Design and Art Australia Online

portrait and figure painter, born at Hawick, Scotland and drowned off Broken Bay, New South Wales in 1852, would be almost unknown but for the memoirs of his surviving daughter, Anne Hale Chapman, written in old age at Summer Hill at the turn of the century. She records that Wilson studied medicine but could not stomach dissection and became a portrait painter. After drawing classes, reputedly at Oxford and Cambridge colleges and (more convincingly) at Miss Graham’s boarding-school in London, he was said to be making about £400 a year when he married a French pupil, Aimée Louise Grandovinet, in 1829. The convict-ship’s surgeon and Braidwood pioneer Dr Thomas Braidwood Wilson, who had wedding portraits taken on a marrying trip to England, persuaded the artist to improve his prospects by migrating to Australia.

The Wilsons sailed in the Fairlie in 1836 with 'a great many passengers and 300 emigrants’, as well as Sir John and Lady Franklin going out to govern Van Diemen’s Land. In Sydney there were no more land grants and colonial life was a shock. Anne Chapman, recalling her mother’s fears, stated: 'it was such a disappointing change for well-bred young ladies’. Some attempts to keep up appearances and educate the children were made-a watercolour by Anne is in one of the albums of the nearby Coghill family of Bedervale, Braidwood (National Trust), with whom the children may have shared a tutor-but pioneering life on Dr Wilson’s estate at Braidwood proved 'too severe, so my father left his cattle etc. to go back to Sydney and resume his profession’. Arriving back in Sydney in October 1838 by bullock-dray, with four shillings, Wilson rented a house in Princes Street at The Rocks near Conrad Martens , whom Chapman recalled as her father’s greatest friend. He was introduced to Sydney society by Colonel George Barney , Colonial Engineer, and soon 'did well’. During her stay in Sydney in 1839 Lady Franklin visited Wilson’s studio and was presented with an oil painting of a 'pretty young aboriginal girl’ and some drawings of the Cape. She noted that Wilson charged 10 guineas for an oil and 5 guineas for a 'beautiful’ coloured chalk portrait, and that he had painted a portrait of Martens.

Later that year, Lady Franklin offered a grant of land in Van Diemen’s Land and the Wilsons moved to her Huon River settlement. Anne Chapman recalled more hardships. Wilson decided to return to painting in Sydney: 'he was not strong enough for farm work or management in this colony’. Back at Sydney he rented a house in Cleveland Street, Surry Hills, then known as the Sand Hills. He took pupils, possibly including Adelaide Ironside , but he also secured the position of first clerk at Robert Dunlop’s large store on the Quay at £400 a year with 'fringe benefits’ of provisions to the value of another £100. In 1842 he built a house at Balmain. His daughter recalled him as 'an educated man who could converse on any topic’ and moved in the highest social circles, a regular at Government House.

In 1844 Wilson took his family back to England and rented a large house in Soho Square for portrait painting, but his hopes for the patronage of the Franklins were disappointed when Sir John failed to return from his expedition in the Arctic Circle. Wilson also found the London climate too cold so the family returned to Australia, leaving the two eldest daughters apprenticed to Paris fashion houses. In New South Wales Wilson took up land on the Macleay River; Annabella Boswell recorded him as 'growing raisin grapes and figs but unsuccessfully, in preference to following his profession’. In 1848, when Anne Chapman rejoined the family, her father was living at 97 Hunter Street, Sydney and walking every morning in the Botanic Gardens with the director Charles Moore. A keen naturalist, he sent many new native plants to the gardens and rare birds to John Gould .

At the end of 1849, however, T.S. Mort auctioned thirteen of Wilson’s 'beautiful crayon [pastel] drawings and oil paintings’ and the family moved back to East Kempsey, though Wilson made frequent trips to Sydney to paint portraits. A commission to paint the portraits of Governor Sir George FitzRoy and his daughter, the Hon. Mrs Stewart, decided him to return to Sydney again. Before leaving the Macleay River district he apprenticed his eldest son, James, to a surveyor and married Anne to the son of William Chapman of Yarrabandini. The rest of the family embarked for Sydney in the Rose of Eden . Off Broken Bay, on 23 June 1852, the schooner was caught in a storm and sank. Wilson, his family and all his books, papers, possessions and paintings went down with the ship. ( Richard Noble received the vice-regal portrait commission.)

A classic example of how art can be buried by history, Wilson was claimed by his daughter to be the 'first painter in Sydney’, having painted the portraits of nearly all the people of note. Because Wilson’s society portraits were not signed and perhaps because of the high turnover of Sydney society in the boom and bust of colonial enterprise, none of these are now known. With but one certain exception, extant works come from the Macleay River district, attributed by the sitters’ families. The Mitchell Library holds pastel portraits of Captain Francis Allman and Mrs Anne Chapman of Yarrabandini, somewhat wooden but uncompromising likenesses with an impression of character. Still in family possession, but recorded by the Mitchell Library, is a Mother and Child in oils: a romantic portrait of Elizabeth Cheers, née Chapman, and her small son, posed beside a fishing boat on the seashore. Portraits of the architect John Verge and his wife Mary, who lived for a time on the Macleay, have been attributed to him, while an unsigned oil portrait of Conrad Martens (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW) may be that referred to by Lady Franklin in 1839, a date which fits the apparent age of the subject.

Anne Chapman recalled that romantic portraits of Wilson’s children in shepherdess mode were given to Lady Franklin in Tasmania and presumably taken back to England (where she is recorded as having Tasmanian pictures with Huon-pine frames). The titles of the large number of his own portraits which Wilson, as a member of the hanging committee, included in the second exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in 1849 have an equally romantic flavour suggestive of Gainsborough’s 'fancy pictures’ (but by then evolving into a stereotypical exoticism): Neapolitan Girl , Savoyards , The Two Sisters , Devotion , The Reaper , A Reverie . The Sydney Morning Herald 's art critic praised A Reverie but, appalled by the hanging committee’s self-promotion, severely criticised the 'Wilson Gallery’ of nineteen paintings (twenty-seven altogether are catalogued) for being 'wearisome and suicidal, through the monotonous exhibition of a row of unmeaning faces, occupying the whole line on the left hand as you enter’.

Ironically, the society artist may be rehabilitated into Australian art history by an Aboriginal 'fancy picture’. Found by a London dealer in about 1975 and acquired by the Australian National Gallery in 1979, this is signed lower right and inscribed on the back 'Gunbal Alias Judy Third Gin of Moravanu Chief of Wigwigly Tribe County St Vincent NSW Sept 1 1838’, and seems likely to be the painting given to Lady Franklin in 1839. It is an oil portrait (35.2 × 30.4 cm) of a young Aboriginal woman in 'whiteface’ against a generalised and diminished landscape, as in conventional European portraiture. Belying the ethnographic title, it presents a romantic vision of the Aboriginal woman as a lady of fashion – silk turban, hair dressed in bangs, lips and cheeks rouged, gold necklace and décolletée possum-skin cloak – and as such is unique in Australian art.

Writers:

Parbury, Nigel

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011