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painter, photographer and Anglican bishop, was born in Foots Cray, Kent, on 1 August 1803, second son of Rev. Robert Nixon. His father was a competent watercolour painter who exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy between 1792 and 1808 (as an honorary exhibitor) and collaborated with his brother John Nixon, the caricaturist, to illustrate a book on the seats of the nobility and gentry of England. Nixon senior had encouraged J.M.W. Turner very early in his career, and later Turner would visit his 'good friend Mr Nixon and accompany him on sketching trips’. A view of Mount Snowdon in Wales, said by Francis Nixon to have been painted at his father’s parsonage as Turner’s first attempt at oil painting, accompanied Nixon junior to the antipodes. He lent this to art exhibitions at Hobart Town in 1845 and 1858 together with lesser works by Turner (and other English artists) and paintings both by himself and his father.

Educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School in London (on which he published a history in 1823, illustrated with five lithographic views after his own sketches) and at St John’s College, Oxford, Francis Nixon was ordained and appointed chaplain to the British Embassy at Naples. Here his wife, Frances Maria, née Streatfield, died in 1834, having borne three children. On his return to England in 1836 Nixon was given the parish of Sandgate and, in 1838, the living of Ash, near Wingham, Kent. He had previously been appointed one of the 'six preachers’ of Canterbury Cathedral and chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. On 24 August 1842, in Westminster Abbey, he was consecrated first bishop of Tasmania. The following year he sailed via Cape Town for Van Diemen’s Land in the Duke of Roxburgh , accompanied by his second wife, Anna Maria Nixon , his six children, their governess Maria Medland Wills (later Mrs John Helder Wedge), Archdeacon Fitzherbert Adams Marriott and three servants. The party disembarked at Hobart Town on 18 July 1843.

During almost twenty years in Van Diemen’s Land, Nixon was active in many aspects of life over and above his pastoral duties, especially in matters of education, convict transportation and theology. This resulted in many disputes with both fellow clergy and the official establishment. Although compromise was normally reached, he returned to England during 1846-48 as a result of a clash with Lieutenant-Governor Eardley-Wilmot over state interference in affairs over which Nixon claimed episcopal authority. Due to his ill health, the family returned to England permanently in 1862. Nixon resigned his bishopric in 1863 and was given the living of Bolton Percy, Yorkshire. His health did not, however, improve, and he retired to his villa at Vignolo, near Stresa, Lake Maggiore, Italy, in 1866. Here in 1868 Anna Maria died. Two years later Francis married Flora Elizabeth Muller (known as Agnes) with whom he had two more sons. He died on 7 April 1879 and was buried in the British Cemetery at Stresa.

Nixon was a keen sketcher and painter in watercolours, using his drawings to record his travels around his colonial diocese. This included the whole of the Tasmanian mainland, the Bass Strait Islands, including King Island and the Furneaux Group, as well as Norfolk Island, to which he made a formal two-month visitation in 1851. He went to Melbourne a number of times and to Sydney for seven weeks in January-February 1844 and in 1850, sketching everywhere. His Cruise of the Beacon: A Narrative of a Visit to the Islands of Bass Strait (London 1854), published as a record of one of his northern Tasmanian journeys, contains ten illustrations after his original sketches (now in the Anglican Diocesan Archives, Hobart).

Nixon obviously had a good grounding in art through his family background. In Van Diemen’s Land he was soon associated with John Skinner Prout 's artistic circle, which included G.T.W.B. Boyes , P.G. Fraser , W.P. Kay , F.G. Simpkinson and J.E. Bicheno . He joined with these gentlemen to form the Hobart Town Sketching Club and was the key member of the committee which organised the art exhibition in the Hobart Town Legislative Council Chambers at the beginning of 1845, Boyes noting in his diary that Nixon 'suggests, alters, chatters to everyone, and takes so lively an interest in the affair that one might suppose his own reputation as a connoisseur of fine arts depended upon the success of the Exhibition’.

Seven of his own art works were exhibited. His two oil copies of Italian landscapes by Salvator Rosa were made from those in the Prince of Salerno’s collection at Naples. The rest were A Fisherman (pencil), Ruins of Queen Giovanna’s Palace, Bay of Naples (a pencil drawing after Major Ainsworth), William Grant Broughton, Bishop of Australia (a sketch), Portrait of the Late Thomas Stothard R.A. and A Monk of Sorrento . The two last were oil copies of paintings by William Boxall, an English Royal Academician who had painted portraits of Nixon’s wife and father which were also lent to the exhibition. When writing to her father from Hobart Town on 30 December 1844, Anna Maria had suggested that 'it would be a good plan to lithograph some of the Bishop’s views… Boxall would be the best person to consult if you decide upon doing anything in the matter’.

Bishop Nixon was also on the committee for the next art exhibition, held at R.V. Hood 's exhibition rooms in 1846. He showed his watercolour Valley of the Mills, Amalfi together with engravings and paintings from his extensive art collection. He showed none of his own work at future exhibitions but continued to lend his European pictures. When reviewing the 1851 exhibition, the Hobart Town Courier noted that these were among 'the best strength of the paintings’. For the 1858 Hobart Town Art-Treasures Exhibition Nixon was, inevitably, on the committee, but instead of showing his watercolour landscapes then, he held a solo exhibition at the Mechanics Institute in October.

Examples of Nixon’s watercolours are in Tasmanian public and private collections. Sydney’s Mitchell Library holds two sketchbooks, one with thirty-four watercolour, ink and pencil sketches of Tasmania (1840-53) and the other with forty watercolour, pencil and crayon sketches of Sydney and Melbourne (1843-52). A large collection of his watercolour and pencil views of Norfolk Island and the Tasman Peninsula, as well as copies and similar views by ' A.M. ' – probably his wife – are in the Dixson Galleries (ML), bound into two albums. His forte was the picturesque landscape, such as Eaglehawk Neck, 18 February, 1846 , Prosser’s River, Paradise, Orford 1857 (unsigned w/cs, TMAG) and Bishop’s Crag, Freycinet’s Peninsula, 8 November 1848 (unsigned pencil, TMAG). He rarely included buildings in his sketches but when he did his taste was for the quaint and shabby rather than the grand, an understandable exception being an attributed watercolour dated 10 January 1849 of Christ College, Hobart Town (at the college), an institution he founded. Some of his Tasmanian work is initialled 'F.R.T.’: Francis Russell (Bishop of) Tasmania.

Exclusively admired by his contemporaries as a talented and prolific sketcher, Nixon is now especially appreciated as an early and competent wet-plate photographer. He was one of the first people in Tasmania to be interested in photography, showing daguerreotypes by one of Britain’s earliest commercial portrait daguerreotypists, Richard Beard, to Thomas Bock about 1843. Few of the many photographs he is said to have taken, however, are extant. Best-known are his portraits of the eight surviving Aboriginal people at Oyster Cove, taken in March 1858 with a stereoscopic camera. In April he took a large half-plate group portrait of the six Oyster Cove women, and a separate study of Flora , aged fifty. Original prints from this group of negatives survive in Alfred Abbott 's album (Crowther Library), in the Anglican Diocesan Archives (Hobart), in Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’s album (National Portrait Gallery, London) and in the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford). From the 1890s prints made by the Tasmanian photographer J.W. Beattie from Nixon’s glass-plate negatives were widely circulated. Long states that Nixon imported a panoramic camera, probably the Sutton, in September 1860, but no panoramic views taken with it are known.

Writers:

Brown, Tony

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011