Design and Art Australia Online

watercolour and miniature painter, third and youngest daughter of the first governor of South Australia, Sir John Hindmarsh, and Susannah, née Edmeades, grew up in France and came to the province with her parents in 1836. Mary Hindmarsh’s drawings of the early settlement include a view of Robert Gouger’s tent at Glenelg where the first officers of the colony were sworn in, the first council held and the province proclaimed on 28 December 1836. Her watercolour of North Terrace, looking south, shows the South Australian Company’s bucolic bank premises west of King William Street (21 July 1838, AGSA). A sketchbook inscribed 'Mary Hindmarsh/South Australia/ 1836’ (ML) includes several views of Glenelg in 1839 and one of McGill in 1840; and in 1839 she painted nine watercolours of native flowers in her diary. Her views of the first Government House, the Southern Cross Hotel and Gilles Arcade were lithographed in England about 1839.

In July 1840, at Holy Trinity Church of England on North Terrace, Mary Hindmarsh married George Milner Stephen , her former drawing teacher (and the Colonial Secretary). Later that year the couple sailed for England. In 1842 George became secretary to Mary’s father who was then governing Heligoland, an island off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein; sketches made there by both are in the Mortlock Library.

Nine sons and four daughters were born to the Stephens, and the bulk of Mary’s sketching was done before her marriage. Yet some of her more ambitious work was painted afterwards – done even more in the shadow of her husband. In the 1847 Adelaide Exhibition of Colonial Artists she showed Ancona , and with her husband a joint work, St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall . The latter was highly praised by the South Australian Register on 13 February: 'were it not attributed to two amateurs, we should certainly have supposed [it] the work of some great master’.

Between 1846 and 1887 the Stephens lived in South Australia, in Victoria, England, Heligoland and Sydney. Mary’s sketches dated 1864 were probably made on a journey up the Murray River from Encounter Bay to Echuca. She was living at Darlinghurst when she exhibited two watercolour drawings on cotton at the 1870 Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition. In 1874 'Chateau Gröditz’, Silesia , an original pastel view, was shown with the New South Wales Academy of Art. She died in London on 27 December 1887. Her drawings are sensitively executed, but their subjects become increasingly impersonal.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FROM JOAN KERR’S BLACK AND WHITE ARTISTS FILES:

In 1872 Mrs G.M. Stephens [sic] was listed as one of the illustrators in Punch Staff Papers: A Collection of Tales, Sketches &c., in Prose and Verse. By the members of the staff of Sydney Punch (Sydney: Gordon & Gotch, 1872), but with a conventional view of Sydney to illustrate a poem by Henry Kendall, not a cartoon. The other illustrators listed were all men, including Monte Scott , H. Wise , G.G. McCrae and J. H. Flynn, and the book is basically a 'keepsake’ collection. There is no evidence therefore that she ever drew cartoons – though the possibility cannot be dismissed given the family’s apparent financial problems.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989