draughtsman and architect, was one of the fifteen children of James Macgeorge, a merchant, and Elizabeth, née Duncan. His parents and most of the children came to South Australia in 1839; James junior followed them in the Kangaroo in December 1854 and set up an architectural practice in Gresham Street, Adelaide. By 1856 his office was at 40 King William Street, where he remained until at least 1870.
Although his art works appear to have been strictly architectural, Macgeorge was heavily involved in the promotion of the fine arts generally. He chaired the meeting which founded the South Australian Society of Arts on 15 October 1856 and was its honorary secretary for about ten years. At the society’s first exhibition in 1857 he showed a composite work: a view of the Adelaide Catholic church of St Francis Xavier, stated in the catalogue to have been drawn by him and coloured by S.T. Gill . At a conversazione held in 1861 during the society’s fifth exhibition Macgeorge delivered a paper 'On Art’. In December 1863 he won first prize for the architectural elevation he had submitted to the seventh exhibition in the class of 'mechanical drawing’. The South Australian Advertiser noted that there were very few exhibits in this category but acknowledged that Macgeorge’s was 'a very faithful and delicate drawing’. A Miss Macgeorge, presumably one of James’s sisters, exhibited a painting non-competitively at the same exhibition. At the 1870 exhibition Leslie Macgeorge (another relative?) received a prize for a pencil landscape, while L.O. Macgeorge was awarded the prize for architectural drawing.
In 1859 Macgeorge was appointed consulting surveyor to the City of Adelaide. That year his Roman Corinthian design won the competition for the Savings Bank of South Australia, erected at 17 King William Street (completed 1860: now the South Australian Government Tourist Bureau and considerably altered). The Jensens state that a classical temple design he provided for the North Adelaide Congregational Church in 1859 was rejected, whereupon Macgeorge put it on display in the window of a local stationery shop. The Presbyterian Church, Wakefield Street (deconsecrated and without its spire), and Maughan Church in Franklin Street (demolished) were other Adelaide works, and he also designed the Congregational Church at Port Adelaide (extant), the neo-Jacobean Holland House, Turretfield, near Rosedale (1854: extant), Romalo at Magill (1858: altered), the Early English Congregational Church at Glenelg (1859: deconsecrated) and the central block and, later, wings of Sunnyside, Glen Osmond (c.1857 and c.1859) for Sir William Milne. William McMinn served his articles under Macgeorge in the early 1860s.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
