Design and Art Australia Online

sketcher and author, was born on 31 December 1802 in Edmonton, near London. Brought up by his wealthy paternal grandmother, he attended John Clarke’s school where John Keats had been a pupil. Influenced by the poet Shelley, Horne embraced a literary career after fighting for Mexican independence in 1825-26. Sketchbooks from his Mexican experience include many drawings of yellow fever victims, while a North American tour made before returning home resulted in more conventionally picturesque subjects such as the Catskill Mountains. Back at London, Horne published prolifically, most notably an epic poem, Orion (1843), sold at a farthing a copy. Its price and content made him a celebrity.

Horne married Catherine Foggo in 1847, but the marriage was a failure. As well, his financial position was precarious and he had come to dislike working on Charles Dickens’s Household Words, so in September 1852 he arrived at Melbourne in search of a fortune and a new life, the most famous poet ever to set foot in the antipodes (as he asserted). He was an assistant gold commissioner at Heathcote until dismissed in November 1854. His wife requested a formal separation in 1855 and Horne then lived with a Scottish woman, Jessie Taylor. Their baby son died in 1857. After unsuccessfully contesting two elections and losing other jobs, he became warden of the Blue Mountain goldfield in Victoria ('the Siberia of all the goldfields’) from which he frequently escaped to Melbourne.

A flamboyant and eccentric character, Horne was one of the founders of Melbourne’s Garrick Club (with the critic James Smith), arriving at its first meeting in 1856 in Elizabethan costume. He was friendly with writers such as Marcus Clarke and with the poet and artist George Gordon McCrae who was to illustrate an epic based on Horne’s Australian experiences to be called 'John Ferncliff’, which never proceeded beyond the prospectus. But Horne spasmodically wrote a good deal during his Australian years. His prose was primarily journalism for Dickens (and later, begging letters), but he also published Australian Facts and Prospects: To Which is Prefixed the Author’s Australian Autobiography (London 1859), a highly romanticised, self-promotional book which was received far more warmly in London than in Victoria. His lyric masque, The South Sea Sisters, opened the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition. He wrote a cantata for the visit of the Duke of Edinburgh in 1867 signed Richard Hengist Horne, the name he adopted thereafter. He also made several lecture tours.

Giving his address as Flinders Lane East, at the 1854 Melbourne Exhibition Horne exhibited a sheet of pen-and-ink sketches titled Recollections of the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, having studied there in 1819-20 before being expelled. Another version dated 16 October 1856 (private collection) was drawn during his brief sojourn as clerk to the Melbourne lawyer and art patron Archibald Michie; the journalist James Hingston recalled Horne holding court in Michie’s rooms while working on the sheet. These further recollections were shown at the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition and art-historically are of great interest, the large single sheet progressively illustrating the first-year exercises set at Sandhurst in military drawing (hill hachures) and landscape studies (picturesque British views), together with a view of the college itself and two sketches of 'Local Characteristics’ (caricatures of military personnel).

Horne also showed The Forest King (a watercolour), An Incantation (listed as a watercolour in the first edition of the catalogue and as an oil in the second) and a pen-and-ink Portrait of Bonaparte, Lieutenant of Artillery copied from a print. The catalogue of Victorian exhibits included in the 1867 Paris Universal Exhibition includes his watercolour, A Lion’s Head (possibly the portrait of Napoleon). A competent charcoal sketch of two young women, signed 'R. Horne’ (hence drawn before 1867), is in a private collection in England.

Horne left for England in June 1869. There he again published a great deal but never made any money or had another success like Orion. He received a government pension in 1874 and died on 13 March 1884.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011