A Passion for Natural History

By Richard Neville, Mitchell Librarian

Why would a 30-year-old illustrator set sail from London in 1799 for a small convict settlement, clinging precariously to Sydney Cove? Inspired by the European passion for natural history, John William Lewin wanted to paint and publish Australia’s wild curiosities ‘on the spot, and not from dry specimens, or notes still more abstruse’. He planned to avoid the great problem of natural history illustration: that specimens arriving in Europe from across the world were often damaged or poorly preserved. John Lewin was born in London in 1770. Arriving in Australia in 1800, Lewin began as a conventional natural history illustrator, steeped in English traditions. His immediate response to Australian nature, however, was innovative, creative and completely unexpected. Lewin was Australia’s first professional artist who was not a convict. Rather than return to England as he had intended, Lewin settled permanently in NSW, in what he called one of the finest countries in the world.. Lewin had arrived a skilled artisan — and when he died in 1819 he was described as a gentleman, and considered himself not a natural history illustrator but a fine artist. John Lewin’s story is a typical colonial one in some ways — a tale of grabbing opportunities and using them for social advantage. But it also reveals an original and perceptive response to a new environment; a response developed in isolation, which prefigures the major directions of natural history illustration of the nineteenth century.