Design and Art Australia Online

sketcher and naturalist, son of Heinrich and Margareta Herrgott, was born in Schesslitz, Bavaria. He came to South Australia about 1853. In 1858 he was artist and collector on the Benjamin Herschel Babbage expedition to Lake Torrens and the following year joined Alexander Tolmer on an unsuccessful attempt to cross the continent from south to north. In 1859-60 he travelled as botanist with the explorer John McDouall Stuart.

The Royal Geographical Society of Australasia (SA) holds sketches made by Herrgott on Babbage’s 1858 expedition, together with other of his papers. His twenty-one comical pen-and-ink sketchbook drawings (8.5 × 14.5 cm) include a scene in the bush titled A Satisfactory Conclusion , showing Babbage concluding a report four times the size of the nearby tent from which a startled face (evidently Warburton’s) appears (ill DAA , p.360). His sketches made on the 1859 Stuart expedition are in the Mitchell Library.

Herrgott died in Victoria on 8 October 1861. An obituary noted: 'His general attainments in the arts and sciences were of no ordinary character, and he has left behind him many a trace of his mastery in nature and art’.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011