A view of Queenborough on Norfolk Island
c1804
Watercolour on paper
Bequest of Sir William Dixson, 1952
DL Pd 397
This watercolour of the settlement of Queenborough on Norfolk Island was painted by someone who had never been there! Norfolk Island was settled only a couple of months after the First Fleet landed in Sydney in January 1788. It was hoped that the island’s famous pines could provide masts and spars for the British navy, and the flax that grew there cloth for its sails.
Queensborough, now known as Longridge, was south of what is now the island’s airstrip. The settlement was established in a protected, fertile valley in June 1790: the land was cleared, corn planted, and huts built.
John Eyre, however, never visited Norfolk Island. This watercolour is probably a copy of a drawing made on the island around 1796 by storekeeper William Neat Chapman, who was a good friend of the island’s governor, Philip Gidley King. King later commissioned Eyre to copy Chapman’s watercolour. Chapman’s original wash drawings were in black and white, so Eyre would have guessed the colours or perhaps relied on King’s descriptions of the Norfolk landscape.
A most charming appearance
Drawings such as this may seem quirky and naïve now, but when they were painted they were often the only visual record of a place and were examined closely for their information. In 1791 Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of soldier and farmer John Macarthur, wrote to a friend in England that Norfolk Island:
"...has a most charming picturesque appearance from the drawings I have seen, and what I have heard corresponds with it, the Pine Trees are very lofty and majestic ... There are various other trees fitted for domestic purposes; and some which add greatly to the beauty of a Landscape …"*
Footnotes
* Joy Hughes (ed), The Journals & Letters of Elizabeth Macarthur 1789–1798, Elizabeth Farm Occasional Series, HHT, 1984, p 23
Not the first rank
Artists
employed by colonists were rarely of the first rank. Many – like John Eyre –
were convicts; most other artists were either artists attached to expeditions
of exploration or were looking for new opportunities in a colony where they
could be assured of little competition. Colonial artists had to be prepared to
take on a diverse range of work to survive. Eyre, for example, was principally
a landscape or topographical painter. He made many watercolours of Sydney, with
some published as engravings in both London and Sydney. However, he was also
prepared to turn his hand to anything that would pay. In 1811 he was employed
to paint house numbers on all the buildings east of the Tank Stream.
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