caricaturist and army engineer, was one of the royal engineers posted to Western Australia under Comptroller-General Henderson in order to prepare for the imminent arrival of convicts. Le Mesurier arrived from one of the eastern colonies on board the Thames on 25 April 1853. In 1854-55 he served as assistant commissary-general at Fremantle. On 21 December 1854 Lieutenant Le Mesurier married Amelia (b.1834), the daughter of Richard McBryde Broun and his servant Hannah Dyer, who had been adopted by Broun and his first wife, Anne Elizabeth Leake. One child was born in the colony before the Le Mesuriers left for Hong Kong in the Lady Elizabeth on 11 July 1856.
The Battye Library holds Le Mesurier’s portrait sketch of his fellow royal engineer, Henry Wray , while his self-portrait is privately owned. The latter, a rough but lively ink profile sketch of a mustachioed man of military bearing, was done for Edmund Du Cane , who was also the recipient of Le Mesurier’s ink caricature of their tall, thin boss, Captain Henderson, drawn towering over his wife and son with whom he is out walking. Le Mesurier’s strongly drawn, good-natured caricature style is quite distinctive and these and similar ink sketches are undoubtedly by him (rather than by Du Cane to whom they have hitherto been attributed). Included in Du Cane’s papers are numerous caricatures of fellow officers by Le Mesurier. A folded hand-written sheet, presumably a preliminary drawing of the programme for the evening, lists the cast for an amateur performance of The Rival Valets 'as performed at the Court House Perth on the [blank] September 1854’, while its centre spread, 'Put him out of his misery Sir’, is a view of the stage at a high point of the melodrama. The very competent Professor Elliot’s Grand Ascent de Chemin é (1854) shows a hairy trouserless Lieutenant R. Elliot about to climb up the chimney during an evening drinking party, benignly observed by the local police magistrate and a fellow officer of the 99th Regiment. These stylish ink drawings are all privately owned.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
