Design and Art Australia Online

painter and art teacher, was born in Brussels, third son of Richard Sasse RA and Harriet Blake n ée Boyes. His father (who added the final 'e’ to the family name) had been drawing master to Princess Charlotte in 1811 then landscape painter to the Prince Regent, while his uncle Henry Sass, another respected landscape and portrait painter, founded the well-known art school in Bloomsbury. From 1815 Richard and Harriet Sasse and their family lived in Brussels, then in Paris where Richard died in 1849. Edmund and his older brother, Harry, came to Victoria in 1852, presumably to join the goldrush. The following year he set up as a drawing master in Melbourne, albeit in an ostensibly casual way, advertising in the Argus in May that he wished 'to fill up a few spare hours in giving lessons in drawing, water colors, & perspective’.

Harry stayed in Melbourne but Edmund was soon resident in Geelong, where he threw off all semblance of indifference to an artistic career. He was in partnership with the engraver C.E. Winston at Bellerine Street, Geelong, in 1853-54 making drawings and engravings advertising land sales. Their etching on wood, Geelong Railway (1853, RHSV), is inscribed as drawn by Edmund 'Pass’. Sasse also made a pen, ink and wash drawing of the Banquet To Mark the Turning of the First Sod for the Geelong and Melbourne Railway (1853, GAG). The firm drew and engraved the advertisements for Hooper’s (formerly Mack’s) Hotel and the Belle Vue Hotel which appeared in the Geelong Directory for 1854 but does not seem to have survived beyond that year. For the rest of the 1850s and throughout the 1860s, Sasse advertised as a drawing master, taking pupils at his home in La Trobe Terrace and later at Myers Street. In 1856 he wrote home to his mother (living in London with his eldest brother, Frederick) about the end-of-year exhibition of his pupils’ work: 'All my pupils coming by turns to my house, to finish their drawings, a number of which, “the Best”, I am framing. Those that are not framed, I mount, and draw a dark line round them as a set off.’ He was also employed as drawing master at Geelong Grammar School and other institutions in the district (including Mrs M.G. Burn’s Olrig House from 1863, a girls’ boarding-school where T.W. I’Erson, q.v., taught singing).

Sasse was appointed to the committee of the 1857 Geelong Mechanics Institute Exhibition, at which he showed a landscape painting and a watercolour study of his own, an oil painting by the English engraver George Baxter, and a silver-plated vase. In both the Ballarat and Geelong Mechanics Institute exhibitions of 1869 he showed British views and illuminated addresses. That year, in partnership with William Pye, he opened a Technological School and School of Art and Design in the hall attached to Christ Church, Geelong at the top of Moorabool Street. It offered classes for working men two nights a week. Pye ran the Day School where Sasse taught painting and drawing. In 1873 Sasse organised art and design classes for girls at the Technological School and in September 1874 organised an exhibition in the Mechanics Institute to display the work of both groups of students. After initial prosperity, decline set in. In 1879 both the Technological School and the School of Art and Design were removed to Sasse’s home at 63 Great Myers Street. The school, however, had pioneered technical education in Geelong; the Gordon Institute of Technology (opened in 1887) grew from Sasse’s classes.

On 5 July 1855, Edmund Sasse married Elizabeth Sarah Gibson; they had two daughters, Sophia Elizabeth and Maude, both of whom became art teachers. The Misses Sasse are remembered for holding painting and drawing classes in an imported iron prefabricated studio from Switzerland which had been erected in a lane close to the Sasse family home in Myers Street.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011