith(c.1860), president of the Maitland Benevolent Society in 1878-1900, was attributed to Joseph Backler for many years. Fortescue Hitchins died at Maitland in 1870.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
