Design and Art Australia Online

natural history painter and naval officer, was born in Salisbury, England on 13 December 1768, second of the six sons of James Tobin, a merchant and plantation owner on Nevis in the West Indies, and Elizabeth, née Webb. Tobin entered the Royal Navy in June 1780, aged eleven, and was present at naval action in the West Indies on 12 April 1782. After serving in England and Nova Scotia, he travelled to India and China in an East India Company vessel, then returned to duty and was commissioned third lieutenant. In 1791 he joined the Providence under Captain William Bligh who was making a second expedition to the South Seas (the first having led to mutiny) to obtain breadfruit. It was Tobin’s first posting as an officer and, as he later wrote to a friend, 'I joined full of apprehension… [but] I soon thought [Captain Bligh]...was not dissatisfied with me…it gave me encouragement and on the whole we journeyed smoothly on. Once or twice indeed I felt the unbridled licence of his power of spe ech yet never without receiving something like an emollient plaister to heal the wound.’

The official artist appointed to the expedition, W. Kirkland, had withdrawn, ill, at the last moment, and this left Tobin, a keen amateur naturalist and sketcher, as the major visual recorder of the voyage, although, Tobin wrote, 'this obliged us all to work with our pencils as well as we were able’. The other significant sketcher on the voyage was Bligh himself. Providence and her tender Assistant arrived at Adventure Bay, Van Diemen’s Land, in February 1792 and Tobin became the first European to record the echidna or spiny anteater, Tachyglossus aculeatus . His charming watercolour, like Sydney Parkinson 's drawing of a kangaroo, shows the artist grappling with the difficulties of drawing a previously unencountered animal. 'Of what species , or to what genus they belong, I am entirely in the dark’, Tobin wrote, describing this unfamiliar beast in his journal as 'a kind of sloth, about the size of a roasting pig with a proboscis two or three inches in length’. When roasted, it was found to be 'of a delicate flavour’. The crew also hunted kangaroos, but they proved too fleet of foot to be sampled.

Other watercolours from Tasmania include Bird’s Eye View of Adventure Bay … From near Fluted Cape and Native Hut (or Wigwam) of Adventure Bay, Van Diemen’s Land ('where we messed’). Tobin documented fish and birds of the area in other drawings, including black swans which, he admitted, he had not seen during their fortnight’s stay. His naive assumption that black swans and 'partridges’, however invisible, must inhabit any place labelled New Holland seems typical of his work: earnest, lively and well-intentioned but sometimes misleading through ignorance.

Tahiti was reached in April 1792 and the crew remained three months to collect breadfruit trees. The Dixson Galleries holds Tobin’s watercolour View on Matavai River, Otahytey [Tahiti] . On the return voyage the expedition passed through Torres Straits and Tobin added to his collection of watercolours, e.g. Torres Straits. The General Order of Sailing , Torres Straits. The Meeting of the Cutter and Canoes (both dated September 1792), and further drawings of birds and coastal profiles.

The expedition arrived back at England in September 1793. A letter Bligh wrote to Tobin on 9 March 1795 indicates that both were still hopeful of having some of their illustrations published in Bligh’s official account of the voyage but decreasingly so. Bligh wrote: 'I regret very much that I cannot positively say when my voyage will be printed, this some time past my drawings have been done, but I do not know if I shall be able to get the Admiralty to assist me, if they do I shall be ready to comply with your wish in introducing as I promised those I marked when you requested me to look at the original sketches’. The work never appeared. As Bligh also stated: 'At present Books of Voyages sell so slow that they do not defray the expense of Publishing, and unless the Admiralty will indulge me in paying for the engravings it will be out of my power to introduce anything but what is absolutely necessary’.

Perhaps Tobin then had hopes that his own journal might be published for he wrote to his brother in 1797 that he was putting his notes in order. His journal and Providence drawings (and some sketches from later voyages, mainly watercolours) are now in the Mitchell Library. Those drawings selected by Bligh for his intended publication are initialled W.B. in red ink. The Tasmanian view with black swans is not marked but the comical echidna is.

Twelve watercolours by Tobin were sold by Deutscher Fine Art in 1985. Six were made on the Providence voyage but none is of a Van Diemen’s Land subject. They include The Corpse of Moworoah, a Chief of Otahytey… and The Brothers – Small Islands off the Coast of New Guinea . The rest depict the Thetis engaged in various actions on North American waters, Tobin serving on this frigate under Captain Cochrane from soon after his return until about 1797 mainly in North American waters. He was promoted captain in 1802, made a Commander of the Bath in 1831 and attained the rank of Rear-Admiral of the White in 1837 but did not again serve at sea after July 1814. He died at Teignmouth, Devon, on 10 April 1838. In 1804 he had married Dorothy, daughter of Captain Gordon Skelly RN and widow of Major William Duff of the 26th Regiment; they had a son and a daughter. A box fish, Ostracion tobinii , was named after Tobin in Donovan’s Naturalist’s Repository (London 1824).

Writers:

Phipps, Graeme
Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011