sketcher, arrived at Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land, aboard the Medway on 12 August 1827, with her four sisters and two brothers. Robert Vincent Legge was granted 1200 acres near St Mary’s on the Break O’Day River which he named after the family home, Cullenswood in Ireland, but none of his sisters lived there long. All married soon after arriving in the colony, the youngest, Frances Blanche, becoming the second wife of Edward Dumaresq, brother of Eliza Darling , in November 1827. In a letter dated 24 January 1836 to his brother-in-law John Lord in London, John Richardson Glover commented about his neighbour, Mrs Thomas Pitcairn: 'Mrs P. was one of five sisters, of the name of Legge, from Ireland, brought out by their brother on matrimonial speculation, and have all succeeded. They are colonially distinguished by the epithets of long, short, middle, right and left legs’.
The Miss Legge who sketched is not distinguished (even in this way), her grand-nephew Robert W. Legge merely annotating two watercolour and pencil sketches of Tasmanian Aborigines (1830s, TMAG) verso: 'original sketch of Break O’Day Native (VDL) taken at Cullenswood Homestead in the early days by a sister of the late Robt. Vincent Legge’. It is possible that this Miss Legge was Eliza Pitcairn 's aunt – except that since 1987 some doubt has been cast on the entire Legge attribution. The Aborigines in the drawings are coarsely caricatured in a most 'unladylike’ way and some art historians now wish to re-attribute them to William Buelow Gould . However, the one closely comparable caricature of a group of Aborigines attributed to Gould (pencil and w/c, c.1833, ML) is unsigned and quite unlike his (signed) far more sympathetic portraits of Aborigines. It, perhaps, should be re-attributed to Miss Legge.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
Note: credit in Heritage
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 1992
