painter and composer, was born in Wigton, Cumberland, son of Joseph Graves, an ironmonger, and Ann, née Matthews. Before leaving England for Van Diemen’s Land in 1834 with his second wife Abigail, née Porthouse, and their six children as assisted migrants Graves worked in a woollen mill and a coal-mine. At the same time he developed his skills in drawing, painting and music. Although his song 'D’ye ken John Peel?’ set to a traditional tune subsequently brought him fame, Graves’ early ambition was to be a painter. He hoped to take lessons and he painted some oil portraits, yet his formal art training appears never to have progressed beyond an apprenticeship to his Uncle George, a coach-painter.
In the colony Graves tried a number of different occupations. In May 1836 he advertised that he was 'willing to repair, paint and varnish carriages, paint portraits and heraldic devices and undertake japanning, plumbing and glazing’. He also applied, unsuccessfully, for the position of government lithographer in June 1837. In 1842, having spent some time (apparently as an inmate) in the New Norfolk Lunatic Asylum, he went to New Zealand. He returned to Hobart in 1845, probably via Sydney, and remained in Tasmania until his death in 1886. The eldest of his eight children, a namesake son, became a successful Hobart Town lawyer, but it was the eccentric composer father to whom a memorial was ultimately erected in St David’s Park, Hobart (in 1958).
Few artworks are known. In December 1850 Graves advertised in the Hobart Town Advertiser offering to paint transparencies 'suitable for the forthcoming rejoicing’ (over the abolition of transportation). From Hobart Town in 1875 he sent an oil painting, Harvest Time , to the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition held in preparation for the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. An oil portrait of the Tasmanian farmer and politician William Hodgson (VDL Folk Museum), inscribed 'Unfinished and unsigned portrait by his friend John Woodcock Graves’, presumably dates from the 1880s. In the catalogue of the 1896 Old Hobart Exhibition, J.W. Graves was stated to have painted the pony and dogs in an equestrian portrait of Tasmania’s first chaplain, Rev. Robert Knopwood, with T.G. Gregson and Frank Dunnett also contributing to the work, though this may have been the son.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
