sketcher, architect and clergyman, a native of Lincolnshire, was a Methodist minister in Cornwall when elected one of the English representatives to the Australasian Wesleyan Methodists’ Conference to be held at Sydney in January 1861. He wrote a book about his antipodean journey, Australia, with Notes by the Way, on Egypt, Ceylon, Bombay and the Holy Land (London 1862), which contains a frontispiece after one of the watercolour sketches he made on the voyage, Sydney from the North Shore . The original drawing is in Jobson’s album of 15 Australian Watercoloured Views 1860-61 (NLA) together with First View of the Australian Coast (wash drawing), Hobart Town, Tasmania , Leaving St. [sic] George’s Sound (pencil), Cape Otway (pencil), Sydney from the Balcony at the Honble A. McArthur’s – Glebe Point (w/c), Sydney Heads – Port Jackson (w/c), Tamar from Bass’ Straits to Launceston, Tasmania (pencil) and Wilson’s Promontory (wash drawing).
As well as giving a great deal of information about Methodism in the Australian colonies in 1860-61 (especially New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia), Jobson’s book is of considerable value to the architectural historian. He was a competent amateur architect, having studied ecclesiastical architecture under Edward James Willson, the brother of the first Roman Catholic bishop of Tasmania and A.C. Pugin’s collaborator on Specimens of Gothic Architecture . In 1850 Jobson published Chapel and School Architecture, as Appropriate to the Buildings of Nonconformists, Particularly to those of the Wesleyan Methodists, with Practical Directions for the Erection of Chapels and School-Houses . This was largely a plea for the adoption of Gothic styles for Nonconformist ecclesiastical architecture. In addition to the winning Gothic Revival design (by James Wilson of London and Bath) in a Wesleyan Model Chapel competition held in England, Jobson’s book included illustrations of three Gothic-style chapels he had designed himself (classical losers in the competition barely having been mentioned, let alone illustrated).
In Victoria Jobson had been gratified to note that the larger of the Wesleyan Gothic Revival chapels at Ballarat 'had been mostly copied from one of my own published designs’ (although this design may have derived from the Watchman , the English Wesleyan newspaper for which he wrote weekly articles). Even more numerous in the Australian colonies were the Wesleyan Gothic chapels copied or adapted from Wilson’s winning Model Chapel design which Jobson so strongly advocated. Sydney versions at Newtown and Balmain were by the architect J.A. Mansfield, son of the pioneer Wesleyan missionary Rev. Ralph Mansfield whom Jobson visited on 24 February 1861, and other examples continued to be erected throughout the colonies long after Jobson’s visit. Although a competent sketcher of the picturesque traveller type, Jobson’s significance for the Australian visual arts is therefore far greater in architecture than in painting.
Jobson had written an earlier travel book illustrated with his own sketches, America and American Methodism (London 1857), and he also published pious biographies: A Mother’s Portrait , The Servant of his Generation (a biography of Rev. Jabez Bunting) and The Shipwrecked Minister and his Drawing Charge: Memorial Tribute to the Rev. Daniel J. Draper: A Sermon .
