painter, art teacher and naturalist, was the first free artist to settle in New South Wales and attempt to make a living as a professional painter. Son of William Lewin, an ornithologist and fellow of the Linnaean Society, Lewin received his early training as a natural history draughtsman from his father. He helped extensively with the drawing and engraving of plates for Lewin senior’s The Birds of Great Britain (London 1789-94).
Early in 1798 John decided to migrate to New South Wales to see the country and collect and paint natural history specimens. He was encouraged by his English patrons, who included Lady Arden, a natural history collector, Dru Drury, a London merchant with an interest in entomology, and the Duke of Portland who sent a letter of recommendation to Governor Hunter which stated: 'Mr. Lewin is a painter and drawer in natural history…being desirous of pursuing his studies in a country which cannot help to improve that branch of knowledge’. He reached Sydney on board the Minerva in January 1800, his wife Anna Maria having preceded him in the Buffalo .
In 1801 Lewin accompanied two expeditions as unofficial natural history artist. The first, led by James Grant, was to the Hunter River in June and July. Colonel William Paterson and surgeon John Harris were other members of the company. Lewin later drew a koala for Paterson (w/c, ML), the first known depiction of this animal. His earliest known landscape painting, taken on the same expedition, shows a night camp on the Paterson River (w/c, ML). Later that year Lewin went to Tahiti with an expedition organised by Governor Philip Gidley King . After various mishaps, including shipwreck and local wars, the expedition members finally returned to Sydney in December 1802. Five portraits of Tahitians exist from Lewin’s sojourn on the island (ML).
For the next few years, until 1808, the Lewins lived at Parramatta on a 100-acre land grant. It was during this period that Lewin collected the specimens and drew and engraved the plates (apparently with the help of Maria) for his only two published works, Prodromus Entomology. Natural History of Lepidopterous Insects of New South Wales. Collected, Engraved and Faithfully Painted after Nature and Birds of New Holland, with their Natural History. Collected, Engraved and Faithfully Painted after Nature . Both were printed in London, in 1805 and 1808 respectively, by John’s brother Thomas. Today both are very rare books, the latter exceptionally so as only the seven London subscribers’ copies ever appeared due to some undisclosed disaster at the time of publication. The plates for these books, which Lewin sent back to England to be published, were the first to be engraved and printed in the colony, a few of the birds being completed in 1800-01. To satisfy his sixty-seven New South Wales subscribers to The Birds Lewin produced a Sydney edition, published in 1813 by George Howe, the government printer. Eleven copies of this work are known today. It was the first illustrated book to be published in New South Wales.
While at Parramatta, Lewin also produced a large number of botanical drawings. The Mitchell Library has a collection of over 250 thought to have been commissioned by Governor King and his wife, Anna Josepha. At the end of 1809 the Lewins moved to Sydney and for a time existed by selling wines and spirits, having been among the supporters of the deposed Governor William Bligh . John also advertised as a portrait and miniature painter and turned to landscape painting, although he appears to have continued to consider himself principally a natural history artist. Several views of Sydney Cove are dated 1808 and in 1809 he copied some of G.P. Harris 's watercolours of Port Dalrymple (Launceston), again probably for Colonel Paterson. Other Sydney views are dated 1811 and 1812, this time painted from the North Shore. All are held by the Mitchell Library. The drawing classes he advertised for 'the youth of both sexes’ at Sydney in 1811 are thought to be the first given in the colony.
Lewin’s fortunes improved with the Macquaries’ arrival at the end of 1810. Major Cleaveland, Sydney’s brigade-major until his premature death in about 1812 ('a good friend to me. I painted a Number of different subjects for him’), paid Lewin well enough to help finance the erection of a single-storey cottage in Sydney (almost finished by November 1812) and, more significantly, promoted Lewin at Government House. Lachlan Macquarie, always eager to foster artistic talent, gave Lewin several commissions and a job as Sydney coroner at £20 a year, doubling this salary in 1814. Lewin held the position, apparently a sinecure, until his death. Macquarie also allowed him the use of a room in the incomplete Sydney Hospital building as a studio.
Elizabeth Macquarie ordered most of the Government House work but proved reluctant to pay for it 'in that liberal manner that the fine art [sic] requires to encourage them’, Lewin privately complained to his friend Ensign Alexander Huey . A major commission was a transparency for the King’s Birthday Ball in 1812, about which Lewin wrote to Huey:
You must remember my having a transparency to paint for the birth night & it was to be a great secret. Well that secret must out & behold it was a Co-ro-be-ra of the natives in a transparency for dame Macquarie – and from a transparency it [h]as become a fine picture after two years labour at different times & greatly have I gained more knowledge by painting it than I ever gained before – the size of it is fifteen feet by eighteen [4.57 × 5.48 m], the figures as big as life & portraits – it has gained me much praise, much envy & little profit excepting my own practice – it is painted in distemper.
The corroboree painting has long disappeared, but an oil on board head of an Aborigine survives. Known as One of the New South Wales Aborigines Befriended by Governor Macquarie and given by Macquarie to a family retainer back in Scotland (ML), it is possibly a cut-down portion of a larger painting by Lewin. No comparable work, however, is known. The cheerfully crude engraving of an Aborigine, A Native Chief of Bat[h]urst , stated to be after Lewin in John Oxley’s 1820 Journals , bears little similarity to this sensitive and surprisingly naturalistic portrait. However, Wantrup’s attribution to Lewin (as original artist) of the ten splendid aquatints by John Heaviside Clark (a commercial artist in London who worked up other people’s drawings) in Field Sports, &c. &c. of the Native Inhabitants of New South Wales; with Ten Plates, by the Author, Dedicated, by Permission, to Rear Admiral Bligh (London 1813: many subsequent editions) has been generally accepted though unsubstantiated.
Lewin had taken up painting in oils in 1812, writing to his friend Huey on 7 November:
you have often heard me say I should like to paint or that I would like to paint such a thing in Oil – but at every attempt it was attended with some difficulty or other to defeat me – behold, the Charm is broke & now I am painting in Oil two large pictures… I am sorry I have not a picture in Oil to send by this but will paint one on purpose.
A large historical painting painted in his studio was subsequently hung in the Government House dining room. Lewin worked for private settlers as well as for the vice-regal couple and it is not known for whom he painted a large and dramatic still-life oil painting of fish (AGSA), which could be the first oil painting done in the colony (see also Thomas Watling ) – if it is actually his work. (Although signed 'I.W. Lewin’, it bears a marked similarity to a verbal description of an oil painting by Thomas Agar Newall and more convincingly fits its 1850s date.)
On 7 December 1814 the merchant and settler Alexander Riley wrote to his brother:
Agreeable to your Wishes, I have had a pair of the most elegant Flowers painted by Mr Lewen [sic], viz the Gigantic Lily and the Warataw [Waratah] done in his good style which I have sent to Mr Palmer…and I may with truth repeat the remark of all who have seen them, viz “That they are worthy the Palace of a Prince”... Lewen has charged me £12/12/-, and from his high style of finishing them he did not earn journey man’s wages.
A Lewin watercolour of The Gigantic Lyllie of New South Wales (1810) is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales and two other watercolour versions of the flower (the Gymea Lily) are in the Dixson Galleries (ML); one is dated 1806, the other is undated.
Lewin was a member of the vice-regal party that made the first official crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1815. At least twenty watercolours of scenes en route were given to Captain Henry Antill; fifteen survive in Antill’s journal (ML). They show he had already developed an appreciation of the distinctive atmosphere of the Australian bush and must be considered the first resident British artist to attempt to record his impressions without reference to standard English conventions. Early works such as a view from Governor Bligh 's farm on the Hawkesbury (c.1806 8, w/c, Dean Management Services) possibly owe their naturalism to the use of a camera lucida, but the Blue Mountains watercolours seem more creative and analytical. As Bernard Smith notes in European Vision and the South Pacific :
he grasped in short, the open nature of the tree, and he observed many features of its growth missed by earlier artists: the variety of colour in the trunk…; the nature of the bark…; the strange angles and twisted appearance of saplings.
Watercolours of Cox’s River and Springwood (ML), in particular, support Smith’s judgement.
In 1817 Lewin was invited to join John Oxley 's expedition to the Macquarie marshes, but declined. He did, however, make a number of drawings of botanical specimens gathered by Allan Cunningham, eighty-nine of which are in the Library of the Herbarium, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney. The following year Oxley made a second unsuccessful attempt to trace the western rivers and Lewin again made drawings from specimens, including four botanical sketches (NLA) – three of birds and one of red kangaroos – sent to Earl Bathurst by Macquarie. As a natural history artist Lewin executed hundreds, possibly thousands, of drawings. His skill was not remarkable but he often achieved a dramatic and always faithful rendering of colour and detail.
During the last years of his life Lewin ran a farm of 200 acres granted to him by Macquarie at Airds, near Campbelltown, as well as an 'academy of painting’ where he gave lessons for 5 shillings per pupil. He died in August 1819 after a 'severe illness’. The following year Maria Lewin and William returned to England where she arranged the publication of new editions of The Birds and Prodromus Entomology .
- Writers:
- Mander-Jones, P.
Ellis, Elizabeth
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 1989
