Thomas Shotter BOYS

English 1803–74

George French ANGAS

English 1822–86
worked in Australia 1844–45, 1850–63

The nineteenth century was the great age of travel illustration. Audiences eager for images of distant and exotic scenery provided ready work for artists and publishers. George French Angas was one such artist who travelled extensively in search of subject matter for publication. By the time of his first visit to South Australia in 1844 at the age of twenty-two, he had already published an account of his travels in Malta and Sicily, illustrated with lithographs he had drawn himself. Travels in Australia and New Zealand over the following two years provided material for his next publications which he issued following his return to England in 1846: South Australia Illustrated, 1846–7, The New Zealanders Illustrated, 1846–7 and Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, 1847. Angas emigrated to Adelaide in 1850, relocating to Sydney shortly thereafter where he was well placed to travel to Bathurst to record the gold rush in 1851. His precarious financial position, exacerbated by difficulties with the English publisher of his prints, was alleviated by his appointment as secretary and accountant to the Australian Museum in 1853. Here he worked not only as an administrator, but also took a special interest in the collection of shells, publishing both texts and illustrations in this field, particularly following his return to England in 1863.

Angas’s training with the English natural-history painter and lithographer Benjamin Waterhouse is reflected in his work in its careful attention to detail and the accuracy of the drawing. In this atmospheric lithograph of Sydney Harbour, the panorama is labelled with the names of the major topographical features, buildings and native flora. This labelling, together with the depiction of ‘a group of natives, with the “Banksia”, “Waratah” & other native shrubs peculiar to the soil’1 in the foreground, reveals Angas’s eye to meeting his audience’s interest in exotic detail. Drawn on the lithographic stone in London by Thomas Shotter Boys after Angas’s watercolour, The city and harbour of Sydney, from near Vaucluse, 1852, is a fine example of the travel-lithograph genre. Boys was himself an accomplished artist who had brought a new sophistication to lithography by skilful use of a tint stone, in addition to the black stone, to achieve a broader chromatic range. This is evident in this lithograph, which has also been extensively hand-coloured.

1 George French Angas, letter to his publisher, William Hogarth, 30 September 1851, quoted in J. Tregenza, George French Angas: Artist, Traveller and Naturalist 1822–1886, Adelaide, 1980, p. 83.

Cathy Leahy