painter, scene-painter, topographical draughtsman, amateur photographer, settler and public servant, was born on 5 September 1844 in Calcutta, India, where his father Charles Robert Prinsep was British agent-general. Educated in England under the care of his uncle Thoby Prinsep, Henry (known as Harry) was given art lessons by George Frederick Watts in company with his older cousin, Valentine Prinsep. Later he studied law at Oxford and art at Dresden and Heidelberg. His father died in 1865 and in January 1866 Prinsep set sail in the David and Jessie for the Swan River Colony (WA), where his father had bought land in 1857. He arrived at Fremantle from Singapore on 20 May 1866, having made many sketches on the voyage. In October he met Charlotte Josephine Bussell (1847-1929) – known as Josephine – the youngest daughter of Charlotte and John Garrett Bussell . They married on 26 February 1868 and settled at Prinsep Park, Dardanup, near Bunbury, one of the East India Company’s properties that Henry managed.
At Prinsep Park, Henry supplied the Nygungar George Coolbul with drawing materials and encouraged him to do coloured pencil and crayon drawings in a sketchbook entitled 'West Australian Native Art’ (AGWA). He wrote: 'The drawings in this book are a few among many drawn by a West Australian native known as George Coolbul, of the Vasse district during his service with me on a horse station at Prinsep Park, Dardanup in 1868 and 1869. He came to an untimely end in 1871 being speared through the body by another native at night during a feast which prevented his further progress in art.’
Following the almost total loss of a cargo of horses and railway sleepers in 1870 when the Heimdahl (with Prinsep, his wife and eldest daughter, Carlotta, on board) ran aground on the mudbanks of the Hoogley River, Prinsep was forced to abandon pastoral pursuits. In February 1874 he joined the Lands and Surveys Department as a draughtsman. The family settled in Perth, in a house next door to the Royal Mint known as 'The Studio’. By 1894 he was head of the Mines Department and, in 1898, Chief Protector of Aborigines. He retired in 1907, lived in England until 1912 and died at Busselton on 20 July 1922.
Prinsep’s artistic training served him well in obtaining employment as a draughtsman, but there were few other professional outlets for his talents. He painted the scenery for a dramatic performance at Perth soon after his arrival as well as for later performances in both Perth and Geraldton, but these efforts, like the scenery and drop-curtains he painted for an 1878 Mechanics Hall production for the St George’s Cathedral organ fund, were probably purely voluntary. He was also a keen amateur photographer; one of his photographs shows Perth Town Hall under construction and is thus dated 1869. The house to which he retired at Busselton, named Little Holland House after his uncle Thoby’s London home, had its own darkroom.
Prinsep’s sketches for John Forrest’s Journal of Proceedings of the Western Australian Exploring Expedition (1875) and Ernest Giles’s Australia Twice Traversed…1872 to 1876 (1889) were commissions from the Lands Department. Although adequate for their purpose, the illustrations betray their official origin. (It is interesting to note that in the introduction to Giles’s book he is conflated with his more famous artist-cousin and called Mr 'Val’ Prinsep of Perth.) Far more expert are his watercolour views of Perth, Geraldton and Rottnest Island; these charming works are deceptively simple. His diary for 1876 records the execution of one such sketch: 'Mrs Hocking and I would take our blocks and Josephine would read to us as we painted and I have brought home a trophy in the shape of a rather nice water colour sketch of the Falls’.
Prinsep helped found the Wilgie Club, WA’s first art society, and was connected with the short-lived illustrated paper, Possum . He was a member and vice-president (1904 05) of the Western Australian Society of Arts, with which he exhibited from 1901 to 1908. Of his three daughters, Virginia Mary (1880 1958) and Carlotta Louisa (1869 1960) also sketched and painted. Extant sketches by Prinsep himself are largely topographical, but they include an unusual and amusing black and white sketch of a fancy dress ball on roller skates apparently taking place in the Perth Town Hall, the central participant being disguised as a (rather wobbly) Egyptian obelisk (BL).
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
Callaway, Anita
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
