sketcher and lithographer, a daughter of John Dunn, the manager of the Commercial Bank of Van Diemen’s Land in the 1840s, and Catherine, née Colville, was born and educated in Hobart Town. Her hand-coloured lithograph Heathfield Hobart Town (c.1845, Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts) shows her home, built by the architect Andrew Bell for Affleck Moodie and rented by John Dunn from Moodie’s estate for many years. The style of the drawing suggests that Miss Dunn, like so many Tasmanian gentry, was a pupil of John Skinner Prout . Its quality as a lithograph implies some assistance. No original drawings are known and Anna Maria Nixon , for one, considered Jeanie Dunn an artistic ignoramus after overhearing her comments on the Old Master paintings in the 1845 Hobart Town Art Exhibition. Miss Dunn was visiting the exhibition in the company of her (equally ignorant) fiancé, Robert Charles Chester Eardley-Wilmot, and her future father-in-law, Sir John Eardley Eardley-Wilmot, lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land. She married Robert in 1848. Two of her sisters also married Eardley-Wilmot’s dreary but socially splendid sons, alliances considered by their Tasmanian contemporaries to be a dazzling tribute to the wealth of the Dunns’ self-made father.
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- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
