watercolour painter, naturalist and philanthropic worker, was born in England on 9 November 1793, eldest of the six daughters of Alexander Macleay and Elizabeth, daughter of James Barclay of Fleet Street, London. Fanny’s father was descended from a County Ross family noted for its intellectual achievements and community service; he served as colonial secretary of New South Wales from 1825 to 1837. Fanny learned painting and drawing from an expensive 'drawing master’ in London. Examples of Fanny’s flower and fruit paintings were hung in London’s Royal Academy Summer Shows in 1816, 1819 and 1824 – in the category of 'honorary exhibitor’. Two surviving large watercolours of flowers survive (owned by Mr and Mrs Peter Hely, England: photographic facsimiles Elizabeth Bay House [EBH]). One was a lavish collection of English flowers, painted and shown at the RA in 1824; the other, which incorporates Australian flowers, including the waratah, was painted at Sydney in 1830, judging from her self-depreciating comments about its progress in surviving letters to her elder brother, William Sharp Macleay. Both are elaborate academic works, very much in the seventeenth-century Dutch manner of artists such as Rachel Ruisches, despite the watercolour medium. (In 2000 the Friends of EBH purchased a mezzotint flower piece c.1800 by Boydell, possibly owned by the Macleay family and believed to be the basis for these paintings; it now hangs in EBH library.)
Fanny Macleay grew up in eminent scientific circles and was profoundly influenced by the scientific interests of her father, a fellow of the Royal and Linnaean societies, and of her brother William, a well-known naturalist. Robert Brown, one of the foremost English botanists in the scientific world in the first half of the nineteenth century, who accompanied Matthew Flinders on his expedition to and around the coast of Australia, was in love with her, but all she returned was an interest in botany. Early in 1830 she wrote to William that she had sent Brown ’12 Drawings or daubs as you would call them … in case one or two things may be worth copying into the Bot. Mag.’ (the London Curtis’s Botanical Magazine , edited by Brown).
The Macleays and their daughters had come to New South Wales in 1826, and several members of the family worked as collectors and recorders, compiling Australia’s earliest natural history collection. This interest took Fanny beyond the conventional female role of recording only the formal appearance of flowers in ignorance of their scientific interest. In a voluminous and lively correspondence with William spanning twenty-four years, she drew him numerous examples of English and Australian insects, animals, plants and fossils, as well as local views. An unsigned and undated watercolour sketch of Sydney showing St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral under construction (c.1833, Mitchell Library) has been attributed to her father, but it is clearly by Fanny and must have been intended for William from the tone of the inscription on the back. It provides a key to the major buildings in the picture, apologises for omitting many buildings – 'it would be difficult to manage them all in so small a sketch’ – and concludes: 'Admire my liberality in sending you so beautiful a thing!’
Fanny died in 1836, six weeks after her marriage to Thomas Cudbert Harington. There is a large monument to her memory in St James’s Church, Sydney, where her work as a philanthropist is publicly acknowledged. Few, however, were aware of the important role she had played as amanuensis to her father in the accumulation of one of the finest and most extensive natural history collections owned by an individual family in the nineteenth century, material which is now housed in the Macleay Museum at the University of Sydney.
Two extant ambitious flower paintings prove that Fanny Macleay was a most gifted watercolourist (facsimile reproductions Elizabeth Bay House, Sydney, from originals held privately in England). One, a large elaborate composition of English flowers, was shown at the Royal Academy, London, in 1824, two years before Fanny came to Australia with her parents and five younger sisters. The companion piece, illustrated here, was painted at Sydney in 1830 and incorporates twenty-one varieties of flowers, sixteen being Australian natives. Five are introduced species from Europe or South Africa.
All are massed in a terra-cotta urn set on a marble slab located in a Greek Revival setting that is more evocative of the as-yet-unrealised garden at the Macleays’ Elizabeth Bay property than of either classical antiquity or Regency England. The Elizabeth Bay gardens had been planted with a similar profusion of plants from all over the world, as well as many Australian natives, and a comparable ionic colonnade was proposed to encircle three sides of the house designed by John Verge. Equally lavish imported statuary, garden ornaments and follies were proposed to ornament the garden.
Sadly, there was never enough money. Despite an exuberant, excessive commencement soon after the family arrived, Alexander Macleay’s dreams were never fully realised. Fanny herself did not live to see the house completed (minus the colonnade), but she certainly participated in planning it and the garden. Even in its infant state, the garden aroused wonder and envy in many a visiting natural scientist’s breast. This painting is no nostalgic dream of what had been left behind but a foreshadowing of its realisation in the antipodes-the equal, even the superior, of the most lavish English aristocratic country estate.
Fanny’s surviving letters to her elder brother in Cuba, William Sharp Macleay, occasionally contain wryly self-disparaging comments on her painting. On 2 December 1830, she wrote: `I am very busy drawing a large piece of Native Plants-& it is not very ugly tho’ of course full of faults.’ Perfectly aware that it was actually something special, she cannot quite confess her pride in it to the long absent older brother who had made patronising comments on her art, or `daubs’ as he had called them (as she was fond of reminding him).
This is a surprisingly elaborate, academic work to have been produced in Sydney in 1830. Despite the watercolour medium, it belongs within the seventeenth-century Dutch manner of renowned still-life oil painters such as Rachel Ruisches, a style continued in the finely-detailed English work of flower painters such as Fanny’s much admired Mary Lawrance (1794-1830). As such, it is a quite exceptionally sophisticated example of early Australian colonial art of any kind.
- Writers:
- Windshuttle, Elizabeth
Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 1992
