In an earlier article in response to Peter Grant’s lovely piece on the Australian landscape and especially gum trees, I talked about the difficulty early European settlers had in seeing the Australian landscape objectively, and in depicting the genus Eucalyptus. The underlying idea is that both the landscape in general, and the eucalypts in particular, were so alien that they were impenetrable to the colonial observer.

The great Tasmanian artist, Max Angus, had a bit to say on this topic, and he was well qualified to do so, depicting the Tasmanian landscape, in watercolour, as well as it has ever been done. Others who managed to see the new landscape with unprejudiced eyes include Patricia Giles, Jack Carrington Smith and Fred Fullerton (disclaimer, Fullerton is my brother-in-law and Carrington Smith’s wife, Bobbie, was my godmother).

Max Angus was a champion of an early visitor to the colony who, Angus thinks, was one of the first – if not the first – European to really “see” the Australian landscape, and to depict eucalypts realistically. Angus did a great deal of research and published a beautiful large-format book to prove his case about this early colonial artist.

“The chief criticism levelled at early colonial artists is that they failed to see the antipodean landscape other than through European eyes,” Max Angus wrote. “A great deal … has been published on this subject, giving reasons for this apparent blindness to local conditions; among them are nostalgia for home.”

Of one early colonial artist, Angus quotes another commentator, “Lycett was transported to Australia for forging banknotes. How many migrants he induced, by forging landscapes, to settle freely in the country will never be known.”

In the same vein, the famous John Glover sold his somewhat romanticised landscapes back in England, at considerable profit. Some of these were complete with Tasmanian Aboriginal people who had long been dispossessed from the depicted landscape (though drawn from life on a visit to Kangaroo Point, Bellerive).

The early colonial artist Max Angus thought could see the Tasmanian landscape, and the eucalyptus, and managed to portray it with some semblance of verisimilitude, was Francis Guillemard Simpkinson (later, after an inheritance, Simpkinson De Wesselow).

Royal Navy Lieutenant Francis Simpkinson (usually known as Frank to distinguish him from his father, also Francis) arrived in Hobart in 1844, just eight years after Darwin’s visit, to take up a position with the Rossbank Observatory, the business of which was to take magnetic and other observations on an hourly basis. This was part of a worldwide project promoted by the great German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, which the Royal Navy had surprisingly (to me) signed up to.

Frank Simpkinson was 25 and a naval officer of 12 years’ standing. On his appointment, he had expected to be re-united with a favourite uncle and old shipmate, Sir John Franklin, Governor of Van Diemen’s Land. Sir John’s wife, Jane, was Frank’s aunt, his mother, Mary, being Jane’s youngest sister. But the governor had been abruptly recalled and, when Simpkinson arrived, Sir John and Lady Franklin were no longer in Tasmania.

Despite this disappointment, Frank Simpkinson soon became part of society in Van Diemen’s Land and formed social bonds with the important people of the colony. One such was the recently arrived John Skinner Prout, a professional artist who had quickly become established as the colony’s dominant figure in the visual arts, giving lectures, taking pupils and receiving commissions. Because of his training and experience in the navy, Frank Simpkinson would not have needed Prout’s tutelage, but the two became frequent painting partners, travelling as far as Flinders Island where they visited the Aboriginal establishment at Wybalenna.

Why I say that Simpkinson would not have needed Prout’s tutelage is that Frank had often been engaged in naval survey work, part of which was to provide accurate depictions of coastlines – and quickly (the ship moves forward, the coast moves the other way). When more than just outline drawings were needed, watercolour was the preferred medium and, on the evidence, Simpkinson had mastered the art.

Survey work in ink and watercolour was surely the training ground of the talent that Max Angus perceived and publicised in a lavish, limited edition coffee table book, published by Dan Sprod’s Blubber Head Press in 1984. A copy of Simpkinson De Wesselow: landscape painter in Van Diemen’s Land and the Port Phillip district; 1844-1848 is one of my most prized possessions. I want to acknowledge here the great work that Dan Sprod did in publishing, beautifully, important Tasmanian works.

In his naval survey work, Frank Simpkinson would, by definition, be working to depict an unfamiliar landscape objectively – to see it as it was, not as some variation of more familiar shores, and then render, as an aid to navigation, an accurate portrait of what was in front of him. Of some of his coastal profiles (particularly of the Firth of Lorn in Scotland), one modern naval surveyor, RN Captain Andrew Davis, thinks that they go beyond an excellent professional representation of the coast, writing, “Artistically … they are superb and exactly depict the colouring with violets predominating for the distant hills, with greens and browns for the nearby verdant islands.”

It would seem Frank Simpkinson arrived in Tasmania with a fully developed set of painterly skills.

As already pointed out, it is often said that early settler artists could not make good representations of gum trees – could not paint them – because they could not “see” them. With his naval training, in representing alien landscapes realistically, Simpkinson could, and he did.

The Rossbank Observatory was situated near the shore of the Derwent on the Domain, within the grounds of the present Government House. From there, Simpkinson could paint picturesque landscapes and access the town with a short walk. He also travelled extensively, sometimes with Prout. When he returned to England in 1848, he took with him a wonderful record of the rural and urban Tasmanian (and Port Phillip) landscape.

What happened when Simpkinson went back to Britain, and how his paintings returned to Tasmania, is quite a story and I am indebted to Alison Alexander’s excellent biography The Ambitions of Jane Franklin (2013, Allen and Unwin) for parts of it. The rest comes from Max Angus’s research and my own.

On his return home, Simpkinson was living (as a naval officer with no formal placement, and on half pay) in the family home in Bedford Place, London, with his grandfather, both his parents and two of his sisters, and from time to time his aunt, Jane, Lady Franklin, and her companion, Sophy Cracroft.

This was not a congenial arrangement. It was at a time when Jane, with the ardent assistance of Sophy, was promoting expeditions to the Arctic to discover what had become of her husband, Sir John Franklin, who had gone – yet again – in search of the North-West Passage across North America, this time, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Most people, including Frank Simpkinson, believed that Franklin and his crew must be dead. By the late 1840s, Franklin had been missing for five years, and the expedition had had provisions for only three, but Jane was raising, and spending, vast sums promoting expeditions to find her lost husband.

I suspect – with her biographer – that some of this effort was to augment her growing fame. Lady Franklin was being lauded in the newly created popular press as a marvellous example of wifely devotion and had become the most famous woman in the English-speaking world.

Frank Simpkinson and Jane Franklin loathed one another – usually cordially, but blazing rows also took place, not the norm in a decorous, well-to-do Victorian household. This family animosity was hardly alleviated when Lady Franklin’s father, John Griffin, died at a great age and it transpired that he had altered his will to disinherit his daughter in favour of his favourite grandson, Frank Simpkinson. This was, again, a reaction to Lady Jane’s profligate spending on the lost cause of her husband.

Proof of John Franklin’s demise finally came in 1859 and was somehow turned into a popular triumph for his wife, whose futile search, and Sir John’s failed expedition, were spun into a triumph of British grit and valour, much like Scott’s polar expedition 60 years later (as Alison Alexander points out).

After the death of his parents and his inheritance from his grandfather, Simpkinson managed to evict Jane Franklin and Sophy Cracroft, from Bedford Place. After the eviction, not short of money, the two women travelled the world for most of the rest of their lives – Franklin to great acclaim.

Simpkinson did the opposite. He did well out of another inheritance – as previously stated, he changed his surname to Simpkinson de Wesselow after a further lucrative legacy. Then he and his wife retired to a quiet life in the south of France where he painted a bit, and his Tasmanian works were just stored.

In the late 19th century, however, they had a revival. Henry Montgomery was the Anglican Bishop of Tasmania (the father of the famous World War II general – yes, Monty, the architect of the victory at El Alamein, spent his childhood in Hobart, apparently miserably, under the regime of an abusive mother). The bishop was very involved with the Royal Society of Tasmania, the progenitor of which, the Tasmanian Society, had been founded by Sir John and Lady Franklin many years before. Wheels within wheels.

When Bishop Montgomery put out a call for artworks and manuscripts pertaining to early colonial Tasmania, a relative in South Australia alerted him to Frank Simpkinson’s work. Simpkinson was now very old, but still alive (and possibly now back in England), and was happy to send the Tasmanian works to the society, which he did in zinc-lined boxes.

And so we have, thanks to the bishop, this remarkable body of work, although it languished in the vaults of the Royal Society until Max Angus exhumed, exhibited and published it. 

Some of these faithful and beautiful images accompany this article. Judge for yourself whether Max Angus’s assessment that Frank Simpkinson was one of the first, possibly the first, artist to really see the Australian landscape, and the eucalypt.

I for one, think he could be, but whatever the case, these are remarkable records of nature and society in early colonial Tasmania.

James Parker is a Tasmanian historian (but with deep connections to Sydney), who writes and talks on mainly colonial subjects – especially convicts, women and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.