Joseph Henry Hart was born and trained in England but nothing is known of his years there. Hart came to Australia in 1917, enlisted for service in the Australian Imperial Forces the following year in Brisbane and embarked for England in November 1918 from Sydney. At that time his age was given as 38 years and his profession a commercial artist.
He spent some time in England (where his wife was still living) before returning to Brisbane. He provided an impressive series of engravings to illustrate Phoebe Kirwan’s Mt Coot-tha (The Mount of Beauty), which was published in 1925 by Brisbane City Council. His wood/lino-block illustrations for a pamphlet published by Janie M. Stevens, With Pen and Pencil in Southern Queensland , published 1929 by Barkers Bookstore, is rather more modest in achievement.
Hart became involved with art groups including the Brisbane Sketch Club and as an exhibiting and committee member of the Queensland Authors’ and Artists’ Association from 1925 to 1927 where on 19 May 1925 he presented a paper on 'Art processes’.
Hart tried his hand at other craftwork in the late 1920s and exhibited bookbinding and carved and modelled leatherwork at the exhibitions of the Arts and Crafts Society of Queensland from 1929 to 1933, and drawings and pewter work in the latter year. In 1929 the local papers reported that examples of his work were acquired by members of the visiting Russian Ballet, including the famous ballerina Anna Pavlova and her partners Vladimiroff and Algeranoff. He also exhibited items of his leatherwork with the Queensland Art Society in 1930. He exhibited several landscapes of Mount Coot-tha in the exhibitions of the Queensland Art Society from 1930 to 1933, together with floral and figurative studies including a portrait of Professor Cumbrae-Stewart (the first Garrick Professor of Law at the University of Queensland) and a sketch of 'the late’ Anna Pavlova in 1931.
A posthumous exhibition of his work, selected by Mrs Gladys H. D. Powell, was held under the direction of the Public Curator at Celtic Chambers, George Street, Brisbane, and was opened by Professor F. W. Robinson on 21 May 1935.
- Writers:
- Cooke, Glenn R.
- Date written:
- 2009
- Last updated:
- 2011
