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painter, photographer and public servant, fourth son of Dr William Elyard and Sarah, née Gilbert, was born on the Isle of Wight on 9 May 1817. The family arrived at Sydney on 18 December 1821 aboard the convict ship John Bull , on which William Elyard was surgeon-superintendent. Samuel was sent to Mr Gilchrist’s school in about 1826 where he was taught drawing by Edmund Edgar . He then attended John Dunmore Lang’s Australian College and studied miniature and oil painting under J.B. East , becoming sufficiently competent to receive commissions and to hold his own drawing classes at the college when aged nineteen. He became acquainted with Conrad Martens , painted his portrait and purchased a number of his landscapes. Elyard took more lessons from William Nicholas at about this time, then attempted to earn his living as a portrait painter in watercolour, pencil and chalk. His sitters early in 1837 included Mr Wrightman, Mr H. Morgan, Mrs Carmichael (the headmaster’s wife), Mr Gurner 'in his gown and wig’, Miss Kirk and Mrs Radford (later Mrs A.B. Spark). He was not, however, very successful, and on 15 April he became a clerk in the Colonial Secretary’s Office on 5s a day. 'There is not so much anxiety about this kind of life as there is in the Profession of Painting alone – consequently more of happiness’, he wrote: 'It is however an everyday sort of life’. He continued to execute commissions in his spare time and for a while continued teaching at the college.

Presumably influenced by Martens, Elyard subsequently took up landscape painting and devoted much of his leisure time to it, making a great number of sketches in and around Sydney. In the early 1840s he was taught by John Skinner Prout , probably the most significant influence on his pupil’s future artistic career. Prout’s watercolour Miller’s Point, Sydney 1841 (with gasworks stack in the distance) auctioned by Christie’s in Sydney on 14-15 August 1994, lot 32, was once owned by Elyard. Like Prout, Elyard favoured picturesque buildings, street scenes and landscapes. His paintings were shown with the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in 1847 and at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts in 1857. Two of his sketches of Botany Bay were engraved and reproduced in the Illustrated London News of December 1865. At the 1867 Paris Universal Exhibition he showed five watercolours as an amateur artist.

In addition to painting, Elyard’s life in Sydney was not uneventful. On 10 April 1849 he went through a form of marriage with Angelina Mary Hughes Hallett, née Scott, an alleged prostitute later gaoled for robbery and child-stealing. Elyard quickly repudiated the marriage and printed posters and pamphlets explaining his insanity at the time due to her systematic and malicious administration of drugs. However, the insanity did not simply disappear when they separated, for within a few years he was claiming another strange marital relationship. He was apparently convinced of his being 'Samuel Rex, King of Australia’, reigning with Phebe Hilly, 'Empress of Australia’. Their partnership was also dissolved, probably by 1860. Elyard cut a controversial figure in local ecclesiastical circles. For a number of years he believed he was, among other biblical characters, the prophet Elijah sent by God to herald the second coming of Christ. The Church of England refused him permission to preach, but he was more seriously entertained by Herman Hoelzel of the Sydney Synagogue, who signed a petition supporting Elyard’s outlandish claims. When the Synagogue Board discovered this, Hoelzel was forced to resign.

On 18 August 1868, at the age of fifty-one, Elyard retired from his position as second-class clerk in the public service on the grounds of ill-health and was given a pension. Sands Sydney Directory for 1867 lists him as living in Cleveland Street, Surry Hills, but by March 1869 he was living permanently on the south coast at Nowra and occasionally returning to Sydney, usually for brief visits to members of his family. He became less eccentric and settled down to a relatively quiet life of painting. Several of his watercolours and oil paintings, mainly of scenery around Nowra, were exhibited with the New South Wales Academy of Art in 1872 and 1873. Later he participated in local shows and exhibitions, being awarded a silver medal by the Shoalhaven Agricultural and Horticultural Association in 1890 for his continuing artistic activity.

He also advertised and exhibited as a photographer from the 1890s, using many skills and conventions derived from his experience as a painter. He was well acquainted with photography, having purchased a daguerreotype camera from Freeman Brothers as early as 1856, and he sometimes combined his media with interesting results. For example, his Cabbage Tree Creek is a photograph of a scene composed of several overpainted photographs, a collage of images which slightly modifies the actual landscape. Not all the photographs he overpainted, however, were his own. Some were undoubtedly purchased from Sydney photographers such as Edwin Dalton and Albert Lomer , or from the Sydney booksellers who sold their work. In 1877 he 'bought photographs of coast scenes at Clarke’s’. In 1892, with the assistance of the photographer M.D. Hussey, Elyard published Scenery of Shoalhaven in Sydney, a book containing photographic facsimiles of his watercolours.

Elyard’s move to Nowra isolated him from developments within the larger art world. His contact with other artists was mainly restricted to Louis Frank , who was in the Shoalhaven district during the 1880s, and to amateur painters such as Mr Marrack and William Lovegrove. His artistic influence was negligible. He gave lessons to only a few children, including his nephew, Walter Raleigh Elyard. Such an isolated, provincial life, however artistically detrimental, was undoubtedly physically beneficial. Samuel Elyard died at Nowra on 23 October 1910, aged ninety-three. A photograph of him in extreme old age (Mitchell Library) – looking like an Old Testament prophet – was possibly taken in Albert Lomer’s Sydney studio.

Writers:

Watkins, Jonathan

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011