painter and explorer, was born in Pembrokeshire, Wales on 31 January 1829, one of the six children of James Murphy, a businessman who was later mayor of Sydney (in 1860). John left for New South Wales with his parents, brother and three sisters in October 1841 on board the Sir Edward Paget . Ludwig Leichhardt was another passenger and the 12-year-old boy became an admirer attracted to Leichhardt’s dreams of exploring unknown parts of Australia. In 1844 Murphy was appointed one of the four European members of Leichhardt’s Port Essington (Northern Territory) expedition. On the journey the naturalist John Gilbert became a close friend and apparently advised the lad on scientific details in his drawings of birds. Although only fifteen, Murphy acquitted himself well on this exhausting expedition that so nearly proved fatal. As Alec Chisholm points out, Johnny Murphy had a hunch back, a characteristic which Aboriginal tribesmen used to identify the expedition to ensuing search parties.
Leichhardt named a lake and a range after Murphy and a few of his drawings (presumably views and a sketch of a grasshopper) were published, unacknowledged, as vignettes in Leichhardt’s Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia (London 1847). Reportedly, Leichhardt later stated that he had only included Murphy’s work in the book 'for the purpose of humouring him and at the request of some of his friends’ – but Leichhardt was no connoisseur, being said by one of his own party to be unable to 'distinguish one picture from another’. In fact, he needed Murphy’s sketches for no official artist had been appointed to the expedition. The full-plate views in his sparsely illustrated Journal were apparently provided by artists not on the expedition, chiefly Harden S. Melville .
Leichhardt begged the Murphy family to let John accompany him on his next expedition, but his mother sensibly refused to allow him to go. He remained in Sydney and for a time worked in partnership with his brother-in-law, J.O. Bradly. Later he became a portrait painter. In 1847 his Portrait of Lord Lyndoch was lent to the first exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia by E.H. Pollard Esq. Two years later, Mr J.S. Beach lent Murphy’s 'Copy after Hayter’ (very probably a portrait) to the society’s second exhibition, where his Napoleon was shown by Mr Nicholas (possibly the portraitist and engraver William Nicholas ). The Sydney Morning Herald 's reviewer thought the first had 'few pretensions but [is] far too good to be passed over without a note of admiration. A similar remark will apply to no. 267 – Napoleon – by the same author’. All sound like copies. At the 1854 Australian Museum exhibition, however, Murphy exhibited Portrait of a Gentleman , which is more likely to have been an original work. He was listed in Sands & Kenny’s Sydney directories for 1857-61 as an artist of 61 Hunter Street, where he apparently shared a studio with the portrait painter E. Thomas (listed at the same address).
John Murphy died unmarried, aged forty, on 9 January 1870. Some outline drawings of birds appear in his copy of John Gould 's first book on the birds of Australia ( A Synopsis , p.c.), which Leichhardt had given him, but no later works are known.
