This small landscape painting of Prospect Hill (now the suburb of Pemulwuy), NSW, shows the rural estate of soldier, surveyor, explorer and pastoralist, William Lawson (1774-1850). Situated 30 kilometres west of central Sydney and about 8 kilometres west of Parramatta, the view shows Lawson’s property during transition. Construction of a new mansion house Veteran’s Hall was underway, replacing an earlier house of 1810, though the roofless structure at the centre of the image could be either dwelling. The property was demolished the 1920s and is now largely covered by the Prospect Reservoir.

A dated inscription on this work places its creation in the final weeks of 1819, when the French corvette Uranie brought Louis de Freycinet’s expedition of scientific discovery (1817-1820) to Sydney for five weeks. Towards the end of November, midshipman and naval draughtsman J. Alphonse Pellion (1776-1868), with two fellow Frenchmen, a couple of indigenous guides and a sailor as interpreter, travelled to Bathurst via the newly completed Cox’s Road, making only the fifth recorded crossing of the Blue Mountains by Europeans.

Governor Macquarie had instructed William Lawson, recently appointed Commandant of Bathurst, to accompany the visitors on their regional tour and facilitate their scientific researches; the party spent the first night of their twelve day excursion at the Lawson estate. Naturalist Gaudichaud-Beaupre described the moist and marshy soil of Lawson’s property as ‘so abundant in alumide (aluminium oxide)’ that ‘nothing more is necessary but to form the earth into masses of a proper shape and burn these to produce bricks...sufficiently substantial for building; to which use they are daily applied’. It is, perhaps, just such a brick manufactory that appears – as a row of five tallish beehive ovens – in the mid-foreground on the right of Pellion’s view of Prospect Hill.

Pellion’s suite of NSW drawings – grouped under the title ‘Voyage à Bathurst’ and of which ‘Une vue de Prospect Hill’ appears to be the first – were all taken from nature, drawn on the spot and completed within days or weeks of each other. These works were then returned to France where they remained in the collection of Claude, Baron de Saulces de Freycinet (great great-grand-nephew of Louis de Freycinet) until the early 1960s.