Design and Art Australia Online

painter, lithographer, sculptor and public servant, was born at The Briars on the island of St Helena on 15 June 1810, second son of William Balcombe, merchant and public servant, and Jane, née Cranston, brother of Betsy Abell and Alexander Beatson Balcombe, a pioneer settler on the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria. Thomas came to Sydney aboard the Hibernia in April 1824 with his family, his father having been appointed Colonial Treasurer of NSW.

After attending Sydney Grammar School, Balcombe worked for the Australian Agricultural Company at Port Stephens until he badly injured his head in a riding accident. He joined the Surveyor-General’s Department under Thomas Mitchell in September 1830 as a draughtsman, but his dedication to his job does not seem to have been great. Governor Bourke, replying to a memo from the colonial secretary concerning patronage for the recently bereaved Balcombe family, noted that Thomas was 'not well spoken of by his superior and it was in consequence my intention to have him reduced at the first opportunity’. Balcombe, however, kept his job and his £150 annual salary. Later he was promoted field surveyor, and he remained in the department for the rest of his life. He was surveying in the Murray River area around 1835-6, presumably with Mitchell, and made sketches on the trip that formed the basis for several later paintings. An attributed oil study, Scene on the Murray River, N.S.W. , dated 1849, is in the Queensland University Art Museum. On 27 June 1840 Thomas Balcombe married Lydia Stuckey; they had three children.

Balcombe’s professional artistic life seems to have begun after his marriage. His earliest identified work – a rather crude lithographic Kangaroo of New Sout [sic] Wales – was put on the stone and printed in 1842 by T. Liley (who also published John Skinner Prout ). Two years later, Balcombe made a set of four lithographs after Edward Winstanley 's drawings, The Five Dock Grand Steeple Chase . In April 1847 he drew and lithographed Big Ike the Port Phillip Pet , a portrait of Isaac Read, champion boxer of New Holland, which sold for a guinea. By the end of the 1840s he had achieved some local reputation. Heads of the People 's article of 28 August 1847 on the recent exhibition held by the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia singled out Balcombe, Winstanley and T. Newall as 'animal painters of no mean merit’ – even though Balcombe seems not to have contributed to the exhibition.

He was, however, well represented at the society’s second exhibition in 1849. Four of his 'clever equine portraits’ were lent by Mr Downes, a prominent pastoralist and racing man, while the artist himself showed Evening , New Hollander Cutting Out a Kangaroo Rat and Talambee, a Native of the Bogan River . The last, an oil painting relating to an illustration of an Aborigine with a remarkable confection of fruit in his hair in Mitchell’s 1848 Journal , was highly commended in the Sydney Morning Herald of 2 June 1849. Balcombe, the critic declared, 'has long been known in the colony as a very spirited animal painter, but he has now taken a higher flight, and this picture affords an undoubted proof of his ability as a painter of the human figure. It is without exception the best attempt in this style and on this scale that we remember to have seen from the hand of a colonial artist’.

Similar praise was lavished on another figure study, Aboriginal Native in Pursuit of Game , which received an award at Grocott’s third art union in 1850. The 'drawing and colouring are both admirable’, observed the Herald on 20 July 1850, 'and this strikes us as being the best colonial painting that has come under our notice’. Balcombe’s second entry in this art union, a handsomely framed oil painting titled Australian Stockmen , won the first prize of £30 and a silver medal. At some stage he also modelled a wax figure of a New Hollander (ML). It depicts a wary Aboriginal hunter sitting beside a tree stump with his booty – including a shee

Balcombe’s surveying trips provided further opportunities for landscape sketching and he also enjoyed considerable success as an illustrator. From the late 1840s his drawings and lithographs appeared in several colonial publications, including the Australasian Sporting Magazine . Bernard Smith calls Mr E.H. Hargraves, the Gold Discoverer of Australia Feby 12th 1851 Returning the Salute of the Gold Miners on the 5th of the ensuing May 'one of the best drawings that has been preserved of this period’. It later appeared as a lithograph, being advertised for sale in the Sydney Morning Herald of 13 June 1851 with a companion print, Gold Diggings of Ophir . On 14 August 1851 the Herald mentioned an oil painting of Hargraves by Balcombe. The Mitchell Library holds all three versions.

In October 1851 Balcombe joined his brother William at the Turon River goldfields, outside Bathurst, and may also have visited neighbouring Ophir. Sketches at the Gold Diggings, 1852 , an album of nine pencil and wash drawings (NLA), records the visit. Badly affected by William’s sudden death, he soon returned to Sydney where he produced the illustrations for G.F. Pickering’s Gold Pen and Pencil Sketches. Adventures of Mr John Slasher at the Turon Gold Diggings . Reviewing this volume, the Sydney Morning Herald of 5 July 1852 paid great attention to the illustrations, noting that Balcombe’s engravings deserved the 'high reputation which that accomplished artist has earned for his delineations of Australian scenery and character’. This and related works are also in the Mitchell Library.

Not a great deal is known about Balcombe’s subsequent activities. Stylistic evidence and subject matter both strongly indicate that Balcombe was also the artist T.B. . Balcombe’s known late works include the sketches he provided of swan hunting and sheep shearing at Mummell Station, near Goulburn in 1853-54, from which engravings were made for the Illustrated Sydney News along with views after J.R. Roberts. He also drew a portrait of the horse Cossack for Bell’s Life in Sydney . He painted two excellent oils in 1853, both of which carry the title Kangaroo Dog Owned by Mr Dann of Castlereagh Street, Sydney , and a portrait of Reverend John Joseph Therry , Sydney’s pioneer Catholic priest. Revisiting the Turon in February 1853, he made a pencil sketch in his album, Graves at Turon , obviously in memory of William. On 21 March 1859, the Herald mentioned a 'beautiful oil painting by Mr Thomas Newall, after a sketch by Mr. J. [sic] Balcombe, of a female aboriginal of one of the distant coast tribes of this colony’. His last known works are dated 1857: a watercolour of an Aborigine hunting fish with two figures splashing in a pool behind (NLA) and a pen-and-ink sketch, The Paddington Omnibus (ML).

Due to domestic upheavals and the death of his eldest daughter, Balcombe’s emotional instability intensified in the late 1850s. At his home, Napoleon Cottage in Paddington, on 13 October 1861, he shot himself. Bell’s Life in Sydney reported the inquest at some length and described Balcombe as an 'artist of considerable repute and a gentleman in the most refined sense of the word’.

Writers:

Laverty, Colin

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989