sketcher and lithographer, arrived at Wellington as a cabin passenger on board the Olympus on 20 April 1841, aged 25. The May edition of the New Zealand Gazette and Wellington Spectator commented: 'We are happy to find a lithographer has arrived here in the Olympus and that we shall now be able to publish charts of the harbour, of Cook’s straits and plans of the town at a very modest charge’. That year Jones lithographed a Chart of Port Nicholson NZ … 1839 after E.M. Chaffers’s survey. An album containing 26 pencil and white sketches of New Zealand, most signed J.W. Jones and three dated 1842, is held by the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia (South Australian branch). It includes two panoramic views of Wellington, one a harbour scene with fishermen and ships in front of the Customs House, the Exchange and other buildings on Lambton Quay.
On 8 January 1842 Jones left New Zealand in the barque Matilda bound for Sydney. There he also produced chalk sketches touched with white on tinted paper. Seven dated 1843-47 are in the Mitchell Library, including View in Sydney Cove NSW , St James’s Church , Government House and St Andrews Cathedral, Sydney (1847). The last is presumably Jones’s sketch of the same title which was lent by Michael Metcalfe to the second exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia in 1849 of which the reviewer on the Sydney Morning Herald said: 'Apparently a very highly finished drawing. At first sight we imagined it to be an engraving. The perspective is most accurate…[but] it is hung so high that it is impossible even to decide in what material it is executed. Is this fair treatment?’.
In 1855 Jones was a member of the Sydney Sketching Club, of which Conrad Martens was president, the qualification for admission being 'that each member possess a certain degree of competency to sketch from nature’.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
