Design and Art Australia Online

watercolourist and army officer, third child and eldest son of the seven children of Anne and William Thomas Lyttleton , was born in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) when his father was on an army posting there and was baptised Westcote, a family name of the Lyttletons of Hagley Hall, Stourbridge, Worcestershire, to whom he was distantly related. The family was in England and Scotland in 1822-25, then migrated to Van Diemen’s Land where Westcote remained for ten years. He left for London in February 1835, arriving in August in order to enter his father’s old college, the Royal Military Academy.

Commissioned ensign in 1837, lieutenant in 1839 and captain in 1845, Lyttleton was posted to Halifax, Nova Scotia, with the 64th Regiment in 1840 and arrived in October. In 1842 he married Joanna, eldest daughter of 'Governor’ Peter McNab, a member of one of Halifax’s leading families. He purchased McNab Island off Halifax and lived there for seventeen years. Carter calls his undated watercolour panorama of Halifax Harbour Seen from McNab’s Island (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa) the masterpiece among the small number of works of early Halifax known today. Although obviously a very competent landscape sketcher before arriving in Canada, no Tasmanian work has been conclusively identified. This Canadian watercolour, however, is close in style to that of William Lyttleton’s Panshanger , allowing the presumption that his art training came as much from his father as from the drawing lessons he would have received at Sandhurst.

In 1853 W.W. Lyttleton was one of the judges in the Fine Arts section of the Provincial Exhibition (where his sheep won an agricultural, not art, prize). At the 1862 London International Exhibition his Sketch of Halifax and American Winter Scene were included in the Nova Scotia court and at about this time a lithograph after his Halifax view was published in both London and Boston. In 1863 Westcote helped organise an art exhibition in the Halifax armoury which included several of his watercolours. Nor was he entirely forgotten in Tasmania. At the 1862-63 Art Treasures Exhibition in Hobart Town his mother exhibited his watercolour, Halifax Harbour, Nova Scotia . It is also possible that he made a short visit to see his brother Thomas in Victoria and revisited Tasmania after he retired from the Royal Newfoundland Companies in 1866. An unsigned and undated watercolour of Ben Lomond and South Esk River (Tas.), presented to the Mitchell Library by Westcote’s niece Edith Lyttleton in 1937, together with sketches of Canada and Scotland, stylistically appears to belong to the 1860s rather than the 1830s. Lyttleton subsequently left Halifax in order to live in Britain. He died at Keswick on 9 August 1886.

Few surviving works are known. Four watercolours, two lithographs and a drawing for an engraving (all of Halifax subjects, including a precisely detailed watercolour view of his brother-in-law’s house) are in Canadian public collections. A single page from an album (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery) has a large watercolour on each side. One is an unsigned and undated portrait of 'Major Edward Giels of 19th Lancers, who came from Ardmore on the Clyde, Dumbartonshire’, additionally annotated 'A friend of W.T. Lyttleton of 73rd Regt’, while the verso is a signed view of some European mountains with figures in high hats and knickerbockers. Ancient Entrance Gateway to Sangwhar House, near Forres, Forfarshire [Scotland]. Aug. 29, 1883 ' is in the Mitchell Library, which also holds a collection of views sometimes attributed to him but almost certainly by his father. The two have continually been confused.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011