Design and Art Australia Online

sporting and animal painter and police officer, was born in Van Diemen’s Land on 10 June 1826, third son of William Thomas Lyttleton and Ann, née Hortle. Thomas grew up on the family property, Hagley, at Longford near Launceston, moving to Victoria in 1851. He joined the Victoria Police Force on 9 January 1852. After serving in various country districts he was appointed superintendent of the Melbourne Metropolitan Police Force in the early 1860s. Sadleir commented that Lyttleton 'never seemed to take his duties quite seriously’, but he appears to have been well liked.

At the age of twenty-seven, Lyttleton married Emily Fenton in Hobart Town; they had two sons and two daughters. In 1853 he joined the Melbourne Club. His interest in the turf is first documented in 1857 when he was elected to the committee of the newly formed Castlemaine Turf Club. His earliest recorded painting is an 1856 watercolour of the horse 'Free Trader’, winner of the inaugural Melbourne Hunt Club Cup. Now owned by the Victoria Amateur Turf Club, it was the first in a series of paintings done over the next few years for his friend, the pastoralist and very successful amateur rider Herbert Power.

Lyttleton contributed 'Four Pictures of Horses’, all watercolours, to the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition. In 1868-69 he painted several steeplechase, hurdle and hunting scenes featuring Adam Lindsay Gordon, the then famous amateur rider who was just beginning to receive recognition as a poet. These included Adam Lindsay Gordon Steeplechasing at Dowling Forest Racecourse, Ballarat (1869, oil on board, LT) and Hunting Scene, Gonn Station, Murray River (1869, oil on board, Warrnambool AG). He contributed a watercolour, The Bivouac , to the 1869 Melbourne Public Library exhibition. The eight oils catalogued as lent by 'W.C.’ Lyttleton and painted by 'Lyttleton’ were undoubtedly his; they included racehorse portraits ( The Barb , Glencoe , Western and My Dream ), a Group of Cattle and a landscape of Panshanger, Tasmania , as well as two oil paintings titled The Start and The Finish —possibly the extant pair of oil paintings of a steeplechase held at Flemington on 7 November 1868 and won by Viking, a horse owned, trained and ridden to victory by Gordon (p.c.).

Lyttleton was a foundation member of the Victorian Academy of Arts and exhibited ten oils at the first and second exhibitions in 1870 and 1872. Again these were mainly portraits of champion racehorses, and one called Coaching on the Woods Point Road . Photographs by Charles Hewitt after Lyttleton’s paintings of the champion horses Camden and Barwon were included in volume 3 of William Yuille’s Victorian Stud Book (Melbourne 1871) together with three photographs of horse portraits by Frederick Woodhouse . That year Lyttleton painted a fine oil of the three Power brothers—prominent pastoralists, stock auctioneers and racing administrators—in a steeplechase at Melbourne.

In poor health, Lyttleton was superannuated from the Melbourne Metropolitan Police Force on 18 August 1874. He went to live in Drysdale (Vic.), and continued to paint in his retirement, completing a portrait of Speculation, Sir Hercules Robinson’s 1874 Melbourne Cup horse, that same year. Some of his paintings were exhibited at Geelong. In April 1875 he was briefly in Sydney for an exhibition of his paintings at Joseph Clarke’s Print Shop in George Street and during his visit advertised his availability to paint horse and cattle portraits. Examples on view at Clarke’s included a painting illustrating Gordon’s poem 'How We Beat the Favourite’.

Thomas Lyttleton died at Drysdale from 'heart disease’ on 22 January 1876, aged forty-nine, and is buried in Geelong Cemetery. He was survived by his wife, two sons and a daughter. The Geelong Advertiser reported: 'in Mr. Lyttleton the colony has lost an artist of no mean repute, his oil paintings of many of our most celebrated race-horses having invariably elicited much admiration. It is only a few short weeks ago that a representation in oil colors by the deceased gentleman of a winter scene in England, a stage coach and pair standing opposite a lodge gate, was deservedly most favourably commented upon’.

Writers:

Laverty, Colin

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011