H. E. Pain

  • Artist (Painter)
H. E. Pain was a collector of curios from the Pacific Region, confusingly still referred to as the 'South Seas' by Australians at the time, a hangover from the country's British heritage. He was also a talented artist and was commissioned to create works to welcome the Duke of Edinburgh in 1867. He particularly focussed on the lives of Indigenous Australians and on native flora and fauna.
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painter and natural historian, exhibited his collection of 'natural curiosities relating to the Australias, the Fijis, and other South Sea Islands’ at the Mammoth Museum, Bourke Street, Melbourne, in 1862. In 1867 he worked in partnership with S.T. Gill , painting transparencies to celebrate the Duke of Edinburgh’s forthcoming visit to Melbourne. Their transparency for the Southern Insurance Company in Queen Street was described by the Argus as 'one of the best’, being 'a very truthful view of Queenscliff and the Heads, with the Galatea passing the batteries … the Prince being drawn through the water in Neptune’s car’. Another, displayed on Dalgety & Blackwood’s Bourke Street warehouse, depicted 'a moonlight view of a native corroboree’. Pain was living in Elizabeth Street North, Carlton, at this time. The transparency displayed at his residence 'representing Aboriginals kangaroo hunting [with] the trees in the foreground alive with the bird and insect life of Australia’ was presumably his own work, with or without the assistance of Gill.

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Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1992
Last updated:
2011

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