John Skinner PROUT

English 1805–76
worked in Australia 1840–48

Principally an agile, outdoor watercolourist, John Skinner Prout most frequently depicted picturesque Australian landscapes containing people and human activity in the form of cart tracks, fencing, sawn trees and huts. This work, Fern Tree Gully, Table Mountain Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land, 1844, includes the artist with sketchbook, seated left of centre beneath enormous man ferns at the base of Mount Wellington, Hobart, a landmark that provided the setting for numerous works.

Skinner Prout, his wife Maria and their eight children emigrated from London to Australia in 1840 where the artist worked in watercolour, oils, lithography, scenery-set painting and as a teacher and writer. Living in Sydney until 1843 and Van Diemen’s Land from 1844 to 1848, Skinner Prout is most noted for watercolours deftly executed with flashes of primary blue, red or, more often, Chinese white highlighting the dancing surface of rocks, leaves and water. Actively drawing the viewer from an often neutral foreground to an active middle ground and background, his articulation of both people and place are characteristically raw and often seemingly unfinished. A sense of urgency permeates many works in which only the central focal subject is completed, giving the impression of an artist rapidly capturing a briefly available moment.

This economy of line, colour and infill within a spontaneous, outdoor-based practice set Skinner Prout apart from many artists of his generationa and his presence in Tasmania encouraged a following whereby ‘a landscape sketching and water-colour fever raged with extraordinary vehemence’.1 Other contemporaries, including Conrad Martens and G. T. W. B. Boyes, were less enthusiastic of Skinner Prout’s simplicity of line and colour yet nonetheless were influenced by his method and approach.2

The art historian Bernard Smith remarked that Skinner Prout was ‘the first itinerant painter in the colonies whose work ceases to be dominated by the requirements of topographical accuracy’,3 yet despite his compellingly raw and individual response to place, Skinner Prout ensured that the geographic locations of most works were carefully identified in their titles. Perhaps this artist’s ardent personalisation of place can also be linked in intention, if not in style, to his detailed portrait work, notable also in that it consists almost entirely of Aboriginal people in dignified, naturalistic poses, such as Neptune and his son, Moriarty, 1845.4 John Skinner Prout’s often underrated legacy is an innovative elevation of human activities within traditional landscape settings that emanate from a curiously liberated hand and palette.

1 B. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, Sydney, 1984, p. 290.

2 ibid., p. 299.

3 ibid., p. 298.

4 In 1843 Skinner Prout drew his first recorded portraits of Aboriginal people of New South Wales and within two years created twenty-one portraits of Tasmanian Aboriginal people exiled on Flinders Island and five Maori political prisoners incarcerated in Hobart, later also portraying Victorian Aboriginal people.

Julie Gough