Design and Art Australia Online

watercolourist, lithographer and photographer(?), was born at Perriton, Devon, England on 21 May 1818, eldest of the five children of Rev. Samuel Gill, a Baptist minister and schoolmaster, and his first wife, Winifred, née Oke. He was educated at his father’s school in Devonport and at Dr Seabrook’s Academy, Plymouth. Having shown an early aptitude for drawing, he began working as a draughtsman and painter at the Hubard Profile Gallery in London. After the death of two younger children from smallpox, Rev. Gill purchased an 80-acre section in South Australia and the family sailed for Adelaide in the Caroline . Soon after their arrival, in December 1839, Gill’s mother and sister died.

S.T. Gill established a studio in Gawler Place, Adelaide. An advertisement in the South Australian Register of 7 March 1840 stated that he could supply 'correct likenesses’ of people, horses, dogs, local scenery and residences. He showed an early interest in the South Australian interior and its Aboriginal inhabitants, his watercolour of a 'native sepulchre’ near Missunga Plains (Royal Commonwealth Society, London) being dated 8 May 1842. Few portraits survive apart from a series of twenty lithographs of 1849 titled Heads of the People , where the artist portrayed leading citizens of the colony with a keen sense of observation bordering on caricature. Gill’s watercolours of Adelaide are a lively record of the early years of the city’s development. They show broad streets peopled by picturesque inhabitants and document many aspects of the town, from a fine series of churches, including Trinity Church, Adelaide (1845), to race meetings such as Adelaide Racecourse (1845).

S.T. Gill was possibly the first person to import daguerreotype equipment to the colony. On 8 November 1845 the South Australian Register announced: 'A daguerreotype has been sent to the colony, and is in the hands of Mr Gill, the artist. It appears to take likenesses as if by magic… The portrait is, in fact, a preserved looking-glass. We understand Mr Gill will soon be prepared to show us as we are.’ But Gill did not persevere with the process. He sold the equipment early in 1846 to Robert Hall and no examples of his daguerreotypes are known. Indeed, it is unclear whether he used the camera at all in the few weeks he owned it.

Inspired by the exploits of local explorers, particularly Edward John Eyre and Charles Sturt, Gill produced several watercolours of the departure of Sturt’s expedition into the interior in August 1844. These are some of Gill’s finest works, displaying an ability matched by few contemporaries to integrate figures and buildings into the landscape. As a visual reporter he seems to have rejected no minor detail. An accomplished horseman, he travelled alone on horseback throughout the settled areas of South Australia, and the watercolours from his travels show a real acceptance of the colours and forms of the Australian bush. When John Ainsworth Horrocks organised an expedition to explore the country north of the Flinders Ranges in 1846, Gill joined the party as unpaid draughtsman. The expedition was well planned but ended unhappily with Horrocks’s death from an accidental gunshot wound. After the accident Gill was left alone with the injured leader, but his devoted nursing was in vain. His poignant diary of the expedition was published in the South Australian Gazette on 10 October 1846.

In January 1847 Gill assisted the committee appointed to arrange South Australia’s first general 'Exhibition of Pictures: The Works of Colonial Artists’ in which he displayed sixty-two works, among them a dramatic series of thirty-three pictures of the Horrocks expedition, arranged chronologically and depicting the rugged Flinders landscapes, the hard country through which they had travelled and the tragic return with the dying Horrocks. A View to the North West , for example, drawn on 22 August, shows Horrocks and the artist standing on a rocky outcrop gazing into 'an immense space of dry sandy country covered with a low bush scrub’. It is an objective visualisation of the breadth and emptiness of the Australian desert.

A similar exhibition of pictures was held in 1848. Records are incomplete, but Gill displayed at least ten works, including six of the seven watercolours of the Burra Burra Mine he had painted in April 1847 as a commission (2 guineas a painting) from the directors of the South Australian Mining Association. (Some of his Burra Burra pictures were reproduced, unacknowledged, in the Illustrated London News at the end of 1848.) In 1851 he was declared bankrupt. Increasing bouts of drunkenness had affected his output and the previous year he had suffered an inflammation of the right hand, which prevented him from working for several months. He decided to cut his losses and in 1852 travelled to the Victorian gold-diggings, where he was later joined by his brother, John, and a friend. They joined the large group of South Australians flocking to the Mt Alexander (Castlemaine) goldfields.

The excitement and squalor of goldfields’ life was an inspiration to Gill. He quickly deserted mining to record all aspects of life and work in a place and time of almost cataclysmic change. In a few months he returned to Melbourne with a large collection of watercolours and wash drawings. His panorama of Forest Creek, Mount Alexander shows not only the bustle of a main street, still largely tents, but also the despoliation of the countryside beyond. An exhibition of his drawings was reviewed favourably in the Argus and he was compared to the English cartoonists 'Phiz’ and Cruikshank. In Melbourne Gill obtained work as chief illustrator for a short-lived satiric journal, the Armchair , drawing both its frontispiece and several illustrations, among them Melbourne Winter and Melbourne Summer showing the extremes of climate that afflicted the city. He did not, however, do his own lithography and the illustrations suffer from being clumsily executed.

Gill was a skilled lithographer well able to make his own plates. He made them in a room above Blundell’s bookshop in Collins Street where they were sold, transferring his lively drawings onto the stone without loss of their essential qualities. His first series of twenty-four lithographs, Victorian Gold Diggings and Diggers As They Are , was published in Melbourne in August 1852 – and in London the following year in a pirated edition. The Armchair lamented the 'bare-faced effrontery of an English publisher who has produced a miserable counterfeit of them and sent them out here to be sold at ridiculously low prices under the very eye of the talented artist, who is thus sought to be robbed of the reward of his honest labour.’

Gill returned to the diggings regularly, visiting Mt Alexander, Ballarat and Bendigo, as well as travelling around the colony on horseback. He made sketches wherever he went, as he had done in South Australia, and produced several more sets of lithographs, including The Diggers and Diggings of Victoria As They Are 1855 and Sketches in Victoria . At least forty-six vignettes were lithographed for letterheads with wry explanatory captions. Victoria Illustrated , engraved in London after drawings by Gill and published in Melbourne in 1857, is also somewhat lifeless in comparison with his own lithographs. His success as 'the artist of the goldfields’ was so great, however, that his work continued to be pirated in both England and Germany. John Sherer’s The Gold-Finder of Australia; How He Went, How He Fared, and How He Made His Fortune , published in England, contains forty-eight engravings attributed to W.A. Nicholls but obviously taken from Gill.

In 1856, at the height of his fame, Gill travelled to Sydney with his de facto wife, Elizabeth ( Gill ), hoping to repeat his Victorian success. He quickly produced a set of lithographs, Scenery in and around Sydney (1856), and received several commissions for drawings of houses. In 1857 a French wool merchant and art collector, Monsieur H. Noufflard, commissioned eight watercolours of his house in Bligh Street, Sydney. Produced with the artist’s usual eye for intimate detail, they are the earliest full set of illustrations of the exterior and interior of an Australian residence. Unfortunately Sydney, a conservative seaport town, was suffering a depression due to a slump in wool prices. Without the buoyant market he had found for his work in Melbourne, Gill was forced to supplement his income by taking students and working for the illustrated newspapers. His reputation was severely set back over the 'Veno’ case of 1858 when a rival newspaper, Bell’s Life in Sydney , claimed that Gill’s illustrations for the finish of a horse race published in the Era had not been drawn from life. The proprietors of the Era sued and were embarrassed when Gill admitted under cross-examination that he had seen neither the race nor one of the horses. By then he was beginning to suffer the inevitable effects of alcoholism.

When he returned to Melbourne in 1862 Gill found he had been forgotten in a rapidly-changing city of over 100,000 inhabitants. Continuing to work assiduously during his sober periods, in 1865 he executed an attractive set of coloured lithographs, The Australian Sketchbook , with twenty-four plates. He made a large number of cartoons, increasingly crude in execution, which he intended to publish as Colonial Comicalities . Although the publication did not materialise, a number of lithographs produced after his cartoons survive in public collections, e.g. Native Dignity (which exists in at least 2 versions).

In 1866 eight of Gill’s watercolours, including bush and Sydney scenes, were displayed at the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition. The following year he showed 'scenes in and near Adelaide in the early years of the colony’ with the South Australian Society of Arts. He appears to have had no difficulty in finding work. He continued to produce drawings for the Melbourne Herald until his death and occasional illustrations also appeared in the Illustrated Melbourne Post . In 1869 the trustees of the Melbourne Public Library commissioned (for £53.10s) a set of forty watercolours after his earliest goldfields sketches. The resulting collection, The Victorian Goldfields , is a superb depiction of all aspects of gold-mining and goldfields’ life. It would seem that he also had plans to produce a new series of lithographs, for three years later he made an almost identical set of fifty-three watercolours with a title drawing, The Gold-Fields of Victoria during 1852 3 Comprising Fifty Sketches of Life and Character, Primative [sic] Operations &c. &c. By S.T. Gill Melbourne 1872 – although the set was not published in his lifetime.

By 1872 Gill’s health was failing, the venereal disease he had contracted on the goldfields being aggravated by his drinking. Naturally reticent, he became a forgotten man, moving restlessly around hotels exchanging quick sketches for the price of a drink. Occasionally a drawing was commissioned and he was able to produce it with something of his former brilliance. On 27 October 1880 he died, destitute, on the steps of the Melbourne Post Office. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in the Melbourne General Cemetery.

Six of Gill’s watercolours were hung in the 1884 Victorian Jubilee Exhibition (for their historical interest) but he was virtually forgotten until 1913 when A.W. Greig presented a paper on his life and work to the Royal Historical Society and subsequently organised a subscription list to allow his remains to be removed to a private grave with a marked headstone.

Writers:

Jones, Shar

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989