A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
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A portrait such as Balloderree (which must date after September 1790 but before his death in December 1791) matches David Collins’ assessment of him as a fine young man. Ballooderry’s strong torso, with its elegant markings, and his direct gaze create a sympathetic image, and it would seem that the artist has responded to a subject sitting in front of him.24
It is clear, however, that these are documentary illustrations rather conventional portraiture. The Port Jackson Painter captured general characteristics rather than attempting summations of personal character. Lengthy titles, named individuals, depictions of customs such as hunting and fishing, and an emphasis on material culture and tools and implements, reflect general colonial conversations about Aboriginal people, and can be matched to what was being written in journals and diaries. These were illustrations of a people being documented from a position of curiosity, power and authority. It was certainly not a dialogue or conversation. Carefully observed, but awkwardly executed, these images with their inexpertly rendered facial profiles and over-sized eyes, brought the same compromised gaze to the Eora, that the Port Jackson Painter brought to the colony’s natural history.
Two similar but not identical watercolors of the spearing of Governor Phillip in September 1790 illuminate some of these issues.25 The drawings closely align to the description of the immediate aftermath of the incident provided by Watkin Tench.26 Aboriginal men are fleeing into the bush, Phillip stands on the shore with Captain Waterhouse, attempting to extract the spear in his shoulder, and the only gun which worked has been fired. David Collins noted that the colonists had four guns with them: four guns are shown in the watercolors. These watercolors have a sense of being recreations of events of great local significance: they are minor history paintings no doubt composed from the stories later recounted by the participants.
Tench hoped that the rapprochement which emerged after the spearing of Phillip would lead to deeper understanding between the two cultures noting that “We gradually continued henceforth to gain knowledge of their customs and policy:– the only knowledge which can lead to a just estimate of national character.”27 Thomas Watling’s watercolors and pencil drawings, which date from late 1792, are as already been noted, more sophisticated than those of the Port Jackson Painter. His fluency with the basics of orthodox pictorial language mean that his portraits are much more conventional in their structure and realization: indeed Watling rarely diverted his practice to depicting customary activities or material culture. Yet despite Watling’s putative realism, his portrait of Colebee, whose face was “very thickly imprinted with the marks” of smallpox, reveals no evidence of the disease.28 Watling’s own views on Aboriginal people, which were not sympathetic, are not evident in these portraits, which reflect instead the sentiments of his employer, John White.
The frontispiece to the second volume of Collins’s An account of the English colony … (1802), A Night Scene in the Neighbourhood of Sydney, probably also based on drawings by Watling, is a romantic depiction of a group of Aborigines peaceably enjoying themselves by the light of the moon. In his preface to the volume, Collins wrote, “It were to be wished, that they never had been seen in any other state than … in the happy and peaceable exercise of their freedom and amusements.” Watling’s more literate compositions locate Aboriginal people within the language of European painting, recalling genre images of the picturesque rural poor by artists like Richard Westall and Francis Wheatley while at the same time playing on the nostalgia of dispossession.
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By 1800, as colonists expanded across the Cumberland Plains, occupied the Hawkesbury, and began pushing into the Hunter, the intense curiosity of the 1790s had dissipated significantly, reflecting the assumption that the colony was no longer an experiment, but rather a permanent and evolving settlement, and an increasingly valuable asset to the Empire, with an explicitly British character. When the merchant Richard Jones was asked in 1819 if it would be apparent to a visitor that Sydney was a convict town, he replied “No … if he kept from the Rock part of the town … he would rather regard himself as in some country town in England…”29
From 1800 onwards art was largely commissioned from professional artists, who had arrived in the colony either as convicts or as free settlers. Colonists now looked for images by professional artists, which documented the progress and development of the colony, and its various satellite towns. Ironically there were most probably more artists in early nineteenth century Sydney than in comparable English towns. In the early 1800s convicts such as John Eyre, John Austin, Samuel Clayton, Joseph Lycett, Richard Browne, Philip Slaeger, Richard Read (Senior) and Francis Greenway were all working in the colony. They were competing with free artists such as John William Lewin, Richard Read (Junior) and George William Evans.
It was only well-appointed exploration voyages, like those of Nicolas Baudin’s Géographe or Matthew Flinders’ Investigator expeditions, that were supported by professional artists such as Ferdinand Bauer, William Westall, Nicolas-Martin Petit or Charles Lesueur, pursuing a discipline of comprehensive and systematic documentation, consciously compiled in conjunction with naturalists. The audiences for these works were European savants, intent on describing and naming the flora, fauna, peoples and landforms within European knowledge systems, and had little intersection with colonial experience.
Colonists could see beautiful or picturesque landscapes in NSW: early writers regularly commented on its picturesque vistas, or compared expanses of open country to a gentleman’s park, one of the highest accolades that could be bestowed upon a view. But colonial patrons were rarely interested in the picturesque, or the sublime. Instead they wanted art to celebrate the bricks and mortar of colonial progress, and a topographical aesthetic perfectly matched their purpose.
The topographical draughtsman, it was said, looked to capture “Every absurdity, as well as beauty [of a view so that a drawing of it hands] down to posterity that local and particular truth, which it is expressly his business and purpose to transmit.”30 A topographical image was essentially about conveying specific information about a particular place, and it remained the dominant aesthetic for colonial landscape painting for the next three decades. It was a familiar pictorial language for colonists, who were conversant with it through the ubiquitous sets of topographical views of cities, towns, estates and counties which were readily available throughout England.
Other agendas also help circumscribe the making of colonial art: in a society in which convicts, class and authority were considered dangerously combustible, art was required to be compliant. The publisher Absalom West asked for, and was given, Governor Macquarie’s approval for a series of views he proposed to publish in 1814.31 While this publication did not eventuate, the fact that the Governor’s assent was sought suggests that colonial art was, at least in part, in the service of government.
Ironically it was the military who rebelled and their celebrations of the overthrow of Governor Bligh on 26 January 1808 quickly co-opted local artists: celebratory cartoons were drawn on walls inside public houses and pub signs erected outside, effigies burnt, buildings illuminated, and a small libellous watercolor drawing depicting Bligh being pulled from underneath a bed – the implication was entirely about cowardice – was publicly displayed in a house, perhaps the first time a work of art was presented for public exhibition in the colony.32 Such images only appeared in a time of unrest or tension: once the rebels themselves were in control these images disappeared.
Literal topographical views of the colony’s various settlements were offered by nearly all colonial artists. The focus on these views was largely on government buildings, such as St. Philips, First Government House at the head of Sydney Cove, or the Commissariat Building, all clear evidence of the progress of civil society in NSW. The neat and tidy Sydney in John Eyre’s c.1806 View of Sydney From the West Side of the Cove (Mitchell Library) seems a perfect antidote to the idea that the colony was a den of iniquity. The watercolor is both a comparatively faithful record of the town’s infrastructure and general topography, and a celebration, through its lush, green ambience, of its conformity to English towns.
Colonial artists very rarely tackled the landscape as a subject in of itself. George William Evans’s A View Near Grose Head, of 1809 (State Library