Design and Art Australia Online

Amateur artist, sketcher, architect and civil engineer, was born in England, only son of Willey Reveley, an English architect who travelled in Rome, Egypt and, especially, Greece, making many competent watercolour drawings of his travels (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK) before dying suddenly in 1799 when Henry was only ten. A year later Henry’s mother Maria, née James, married John Gisbourne and the family went to live in Italy in 1799. While in Italy, Henry studied science and engineering at the University of Pisa, graduating to become a civil engineer. It was here he formed a friendship with Percy Bysshe Shelley. His chief claim to fame has always been that he was a close friend of the Shelleys—Mary and Percy Bysshe—and that he saved the poet from drowning in the Arno in April 1821 (to little avail; Shelley drowned the following year).

On his return to England later in 1821, Reveley travelled around the country looking at 'mines, machinery, manufactures, mineralogy’, according to his mother. In April 1822 the Society of Arts awarded him a silver medal for his paper describing improved methods of paving and for cutting millstones. In September he submitted a design for the new London (Waterloo) Bridge. The competition was won by John Rennie, who employed Reveley for a while. In 1826 he was appointed civil engineer and superintendent of buildings at Cape Town until unfairly dismissed in November 1827. He and his wife Cleobulina (apparently known as Amelia, whom he had married in 1824), sister of at least five painter brothers, including Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding and Frederick (Raffael?) Fielding, were still at the Cape in May 1829, with Henry unemployed, when Lieutenant-Governor James Stirling called en route to Western Australia. Henry was appointed Civil Engineer at Capetown, but the Reveleys joined the pioneering party on board the Parmelia and Henry was subsequently employed by Stirling as civil engineer to the new Swan River settlement. His first job after arrival was to erect huts at the temporary encampment on Garden Island, no trace of which now survives apart from a well.

Reveley was responsible for all public works at Fremantle, Perth and outlying districts, including the Perth Government Offices, ranging from five small wooden huts for offices, begun in 1829 (for which Reveley’s drawings survive), to the two-storeyed Public Office and Legislative Council building, completed in 1839 after his departure. The Commissariat Store (1834), the first modest Government House (1835), barracks (1833), gaol, court-house, jetties, tunnel, roads, bridges, drains, footpaths and other minor works were erected to his design and under his supervision. He prepared drawings and specifications for country gaols and barracks, in all cases having to contend with the penny-pinching attitude of Whitehall. He is best known for his first major building, the twelve-sided sandstone gaol now called the Round House (1830-1831) on its dramatic site on Arthur’s Head, Fremantle, the only major building erected at the port town during these years and the focus of many an early drawing and print. Its form (but not its planning) apparently owed something to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon which Reveley’s father had drawn up for Bentham in 1791. Reveley erected a temporary court-house at Fremantle in a complementary flat-roofed style and was responsible for excavating the tunnel under Arthur’s Head (1837, extant), mainly for the use of the Fremantle Whaling Company.

His other substantial public buildings were all at Perth, the sole survivor today being the Greek doric Old Court House (1836-1837), erected to serve the dual function of court and church. Although very plain, most of Reveley’s architectural designs, including St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (doric) and St George’s Church (ionic) at Cape Town, display some evidence of his enthusiasm for the Greek neoclassical style in which his father had been a pioneer in England. (Reveley senior had edited volume 3 of James 'Athenian’ Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens , London 1794; his 1792 church, All Saints, Southampton, was Greek ionic in style.)

Henry Reveley’s only known art work is a charmingly informal pen and watercolour sketch of his home at Perth between St George’s Terrace and the river. His house was made from white Mt Eliza stone covered in brown sandstone from the same place. My House and Garden in Western Australia (National Library of Australia, Canberra, ACT, Australia) was sent on 28 September 1833 to his brother-in-law, the painter Frederick Fielding, in London. The controversial two-storey water-mill where he ground flour commercially is shown on the right. (Unsigned, although clearly by a Reveley, it could equally be Cleobulina’s work.)

After resigning and having sold his collection of 'valuable books on architecture in Latin, French, Italian and English’, Reveley and his wife left for England in the American whaler Pioneer on 30 November 1838. He wrote a series of articles on Western Australia for the English Australian Record , according to the Perth Gazette of 9 October 1841. By 1844, when he published an article on Western Australian immigration policy, he was living at Sunny Hill, Parkstone, Dorset. He moved to Reading, Oxfordshire, about 1873 (when he published a paper on Western Australian timber). He lectured on the arts and sciences to paying audiences in mechanics institutes and schools of arts and seems not to have practised either as an architect or engineer in England. His later interests included photography; on 11 March 1853 he published an article on this topic in the London Journal of the Society of Arts in response to a letter from the leading London studio photographer Antoine François Jean Claudet. Reveley died at Reading on 27 January 1875. He and Cleobulina were both buried in Reading Cemetery.

Writers:

Staff Writer
nmian

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2012