painter, art teacher, lithographer and public servant, arrived with his wife at Hobart Town in the Britomart on 31 December 1834. He advertised as a professional artist and art teacher but soon found it necessary to supplement his income with clerical work for the Board of Assignment. Lady Franklin commissioned two drawings of Government House from him in 1837, the year he exhibited in Australia’s first known public art exhibition – held at Peck 's gallery in Hobart Town.
From the first Chapman apparently intended to publish local views, although only one lithograph in his own hand is now known: New Wharf, Hobart Town (ALMFA), from a pencil sketch of 1836 (TMAG). He was, however, proposing a London publication of over 30of his drawings of the scenery and townships throughout the colony, a luxury book of large lithographs (40.6 × 25.4 cm) to cost about four guineas, and called for subscribers in the Hobart Town Courier on 14 July 1840. The Edinburgh print-seller and schoolteacher J.A. Thomson was to take Chapman’s drawings home 'to be lithographed on three stones by one of the most eminent artists in Europe’ but nothing eventuated, presumably because this proposed 'elegant addition to the ornaments of a drawing room table or a valuable and interesting present to friends at home’ proved too expensive to attract adequate patronage.
The economic depression of the 1840s badly affected Chapman and curtailed all such plans. Despite finding employment as a clerk in the office of the principal superintendent of convicts at a salary of £120 a year from 9 August 1841, Chapman was declared bankrupt in October 1842 (but discharged the following month). Only a modest local version of his grand scheme ever appeared, in 1844, when Thomson’s former employee, the printer Thomas Bluett , put out a cloth-covered collection of six lithographs by H.G. Eaton after Chapman’s Hobart Town drawings. That only a single intact copy of this book is now known (published in facsimile in 1957), with no successors, suggests that sales were disappointing.
In November 1846 Chapman was appointed master of landscape drawing at the Hobart Town Mechanics Institute, a part-time position he prudently combined with his daytime clerkship. He died at his home in Davey Street, Hobart Town, on 30 September 1864, aged 74, better known as a drawing-master than as a painter or lithographer, his work having rarely been seen in public exhibitions. During his lifetime, two of his drawings – On the Dart, Devonshire and Roseway House, Tasmania – were lent to the 1857 Geelong Mechanics Institute Exhibition by A. Douglass, and after his death four of his Tasmanian watercolours were lent by J. Luckman to the 1875 Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition Preparatory to the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial. The 21 views by Chapman in the Art Society of Tasmania’s Old Hobart Exhibition came from four private collectors, most being from J. Legrand.
The vast bulk of Chapman’s work – hundreds of pencil sketches and watercolours – still remains largely unseen, although now mostly in public collections. Henry Allport regretted this neglect as early as 1931, pointing out that Chapman was not only one of early Tasmania’s most prolific, competent and detailed sketchers but since he labelled, dated and signed virtually everything his work offered 'a wonderfully valuable record of the past’.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
