sketcher, came to Sydney from Ireland in the Maidstone in 1854 with her husband Thomas, an employee of the first Commercial Bank. She brought her album with her. This contains sketches and watercolours of flowers, birds and landscapes of Ireland together with favourite pieces of poetry and some coloured cut-outs. It also includes her drawing of the Maidstone in a squall off Cape Horn, dated 20 March 1854. Frances gave the album to her sister-in-law Eliza Dickinson (now Mitchell Library). No Australian sketches are known but perhaps may be presumed from this evidence.
At first Frances and Thomas McComb lived in Macquarie Street, Sydney, in a house owned by John Fairfax, but later in 1854 Mrs McComb set up a boarding-house in William Street, probably as a result of her husband’s death. Eventually she went to live with her daughter Harriette and her son-in-law Henry Wallace on their property in the Cooma district. She died there at the age of ninety-three. The Mitchell Library has a miniature of her in her wedding dress. Painted on ivory by an unknown artist, it shows a thin, pretty woman in her mid-twenties.
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- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
