lithographer and publican, son of John Green and Emma Eaton, was christened in St Dunstan’s, Stepney, London, on 11 July 1819. His grandfather, Daniel Isaac Eaton (d.1814), an East End bookseller indicted at least nine times for printing, publishing and selling seditious literature – mainly Thomas Paine’s pamphlets but also his own magazine and tracts – spent several terms in prison and three and half years in exile in North America. It is not known if H.G. Eaton came voluntarily to the antipodes, but he was in Van Diemen’s Land by 1844 when Thomas Bluett published Six Views of Hobart Town, lithographed by Eaton after drawings by T.E. Chapman. Eaton’s billhead for T. Stump, 'Purveyor of Meat to his Excellency’ (c.1845, p.c.), with its carefully detailed view of Stump’s Elizabeth Street butcher’s shop, was undoubtedly a more normal commission.
Eaton apparently left Tasmania in the 1850s. When he married Lucy Hayman in a Wesleyan ceremony at her parents’ home in Darlinghurst, Sydney, on 20 August 1861, he gave Queensland as his place of residence. The family, including their only child, Esther Lucia (born c.1858), remained in Queensland where Henry continued to work as an 'artist lithographer’. Craig notes that H.G. Eaton signed the lithograph Somerset, Cape York, 1866 in Narrative of the Overland Expedition of the Messrs Jardine, from Rockhampton to Cape York, Northern Queensland (Brisbane, 1867). The 22 plates in Frederick M. Bailey’s Handbook to the Ferns of Queensland (Brisbane, 1874) and all Silvester Diggles's bird prints were his work.
By 1882 Eaton was at Rockhampton. His competent lithographic Q.N. Bank, Quay Street Rockhampton was published over two pages in Louis Marcellin Martin's Rockhampton Laughing Jackass on 22 April, and he contributed large portrait lithographs of local notables to the magazine, including those of Mayor R. Sharples (6 May) and Donald Paterson, 'Our Senior Member [of Parliament]’ (20 May). His lithograph of W. Pattison JP, chairman of the Gogango divisional board (8 April), was acknowledged as being after a photograph taken by the American Photographic Company (see William True Bennett) and the others were evidently based on photographs too. The Rockhampton Laughing Jackass expired with the issue of 10 June 1882. Its lithographs had appeared infrequently and eccentrically, rarely when advertised, and Eaton clearly had some more compelling interest. Martin’s regular anguished apologies in the journal’s editorials contain a strong hint that this was alcohol, so it seems appropriate that from 1883 to 1886 H.G. Eaton is listed in Queensland directories as proprietor of Rockhampton’s Turf Hotel. He died, aged 76, on 29 October 1887, survived by his wife and daughter.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
