Design and Art Australia Online

painter and illustrator, second of the five children of Edward William Percy Sinnett, a London editor, and Jane, née Fry, was born in Hamburg, Germany where her father was co-editing two English-language newspapers with Professor G.F. Wurm. The family returned to London in 1836. Percy, as her father was called, died in 1844, leaving Jane Sinnett to support the family with her writing, editing and translating. In 1853 the professional painter Miss Sophia Sinnett of 17 Victoria Road South, Kentish Town, exhibited Market Day at Bonn at the London Royal Academy. Improving the Haycock followed in 1855 from 2 Wells Street, Kentish Town, while in 1856 and 1857, from 65 Marland Place, Southampton, she showed a child study. She also exhibited landscape and genre paintings with the Society of British Artists: The Picture Book , Opening in Park, near Malvern, Worcester and Opening in the Frankfort Woods, Showing the Taunus Mountains, and the Village of Niederad in 1853, and Fields about To Be Broken up for Building, Kentish Town and Taunus Mountain in 1854. Going to School (4 guineas) was exhibited at the British Institution in 1857 and Sea-Side Treasures in 1858, by which time she had moved back to London, to 77 Euston Road. In 1859 she was one of the 38 signatories on the women’s petition sent to each Royal Academician asking him to use his influence to open the Royal Academy schools to women. (The petition is reproduced as Appendix 2 in Deborah Cherry, Painting Women , Routledge, 1993; another of the signatories was Florence Claxton .)

Sinnett’s work apparently reached the antipodes before she did. John Rae showed The False Magician by 'Sinnett’ at the Fine Art Exhibition at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts in 1857. A few years later Sophia Sinnett turned up in South Australia, probably in 1862 when her younger brother Frederick Sinnett ( c.1830-66), was living in Adelaide establishing the Daily Telegraph , the first evening newspaper to be published in that colony. If not involved in the Telegraph 's production, Sophia possibly helped with the Weekly Mail , Frederick’s later literary journal.

Oil paintings by Miss Sinnett shown with the South Australian Society of Arts in 1863 and 1864 attracted favourable comment: the South Australian Register (1 December 1863) noted that her painting Reading the List of Killed and Wounded after the Battle of Alma , 'although apparently wanting in finish, is deserving of careful inspection’. She also exhibited The Dead Pet , A Child’s Head , A Cottage Interior , A Cottage Door and two landscapes. The South Australian Register commented:

with the exception of … [the landscapes], these pictures reflect the highest credit on her talent … They have finish, rich colour, breadth of light and shade, and would be more fitted to grace the walls of the British Institution than an Adelaide Exhibition. We hope this lady will turn her attention to the incidents of colonial life. She will find ample scope for her genius in this unique field.

Sinnett exhibited more oil paintings with the Society of Arts the following year. None are known to have been of local subjects.

While living in Adelaide Sinnett made a set of twelve line drawings illustrating Tennyson’s Idylls of the King , whichwere photographically reproduced by the Adelaide Photograph Company ( see F.S. Crawford ) and published by Balliere of Melbourne at the beginning of 1865 as a collection of loose plates in a bound folio entitled Idylls of the Kings [sic] by Sophia Sinnett . The Illustrated Melbourne Post called the original illustrations 'etchings’ (meaning pen-and-ink outline work) in the style of the London Art Union prints, which, significantly, had published a folio of illustrations to Idylls of the King the previous year. Sinnett’s illustrations, however, had an almost exclusive focus on the women of the legend, two plates being taken from Tennyson’s 'Geraint and Enid’, six from 'Lancelot and Elaine’ and four from 'Guinevere’, with the women’s names alone being mentioned in the captions. In 1866, perhaps inspired by Sinnett (though the Arthurian Legend was a popular subject for art generally), Margaret Thomas exhibited two painted scenes from Idylls of the King in Melbourne that also emphasised the women’s role in the legend: Enid and Geraint and Merlin and Vivien .

The Australasian (misprinting her name as Sennett) thought all the drawings 'very skilfully designed and executed’ while another Melbourne reviewer thought them 'rather unequal’, although acknowledging that they generally displayed great talent, 'and in the female figures Miss Sinnett has completely caught the spirit of the poet. Her Enid is a gem’. Enid, of course, is the most modest and submissive woman in the legend, the 'best’ of Guinevere’s court. Moreover, Geraint going to the bad is predictably all her fault-as Geraint points out in the 'Enid’ caption:

Enid, the pilot star of my lone life,

Enid my early and my only love,

Enid the loss of whom has turn’d me wild.

Her appeal to the (undoubtedly male) reviewer is obvious. For this female contributor, Sinnett’s illustration to 'Guinevere’ showing the queen between Enid and Vivien (Frailty between Good and Evil), holds more appeal:

The Queen who sat betwixt her best

Enid, and lissome Vivien, of her court

The wiliest and the Worst

Vivien’s lively wickedness in contrast to Enid’s blandness is cleverly evoked within the strict Pre-Raphaelite constraints of form and emotion observed.

In Adelaide, the South Australian Register praised all the drawings and thought they would 'bear looking at again and again’ but was especially impressed by the perfect facsimiles produced by the photographers, then a great novelty. The collection is a very early Australian example of photographs being sold commercially as a narrative rather than as single unconnected images in an album. Indeed, the publication of Sinnett’s illustrations as photographs predates Bailliere’s Melbourne edition of The Horse: Its Treatment in Australia (1866), containing nineteen photographs after sketches by George Hamilton , and puts in doubt Robert Holden’s hypothesis in Photography in Colonial Australia: The Mechanical Eye and the Illustrated Book (Potts Point, 1988) that Hamilton may also have been their photographer. The production of art photographs as book illustrations was soon a profitable, professional enterprise and in Adelaide Townsend Duryea soon joined Crawford’s Adelaide Photograph Company in producing them commercially.

It also seems likely that Sophia’s journalist and editor brother was initially involved in some entrepreneurial way with the translation of Adelaide photographs of his sister’s drawings into a Melbourne publication. Before working in Adelaide (from 1859 until his death) Frederick had been a publisher in Melbourne – one of the founders of Melbourne Punch in 1855 – so had well-established connections there. As Sinnett & Co. of 9 Bourke Street East he had also founded a printing company that showed examples of its prowess at the 1854 Melbourne Exhibition. Yet even if the novel photographic presentation received most attention, Sinnett’s severely simple Pre-Raphaelite competence in line drawing and design and feminist focus on the women’s role in the legend make this a notable-indeed unique-contribution in the history of Australian art. Nothing further is known of Sophia although her brother’s career is well documented. She presumably returned to England after Frederick died in 1866.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

2011