Design and Art Australia Online

painter, son of Joseph Fowles and nephew of Daniel Adey Fowles , is thought by his family to have been born in Somerset, England. He and his wife arrived at Sydney on 31 August 1838, having sailed from London via Hobart Town aboard the barque Fortune . Although nothing is known of his early life in England, Fowles undoubtedly had some artistic as well as medical training. This is substantiated by his diary of the voyage to Sydney which records that he sketched and painted the ship and shipboard scenes and acted as ship’s surgeon, and by his claim to a reputation as a marine painter upon arrival in the colony. His earliest known Australian art work (1841, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales) is a marine scene. Nevertheless, he chose to earn his living as a farmer, leasing Mary Reiby’s Figtree Farm at Hunter’s Hill (now Figtree House, Reiby Road) from 1838 to 1842 and selling his fruit, vegetables and wood in Sydney. His journal (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales) contains detailed descriptions of the farm and its environs, as well as some sketches of it, and of travelling by boat to Sydney.

Fowles initially came to public attention as an artist in 1847 when he opened a studio at Harrington Street, Sydney and contributed to the first exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia in July. Five of the seven paintings he exhibited were of ships and shipping; one was Kangaroos , Fowles’s first documented animal painting. Critical response was somewhat mixed. The Sydney Morning Herald of 26 July 1847 suggested that 'Mr. Fowles sometimes attempts too much for a young artist. His quiet scenes are much better than his attempts to represent “The Hell of Waters” howling and hissing in a tempest’. Likewise, a foray into landscape painting shown at the second exhibition of the society, titled Byrne’s Mills, Parramatta , was described in the Sydney Morning Herald of 2 June 1849 as 'A glaring and unmeaning mixture of red, yellow and brown’.

Fowles is best known today for his publication Sydney in 1848 . Issued in twenty parts between 1848 and 1850, this consists of eighty 'Copperplate Engravings of the Principal Streets, Public Buildings, Churches, Chapels, Etc., Etc., from Drawings by J. Fowles’. Intended for the English market, Fowles stated that its express purpose was 'to remove the erroneous and discreditable notions connected with the Colony’. Republished in 1878 and again in 1961, Sydney in 1848 was a great commercial success and today serves as an important sourcebook for the architectural historian.

Fowles continued to exhibit marine paintings, his two works listed as prizes in an 1848 Sydney art union being The Fleet Beating out of the Bay of Trafalgar during the Gale, Two Days after the Memorable Victory and The Carrysfort Entering the Heads of Port Jackson . In Joseph Grocott’s third art union, held at Sydney in July 1850, Fowles’s Action at Sea (Marine) won a prize of £10. The Illustrated Sydney News was still referring to him as 'the well-known marine artist’ in 1855.

By the mid 1850s, however, Fowles had achieved a new reputation as a painter of racehorses. The People’s Advocate of 13 January 1855 reported that he had been commissioned by Governor FitzRoy to paint a portrait of his favourite horse, Sam Weller, and The Buffalo Bull with a Group of Cattle . The latter was judged to be 'well composed, and the artist has adhered with strict fidelity to the animals and objects around. We must add a note of praise to the sky which is put in with a bold, dashing, vigorous pencil, without portraying the least mark of slovenliness or haste’. Fowles built up a successful business selling painted and lithographed portraits of champion racehorses in the late 1850s. He exhibited the portraits Van Tromp and Cooramin in the 1857 Fine Art Exhibition at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts. In 1858 he was advertising that he would 'paint pictures of Australian “cracks” and will dispose of engravings of horses from his own pictures’. His fame was such that Bell’s Life in Sydney on 4 September 1858 designated Fowles 'our Colonial Herring’ after the famous English horse painter, John Frederick Herring senior.

Early in 1862, employing an experienced trainer, Noah Beal, Fowles established the Newmarket Training Stables at Randwick. The venture failed and in June 1862 'Joseph Fowles of Randwick, artist’ was listed as insolvent. He returned to painting and received numerous commissions throughout the 1860s. Two small oil paintings of Mr Justice Cheek’s celebrated racers, Clore and Sir Patrick , were on display at Sandon’s shop in George Street in 1865. Early in 1868 the Brisbane Courier described Fowles’s oil painting North Australian in detail after the horse won the Duke of Edinburgh stakes at the Duke’s Day Races in Brisbane: 'it is seldom that a really life-like picture of a race-horse can be obtained in the colonies, but Mr Fowles has achieved a reputation in the southern colonies for his skill in this description of painting, and he has painted many of the winners of the principal events of late years in New South Wales and Victoria’. North Australian was subsequently despatched to Prince Alfred as a souvenir of his Australian visit. Portraits of 'celebrated colonial racers’ were included in the 1861 exhibition of the Natural and Industrial Products of New South Wales held at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts; a landscape, a marine painting and a portrait of the racing mare Zoe appeared in the 1869 Intercolonial Exhibition held by the Agricultural Society of New South Wales.

Fowles taught as well as practised art. He was in charge of the training and examination of art teachers for the National Board of Education from 1854 until 1867 when the board was succeeded by the Council of Education. Hilson notes that it was largely through Fowles’s efforts that 'at the surprisingly early date of 1869, drawing was being taught in every government school in New South Wales. He was also drawing master at a number of private schools, including The King’s School, Sydney Grammar, Sydney High and Camden College, as well as at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts (lessons £1 a quarter) where he delivered public lectures on 'Drawing, and the Advantages to be Derived from it’ in October and December 1858. In connection with his teaching activities, he composed and sold a series of eight graded Elementary Free-hand Drawing Books in the 1850s and early 1860s, on the cover of later editions of which he styled himself 'Artist by Appointment to His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh’. Reviewing one of these publications on 26 December 1864, the Herald commented that 'in this excellent and unpretentious work, the author has given full directions for the guidance of teachers who have not had the advantage of previous instruction in drawing—such directions as will enable them to conduct a drawing-class without difficulty’. These books were the basis of the drawing curriculum of New South Wales government schools until the 1880s.

Fowles suffered from epilepsy. In 1868, when his studio was at Glebe Road, Glebe, he fell down in the street and broke his arm. According to Collingridge Rivett, the regular spiritualist seances he attended were thought to aggravate his condition. On 25 June 1878, at the Fairfield home of Mr Matthews, head teacher of the William Street School, Fowles was attending an after-dinner seance when he began to throw himself around the darkened room shouting in agony. His companions rushed for assistance but on returning with a doctor found his dead body 'entangled around the leg of a table in a pool of perspiration’. The 'paralytic fit’ diagnosed as the cause of death was the third he had suffered. He was survived by his second wife, three sons and three daughters. His artistic materials together with 'the goodwill of his practice’ were left to his eldest son, stated in Fowles’s will to have 'artistic tastes’.

Early in 1999 the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, acquired Fowles’ early watercolour of the historic property Bungaribee, offered by the Joshua McClelland Print Room in Melbourne for $40,000 (T. Ingram, 'Saleroom’, Australian Financial Review , 1 July 1999, 34).

Writers:

Laverty, Colin

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989