painter and diorama artist, was born in Bombay, India, on 18 November 1829, son of Joaquim Hayward and Jane Stocqueler. His father, variously soldier, journalist, playwright and lecturer, was then editor of the Bombay Courier . The name Stocqueler (an anglicisation of Estocqueler) derived from a Portuguese forebear and was assumed as a family name by Joaquim in his early years and for some of his writings. (Later, particularly in the United States, Joaquim adopted the name of Siddons claiming a relationship to the famous English actress.) In about 1843 the Stocqueler family returned to England from India and Stocqueler’s father became associated, not very successfully, with the London stage. (Colligan, on the other hand, calls him 'an eminent lecturer at moving panorama shows in London’s Regent Street Gallery of Illustration’ (p.51).) A rift appears to have arisen between husband and wife and, heavily in debt, Joaquim Stocqueler set off to the United States. He did not return to England until the 1860s.
Edwin and his mother sailed for Australia, apparently in the early 1850s, doubtless attracted by the gold discoveries and the hope of replenishing the family coffers. Edwin Stocqueler was on the Bendigo diggings by 1853 and made Sandhurst (now Bendigo) his headquarters. Nothing is known of his artistic training, but a letter to the Bendigo Advertiser in 1857 made reference to his acquaintance with 'Mr. Phaey, R.A. (since Secretary to the London Art Union)’ who, almost certainly, was the drawing master James Fahey (1804-85), secretary of the New Water-Colour Society and painter of a moving panorama of the Nile exhibited in London’s Egyptian Hall in 1849 (Colligan, p.52). Possibly Stocqueler had trained under him.
Over the next four years Stocqueler, accompanied by his mother, travelled widely, undertaking hazardous journeys in a canvas boat along the Murray, Ovens and Goulburn Rivers. Probably undertaken intermittently, these extended over some four years and involved him in observation and records of natural history along the routes. Returning to Sandhurst early in 1857, he established a studio in Market Place and completed a diorama depicting life on the goldfields and in other parts of the colony. He appears to have worked on this for some time, as the diorama was described in the Bendigo Advertiser as being a mile long (almost certainly an overstatement). It was presented in two parts, each consisting of at least twenty-five paintings. The first half mainly comprised views of Melbourne, Sandhurst, the Bendigo goldfields and the Goulburn River country, while the emphasis in the other half was on north-eastern Victoria, mainly around Beechworth but concluding with several views of Castlemaine. Accompanied by music and songs, it opened to the public in the Sandhurst Mechanics Institute on 8 August 1857. A week later it had moved to Stocqueler’s 'Royal Gallery of Illustration’, the grandiose title deriving from the London gallery where his father had provided the commentary to Grieve & Telbin’s diorama of the shipping route to India and Australia in 1853.
By October the diorama had been succeeded by other entertainments at the gallery, but it reappeared in February 1858 at the Criterion Hall, Castlemaine. Early in March it was being shown at Tarrengower (Maldon) and it is probable that it travelled with Stocqueler to other goldfield towns before it opened at Melbourne in June 1859 in another Gallery of Illustration in Bourke Street. By then a splendid title had been bestowed upon it – Golden Land of the Sunny South . Yet it does not appear to have provoked great interest. Stocqueler moved it to the suburb of Collingwood but soon afterwards both it and its artist disappeared from the local scene. Should the diorama have survived and one day be retrieved, it might well provide one of the most valuable visual records of early colonial and goldfields’ life.
Stocqueler painted other works too. Visiting his studio in 1857, a reporter from the Bendigo Advertiser noted some seventy paintings of native birds and animals and referred to other 'very numerous and interesting sketches and paintings’. He is now known by only a handful of paintings: a small watercolour of early Bendigo (Bendigo Art Gallery), a large oil of Castlemaine from Ten Foot Hill (1858, Pioneers’ and Old Residents’ Association, Castlemaine), an undated oil of a night corroboree (National Library of Australia [NLA]) and two or three others in private collections. Also convincingly attributed to him is a large unsigned Australian gold-diggings scene (c.1858, oil on canvas, NLA). These few works bear out the assessment of a reviewer of his diorama that he was 'an artist and naturalist of considerable merit’, while the probable dating of one or two of them suggests he remained in Australia until about 1870.
Then he went to South Africa. Three signed South African paintings are recorded by Gordon-Brown (locations unknown), one of Durban being dated 1870. Nothing is known of when or where he died. His small watercolour of Pall Mall, Bendigo (1856, Bendigo Art Gallery) was given to a friend of his Sandhurst days who happened to meet the artist by chance in London some time before the 1890s. He found him in straitened circumstances. There is a possibility that his wanderings in the interim also took him to North America.
- Writers:
- Cusack, Frank
Note:
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
