Design and Art Australia Online

painter, lithographer and photographic colourist, was listed as a Melbourne artist from 1861 to 1867. Nothing is known of his background, but he seems to have had some training in both oil painting and lithography. He may have been an American and was possibly related to one Horatio Appleton of 41 Flinders Lane East who showed A Coloured Crayon Drawing on Copper at the 1854 Melbourne Exhibition in preparation for the 1855 Paris Universal Exhibition. George Appleton is first recorded as showing two oil paintings, The Young Anglers and View on the Merri Creek (the latter painted with F. Woodhouse ), at the Victorian Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1861. Listed in the catalogue as living at 109 Lygon Street, North Melbourne (Carlton), he was described in the Argus as a 'very young artist’.

The following year, David James published a series of American Civil War lithographs drawn by Appleton. In 1864 Appleton himself lithographed a plate after von Guérard’s View on the Upper Mitta Mitta for Charles Troedel 's Melbourne Album . He was at Adelaide in 1865, working for the Adelaide Photographic Company as 'artist in oils’, overpainting their photographs and enlargements. At the 1865 exhibition of the South Australian Society of Arts he won prizes for the best oil painting illustrative of colonial life and best oil landscape.

Appleton must then have returned to Melbourne. In 1866 Troedel published a portrait of the actor Gustavus V. Brooke he had drawn and lithographed, Wisehart & James published his drawing, The People’s Ministry 1865 66 , and he exhibited an oil painting, An Australian Chief Foretelling the Fate of his Race , in Wilkie, Webster & Co.'s Collins Street shop window. The last, reviewed in the Australian Monthly Magazine , was described as representing 'a group of blacks’, one 'a tall erect figure, pointing, with uplifted hand, to where the sun is setting over the city of the white man, which has arisen in the native wilderness. The lurid glare of the setting sun falls upon the upper portion of the face of the chief, and tinges with ruby the waters of the river which flows through the bridge of the city… The subject is highly poetical in its conception, and has been executed very effectively, and in a manner which proves the artist to possess a fine imagination, and a refined picturesque style’. A very dirty painting apparently matching this description was said to be the very work, dated 1865) when offered at Sotheby’s Fine Australian Paintings Melbourne auction on 1 May 1995 (lot 180).

Appleton showed paintings in the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition together with a (presumably coloured) Photograph of New Building, Collins St done with Tweddell . In 1867 'G.A. Appleton, Artist in Oils’ was again listed as working for the Adelaide Photographic Company (in Adelaide) but appears to have stayed only a short time, although his subsequent career is unknown. He may have moved to Sydney. Together Messrs Habbe ( Alexander Habbe ) and Appleton painted transparencies to celebrate the Sydney visit of the Duke of Edinburgh in January 1868, including those for the General Post Office (a trompe-l’oeil of the completed building), Parliament House (allegorical figures of Britannia and Australia meeting in galleys on the ocean), the Mint Building ( Australia, under the Auspices of Minerva and Mercury Inaugurating the Coinage of Money in the Southern Hemisphere ) and the Sydney Infirmary, Macquarie Street ( The Good Samaritan ).

In 1869 the Victorian art collector Dr John Blair lent The Rescue , an oil painting by 'Appleton’, to the Ballarat Mechanics Institute Exhibition, then showed it again at the Melbourne Public Library Exhibition and (non-competitively) at the 1875 Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition Preparatory to the 1876 Philadelphia Centenary Exhibition. At the Victorian Artists’ Society’s 'Australian Art: Past and Present’ exhibition in August 1893 George Appleton’s On the Upper Yarra was lent by his brother, Frederick Charles. George had died by 1889.

Writers:

Darragh, Thomas A.

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011