Curio

State Library of New South Wales
Hobart Town, taken from the garden where I lived

Hobart Town, taken from the garden where I lived

1832
Oil on canvas
Donated by Sir William Dixson, 1938
DG 6

John Glover was probably the most famous cultural immigrant to Australia in the 19th century. He had been a hugely successful landscape painter in England, prior to his arrival in Australia in 1831 at the age of 64. While his work was not always appreciated by art critics of the day, his paintings were successful in the market place. It is not known what motivated his decision to move to Australia. In part it was to join his son, who had emigrated earlier, and to take up a substantial land grant. But it also seems he hoped to encounter in Australia ‘a new Beautiful World – new landscapes, new trees, new flowers, new Animals & Birds’.* He was, in other words, looking for new inspiration.

Hobart Town, Taken from the Garden Where I Live is Glover’s homage to the achievements of British civilisation in Tasmania. His house, in Melville Street in West Hobart, overlooked the Derwent River. Its garden, with its English ornamental flowers such as geraniums and roses, reinforced the success of the transplantation of Europe into the Antipodes, while its detailed account of the town’s buildings would have surely impressed European viewers, who tended to view Australia as a dumping ground for convicts and degenerates. The painting was exhibited in London in 1835.

An astonishingly pleasant town

In 1834, only two years after Glover painted this picture, Austrian diplomat and naturalist Baron Charles von Hügel, visited Hobart. In his journal he recorded his impressions:


"In the afternoon we at last caught sight of Hobart Town, a pleasant little town on a small bay with 30 or 40 ships lying at anchor. Mount Wellington rose up majestically behind the town.


On shore we found an atmosphere of order and respectability which astonished us when we reflected that a large proportion of the population consisted on convicts.


Government House is surrounded by a small English garden.


It may well be imagined what an agreeable impression Van Diemen’s Land made on us: a pleasant, well-built town, hospitable and obliging inhabitants, all of them a picture of health, vitality and activity: orderliness and cleanliness wherever we looked. ... Add to all this a splendid climate".1


However colonial life did have challenges. The missionary James Backhouse reported visiting John Glover and his wife in 1833:


"We visited John Glover, a celebrated painter who came to this country when advanced in life, to depict the novel scenery: his aged wife has been so tried with the convict, female servants, that she has herself undertaken the house work."2


Footnotes
1. Baron Charles von Hügel, New Holland Journal, 1994, pp 99–100
2. James Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies, 1843, p 147