Design and Art Australia Online

sketcher, silhouette artist, lithographer and draughtsman, was born in Rugeley, Staffordshire on 17 March 1809, third and youngest son of Captain Thomas Fernyhough, a military and county historian and a governor of the Military Knights of Windsor, and his first wife Susannah, née Masters. William appears to have worked as a professional armorial painter in Staffordshire. His father was employed by William Salt FSA to help catalogue his Staffordshire collection and William’s sketches appear throughout Captain Fernyhough’s notes and transcripts. A zincograph of Stowe and a pen-and-ink sketch of a tomb at Uttoxeter (William Salt Library) suggest that he was also encouraged to share his father’s local history interests.

William married the daughter of the quartermaster of the Ceylon Rifle Corps, a misalliance which may have led to the couple’s emigration soon afterwards in mid 1836, a move financed 'at very considerable expense’ his father later stated. In Sydney Fernyhough soon found work with J.G. Austin 's lithographic printing firm. His technical abilities in lithography and zincography enabled him to produce prints in both media judged by the Sydney Times of 17 September 1836 to be much superior in quality to those previously available in the colony and promising well 'to embellish our colonial literature’. He seems to have introduced zincography to New South Wales, a technique only commercially viable in England from 1830.

The original pencil sketches for Fernyhough’s first production for Austin, A Series of Twelve Profile Portraits of the Aborigines of New South Wales , survive (Dixson Library). The collection was released in September 1836 as a set in covers for 10s 6d. Later that month a new series Ombres Fantastiques was published, of which two sheets of vignetted silhouettes crowded with local scenes and characters are known (Mitchell Library). In early October Austin issued Fernyhough’s Military and Editorial Sketches , black full-length profile portraits of well-known military officers and civilians such as Rev. J.D. Lang, Thomas Mitchell and Bishop Polding. The set became known as the Sydney Characters . The Dixson Library holds a humorous print of the same silhouette type illustrating the course of a marriage, Matrimonial Thermometer . All sold for a shilling each.

The Sydney Characters provided gently humorous but ephemeral reportage of Sydney personalities, but the Profile Portraits of the Aborigines was aimed at a different audience – 'a pretty present to friends in England as characteristic of this country’. Nowhere were these profiles seen as caricatures but rather as striking likenesses. The series was successful, remaining in print until the 1840s, and both E.D. Barlow and William Baker published emulations. Silhouettes were a cheap form of portraiture that became especially popular once Lavater’s publications were known, being used to analyse racial and personal characteristics supposedly perceivable in the shape of the head. Aboriginal profiles by Fernyhough and his imitators would have provided English buyers, in particular, with another racial type to which they could apply current phrenological and physiognomical theories.

Fernyhough illustrated W.E. Brockett’s Narrative of a Voyage from Sydney to Torres Straits in November 1836 with what the Sydney Herald of 21 November 1836 considered to be 'very excellent drawings’. A few weeks later, Austin printed his Piper, the Native Who Accompanied Major Mitchell in his Expedition to the Interior . The subject was notorious in Sydney for his dress of army redcoat and cocked hat and, Mitchell wrote, 'His portrait, thus arrayed, soon appeared in the print-shops; an ingenious artist (Mr. Fernyhough) having drawn his likeness very accurately’.

After disappearing from the print market for some months, Fernyhough announced in October 1837 that he was resuming lithographic printing and drawing and was available to take likenesses. On 3 February 1838 the Sydney Times , noting a move to George Street, regretted that the 'respectable and talented artist Mr. Fernyhough… does not devote himself to portrait painting in its various styles, as no other artist in the Colony succeeds so well in profiles, or is so happy in his likenesses, which are ever striking… a group of children now in his window is highly creditable to him.’ It was also stated that he had designed the 'very beautiful ornaments which decorate the roof of the recently erected Roman Catholic chapel’ (the original St Mary’s Cathedral), a government job that may help explain the interruptions in his commercial career.

Moore suggests that Fernyhough was appointed a 'surveyor and architect’ under Mitchell and he certainly worked as a governmental architectural draughtsman, drawing up the original plans for St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, Church Hill, Sydney for Bishop Polding in 1840, possibly from the Surveyor-General’s Department. In 1842-43, at the onset of the economic depression, both he and his father wrote requesting that he be re-employed. Fernyhough senior’s letter to Mitchell (1843) stated that his son had been 'induced to resign his situation… at the instigation of a friend who held out delusive hopes to him’. It also gives the interesting artistic information that William’s series of pen-and-ink heraldry drawings for Captain Fernyhough’s proposed publication on the Military Knights of Windsor had been done in Sydney. Their pleas, however, appear to have been in vain. Fernyhough was listed as a private surveyor and draughtsman of Pitt Street in 1844. He died on 15 August 1849, at the age of 40, 'leaving a wife and six children to lament his loss’. Moore attributes his death to injuries sustained after falling down in a fit (suspiciously like Joseph Fowles ) and states that Fernyhough’s family established his widow in business in Sydney – which does seem likely.

Writers:

Neville, Richard

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011