painter, scene-painter and art teacher, was said to have been apprenticed in London to one of the leading scene-painters of the day, Clarkson Stanfield of Drury Lane. He came to Van Diemen’s Land in the Cleopatra on 4 May 1832. On 5 October he was advertising (as Mr Keogh) his intention to give 'private tuition in Oil and Water Colour…Painting and Landscape Drawing, also Poonah Painting and Ornamental Work’, stating that he had studied painting in Paris and that he hoped to find in Hobart Town 'the countenance and support which a taste for the fine arts begets in every civilized country’.
From its opening on 6 March 1837 Keough worked as a scene-painter with the mechanist James Belmore at the new Theatre Royal, Hobart Town. His act drop of Byron’s Dream (presumably after Charles Eastlake’s painting, exhibited RA 1829) was remembered after his death as a 'chef d’oeuvre of theatrical painting’. Belmore returned to Sydney in 1838 to work as mechanist at the new Royal Victoria Theatre and Keough joined him some time later. On 8 June 1839, the editor of the Commercial Journal was under the impression that Edward Shribbs was still the scene-painter at the Royal Victoria Theatre; on 13 June, however, Keough took a benefit performance as the scene-painter. The advertisement for the benefit announced that 'Mr Kough [sic], as a stranger in this Colony, considers that some apology is necessary in soliciting public patronage, and as a pledge for continued endeavours in its service, he has painted, expressly for this Night only, a Great Novelty … A New Drop Scene of Sydney Heads, by Sunrise’.
From then on Keough worked with Belmore at the Royal Victoria. They also worked as a team on Edward Barlow 's Theatre of Arts, which Barlow had either purchased or leased from George Peck in 1838. Barlow retained and expanded scenes from Thiodon’s original repertoire, such as Buonaparte Crossing the Alps and the romantic standard Lake Como , and also commissioned Keough 'to paint views of the most generally known and settled part of the Colony’. The latter included the topical drop scene Barque Lucretia…As She Appeared on Fire in Sydney Harbour, from Lower George-street, on the 25th June, 1839, at half-past 3 p.m. Keough and Belmore’s diorama of The New Settlement at Port Essington [Northern Territory] . Barlow closed his Theatre of Arts in August 1840, having commissioned a second, grander panorama of Hobart Town at the end of 1839, which he took to London along with 'Two Beautiful Panoramic & Picturesque Views of Sydney and Its Environs’ for exhibition in 1841. Keough died in Sydney in October 1840. His position as scene-painter at the Royal Victoria Theatre was taken by Joseph Dennis .
- Writers:
- Callaway, Anita
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
