Design and Art Australia Online

painter, cartoonist and illustrator, was born and worked in Melbourne, mainly as a painter. In 1860, when living at 171 Victoria Parade, he had two oil paintings, The Tempest and Scene from Sintram , and ten line illustrations to Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur in the Victorian Exhibition of Fine Arts. Other paintings, including landscapes and literary subjects, were shown at the 1861 Victorian Exhibition of Fine Arts and the 1863 Ballarat Mechanics Institute Exhibition, including Andromeda and The Departure of Ulysses at the former.

In a lengthy review of the 1861 exhibition, the Examiner stated that Death of Harold had 'triumphed over many of the graver difficulties of his subject’ (history painting). The pseudonymous 'Christopher Sly’ ( James Edward Neild ) thought it remarkable that Greig, with no opportunity to study the old masters, had been able to produce 'a picture which, as to its subject, must be classed in the very highest department of Art, and which in respect of whose execution, it is to be confessed, is infinitely beyond the average such productions’. Its most noticeable flaw was thought to be 'its want of compression … its elements are a little too much broken up’.

Greig was a major contributor to the fourth Annual Exhibition of Fine Arts at Melbourne in 1864, again being said to be an artist of 'considerable promise’. According to the Argus critic (James Smith):

the most attractive and the most successful is … an illustration of a scene in Anthony and Cleopatra … To make the scene thoroughly Egyptian … the artist has not been content with the peculiarity of the tints which the sky and scenery of Egypt offer, but has filled in the background with an unmistakable pyramid. It may also be objected that the voluptuous form of Cleopatra is but imperfectly drawn. As she reclines, with royal robe thrown over her limbs, the impression is left that the subduer of the Roman “pillar of the world” is … either limbless or possessed of nether extremities of dwarfish proportion. This, however, is perhaps somewhat hypercritical. The artist’s effect is ambitious. The picture, as a whole, is commendable and promises well for what the artist will accomplish hereafter.

Greig’s other exhibits were quite eclectic: a religious painting of the Virgin and St John titled The Crusader’s Return ; a scene from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King ; Saxby Weather on the Yarra ; Encampment of Banditti ; and In Vino Veritas . Of them, the Age commented: 'Mr. Greig has been more ambitious than successful either in conception or finish, though here and there we find hints of ability for better things’.

In 1864 Greig moved to Sydney to become principal cartoonist on Sydney Punch . Examples of his work include both political and social cartoons, e.g. What Photography may come to . 'STREET BOY – “Now then Hartis, for a ha’porth of beauty”’ (ill. King II, 69). His best-known and most powerful illustration for Punch is Reign of Terror , a good image of a villainous bushranger published on 2 July 1864, 45 (ill. King 54 and Coleman & Tanner 161). All are signed with the monogram 'EJG’ (in which the 'G’ looks rather like 'C’) and were engraved by 'M’ [Mason].

On 4 October 1864, only a few months after his arrival, Greig drowned in Sydney Harbour together with his wife, mother-in-law and two brothers. His final cartoon appeared on 8 October and an 'epitaph’ was published in Sydney Punch the following week. The auction of his effects took place (with what appears to have been considered unseemly haste) at his residence, 11 Crown Street, Millers Point, on 28 October. The lots in the unreserved sale included: 'Portfolio of Cartoon Engravings and Water Colours… Architectural Drawings, Artists’ Sketches from Life, Pencil Drawings, Unfinished Paintings, Artists’ Materials, Paints, Brushes, &c.’ and, especially, 'an immense collection of oil paintings, sketches from life by the late E.J. Greig, Esq., exhibited at the Melbourne Exhibition, one of which is a beautiful painting of Burke and Wills at the Gulf of Carpentaria’. By 1873 the last was owned by Charles Read, who showed it non-competitively at that year’s Agricultural Society of New South Wales Exhibition under the title The First Sight by Burke and Wills, of the Gulf of Carpentaria . It is now in the Mitchell Library.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989