UNKNOWN

This intimate portrait of an unknown sitter is a good example of nineteenth-century draughtsmanship. Executed entirely in pencil, the assured handling of a variety of drawing techniques imparts character to this informal and warmly observed study. The texture of the sitter’s curling hair and bristling moustache is conveyed by distinct, dark pencil lines, while the rounded face is modulated tonally by the controlled massing of tiny pencil strokes. This detailed treatment of face and hair, in combination with the small proportions of the drawing, suggest that it may have been a preparatory study for a portrait miniature. In miniatures, however, the particulars of clothing were usually also handled with attention to detail—a feature that is not in evidence here. Rather, the broad handling of costume in this drawing—the simple contours and zig-zagging lines—is more in keeping with a style of portrait drawing that gained currency in the colonies in the mid nineteenth century. Combining a detailed treatment of face and hair with summary handling of the clothing of the upper body, this manner had been fashionable in Great Britain since the late eighteenth century. In the colonies these conventions became evident in the portraits of Thomas Bock from the 1840s and also in the work of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright in the same decade.1 Rather than a miniature study, it seems more likely that the drawing is an informal portrait study that reflects current conventions in colonial society portraiture.

The artist responsible for this portrait drawing has yet to be identified, and a former attribution to Thomas Bock has been rejected on stylistic grounds.2 Exact dating of the work is similarly problematic, and the attribution to the mid decades of the nineteenth century is suggested on the stylistic grounds discussed above, the styling of the sitter’s facial hair, and the informal, open-necked collar.3

1 See the discussion in Andrew Sayers, Drawing in Australia, Melbourne, 1989, pp. 38–9 & 59–61.

2 The attribution to Bock has been rejected by Roger Butler, Diane Dunbar, Frances S. Kay and Daniel Thomas.

3 This style of facial hair is also evident in Charles Rodius’s crayon portrait of an unidentified man, dated 1849, in the Mitchell Library, (see E. Buscombe, Artists in Early Australia and their Portraits: A Guide to the Portrait Painters of Early Australia with Special Reference to Colonial New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land to 1850, Sydney, 1979, cat. 8/37, illus. no 208.1).

Cathy Leahy