John LEWIN

English 1770–1819
worked in Australia 1800‒19

John William Lewin was the first professional artist to arrive in the colony of New South Wales as a free man. Having received training from his father, an ornithologist and painter of natural-history subjects, Lewin travelled to Australia with the specific intention of collecting and documenting in visual form the exotic creatures that were to be found in the new colony. Soon after his arrival in January 1800, Lewin participated as unofficial natural-history artist in the first of a number of exploratory expeditions, on this occasion to the Hunter River. Later that year he went to Tahiti and, in 1815, accompanied the party which made the first crossing of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales.1

His first book, Prodromus Entomology, Natural History of Lepidopterous Insects of New South Wales, was published in London in 1805, and was followed three years later by A Natural History of the Birds of New South Wales. Lewin envisaged a series of volumes ‘intended to comprehend the whole of the Birds of New Holland as they may come to the Author’s hand’,2 but only one was ever published, the first two editions (1808 and 1813) containing eighteen hand-coloured etchings with descriptive letterpress text on the facing page, and each of the subsequent editions containing an additional eight illustrations.

A Natural History of the Birds of New South Wales was published in five editions between 1808 and 1878.3 The second edition, printed in 1813 in Sydney by the Government Printer, George Howe, holds a significant place in Australia’s history, being the first illustrated book to be published in New South Wales. This plate depicting The tree creeper, 1822, can be identified as being from the 1838 or 1875 editions of the book on the basis of the distinctive hand-colouring (more accurate than previous editions as it followed specimens lent by the renowned ornithologist John Gould),4 as well as the blue-tinted background.5

1 P. Mander-Jones & E. Imashev, ‘John Lewin’, in The Dictionary of Australian Artists: Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870, ed. J. Kerr, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 465–7.

2 A. McEvey, A Natural History of the Birds of New South Wales, Carlton, 1978.

3 For a concise discussion of the complex history of the various published editions, see McEvey’s introduction to the facsimile edition, A Natural History of the Birds of New South Wales, Carlton, 1978.

4 Information from Des Cowley, Rare Books Librarian, State Library of Victoria.

5 Being plate number 25, The tree creeper was not included in either of the first two editions, which only contained 18 plates.

Kirsty M. Grant