Design and Art Australia Online

portrait painter and sketcher, was the eldest daughter of Robert Thomas, a newspaper publisher, and Mary, née Harris. The family migrated to Adelaide in the Africaine in 1836, where her father published the South Australian Register and several other Adelaide newspapers. Her mother was a poet and writer whose diary and letters were published posthumously in 1915. In 1834 Frances painted a small portrait of her mother which Mrs Thomas sent to her brother George in England on 14 October 1838, writing in the accompanying letter: 'The enclosed is my portrait which Frances did about four years ago and which was considered to be a very fair likeness. It may now appear rather too young. It is not very well done, as she had not then practised the art of taking likenesses much, but she can do much better now. Such as it is, I thought it might please you’. As reproduced in the Diary , the portrait does indeed appear crude. In 1840 Mrs Thomas sent her brother three further drawings, 'a view of our two houses, one of the church, and one of the Wesleyan Chapel’. Doubtless they too were drawn by Frances.

In 1839 Frances Thomas married John Michael Skipper , whom she had met on board the Africaine . They made sketching trips together into the Adelaide Hills, and the man leading a horse in her watercolour sketch From Mt Lofty Range (c.1840, Art Gallery of South Australia) is undoubtedly John. She also continued to paint portraits after her marriage. At the 1847 Exhibition of Colonial Artists in Adelaide she showed two works: a study of a Spanish boy and a sketch of the interior of a hut. Her album inscribed 'Frances Amelia Thomas, August 1837 from J.M.S.’ (sold at Sotheby’s in 1986) contains sketches by her husband and at least some of her five children as well as her own work. (Anna Skipper exhibited with the South Australian Society of Arts in 1863 and Isabel won prizes for drawings by a young lady born in the colony at the society’s 1870 exhibition.) Frances Skipper’s youthful pencil sketch (c.1836) of the residence of Colonial Secretary Robert Gouger, and later pencil and pencil and wash drawings, are held by the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Mortlock Library.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011