painter, lithographer and art teacher, was born at Aston Manor, Warwickshire, England on 22 October 1854, the son of Edwin Withers, roper, and his wife Sarah, née Welch. He studied in London at the Royal Academy Schools and South Kensington from 1870 to 1882. His father opposed his desire to be an artist, and sent him to the Colony of Victoria. After his arrival in Melbourne on 1 January 1883 he humped his bluey through country districts to get to know the bush and the lie of the land. By 1884 he was in Melbourne working as a draughtsman with William Inglis & Co. and Ferguson & Mitchell, lithographic printers. He was also attending G.F. Folingsby’s evening classes at the National Gallery School. In this period he began exhibiting drawings and paintings with the Victorian Academy of Arts. His student activities and his membership of the Buonarotti Club led to enduring friendships with Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Louis Abrahams.
In May 1887 he returned to England via Italy and Paris, and on 11 October 1887 he married Fanny Flinn, a painter and music teacher, at Handsworth-with-Soho, Staffordshire. They settled in Paris and he studied at the Académie Julian under Bouguereau and Robert-Fleury. He befriended Australians living in Paris, including E. Phillips Fox, Tudor St George Tucker and John Longstaff.
In 1888 Ferguson & Mitchell invited him to return to Melbourne in order to illustrate with pen and ink Edmund Finn’s The Chronicles of Early Melbourne . They travelled to Australia by way of Italy and arrived in Melbourne on 11 June 1888. At first they rented a cottage in Kew, where Withers established a studio. The following year, when Mrs Withers returned to England for a family visit, he shared a house at Eaglemont with Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton. He also befriended Charles Conder, Arthur Loureiro and George Rossi Ashton. Tom Roberts soon started calling him bq). The Colonelbq). for his efficiency and his desire to organise. In 1890 the Withers family moved into the old mansion at Charterisville in Heidelberg. Withers was able to have a separate studio where he taught art, Fanny taught drawing, and other cottages on the estate were sub-let to his fellow artists at two shillings and sixpence a week. Writing in The Australasian Critic (1 July 1891), Sidney Dickenson named both Withers and Arthur Streeton as leaders of bq). The Heidelberg Schoolbq)..
In April 1891 Withers established a separate studio in Collins Street, and held classes there. His graphic work of this time included illustrations to Bohemia , (eg supplement 29 October 1891 with 'sporting’ gentlemen as well as one of the jockeys).
The financial depression of the early 1890s was especially hard on Melbourne. Few people bought paintings and there was little work for black-and-white artists. He did contemplate returning to England, but Frederick McCubbin helped find him a number of teaching positions. In 1893 he was teaching in Creswick, a mining town near Ballarat. The day classes were en plein air painting, while the evening drawing classes were at the School of Mines. One of his early students was Percy Lindsay, whose younger brother Lionel had just left for Melbourne to eke out a life as an illustrator for a yellow press newspaper. Percy was soon joined by the precocious Norman, the fifth Lindsay child. Both later paid tribute to the importance of Withers’ teaching.
By 1894 the family returned to Heidelberg, where Withers rented a house, and it was here that he produced much of his best known work, including The Storm, which was awarded the first Wynne Prize for Australian landscape in 1897. In 1898 he was able to move to a new home in Heidelberg. With such public success, and with the end of the depression, financial success followed. W.T. Manifold commissioned him to paint a series of historic decorative panels for his new house on the family property at Purrumbete. On the completion of this lucrative commission in 1902, Withers was able to buy a house on 2½ acres at rural Eltham, where he added a studio. The family was based here, while for some years he spent weekdays at his city studio at Oxford Chambers. In the last two years of his life he was a Trustee of the National Gallery, Museum and Library of Victoria. He died of coronary thrombosis on 13 October 1914, and is buried at the Anglican Church at St Helena.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
Joanna Mendelssohn
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2011
