painter, decorative artist and government official, was born on 11 January 1796 at Hamburg, Germany, where his father, Thomas Lempriere, a Norman-Jersey banker and merchant, was working. An adventurous early life included being imprisoned (with his father) by Napoleon at Verdun in 1813, although the 7-year-old boy was soon returned to his mother, Harriet née Allen, in England. Lempriere came to Van Diemen’s Land on board the Regalia in 1822. Following a short and unsuccessful period as a merchant, he joined the Commissariat Department and remained in its employ until his death at sea on 6 January 1852 en route to Aden, having been invalided home to England from a post in Hong Kong.
In 1823 Lempriere married Charlotte Smith (1803-90) whom he had met on board the Regalia ; they had twelve children. He was a devoted and at times somewhat imperious husband and father who played an active role in the education of his family. His sterling worth was documented by the exiled Canadian Linus Miller, a tutor in the household: 'Mr Lempriere was one of those rare specimens of humanity whom nature has endowed with a soul so much larger and more noble than we generally meet with’. As well as working in Hobart Town, Lempriere’s duties took him to posts at the major penal settlements in Van Diemen’s Land: Macquarie Harbour, Maria Island and Port Arthur. He served at the last in 1833-48 and there wrote his account of the penal settlements which was published in parts in the Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science (Hobart Town 1842-46).
An educated, intelligent, witty and urbane man, Lempriere’s record of his Tasmanian life, including his artistic endeavours, is known through his surviving diaries (ML). These cover the years 1834-36, 1837-38 and 1847-48, the earliest being written in both French and English. His interests were many. At Port Arthur he pursued the study of natural history, drawing and recording details of the flora, fauna and climate of his surroundings. He noted the solstices, made a tidal gauge, kept a meteorological journal, engaged in taxidermy, and in January 1838 despatched to England 'a bottle specimen…a native rat with nine young ones in the pouch’.
His interest in painting was not developed until comparatively late in life (he was nevertheless painting before he was thirty-eight) and he displayed an almost childlike pleasure when the sculptor Benjamin Law commended his efforts in January 1837: 'He was greatly astonished that anybody at such an age had begun to paint, a compliment to my abilities, but alas showing how much I have aged’. (The fact that his portrait of Affleck Moodie was considered 'very bad – what a slap’ was not so pleasing.) His 1834-35 diary begins with the first known reference to his painting, when he records having made a sketch for a portrait and another sketch for a miniature in oils.
Portraiture was Lempriere’s forte and comprises the major part of his work. His best-known portraits are probably the early rather wooden ones of his commandant at Port Arthur, Captain Charles O’Hara Booth , and his wife Elizabeth Charlotte, née Eagle (1834?, o/c, TMAG), but Lempriere’s diaries document many others, a good percentage of which survive, largely with the families for whom they were painted. Mrs Murray’s portrait was exceptional, having been begun on 28 April 1834 'as an experiment in Water Colours’, his normal medium being oil paint. Between May and June 1834 he painted Captain Kinghorne’s portrait (p.c.) and was working on paintings of Mr Young, William Thomson, Rev. John Allen Manton and others. He and George Fleming Armstrong were painting portraits of one another in August.
On 29 October 1835 Lempriere wrote that he had completed a self-portrait and noted good humouredly that there was a division of opinion over its resemblance to him. This is probably the large self-portrait in oils presented to the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts by a descendant in 1986. Lempriere possibly painted other self-portraits, a detail being added to one on 30 November 1837, but since he tended to rework paintings from time to time if they remained in his possession it was more likely the same picture.
Other portraits painted in 1835 included those of William Butters and Sarah Smith, the latter promising to pay the first half of Mary Lempriere’s school fees in return. Betsy Carter, Mrs Simpson and Mrs Wilkinson ('such an ugly woman’) were painted in 1836-37. In January 1838 he 'made a bargain’ to paint a small portrait of Mr Cruickshank of the 21st Regiment in return for the sitter’s double-barrel precision gun, Lempriere also being a keen hunter. On 29 August 1838 Governor Sir John Franklin called at Lempriere’s house on an official tour of inspection of Port Arthur and 'was pleased with the Portraits – promised to sit for me’. A preliminary pencil sketch of Franklin survives in a sketchbook (DG).
Lempriere’s artistic inclinations were not restricted to one genre and diary references to other types of art work proliferate. There were still-lifes, as noted on 15 August 1834: 'began to paint a plate of fruit’. There were transparencies, including one for Captain Kinghorne (completed May 1834) and one bearing Lempriere’s own coat of arms. There was a sketch of a native sparrow, which was to be the first of a series, and there were landscape sketches made by moonlight and on walks. On 20 June 1837 he noted, 'This evening began colouring a sketch of Cape Raoul for Lady Franklin [q.v.]’, and on 13 July he 'Received a pretty note from Lady Franklin to thank me for the views I sent her’. On 2 December 1835 Lempriere noted, 'Evening etched a small view of Pt. Arthur’ (which undoubtedly referred to a pen-and-ink sketch rather than a print). The Dixson Galleries (ML) hold watercolour, pencil and ink sketches of scenes in Tasmania, portrait sketches, a watercolour of a bird and various copies. A sketchbook of views on Macquarie Harbour is in the Allport Library, which also holds one of Lempriere’s several finished watercolours of this penal settlement.
History and narrative paintings are also mentioned. Maid of Athens (presumably Byron’s) was begun in August 1834 just after Lempriere had completed a painting of a knight swearing to avenge his father’s death over the paternal tomb in the presence of his mother. For Lieutenant Steele he undertook to paint 'one of his engagements with the French’. At the 1837 Hobart Town Art Exhibition Lempriere 'Found [George] Peck [q.v.] had stuck my Abraham in his exhibition much annoyed at seeing my name blazing at full length in the catalogue’. This presumably was the large painting of Abraham and Agar begun in November 1835, then accidentally damaged by Lempriere ('fortunately in the dark part’) and subsequently repaired. As painting number 7 in the (lost) catalogue of Peck’s exhibition, it was described in the Hobart Town Courier of 18 August 1837 as exhibiting 'all the want of finish of an untutored Artist; but it bears the mark of a genius which with cultivation would do much’.
There were also more practical decorations. A landscape was added to a firescreen for his sister-in-law, Patience Roberts, the glass in the parlour window was painted, and the blue colouring of a room was changed to yellow because blue was 'unsuitable’. Other applied art works included painting a woman’s head on the stern of a boat for Lieutenant Steele, the ordnance arms on the ordnance store’s boat and a trompe-l’oeil snake on the seat of another boat. It is likely that Lempriere was also responsible for the painting on the internal fanlight in the hall of the Port Arthur cottage now known as the Junior Medical Officer’s house.
More technical were his maps, one of which was used in Elliston’s Hobart Town Almanack and Van Diemen’s Land Annual for 1837. There is also a reference to his making a map of the environs of Verdun, France. On 24 August 1834 Lempriere drew two plans of the church 'for our small town’ and on 16 September 1835 he recorded: 'Monday and last night busy in drawing an elevation for our new Church’. It is not, however, possible to ascertain if this had any influence on the design for the original St David’s at Hobart Town.
- Writers:
- Glover, Margaret
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
