oil and house painter, arrived at Hobart Town on 5 August 1831 aboard the convict transport Argyle . He had been tried and convicted at the Dorset Assizes on 12 March 1830 for stealing £5 from a dwelling house. His sentence was life. Stevens, from Bridport, England, was described as twenty years old and 5 feet 5½ inches (166 cm) in height. His background was apparently respectable and he had received some education. His brothers were both established in trade, Shadrach as a cabinet maker and Abednego as a heraldic painter. Presumably baptised Meshach and the second son, Stevens was always called Meshack in convict records.
The behaviour of Stevens while a prisoner was generally good and he received a conditional pardon on 24 May 1839. Just before this, on 27 March 1839, he married Margaret Miller, née Taylor, a 32-year-old widow, in Saint David’s, Hobart Town. His age was given as twenty-seven. In the same year he became licensee of the Rob Roy Hotel, though not listed thereafter. The 1842 census records him as living with his wife and five children at 120 Liverpool Street, Hobart Town. Stevens’s first child, Georgina, had been born on 28 April 1839 and a son was born in 1841, so presumably the other children were from his wife’s first marriage. They had three more children, the last in 1847. He is not mentioned after 1847 when the Hobart Town General Directory identifies him as a painter (i.e. house painter) of Liverpool Street. No further record of the family has been discovered after this date and it is probable that they left the colony. He is thought to have died in 1853.
The only known art work by Stevens is an oil painting showing an Arctic whaling scene (Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, Tas.), which is a fairly competent copy of an aquatint after William John Huggins ' Northern Whale Fishery , published at London in 1829. The Van Diemen’s Land whaling industry was at its height in the late 1840s and colonial vessels were then venturing into polar waters, so it may have been a commission. On the back of the canvas in the artist’s hand is inscribed: 'A View of the Wale Fishing at Greenland and Davis Straits the Mode of Taking and Killing Sperm Wale Seal &c. / Painted by M Stevens / Hobartown Vandiemans Land’.
- Writers:
- Oppeln, Caroline Von
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
