Design and Art Australia Online

painter, art teacher, poet and coal-miner, was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, where, his obituarist claimed, he studied art under William Bell Scott and H.H. Emmerson then practised as a painter in various (unspecified) parts of England until he, his wife Mary, née Watson, and their young child, migrated to New South Wales in 1861. Reay discovered that no artistic patronage awaited him and he was soon working as a coal-miner in Newcastle, New South Wales. His large oil painting which toured to Newcastle, Maitland and Sydney, Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise (unlocated), was, his obituarist implied, painted as an allegory of the Reays’ colonial situation; however, if it was the same painting as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden 'at noon, when they were called upon by the voice of the Deity’, attributed to a self-taught painter and long-term Newcastle resident called 'Bedford’ in the Sydney Morning Herald of 18 November 1863, then Reay may have sent it out to the colonies before deciding to join it. A painting of a similar subject was touring the New South Wales goldfields in 1855. If not the same person, the two painters certainly appear to have been conflated by Reay’s obituarist, who also stated that the success of Reay’s Expulsion picture in Sydney led to a commission to paint the portrait of Governor Sir John Young (later Lord Lisgar), for which purpose Reay was granted several sittings at Government House.

Reay undoubtedly received this commission, but when the portrait was displayed at a dinner given in the governor’s honour by the Hunter River Valley Vineyard Association in 1868, Sir John told rather a different story. As reported by the Maitland Mercury , Young believed that Reay was a self-taught artist and stated that the portrait had been painted under the following circumstances: 'It appears that Reay is a working coal miner by trade, but, having a natural talent for drawing, has contrived in his leisure hours to attain a very creditable proficiency in the art. Some time ago, Mr. Reay instituted a portrait club amongst his fellow miners; he painted their portraits … they remunerating him by certain weekly subscriptions. Some of these portraits were seen by Mr. Keene [the manager], who, struck by their fidelity and the talent displayed in their execution, mentioned the circumstance to Sir John Young, and at the same time requested his Excellency to encourage this self-taught genius by having his portrait taken’.

Despite the unqualified praise of Sir John and Lady Young as to the portrait’s fidelity, Reay returned to the mines. The Mercury concluded: 'It is a great pity that so much promising talent should be buried in obscurity’. Reprinted in the Sydney Morning Herald on 29 May 1868, the story ultimately led to commissions from Mayor Walter Renny and other public men of Sydney, the novelty of being a painter-miner proving Reay’s major asset. Even when his oil View of Waratah Colliery was lent to the 1870 Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition by D.N. Joubert and Reay was wrongly catalogued as 'W. Bray’, his essential identification—that he was a miner at the Waratah Colliery—was there under the misspelt name.

Whether Reay was really self-taught or had been trained by two leading North of England painters is not clear either. Ironically, the latter seems the more likely: that it was the colonial success of his Adam and Eve which encouraged him to migrate. But at this stage Reay had more hopes of emerging from a colonial coal-mine through tales of 'self-help’ and natural working-class genius than by confessing to any professional training. Although undoubtedly a coal-miner by trade (his painting in England would, at best, have been a part-time activity), he may well have attended art classes for working men at the government Schools of Design, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, taught by Scott from 1842 to 1864 and by Scott’s erstwhile pupil Emmerson. Many years later, when employed as an art teacher, Reay’s artistic background was an obvious asset. Then the past could be reclaimed, even embellished.

Reay became art master at Newcastle Grammar School for nineteen years and visiting art teacher at Miss Dowling’s Young Ladies Seminary in West Maitland and at Mr Theobald’s Collegiate School. As such, he was responsible for the art education of a great number of children in the Hunter Valley. He also painted portraits of local residents such as Mr and Mrs Hannay (recorded in the 1880s) and/or a pair of unidentified sitters (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney). His large oil painting of a bushranging incident was purchased by a Newcastle police officer. When Mr R.B. Theobald included his own poetic tribute to Reay in Poems and Lyrics by William Reay, Artist (West Maitland 1886), he affirmed with true poetic licence (if not rhyme) that the portrait Reay had painted of him, now hanging in his home, was 'done so well / That 'twould credit be to Rembrandt or Raphael’.

In old age Reay was respected as Newcastle’s 'painter-poet’ and the painter-miner was forgotten. Of a somewhat higher standard than Theobald’s, his poems are equally archaic in language and even more stereotypical in content and style, his mentors being the inevitable Robert Burns and Shakespeare. He wrote as an exile from a beloved 'North Countree … the Borderland – its Battlefields, its meadows, its foaming torrents, its rippling brooks’, understandably rejecting the local content provided by the rather depressing mining town of Waratah, outside Newcastle, where he continued to live. His poem 'To an English primrose growing in Australia’ includes references to his 'banishment’. He died at Waratah in May 1903, survived by his wife, four sons and two daughters.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011