Design and Art Australia Online

lithographer, worked for the well-known London firm of engravers and lithographers Day & Haghe before coming to Hobart Town in 1843. There he was employed by the Scottish schoolteacher and short-lived publisher James Thomson, at 26-28 Liverpool Street, Hobart Town. On 21 July 1843, Thomson announced in the Hobart Town Courier that he had just engaged an experienced litho printer (undoubtedly Bluett) who could execute any type of printing. Hence 'Artists or amateurs may be supplied (on moderate terms) with stones, chalks, &c, and their drawings will be printed with the utmost care and attention’.

Bluett set up on his own at the Liverpool Street shop in October after Thomson had abandoned the business, offering 'Lithographic Drawings, Maps, Plans, Music, Circulars, Cards, Billheads &c.’ Extant examples have been recorded by Clifford Craig. Bluett’s first known dated lithographs – portraits 'after Cootes’ of two Maori chiefs – were published on 27 October 1843. Possibly his last, a vignette on a letterhead of the shop of the watchmaker and jeweller William Cole, is inscribed 9 October 1844. The later plates in J. Skinner Prout 's Sydney Illustrated (1842 44) and those in Tasmania Illustrated (1844) were printed in Hobart Town by Bluett, but his major work was the production in 1844 of a set of six lithographs of Hobart Town views, sketched by Thomas Chapman and drawn on the stone by H.G. Eaton . Bluett may have assisted Mary Morton Allport with her earliest lithographs, and he obviously improved the sketches which less talented local residents put on stone. Six illustrations which appeared in True Piety (Hobart Town 1844) were lithographed by Bluett and printed by William Pratt, one being The Holy and Undivided Trinity (Crowther Library). Their original artist is unknown.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011