painter, professional photographer and prospector, was born in Sheffield, England. Moore states that he was a pupil of the popular English landscape painter and Royal Academician Thomas Creswick. Wright came to Melbourne in 1852 and that year won a gold medal for his View on the River Plenty (located just north of Melbourne) at the Victorian Industrial Exhibition. He was listed in the Melbourne Directory for 1853 as a landscape and portrait painter of 26 Queen Street. He may then have been a gold prospector at Bendigo, but by 1859 he was living in Back Street, Geelong. He certainly lived at Bendigo in the early 1860s, when he painted many views of the town and district such as Bendigo Valley and the panoramic Sandhurst in 1862 (o/c, Bendigo AG). Lithographs were made after some of these, including Sheepwash Creek, near Sandhurst (1863), drawn and lithographed by F. Cogné for Troedel 's Melbourne Album . A self-portrait in oils (c.1860) hangs in the Bendigo Art Gallery.
In 1864 Wright was listed as an artist of 3 McKenzie Street, Melbourne, but the following year his studio was at 236 Bourke Street, East Melbourne. He may then have visited New Zealand, but was back at Melbourne by 1866 when he showed seven paintings at the Intercolonial Exhibition, six being oil landscapes, mainly of New Zealand subjects. The seventh, a view of Wesley College, where he was employed as drawing master, was included in the category of architectural designs and engravings. In 1867 Wright was listed as both a painter and photographer and had acquired separate rooms in Bourke Street (no. 52) as a photographic studio. He retained both until 1872. From 1867 he also taught landscape painting at the Richmond Artisan’s School of Design in the evenings.
Wright painted several large allegorical transparencies for the Melbourne visit of the Duke of Edinburgh in November 1867. Neptune and Victoria featured at the Bull and Mouth Hotel, the Duke flanked by Britannia and Neptune adorned the Colonial Bank, and Buckley & Nunn’s shop displayed his female embodiments of Victoria, Britannia and Liberty welcoming the Duke. Completed in 1870, Wright’s full-length, life-size posthumous portrait of Rev. Dr D.J. Draper, the former headmaster of Wesley, must have been exceedingly flattering (and quite unlike the subject) as the Argus tactfully noted that he had evidently aimed to give an ideal representation of the man as his admirers remembered him rather than 'any mere photographic exactness of resemblance’. It still hangs at the school.
Although an infrequent public exhibitor during the 1860s, six of Wright’s landscape paintings were included in the 1869 Melbourne Public Library Exhibition, two oils and two watercolours of New Zealand and English subjects being lent by the artist, while a 'sepia composition’ and View near the Heads , a watercolour, came from Alfred Woolley’s collection. Melbourne Punch 's critic thought Landscape, English Composition looked like the work of a beginner: 'Skies ought to be painted in, not smeared’. In May 1870 Wright’s view of the Waitahuna River at Otago, New Zealand, was just being finished in his Bourke Street studio for display in a shop window in the town.
A foundation member of the Victorian Academy of Arts in 1870, Wright sent paintings to its annual exhibitions until 1875. The Argus critic, James Smith, praised two of the five paintings he showed at the first – Doubtful Weather, Richmond Paddock and A View on the Waitahuna River, [Otago] N.Z. (Bendigo AG) – because they had 'the air of having been painted out of doors, and reflect the breezy motion of the clouds and the freshness of the atmosphere’, yet concluded rather dismissively: 'The chief merit of the pictures is, however, their extreme faithfulness to nature’.
At the second exhibition, held in 1872, Wright was 'almost entirely unrepresented, owing to an attack of illness on the eve of completing various pictures intended for exhibition’, but he made up for this by showing six paintings the following year. An 1875 contribution, The Ford , was again praised for its naturalism, 'the sky and background being a minutiae of nature’. Showers and Steam on the North-East Line and Morse’s Creek were shown competitively with the New South Wales Academy of Art in 1874. The former, recognised as an Australian tribute to Turner’s Sunshine, Storm and Steam ( Rain, Steam and Speed ?) except that 'the master touches of the greatest English colourist are entirely wanting’, was a controversial highpoint of the exhibition: 'Some critics have warmly declared this picture to be one of the best in the exhibition’, the Sydney Mail reported, 'but this enthusiastic opinion has been as strongly dissented from’.
Wright continued to paint both Victorian and New Zealand subjects throughout the 1870s while increasingly adding more romantic, generalised landscapes to his repertoire. His large poetical evocation, The Ploughman Homeward Plods his Weary Way from Gray’s Elegy , was completed shortly before his death in 1881.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
