Signed lower right: J. Skinner
Prout
Watercolour over pencil heightened with bodycolour
105 x 171 mm.,
4 x 7 in.
Prout was amongst the most talented
artists to work in colonial Australia. Born in Plymouth, Devon, his uncle was
the artist Samuel Prout (1782-1852). He lived and worked mainly in Bristol
where he was a friend of Müller and Samuel Jackson, with whom he visited Wales
and Ireland in the summer of 1833. In 1840 he emigrated to New South Wales with
his family. He took up a position in Sydney lecturing on painting whilst
exploring the landscape for views that could be used in volumes of prints. He
soon became an influential and supportive figure in the nascent art world
encouraging, among others, Conrad Martens.
In January 1844, he travelled to
Tasmania and, so enlivened by what he encountered, he returned to New South
Wales to collect his family arriving back in Hobart in April. As he had done
before, on his arrival here he delivered lectures on the arts and encouraged
the artists around him, including Francis Simpkinson de Wesselow. With
Tompkinson he explored the region for inspiration for the lithographic series
to be later published as Tasmania Illustrated. He travelled widely, his
journeys including a visit to Flinders Island. Although Prout’s concerns were
often primarily with capturing the picturesque rather than with topographical
detail, with this and the other sketches taken on Flinders island he records
the presence of the few remaining Tasmanian aboriginals, who by this time were
a depleted and dejected community. They had been transferred to this and the
neighbouring islands in an attempt to protect them from harassment by white
settlers in Tasmania. From 1833, the community was centred at Wybalenna on
Flinders Island but of the 200 shipped there 150 had perished and in 1847, just
a few years after Prout’s visit, the settlement was closed. Prout’s work of
this period, and that of his fellow sketchers, does much to illustrate the fate
of this community but also the changing nature of the landscape as it transformed
under the impact of the settlers.
Most of Prout’s sketches remain
undated but, from a near-identical dated sketch by de Wesselow of the same
scene (now in the Tasmanian Library and Art Gallery), we can confidently date
this watercolour to February 1845.
Prout appears to have left Tasmania
by the end of 1846, returning to London in 1848 where he spent the remainder of
this productive life. He continued to work on the material that he had gathered
in Australia reworking many of his sketches for subsequent lithographic
publications. Amongst those works to provide inspiration for these later
volumes is this sketch which appears in printed form in around 1874. In the
print, the three figures have been depicted in a slightly different
arrangement, the same as in another watercolour of this subject by Prout in the
National Library of Australia. This suggests that the version in the NLA may
have been worked from our original by Prout after his return to London in
preparation for the later series of lithographs.
Signed lower left: J. Skinner
Prout
Watercolour over pencil heightened with bodycolour on laid paper
113 x 76 mm., 4
¼ x 3 in.
Prout would appear to have taken great delight in the
valleys strewn with ferns which he came across both in Van Diemen’s Land, later
Tasmania, and in New South Wales. He sketched them frequently and used these
sketches to develop more finished watercolours on his return to the studio and
even once back in Britain.