Portraits like
the newly acquired Thomas Meehan reveal the fears and aspirations of colonial
society.
The story of
colonial art is traditionally about trees, and how artists came to depict them
with increasing ‘truthfulness’ over time. It is as much about faces, though,
and how colonists used portraiture to sell themselves, and possibly hide the
truth.
‘Portraiture is
one of the staple manufactures of the Empire,’ noted English artist Benjamin
Robert Haydon in 1817. ‘Wherever the British settle, wherever they colonise,
they carry and will ever carry trial by jury, horse-racing, and portrait
painting.’
Portraits often
tell intriguing stories, which is why in November 2015 the Library purchased John
Carmichael’s Thomas Meehan. In this painting, a young man presents himself to
the world in ways the world did not perhaps see him.
Of course,
portraits in nineteenth century Sydney held a particular potency because, as Lt
Colonel Godfrey Mundy put it in Our Antipodes in 1855,
‘There is one
grand feature of the social status of Sydney … the convict infusion.’ The
presence of successful emancipated convicts deeply disturbed free settlers, who
were petrified of unsuspecting contamination: how could anyone tell that a
well-dressed emancipist, living in a fashionable house and driving a nice
carriage, was actually a former convict? Emancipists were, Mundy wrote, ‘a
class apart from the untainted. There is a line of moral demarcation by them
peremptorily impassable.’ A portrait was a way to recompose a questionable past.
When John Piper
commissioned Augustus Earle to paint a nearly life-size portrait of his wife,
Mary Ann, and their children in the mid-1820s, it was an explicit statement of
his wealth and social pre-eminence. Yet such ostentatious display was surely also
designed to shadow the potentially embarrassing truth that Mary Ann’s parents
were convicts.
On the whole,
colonists approached such situations pragmatically, accepting them when it was
in their interests to do so (and Piper did throw the best parties in Sydney).
But after Barron Field, the former NSW Supreme Court Judge, described Mary Ann
Piper’s circumstances to Elizabeth Macleay, wife of the new Colonial Secretary,
he noted,
‘We thought it
right to explain Mrs Piper’s situation to [her], and to recommend her to
notice; but
Mrs McLeay did
not stomack it ...’
It is not
surprising, then, that portrait painting was where the money was. As John Rae
reported to struggling landscape painter John
Skinner Prout on 20
May 1847, ‘Portraiture always pays best. Our vanity too favours the portrait
painter.’ The artist William Nicholas was reputed to be earning £500–600 a year
in the late 1840s from portraits.
The Library’s
recent purchase, depicting 20-year-old Thomas Meehan,
is by trade
engraver John Carmichael. Dated 1828, this little painting — some 15.5 x 14 cm
— is the only known formal portrait by Carmichael, and has come from Meehan
family descendants.
Carmichael, who
described himself as ‘deaf and dumb’, was trained as an engraver — considered a
suitable occupation for deaf people — in Edinburgh. He had emigrated to Sydney
on his own, with no family and only his profession to support him, in 1825.
Advertising himself as an ‘engraver and copperplate printer’, he seems to have
found work quickly. Considered one of the best engravers in Sydney, his skills supported him and his
eight children, until his death in 1857. His talents are perhaps most evident
in his work on Sir Thomas Mitchell’s Map of the Nineteen Counties of 1834, but
his many designs for local bill heads and advertisements are his most visible
legacy.
In 1828, Sydney’s
most prolific portrait painter Richard Read was advertising regularly in the
local press, offering ‘Miniatures painted in a superior style, from two to five
guineas … Miniatures and portraits accurately copied’. Towards the end of the
year, in a surprising shift from his
career as an engraver, Carmichael advertised his skills in miniature at the
same price as Read.
Presumably young
Thomas Meehan saw Carmichael’s advertisement and decided to commission a
portrait. Meehan had been born in the colony in 1808, the son of James Meehan,
a surveyor and convict, transported for his involvement in the Irish Rebellion
of 1798. Although a respected surveyor, James’ intimacy with Governor Macquarie
as one of the emancipists invited to the Governor’s table had been
controversial. In 1828, though, James was two years dead, and young Thomas had expectations of
succeeding to his father’s extensive estates at Macquarie Fields.
Thomas had been
educated at Sydney Grammar School, where he won prizes for his knowledge of
Horace. Interestingly, three of his four classmates were the sons of wealthy
emancipist businessmen — education has always been an important step in social
mobility.
Thomas stands
proudly in this miniature, surrounded by what appears to be native plants, with
Sydney Harbour distant behind him. It is an image both traditional in
conception (alluding to late eighteenth century portrait painting) and specific
in locality. Yet this romantic, complex image seems old fashioned, and would
have been interpreted by Sydneysiders as aligning Thomas with the Exclusivists,
the old established free families who saw the colony’s future economic
prosperity being built around land, which of course they owned.
Recently married,
and about to inherit substantial estates, the young man in this portrait is
presented on the cusp of a propertied future, as part of the landed gentry.
Whether the landed gentry themselves considered him this way is a moot point —
Mundy described people in Meehan’s situation as ‘moral bastards’ who suffered
for the sins of their fathers. Sadly, Meehan’s potential was never realised: he
was forced to sell the estates to Samuel Terry (the father of a schoolmate) to
pay debts on the land. He died in 1835, aged 27, the postmaster and
pound-keeper at Campbelltown.
A comparison with
another miniature painted in 1828, Richard Read Junior’s Selina Tomlins, is
instructive. The opportunities open to 28-year-old Tomlins, who was married to
an Audit Office clerk, were considerably fewer than Meehan’s. Her world was
urban rather than landed, and in many ways she represents the growing class of
free immigrants (she arrived in Sydney in 1824) who were beginning to pour into
the colony. Their interests coincided more with the emancipated convicts and
the Australian-born lower and middle classes, who were looking for greater
representation and influence in the colonial economy and government, and saw
themselves as in opposition to the Exclusivists.
Read’s simply
conceived miniature, with its focus on dress and personal presentation,
represents a more modern style of portraiture than Carmichaels’. Read’s
mechanical presentation did not impress aspiring portrait painter young Samuel
Elyard, who recorded in his diary of 8 February 1837 that he had seen some of
Read’s drawings ‘meant for ladies — more like pieces of wood however — one
would think that his breast is a stranger to love, and the more beautiful
feelings, or he could not help painting better than these wretched things’.
The criticism
that colonial portraits were ‘coat-and-waistcoat paintings’, where
‘crochet-work and jewellery rage rampant’ was not entirely unfair, but it also
reflected what patrons were looking for — from Read’s Jane Tompson (wife of an
emancipist) to William Nicholas’s Hannah Tompson (wife of poet Charles Tompson,
who was the son of an emancipist). These are not sophisticated rhetorical
portraits for prominent display in public places — it was acknowledged that
those had to be commissioned in Europe — but they are a confident expression of
material possessions and putative social positions.
Thomas Meehan
seems to suggest a pastoral future for the colony, while at the same time
alluding to its subject’s privilege in the present. With its paradox of
aspiration and embarrassment, it is a wonderful microcosm of colonial society
in New South Wales.