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painter, journalist and convict, was born in London on or about 11 October 1794. Wainewright’s parents died soon after his birth and his upbringing and education were provided for by his maternal grandfather, Ralph Griffiths, founding editor of the Monthly Review (est. 1749), a periodical devoted to literary criticism. Griffiths associated with such revolutionary thinkers as Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Josiah Wedgwood, Henry Fuseli and William Blake, and the intellectual atmosphere of Linden House, Griffiths’s London home in Turnham Green, was to be a major influence in Wainewright’s life. Family connections included the novelist Fanny Burney, the musicologist Charles Burney and his son Charles junior, the classical scholar in whose Greenwich Academy Wainewright was educated. His interests developed in both literature and painting, although his upper middle-class background inclined him towards a leisured and dilettante approach to the arts.

While still a young man Wainewright began to collect gems, books, prints and objets d’art . In 1813 he began a brief apprenticeship with the portrait painter and Royal Academician Thomas Phillips (1770-1845). Wainewright’s first known works, a lost portrait of Byron (a friend of his great-uncle) and a sepia and wash Amorous Scene (British Museum) showing affinities with Fuseli, date from this time. John Linnell also claimed Wainewright as a pupil in an unpublished autobiography – a likely enough connection given Wainewright’s later subject-matter. From 11 April 1814 until 15 May 1815, Wainewright served with the Bedfordshire 16th Regiment of Foot, having purchased a commission for £400 later relinquished by sale. From 1816 dates a watercolour copy (private collection [p.c.], England) of Murillo’s Infant St. John the Baptist with the Lamb (National Gallery, London). Six portraits of relatives and friends dating from about 1820 25 are also known, one of which, John T. Payne (New York Historical Society Collection), shows both the conservatism of Phillips and the stylised patterning and linearity of Blake.

In 1820 Wainewright began writing under the pseudonyms 'Egomet Bonmot’, 'Cornelius van Vinkbooms’ and 'Janus Weathercock’. Under the last, he wrote his most important articles for the London Magazine between 1820 and 1824: reviews of exhibitions and literary criticisms which were published collectively as Wainewright: Essays and Criticisms by W.C. Hazlitt in 1880. Wainewright’s colleagues at the London Magazine , Carlyle, Hazlitt, Hood, Lamb, Mary Russell Mitford and de Quincey, had a considerable influence on his literary taste and, consequently, on his choice of subject-matter for the narrative paintings he exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1821 to 1825.

All these paintings are now lost but their titles and accompanying literary quotations indicate that while Wainewright was working in the eighteenth-century genre of 'Historia’, or narrative style, he used this manner to express nineteenth-century romantic ideas. They include Subject from the Romance of Undine (1821) from the German fairytale; Paris in the Chamber of Helen (1822) from Homer’s Iliad ; An Attempt from the Undine of de la Motte Fouqu é and How They Fared at Castle Ringstetten (1823); The Milkmaid’s Song (1824) from Christopher Marlowe’s poem 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’; and Sketch from La Gerusalemme Liberata and First Idea of a Sketch from Der Freischutz (1825) from Tasso. In 1825 both Wainewright and Linnell were rejected in their bid to become associates of the Royal Academy and Wainewright never exhibited there again.

In 1821 Wainewright had married Eliza Frances Ward, a daughter by a previous marriage of Mrs Abercromby. Little is known of his activities until May 1831 when he fled to Boulogne, France, leaving behind his wife and son, his reputation ruined by the suspicion that he had murdered his uncle, George Griffiths (d.1828), his mother-in-law Mrs Abercromby (d.1830) and his sister-in-law, Helen Frances Phoebe Abercromby (d.1830), since he stood to gain financially by all three deaths. It was later discovered that by means of forgeries committed in 1822 and 1824 Wainewright had availed himself of the £5000 capital left to him in trust by his grandfather. A few weeks after his return to London in 1837 he was arrested for forgery, tried, convicted and sentenced to transportation. He sailed from Portsmouth on 29 July 1837 in the convict transport Susan , arriving at Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land, on 21 November.

These facts have been the subject of continuous publications on Wainewright since 1853. He was the perfect scapegoat for Victorian moralising, semi-fictional literature and as such inspired Charles Dickens’s Hunted Down , Oscar Wilde’s Pen, Pencil and Poison and many other works, including in more recent years Hal Porter’s The Tilted Cross . Dickens had met Wainewright when visiting Newgate Prison and later saw one of his Tasmanian portraits, Miss Power (now lost), when it was owned by Lady Blessington, the sitter’s aunt and a well-known author. Even the more objective biographies by Curling, Lindsey and Crossland are speculative or exaggerated. An interesting theory – that he spent some time in New South Wales in the 1820s and 1830s before his transportation – is the subject of Thomas Kenny’s Wainewright in New South Wales (1975) and may offer an answer to the blank years in his life story.

Wainewright’s colonial oeuvre has made him well known in Australia as a portraitist but some surviving subject paintings form a link with his English works. In Hobart Town his reputation as a model prisoner (reported in his convict dossier) enabled him to work as an orderly in the Colonial Hospital and this relative freedom allowed him to paint. No works can be dated with certainty earlier than Edward Lord (April 1839, Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts [ALMFA]) and Frederick George Brodribb and his sister Frances Maria Brodribb (both 1840, Art Gallery of South Australia); indeed, any attempt at cataloguing his works is difficult as most are unsigned and undated. However, from then until his death, Wainewright completed at least fifty-six portraits and three (possibly eight) subject works. He rarely departed from a modest scale and the use of pencil and watercolour on paper stretched over fine-grain canvas. The quality is inconsistent, possibly due to his declining health, and his style fluctuates between the conservatism due to his background and a strong tendency to romantic sentiment.

His portrait of the Reverend William Bedford (ALMFA) shows the influence of his academic training, while a more romantic influence is present in Portrait of Mrs F.A. Downing (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery) in which maudlin sentimentality and a weak image support the widely held opinion of Wainewright as a painter of affected portraits of women. Portrait of Eleanor Fitzgerald (p.c., Sydney), on the other hand, is among his best works and justifies a more positive appraisal. The oval-framed, small and direct work, mainly in white, has a Regency discretion and simplicity. A matching pair of small watercolour portraits, Edward Paine Butler and Martha Sarah Butler (p.c., Launceston), are more fully worked and finely draughted than other portraits. They also retain the delicate tincture of flesh tones, whites, violets and, particularly, blues, which have partly or fully faded in the remainder of his paintings.

Wainewright’s Tasmanian sitters came from a section of society which represented officialdom and the clergy. Of his fifty-three known sitters (three others being unidentified) thirty-three were related and this fact, together with the implied rationale of group portraits such as Jane and Lucy Cutmear ( The Cutmear Twins , daughters of James Cutmear, gatekeeper at the Prisoners’ Barracks, National Gallery of Australia), Ellen, Georgiana and Maria Butler ( The Three Graces , p.c., Tas.) and Three Daughters of George McLean ( The Three Sisters , now lost), suggests that his portraits and their style served to satisfy sentimental family yearnings of the colonists in the isolation of early Van Diemen’s Land. Part of their value today is the pictorial documentation of personalities in Hobart Town history before 1850: Governor Sir John Franklin (University of Queensland), Dr. William Crooke (p.c., Qld), Matilda Jessie Dunn (Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery), James Maclanachan (p.c., Qld) and Julia Elizabeth Sorell (p.c., Hobart).

Two small subject paintings emphasize Wainewright’s distinct individuality in colonial painting and represent an antipodean continuation of the type of works he had exhibited at the Royal Academy. They are Lothaire of Bourgogne Discovers the Amour of his Wife with the High Constable (p.c., England) and The Reunion of Eros and Psyche (p.c., England) based, respectively, on Barrault’s Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne and Apuleius’s Golden Ass , chapter 9. Both sources allow for Wainewright’s romantic interpretation working within the genre of narrative painting. More important, however, is the fact that both genre and style reaffirm his connection with Fuseli and the early English romantic movement, retained in his exile from the urbanity and sophistication of London. Not only is this evident in the simply drawn, elongated figures and the mysterious eroticism of these works, but Wainewright’s slavish devotion to this master was explicitly stated in his petition of 1844 to Governor Sir John Eardley Eardley-Wilmot for a ticket of leave in which he referred to Fuseli as 'the God of my worship’.

Before his death Wainewright had become known in the colony as an eccentric but talented man. Four of his portraits were lent by their owners to the exhibitions of paintings in Hobart Town in 1845 and 1846, although they received no critical attention. Wainewright died of apoplexy on 17 August 1847 in St Mary’s Hospital, Hobart Town.

Writers:

Anderson, Tony

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011