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.