sketcher, carver and merchant, was working in the commissariat department, Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land, in the 1840s. His first wife, a daughter of Commissary James Laidley and sister of the Sydney merchant Thomas Sutcliffe Mort, died in Sydney and Mitchell later married a sister of Sir George Wigram Allen, Speaker of the New South Wales House of Assembly. In 1856 Mitchell became manager of the Kent brewery in Sydney, and he was subsequently senior partner in Tooth’s brewery for many years.
Mitchell exhibited The Momentous Question , an Indian ink line-drawing (called an 'etching’), at the 1854 Australian Museum Exhibition in Sydney in preparation for the 1855 Paris Universal Exhibition. The elaborately carved picture frame of New Zealand wood 'by an amateur artist’ which J.S. Mitchell separately lent to the exhibition was undoubtedly its owner’s work also. Nehemiah Bartley called him 'a gifted and scientific man, and author of some very valuable experiments on the strength and tenacity of Australian timbers, while as a wood carver, his amateur efforts in the way of gigantic picture frames, reproducing birds, fruits and flowers in marvellous fidelity, would almost vie with the masterly productions of artists like Grinling Gibbons’. His sketches are more modest. His watercolour Ballroom at Etham Point, Sydney (c.1870), known only from a photograph, shows a grand conservatory-like room in his home with two little girls (presumably his daughters) gazing out at the splendid harbour views.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
