Design and Art Australia Online

painter, architect, engineer, author and entrepreneur, was probably born in Great Britain. He married Ann Taylor at some unknown date and place; they had two sons and two daughter. Nothing is known of his background and education until the late 1820s when he trained as a civil engineer in Bristol under G. W. Buck and Robert Stephenson then spent seven years employed as a railway engineer and surveyor. His most notable work was designing the greater part of the London to Birmingham line. He published two technical monographs called Railway Practice in 1837 and 1840 (three technical monographs on railway construction between 1837 and 1840, according to Minson in the New Zealand Dictionary of Biography) while resident in Birmingham, which recorded recent projects by Britain’s railway engineers. In 1830 he won the architectural gold medal of the London Society of Arts for a village church design. In 1863 he stated that he had been articled in 1824, mentioned his gold medal and published extracts from testimonials by 'The Celebrated Stephenson’ ('I have had frequent opportunities of witnessing Mr Brees’ architectural abilities, of which I have a high opinion’), Sir John McNeil, Edward Cresy, Sir William Cubitt and Locke.

Between 1832 and 1837 Brees exhibited 19 topographical works at leading London art exhibitions – from Birmingham in 1833, then from various London addresses. Seven were shown at the Royal Academy [RA] and 11 with the Society of Artists (Suffolk Street) [SS]. The latter included View at Dover (w/c, SS 1832-33), Interior of Rochester Cathedral (RA 1833), Chalk Church, Kent (w/c, SS 1833), Sketch at Bruges (RA 1834), Stone Cross at Rouen (RA 1835) and Interior of Salisbury Cathedral (w/c, SS 1837). From their titles it may be presumed that he made a traditional architectural tour of France and Belgium (and England) after completing his apprenticeship. In 1835 he and Joseph Griffiths entered the design competition for the new Houses of Parliament buildings, London (won by Charles Barry). Their entry was described as 'Gothic, of various periods, embracing the early castellated, palatial, and Tudor styles’. Then he seems to have tried to make a living as a designer of furniture and as an architect. In 1841 he published The portfolio of rural architecture, a series of drawings in the Italian style, for villas, &c. made out practically as working plans for the use of gentlemen building: with forms of contract, detailed specifications, estimates, and practical introductory remarks (London: printed for the author by J. Davy & Sons) – called by Hugh Pagan Ltd in 2000 'the rarest British colour-plate architectural pattern book of the first half of the nineteenth century’.

Having signed a contract with the New Zealand Company for a three-year appointment as a principal surveyor and civil engineer in Wellington at an annual salary of £600, Brees landed in the antipodes in February 1842, accompanied by his wife, Ann Taylor, née Jones, his son Harold, two other children and a servant. He laid out a route from Wellington to the Wairarapa and made some of Wellington’s best-known early maps. He found time to paint many watercolours, a selection of which, engraved by Henry Melville, was published in London in 1847 as Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand . Eight editions appeared before 1849 and did much to encourage emigration to New Zealand. Eleven of the original watercolours survive (Alexander Turnbull Library), evidence that the figures in the published plates were greatly improved, presumably by the engraver’s son, Harden S. Melville .

By August 1844, six months before Brees’s contract expired, the NZ Company was in financial difficulties and no longer able to pay him but was allowed to keep the portfolio of views he had made as some recompense for his loss of salary. He also devoted much of his time to painting while settling his affairs, embarking for England via Sydney in the brig Caledonia on 8 May 1845 with his family, now comprising four children. In London he supervised the painting of a panorama of Wellington based on his Pictorial Illustrations as well as overseeing the production of his book. The panorama, first exhibited (possibly at Burford’s) on 24 December 1849, was commended for its 'topographical accuracy’ and for the fact that it would 'do more to promote emigration than a thousand speeches and resolutions’. Brees accompanied its exhibition with lectures on colonisation, thus publicising another aspect of the engineering and architectural agency he had set up in England, advertised as providing 'one department expressly devoted to the Colonies – procures Land for intending Colonists, and secures them Passages in sea-worthy Vessels and Outfits’.

Other panoramas of New Zealand towns and scenes followed over the next two years (though the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography suggests it was the same one revived) and Brees also developed some of his New Zealand sketches into more finished oil paintings. Port Nicholson, N.Z. (1846, oil on board, National Library of Australia [NLA]) belongs to this period and perhaps also the unsigned and undated Te Aro Flat, near Capt. Sharpe’s Residence, Wellington, New Zealand (oil on board, NLA). At some stage he was again practising as a civil engineer, at Croydon, and he is said to have also exhibited a panorama of Sydney in London. A young friend of the architect J.J. Davey 'came out in ’52 and wrote me that St Andrew’s Cathedral with portion of the walls only executed and not ready for roof was just as he saw it in Brees’ panorama’.

His continued promotion included the publication of A Key to the Colonies; or, Advice to the Million upon Emigration in 1851. Just after it was issued Brees announced in the Times (20 May 1851) that, having decided to close his panorama and return to the colonies, he was seeking capital from interested speculators to invest. It would appear that his first Australian port of call was Melbourne. His undated watercolour of Flemington, Melbourne (La Trobe Library) depicts a Chinese convoy en route to the Bendigo goldfields and he may well have spent some time on the recently discovered goldfields himself. Later he was appointed acting colonial engineer for Victoria, remaining in charge until 1853 when Charles Pasley arrived as colonial engineer and found the office 'undermanned and demoralized’. Brees was listed as an architect and surveyor in private practice at Melbourne in 1854. By 1856 he was at Bendigo. That year he produced, anonymously, How to Farm and Settle in Australia , illustrated with six engravings. Some time later, he moved to Sydney. J.J. Davey stated in his (unpublished) reminiscences that Brees set up practice as an architect in Sydney about 1858-59. He was certainly working there in 1860 for on 21 December 'Mr licensed surveyor Brees C.E., Architect’ announced that he had moved his office to 95 Elizabeth Street North. The following year, he exhibited 'two or three watercolour pictures’ at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts in February then decided to revisit Otago, perhaps enticed by the New Zealand gold discoveries.

The Sydney Morning Herald of 21 August 1861 reported that an exhibition of 60 of Brees’s Australian and New Zealand scenes was being held at his son’s rooms in the Commercial Chambers, New Pitt Street, presumably to raise money for the trip. The newspaper critic thought the drawings displayed considerable merit but noted that 'their value depends not so much on their qualities as paintings as upon their correctness as representations of well-known or romantic spots in these colonies’. The views of New Zealand were judged especially interesting, while his Victorian subjects were also praised:

A Scene at Bendigo is homely and characteristic; and the Mount Alexander Road shows very distinctly the jaded bullocks, the sly-grog shops that display nothing beyond lemonade, with its gay flags and embellishments and the tired and dusty diggers. Camping at the foot of Mount Macedon is a nice picture; as, indeed, are all the bush scenes. The sketch of the Gap is one of the best in the collection; it conveys a very correct and forcible idea of the bold rocks at the South Head. Amongst the scenes in the neighbourhood of Sydney, we may notice a view of Coogee Bay, which is very neatly drawn. Those who feel interested in seeing coloured pictures of familiar spots, should take an early opportunity of visiting Mr Brees’ collection previous to their dispersion, it being intended shortly to dispose of them by a distribution upon the principle of the English Art Unions.

Tickets cost a guinea each and there were nine prizes.

Brees was back at Sydney by December 1862, when he opened an 'Architectural Gallery’ in his son’s Commercial Chambers. Although J.J. Davey wrote that 'The back stone part of “Binnies” in George Street South off Hunter Street is almost the only instance of his work’, S.C. Brees was a great designer. He and Harold announced they had model plans available for all types of buildings: houses, churches and chapels ('ventilation studied first, an effect to command the mind second, expense third’) and public buildings ('suitable to the climate, elegant and inexpensive’). Harold would erect them at a 50 per cent saving:

Comfortable cottages built for £200 to £800. Italian Villas for £1000 to £2000; a palazzo, such that Sydney cannot image, from £7000 to £10 000. Old houses turned into good paying property at trifling expense … 100 plans for free inspection.

S.C. Brees took an active interest in local architectural issues in Sydney. In a letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald (May 1862), he wrote at length on the competition designs for a new Parliament House for Sydney won with a Venetian Gothic design by Lynn of Chester, England. Brees argued that the Gothic style was unsuitable for public buildings in Australia. In December 1863 he commented disparagingly on various city buildings, suggesting that 'covered ways, or piazzas, might be advantageously adopted in this country more frequently than they are’. By then, however, he was utterly disillusioned with local architectural taste and stated: 'it is of no use lamenting, no one feels or believes in architecture’.

Apart from Messrs Ashdown’s Chambers and a few 'other buildings now in progress’ cited in an advertisement at the end of 1863, patrons had clearly ignored Brees’s 'CONVENIENT PLANS versus makeshifts. Life rooms v. death rooms. Elegance v. humdrum. Economy v. waste’. At the end of December 1863 he moved his architecture gallery to other rooms in Pitt Street (opposite the Union Bank) and a year later handed the practice over to Harold and set out for England. On 3 May 1865, S.C. Brees died in the West Indian docks on board the La Hogue en route to London from Sydney.

More would be known about Brees’s life had not his diaries been destroyed many years ago at the express wish of his niece. An article in the Turnbull Library Record , which covered only his New Zealand career and admitted that 'Brees the man still eludes us’, dismissed his artistic efforts rather summarily: 'his paintings are reasonably accurate and rather charming, [although] he should perhaps be described as a dedicated amateur rather than an artist’. Perhaps a different assessment would be made if more of his architectural designs were identified and their influence on Sydney’s Italianate villas determined.

Writers:

Holden, Robert
Kerr, Joan
Lennon, Jane

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989