Design and Art Australia Online

Anglo-Australian colonial artist William George Wilson is noteworthy both for his Queensland origins and for his cosmopolitan upbringing. The eldest child of a very successful Scottish squatter, William Wilson, he was born on 18 April 1849 in either Brisbane or on his father’s first landholding in Moreton Bay, Mt Flinders or Peak Mountain Station near Ipswich. When he was five years old he travelled with his family to Britain and spent a number of years in Edinburgh before returning to Brisbane in the 1860s at which time his family, consisting by then of six children in all (four girls and one other boy), resided at Kangaroo Point. During the 1860s his father sold the Peak Mountain property, becoming in 1869 the lessee of Pilton Station on the Darling Downs. This large estate became a very important part of the family’s identity, bolstering its social standing and providing a comfortable income.

 

Wilson probably received his secondary education in Britain as was customary among this social class, and the pattern of comings and goings between Queensland and Britain continued in his adult years. His surviving artistic oeuvre is concentrated into two main distinct entities: a group of watercolour sketches dating from the 1870s, now in the collection of the State Library of New South Wales, and a later group of small oil paintings from the early 1890s held in the collections of the University of Queensland Art Museum and the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery. Although both sets of images deal mainly with the Darling Downs and Pilton Station they are characterised by striking differences in style and approach. The early pictures are lively anecdotal depictions of figures and buildings in the landscape, linear in style with some interesting compositions, but awkward and amateurish as well. In contrast, the later works are much more accomplished, freely handled and delicately coloured landscapes showing an interest in mood and time of day or season without any figures at all. A closer look at Wilson’s life story can help to explain these contrasts.

 

The earliest of the watercolours is dated September 1870 and is an Italian landscape scene, suggesting that Wilson enjoyed a continental interlude before returning to Queensland where the remaining watercolours were painted. Aged then in his twenties, he worked as Superintendent of Pilton Station while his father became a Member of the Queensland Legislative Council, serving actively from 1874 to 1876. The homestead on Pilton, its large formal garden, and life on the station form his main subjects. However, this Queensland interlude came to an end in the late 1870s when the family again returned to Britain, establishing the family home in Earls Court in London from around 1881. Wilson received professional artistic tuition during this period, studying for three years at the Royal Academy Schools after enrolling in December 1884, falsifying his age as thirty-four rather than thirty-five in order to evade age restrictions. Although he had some success in the Lower Schools (in 1886 he won a Silver Medal for the best copy of an Old Master, an Italian landscape by Richard Wilson) he did not proceed to a final three years of tuition in the Upper School.

 

It is interesting that Wilson embarked on his artistic studies only after the death of his mother in early 1883, evidence perhaps that she disapproved of an artistic career. Certainly his father’s death in May 1887 impacted on his studies since he then had to assume responsibility for his four unmarried sisters and the family business interests. He married in 1889, travelled to Queensland with his new wife the next year, and spent several years overseeing the running of Pilton Station while also trying his hand at developing a career as an artist in Toowoomba and Brisbane. The small poetic oil Darling Downs landscapes date from this period and demonstrate the results of his professional training. They are particularly interesting for their depiction of the dry inland landscape in this period of severe drought. In 1892 Wilson began exhibiting with the Queensland Art Society (QAS) (newly formed only in 1887) along with Godfrey Rivers (1859-1925), another London-trained artist who had become the Art Master at the Brisbane Technical College in 1890. A friendship seems to have developed between the two men. Wilson’s small works attracted favourable critical comment in the local press although a large work, The Edge of the Range near Toowoomba, was criticised for its weak foreground (The Queenslander, 13 August 1892, pg 310).

 

Wilson pursued his artistic activities in Toowoomba for only a few years. A highlight of this period was an exhibition held in 1893 in his Ruthven Street studio, shared with a colleague, probably Samuel Arthur Lindsey (c.1859-1952), an Englishman who later enjoyed a successful career as a British miniature painter. The pair collaborated on a large work, The Kangaroo Hunt, unfortunately no longer extant. As the Queenslander commented, “An exhibition of paintings is quite a novelty in Toowoomba.” Nevertheless, “with the aid of tea and delicious cake a most pleasant afternoon was spent” (The Queenslander, 29 July 1893, pg 235). However, the Kangaroo Hunt failed to impress at the 1893 QAS exhibition and eight small landscapes also shown by Wilson received no comment at all. This lack of critical acclaim no doubt contributed to Wilson’s decision to relocate finally to Britain with his wife and Queensland-born son, William Frederick Pilton Wilson. They were settled in Richmond, Surrey, by 1894. However, as his son’s name suggests, the link with Queensland was a strong one. The lease on Pilton was probably held by the extended family up until 1910, and Wilson maintained artistic links by sending travel pictures or local English scenes to QAS exhibitions between 1894 and 1913. His pictures were frequently deemed 'charming’ in local reviews. Wilson also supported the fledgling Queensland National Art Gallery (established in 1895), donating two original works, a portrait study and Winter Evening on the Tiber (c.1894), plus his Silver Medal winning landscape after Richard Wilson in 1902. Other copies of old masters were gifted to the gallery in 1903 and 1908.

 

In London Wilson also exhibited with the London Salon of the Allied Artists Association between 1909-12. This society did not employ a selection jury so all members were able to submit up to five works for hanging in the annual exhibition. Wilson’s most significant London artistic achievement occurred in 1898 when four of his 1890s Darling Downs landscapes were included in the 'Exhibition of Australian Art’ held at the Grafton Galleries. The catalogue for this event states “All the pictures exhibited were painted in Australia by Australian artists” (Grafton Gallery, 1898). More specifically it could be claimed in Wilson’s case that his pictures were Queensland pictures painted by a Queensland artist. Wilson ceased to exhibit just prior to World War I and he died in Richmond in 1924, aged 75.

 

 

 

 

 

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