AUGUSTUS EARLE (1793 - 1838) PEDRO RIMA CONDOR. A PERUVIAN, AND REGULAR DESCENDANT, OF THE ONCE ILLUSTRIOUS FAMILY OF THE INCAS, 1820 pencil and watercolour on paper on the artist’s washed paper mount 31.0 x 21.0 cm (sheet) 37.5 x 26.0 cm (mount) inscribed with title and date on artist’s paper mount: Pedro Rima Condor. / a Peruvian, and regular descendant, of the once Illustrious Family / of the Incas. at present a Servant in the House of Sr Abadia Lima. Drawn from / nature. / 1820. PROVENANCE Possibly: The artist’s family (It seems probable that Pedro Rima Condor was once owned by a member of Earle's family. The portrait is mounted in the same way and carries the same kind of inscription (without the numbering), of the many drawings from an album once owned by Earle's half-brother, the Royal Navy hydrographer William Henry Smyth (the drawings are now part of the Nan Kivell collection, National Library of Australia) Private collection, Northumberland, United Kingdom Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood, Exeter, United Kingdom, 16 April 2021, lot 1562 (as ‘British School Early 19th Century - Portrait of Pedro Rima Condor, Full-length Standing’) Private collection LITERATURE This work will be included in the forthcoming monograph by Dr Mary Eagle on Augustus Earle. ESSAY A poignant image from embattled Viceregal Peru on the eve of the declaration of independence, this is a hitherto unknown watercolour from Augustus Earle’s visit to Lima, Peru between mid-July and early November 1820. Although modest and disarming in format (as if Earle is disguising his subversive message, sotto voce, in the familiar clothing of the costumbrismo tradition), the artist’s portrait of Pedro Rima Condor nevertheless broadcasts an indictment of Spanish colonial rule and its ruthless exploitation of the indigenous population – a message reiterated in Earle’s inscription. Earle’s subject here anticipates the subject matter that would interest and occupy the artist throughout his ever-itinerant career, as the indigenous, the colonised, and the enslaved, became centre stage in so much of his subsequent work in South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. The portrait of the indigenous Pedro Rima Condor was painted in 1820 within a year of the proclamation of Peru’s independence on 28 July 1821, albeit decades before the feudal society of the Spanish Viceroyalty it so eloquently critiques was finally replaced by a democratic Republic. Earle’s portrait is as spare and mournful a marker of colonial Peru in 1820, as Rugendas’ suite of Peruvian paintings of the 1840s are extravagant and celebratory markers of the newly emerging Peruvian nation. We are grateful to Dr Mary Eagle for kindly granting permission to reproduce excerpts from her research on the present work, to be included in her forthcoming monograph on Augustus Earle. ‘…The manner of this drawing in pencil, ink and watercolour, the uncanonical pictorial concept, and the English inscription and style of handwriting1 strongly substantiate the world-travelling Anglo-American painter Augustus Earle (1793 – 1838) as its creator. The attribution firms when we take into consideration that the work was painted in the embattled Spanish stronghold of Lima, in 1820. War was then imminent and Earle is the only non-Peruvian artist known to have been in Lima in 1820. Peru was embattled because Chile, the country bordering it on the south, upon throwing off Spanish rule in 1817 had turned immediately to the task of forcibly removing Spain from the region. Chile’s navy was under the control of Lord Cochrane, a profit-minded, ex-naval officer from England, who instituted a policy of raiding ports along the coast of Peru and confiscating ships and merchandise. In 1819, Cochrane temporarily blockaded Lima’s port of Callao, interrupting shipping in and out of the port. In August 1820, his squadron transported Chilean troops to a place from which they could attack Lima, then sailed on to blockade Callao, again freezing the movement of vessels into and out of the port. Peru declared its independence in July 1821. Disembarking from a small American trading vessel in mid-July 1820, Earle moved freely between the port and the city six miles away, until early November when the Spanish administration ordered the immediate exodus of non-resident foreigners, and Earle, together with others of his nationality, was collected from the coast outside Lima by a British warship. For a month, he watched events from aboard HMS Hyperion before sailing on that vessel on 12 December, bound for England. The portrait of Pedro Rima Condor was painted sometime during the four and a half months between mid-July and early November. Painstakingly drawn from life, it pictures a subdued man, dressed in ragged clothes, his gaze averted from the artist. The portrayal was out of keeping both with Peruvian art and with the prevailing international mode of portraying national and occupational types. Portraits drawn from life were then very rare in Peru where a strong tradition existed of formal portraits in which the subject's social position was expressed through elaborate detailing and a lavish display of jewellery and gold leaf. (Besides Spanish Peruvians, the tradition included portraits of Inca ‘grandees.’) Capturing a facial likeness and a lifelike presence was of less importance in those beautiful images than portraying the subject’s place in society. After Peru’s independence, an existing international tradition flourished, of costumbrismo prints and drawings that portrayed a range of local occupations. These, too, were not portraits drawn from life but standardised depictions of the costume, activities, and mannerisms of a range of Peruvian types.2 The inscription below the portrait informs us that Pedro Rima Condor was a descendant of ‘the once Illustrious Family of the Incas.’3 The ‘Rima’ and ‘Condor’ of his name are variations of words in the Inca language Quechua (this being the sole Inca language the Spanish conquerors attempted to use and record). ‘Cuntur’ was the Quechua word for the great bird, the ‘condor’. Rima = Lima = Rimac referred to an Inca god (Rimachi – son of Tupac Inca) and to the region encompassing Lima and the Rimac river valley (this having been the most densely populated region in the Inca empire). As with many of Earle’s portraits, the face is shown in three-quarters view. The fully rounded head is sculpted to show the flat ridge of the forehead, the slope of the temple – its angle is echoed below by the line between nose and jaw – the long straight jut of nose, the small dark eyes rimmed by flesh, the distinctively shaped cheeks under high cheekbones, jutting lips, small chin and a slightly sunken jaw that curves below the cheek before turning in a straight line to the ear. As in other carefully studied portrait drawings, Earle outlined the fine wrinkles on the neck and cheeks, the broader frown lines on the forehead, and the parallel lines of facial hair. As well as following the bodily form, these lines delicately trace the lines of age and indicate a sustained unhappiness. Earle may have had Pedro in mind when, eleven years later, he characterised the Incas as ‘gentle and civilised.’4 The inscription goes on to say that Pedro Rima Condor was a servant in the home of ‘Sr Abadia.’ The servant’s shuttered face above patched and torn clothes could indicate an apathetic disregard for personal appearance, yet Pedro cared about personal hygiene – his shirt is clean – therefore the ragged outer garments were not due to carelessness but to sheer poverty. What does this say about his employer? Don Pedro Abadia was a prominent and influential Spanish merchant of Lima. Unlike the majority of Peru's Spanish merchants and administrators – who were monopolist and set in their ways – Abadia publicly endorsed free trade and modern machinery (for example, he imported English steam engines and employed Cornish miners to manage his mines in upcountry Peru), hence he was nudged into playing a major role in the trade war that accompanied the decline of Spain's power internationally in the early 1800s. Speculative traders from around the world, hoping to open rich new markets, flocked to Callao and on arrival sought the support of Abadia. Earle's first visit to the house would have been with the American trader, Captain Zacharias Nixon. In 1821 and 1822 Sir Walter Scott's garrulous friend, Captain Basil Hall, who patrolled the west coast of South America, on naval duty to protect British trading vessels, made a brief contact with Abadia, describing him as a generous public figure. Richard Cleveland, an American trader who had business dealings with Abadia and his partner, explained Abadia’s power: ‘His talents and education, and the extraneous circumstances of his being agent at Lima of the Philippine Company, and of his brother's being about that time one of the cabinet of King Ferdinand all combined to give him an influence with the Viceroy and the Cabildo, unsurpassed by any other individual in the kingdom.’ Cleveland was less complimentary about Abadia as a person: ‘... although of superior education, and extensive intercourse with mankind, he was bigoted and priest-ridden.’5 To which Earle’s portrait adds a further note – Abadia's generosity did not extend to his servants. Earle's independent eye has earned him much attention – even more now that the imagery from Europe's colonies has come under serious review. Unlike the majority of artists who travelled abroad, Earle had few commercial outlets for his work. Apart from coastal profiles, panoramas and portrait commissions, he had two engagements as an illustrator. Most of his depictions of social life (totalling around 200) went into the possession of his family, and those works, rather than connecting with the practices of traditional travel art and the new modes of natural science, were Earle's private comment on what he saw in the many places he visited. Accordingly, it seems probable that Pedro Rima Condor was once owned by a member of Earle's family. The portrait is mounted in the same way and carries the same kind of inscription (without the numbering), of the many drawings from an album once owned by Earle's half-brother, the Royal Navy hydrographer William Henry Smyth (the drawings are now part of the Nan Kivell collection, National Library of Australia). Of Earle’s four known Peruvian subjects (four, now this work has surfaced), Smyth’s album included two, both of them coastal profiles. One is a drawing of the fort of Callao, evidently sketched from the deck of the Warrior between the American ship's arrival and Earle's disembarkation (National Library of Australia). The other is an immensely long 360-degree panorama sketched from aboard HMS Hyperion during the month that vessel hovered out of reach of Callao's guns (also National Library of Australia), while the third (untraced) Peruvian work, Road from Callao to Lima, is known through a copy drawing in the British Museum. 1. Earle's handwriting changed slightly over the years. This inscription fits the date of the work. 2. See exhibition catalogue: Maljuf, N., Reproducing Nations: Types and Costumes in Asia and Latin America, ca. 1800 – 1860, Americas Society, New York, 2006. 3. According to Stevenson in A Historical & Descriptive Narrative of Twenty Years’ Residence in South America (1825), p.303, ‘The principal occupations of the Indians who reside in Lima is the making of fringes, gold and silver lace, epaulettes, and embroidery; some are tailors, other attend the business of the market, but very few are servants or mechanics.’ 4. Augustus Earle, A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827; together with a Journal of a Residence in Tristan d'Acunha, London, 1832, p. 9 5. Cleveland, R.J., Narrative of Voyages and Commercial Enterprises, 3rd edition, Charles H. Peirce, Boston, 1850, pp. 392 – 3
NO RESERVE New Zealand.- Earle (Augustus) A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827, first edition, portrait frontispiece and 6 plates (3 folding), occasional spotting, faint water-staining to margins of 1 or 2 plates, modern half-calf, [Hoken p.61], 8vo, 1832.
Augustus Earle was born in London in 1793 and received his artistic training in London's Royal Academy where he exhibited from the age of 13 through his teenage years. In 1815, at the age of twenty-two, he visited Sicily, Malta, Gibraltar and North Africa, before returning to England in 1817. A portfolio of drawings from this voyage is held by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. In March 1818, Earle left England on a journey that would take him around the world. After leaving Rio de Janeiro he spent 8 months stranded on the remote island of Tristan da Cunha, before being rescued and carried to Tasmania. Upon his arrival in Sydney he quickly established a reputation as the colony's first & foremost artist of significance. He set up a small business and received a number of requests for portraits from Sydney's establishment figures & leading families. Throughout this time, he also painted landscapes, Aboriginal subjects, and a series of views of public and private buildings that record the development of the colony. During his time in Australia Earle made several excursions to outlying areas of the colony, travelling north of Sydney via the Hunter River as far as Port Stephens and Port Macquarie and south to the Illawarra. Earle lived in Sydney from 1825 to 1828, punctuated by a seven-month side journey to New Zealand in 1828. An inveterate traveller, he is noted for being âthe first independent, professionally trained artist to visit each of the five continents and record his experiences. This lithograph is among the most significant images produced during the early colonial years of Sydney. It was actually printed later in London after Earleâs return and bears a number of minor alterations from the original.
Augustus Earle was the most accomplished artist working in New South Wales in the 1820s, and although he only remained in the colony for just over three years, he quickly established himself as Sydneyâs leading artist. He sometimes depicted his own adventures and included himself in his landscapes, but his main income came from portrait commissions from Sydneyâs new wealth. Bungaree, from the Broken Bay area of New South Wales, was the most famous Indigenous Australian in the early nineteenth century. He gained his fame by assisting the colonists and by becoming a leader of the Indigenous people in Sydney until his death in 1830. As a reward for his services, various governors and officers gave Bungaree discarded uniforms and a cocked hat. In 1815 Governor Macquarie decorated Bungaree with a breastplate inscribed with the fictitious title âChief of the Broken Bay Tribeâ. In this portrait Earle has depicted Bungaree welcoming strangers to the colony, with colonial houses in the background. He cast Bungaree in the pose of a landowning gentleman, parodying colonial society and emphasising the tragedy of the Indigenous peoplesâ loss of their native land. Beside him sits his wife Goosberry on one side and two bottles of drink nestled in a wicker basket on the other.* * From National Gallery of Australia collection notes
AUGUSTUS EARLE (1793-1838) Natives of N.S. WALES. As Seen in the Streets of Sydney lithograph printed C. Hullmandel inscribed with printed text on margin 21.5 x 29 cm
AUGUSTUS EARLE, (1793 – 1838), PORTRAIT OF ELIZABETH ANN WILSON POTTER, MRS FRANCIS BARNES, HOBART, 1825, pastel on paper SIGNED: signed lower left: A. Earle. old label attached verso, inscribed: Mrs Row / Government Store / Hobart ‘V.D.L.’ DIMENSIONS: 76.0 x 57.0 cm PROVENANCE: Private collection, Tasmania Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above c.1980 Private collection, Adelaid ESSAY: Son of the American artist James Earl (and nephew of the better-known Ralph), Royal Academy-trained and Royal Navy-connected, traveller in the Mediterranean, the United States, South America and India and perhaps most famous as the first topographical artist and draughtsman on Charles Darwin's Beagle voyage, Augustus Earle is also one of the clearest and most sophisticated witnesses of British-Australian landscape and society in the early decades of the 19th century; he has been justly described as 'by far the most interesting artist working in New South Wales in the 1820s.'1 The story of his arrival in the Australian colonies is well-known. When the sloop Duke of Gloucester, the vessel that was taking him to Calcutta, stopped at the south Atlantic island of Tristan d'Acunha to take on a cargo of potatoes, Earle went ashore with his dog Jemmy to explore. Before he could rejoin the ship, however, a gale blew up, Captain Ammon raised the anchor and the Duke of Gloucester disappeared. The famously gregarious and adventurous Earle was stranded for eight months on one of the remotest places on earth, a rocky island just 11 kilometres long with a total population of six adults, until he was rescued by a passing vessel, the Admiral Cockburn, bound for Hobart Town. During the four years that followed, between 1825 and 1828, Earle made hundreds of sketches, finished drawings, and watercolours, oil paintings, lithographs and transparencies, both in Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales (with a six-month sidetrip to New Zealand). His works combine obvious facility and accuracy with a more subtle dimension of sympathy and charm, and with occasional flashes of the wit he displays so clearly in his journals and correspondence. Throughout his sojourn, as a necessary corollary to and sustainer of his peripatetic lifestyle, Earle produced dozens of portraits, from quick watercolour 'fizzogs' to formal full-length portraits in oil. While occasionally a little stiff and anatomically questionable,2 Earle's best portraits evince clear empathetic understanding. As one of his earliest scholars, Eve Buscombe, has observed: 'the eye-play of all the frontal portraits reveals the ease with which he moved in the society in which he found himself.'3 Indeed, Earle's sitters form a most interesting cross-section of the colonial population, from the Governor of New South Wales Sir Thomas Brisbane to Aboriginal adventurer, diplomat and elder Bungaree, from Port Jackson's customs grandee Captain John Piper to the bogus clergyman (and genuine educator) Laurence Hynes Halloran.4 This last was an emancipist, a freed convict, and it is clear (from the works of contemporary colonial painters such as C.H.T. Costantini and W.B. Gould) that this substantial and buoyant Piper, 1826, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales; Laurence Hynes Halloran, c. 1825-27, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales sector of the colony's society and economy shared the officials' and developers' taste for images of themselves. The sitter in the present portrait is another of this class, a Hampshire woman born Elizabeth Ann Wilson Potter (or Portler), who was convicted of larceny in 1813 and transported for seven years to New South Wales. Transferred to Hobart Town the following year, she married one Philip Macklin, and although records of Mr Macklin's death have not been traced, Elizabeth married again ten years later, this time to Francis Barnes. Barnes, a former soldier and printer, had also been transported (for the theft of bank notes), and as a convict was one of those foundation settlers who came to Hobart Town with Lt-Gov. David Collins on the Calcutta in 1804. Francis appears to have prospered in the new colony; convict musters show that by 1819 he was farming 50 acres of land, and had four assigned servants. He was also an entrepreneur and businessman, proprietor of the Hope Tavern in Macquarie Street (formerly the 'Whale Fishery' and later the 'Hope and Anchor'), Tasmania's first licensed premises. Being situated close to the Sullivan's Cove waterfront and opposite the Government Commissariat office, the Hope was a convenient place to do business, especially the kind of business associated with arrivals and departures.5 It is perhaps not surprising that the newly-disembarked Earle should have found there possibly his very first client in the colonies.6 The portrait is remarkable not only for its early date and its clear autograph signature,7 but also for its being in pastel, a medium not previously recorded in Earle's oeuvre. Like watercolour, pastel is seen (and was recognised by 18th century theorists) as occupying a space and a dignity somewhere between painting and drawing - Joseph Vivien was admitted to the French Académie in 1701 as a ‘peintre en pastel.’ The medium attained high status in the 18th century through a then-supposed superior durability to oil, and through the virtuoso drawings of Rosalba Carriera in Italy, Maurice Quentin de la Tour in France, John Russell in England and Jean-Etienne Liotard almost everywhere; it was quickly and widely adopted by portraitists across Europe. Given the uniqueness of the present work, it is instructive to compare Earle’s deployment of the medium with his watercolour technique. The watercolours follow the common late Georgian fashion, with landscape forms described through broad, floating planes of tone, (somewhat in the manner of Thomas Girtin, or rather Francis Towne),8 and faces by the kind of stipple-hatching of the miniaturist on ivory.9 Here, however, Earle works in the opposite manner to that of a watercolourist, by accumulation rather than separation of pigment, by smooth tonal gradation rather than touches of colour. Furthermore, rather than leaving the support blank (or using a water-resistant ‘stopping out’ varnish, or ‘scratching out’ with a nib or knife) and having the white of the paper flash edges and reflections, linen and water, the artist here adds his highest tone at the end of the process, giving to Mrs Barnes’ aureole of white lace and ribbon the space and form of clouds. Augustus Earle was clearly as comfortable with coloured chalks as with watercolour or oil paint; Mrs Barnes' pink face is delicately, flatteringly modelled (she was 41 at the time the portrait was taken), and the shimmer and translucency of the white collar and cap which frame her visage are particularly deftly executed, in broad, confident strokes, subtly layered and delicately stippled.10 The work is in very fine condition, in its original frame and glass. 1. Ron Radford and Jane Hylton, Australian colonial art 1800-1900, Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 1995, p. 38 2. As with the work of another well-known early colonial portraitist, Robert Dowling, his heads can be a little too large and/or his hands a little too small. 3. Buscombe, E., 'A discussion about Augustus Earle and some of his portraits', Art Bulletin, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, no. 19, 1978, p. 57 4. Sir Thomas Brisbane, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales; Captain John Piper, 1826, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales; Laurence Hynes Halloran, c. 1825-27, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales 5. Notices in the Hobart Town Gazette about a lost horse and the settlement of debts prior to departing the colony give the pub and its landlord as contacts (1 April 1825, 6 May 1825, 27 May 1825). Barnes' advertisement describing newspapers, books and journals available in the parlour - 'Lloyd's List, London New Price Current, London Mercantile Price Current, London Shipping & Commercial List, the Customs, Imports and Exports of London, The Times, The Courier, The Sun, The Morning Chronicle, St James's Chronicle &c. &c' also suggests his clientele had interests other than drinking. (Colonial Times and Tasmanian Advertiser, 17 February 1827, p. 1) 6. Mrs Barnes died in 1827, and Earle did not return to Hobart Town until October 1828, so this portrait must date from his first visit to Van Diemen's Land, ie between January and May 1825. Known Tasmanian subjects by the artist are rare. There are three landscapes: Hobart Town from the Domain (attrib., 1820s, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales); Panorama of Hobart, 1828 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales); Cluny Park, Van Dieman's [sic] Land, the general appearance of the country in its natural state, perfect park scenery (1825, National Library of Australia); and a lost view of New Town mentioned in a review of Earle's Sydney exhibition in 1829 (A.B. (Rev. John McGarvie), 'On the state of the fine arts in New South Wales', Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 30 July 1829, p. 3). There are also two or three other portraits - Lt-Col. Charles Cameron (1825, National Library of Australia); Lucy Parris, Mrs G.W. Evans (1825, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston); and Four children of Joseph Tice Gellibrand (attrib., c. 1827-8, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery) 7. A corresponding upper case 'E' is found in the inscription of the recently-discovered Sketch of Mr Prout at Sydney, New South Wales, private collection, sold Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 4 May 2016, lot 24, for $176,900 (inc. buyer’s premium) 8. See, for example, his folio Views in New South Wales, c. 1825 – 28, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, PXD 265 9. See the Prout portrait, ibid. 10. The confident, translucent sweeps and highlights of ribbon in this drawing anticipate the deft touch of another Vandiemonian, Henry Mundy, who worked in the colony a decade later. DAVID HANSEN Canberra
AUGUSTUS EARLE, (1793 - 1838), SKETCH OF MR PROUT N. S. WALES, c.1828, watercolour on paper DIMENSIONS: 17.0 - 14.5 cm SIGNED: inscribed on label attached verso: Sketch of Mr Prout at Sydey [sic] N.S. Wales, - Mr Hewett - with Mr Earles compliments bears inscription: Sketch of Mr Prout at Sydey [sic] NS. Wales - with Mr Earles compliments PROVENANCE: John Hewett, Leamington Spa, England Sarah Hewett, Leamington Spa, England Company collection, London Private collection, Melbourne ESSAY: From a late 19th century ‘Scrap Album’ of miscellaneous 19th century watercolours and drawings, inscribed on the frontispiece ‘Sarah Hewett’. Included work by Charles Cattermole, Octavius Oakley, William Hunt, William Page and Thomas Baker of Leamington. Among the cavalcade of characters who visited Australia in the early colonial years, one of the most colourful was Augustus Earle. A gifted artist-adventurer, he spent eight months marooned on the mid-Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha before eventfully arriving at Hobart Town in January 1825. In Australia, he travelled and sketched widely, visited New Zealand, and later joined the HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin before ill health saw his replacement by another noted colonial artist, Conrad Martens. Earle was one of the most precociously individual artists of his time. He was probably the first to introduce the subject of bushrangers into Australian art, and admired the nobility of the indigenous people, being sympathetic to their plight. 1 One of his classic works is the oil painting Bungaree, A Native of New South Wales. Fort, Sydney Harbour in the Background, c.1826, (National Library of Australia, Canberra), a portrait of the chief of the Broken Bay tribe dressed in a British general’s uniform and doffing his cocked hat to welcome the strangers to his land. Here and elsewhere, Earle heralded that egalitarianism and laconic sense of humour that would later be considered characteristically ‘Australian’. His keen eye for natural curiosities and individuality of character may be readily seen in his numerous watercolours of the antipodean landscape and many portraits of the notables of Van Diemen’s Land and Sydney. The engaging presentation of a strong sense of character, preference for the half-length pose with sitters facing to their right, and a slight asymmetry of face are among the hallmarks of his portraiture and reveal that undercurrent of caricature so essential to the effective presentation of the personality of the sitter, made infamous many years later by William Dobell and his Archibald winning portrait of Joshua Smith. Regarded as the leading artist of the Colony, his first major portrait commission in Sydney in 1825 was the highly successful full-length painting of the then departing Governor of New South Wales, Sir Thomas Brisbane. The portrait, now in the collection of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney won much praise from his contemporaries and lead to further commissions from the Colony’s leading families. They included Captain John Piper; Mrs John Piper and her children; John Mackaness, Sheriff of New South Wales in 1826; and the naturalist Dr Robert Townson. Today, the portrait of Piper resides in the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, and a shoulder-length portrait of Piper is in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne also has an interesting group of Earle’s portraits of Captain and Mrs Richard Brooks 1826-27, and Captain Thomas Valentine Bloomfield c.1827. Clearly, Earle’s talent as a portrait painter was inherited from two prominent Tory American colonial portrait painters, his father James Earl and his uncle, Ralph Earl. The portrait on offer here bears additional interest in that it presents Cornelius Prout (born 1793), brother of the artist John Skinner Prout and nephew of the English watercolourist Samuel Prout. Cornelius was purser on HMS Warspite when it arrived in Sydney on 19 October 1826. In January 1827 he gained a discharge, and two years later he was appointed the Colony’s Under-Sherriff. While Earle and Prout’s presence in Sydney overlapped twice, between October 1826 and October 1827, and again in May and October of 1828, the likely date of the portrait is 1828.2 Earle later gave it to John Hewett, the English book, print and watercolour dealer with strong links to the Prout family. 1. Skirmish, Bush Rangers & Constables, Illawarra, 1827, watercolour; and Desmond, A New South Wales Chief, c.1825-7, Nan Kivell Collection (NK12/49) and (NK12/61) respectively, National Library of Australia, Canberra. See also the portrait oil painting, Bungaree, A Native of New South Wales. Fort, Sydney Harbour in the Background, c.1826, (NK118). 2. On 28 and 30 July 1829 The Sydney Gazette published a long letter from the Reverend John McGarvie describing an earlier visit to Earle’s gallery in Sydney. It provided a lengthy but not exhaustive list of the works of art on view, including many portraits. No mention was made of Cornelius Prout. DAVID THOMAS
EARLE, Augustus (1793-1839): Natives of N.S. Wales Drinking Bool, or Sugar Water. Notes: An original lithograph (visible image size 155 x 237 mm, with the title written in ink in the bottom margin), matted, framed and glazed; light uneven discolouration; bottom portion of a few letters of the title covered by the mat; in very good condition. A similar image appears in Earle's 'Views in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land' (London, 1830), with the title 'Natives of N.S. Wales. As seen in the streets of Sydney'. Notable differences include the addition of a seated woman to the right of the standing figure, empty bottles in the foreground, and figures and a building in the background. The State Library of New South Wales (SSV 103) has what appears to be an item similar to the one on offer. It is entitled 'Native Blacks, New S. Wales' (185 x 280 mm) and dated 'c.1826', the year Earle acquired a lithographic press. The SLNSW catalogue suggests that it appears to be the basis of the later lithograph.
Augustus Earle (1793-1838) Style of Indigenous People Dancing around a Campfire + Indigenous Men in Camp (possibly American Indians) Each oil on canvas Each 30 x 35.5 cm
Augustus Earle (1793-1838), aquatint entitled Drinking 'Bull' Natives of N S Wales, as they appear in the streets of Sydney, mounted on board, 21.5cm x 31.5cm
Four hand coloured views of Sydney: Sydney Heads, View from the Sydney Hotel, Sydney from Pinchgut Island, and Sydney Lighthouse lithographs 19 x 32cm (unframed) (4)
EARLE, Augustus (1793-1838). Sketches Illustrative of the Native Inhabitants and Islands of New Zealand. London: Lithographed and Published, under the Auspices of the New Zealand Association, by Robert Martin, 1838. Oblong 2υo (374 x 557 mm). Letterpress description of plates. 10 hand-colored lithographed plates after Earle. (Some scattered light foxing.) Original lithographed cloth-backed wrappers (some light dust-soiling, a few closed tears); quarter morocco folding case. FIRST EDITION. Born in London, Earle was the son of the American portrait painter James Earle, and nephew of well known painter Ralph Earle. He traveled to South America and South Africa and after 2 years in in New South Wales, he spent 6 months (October 1827-April 1828) in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, making vivid sketches of Maori life. In his Narrative of nine months' in New Zealand Earl recalls: "I had arrived with feelings of fear and disgust; and was merely induced to take up a temporary residence amongst the natives, in hopes of finding something new for my pencil in their peculiar and picturesque style of life. I left them with opinions, in many respects, very favourable towards them." in 1831 Earle was draughtsman aboard Darwin's H.M.S. Beagle. Abbey Travel 587.
Charles (1809-1882), Capt. Robert FITZROY (1805-1865), and Capt. Philip Parker KING (1793-1856). Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle, between the Years 1826 and 1836, describing their Examination of the Southern Shores of South America, and the Beagle's Circumnavigation of the Globe. London: Henry Colburn, 1839. 3 volumes in 4 (vols. I-III and Appendix to vol. II), 8 o (235 x 146 mm). 9 folding engraved maps (8 loose in cover pockets, one bound in) by J. Gardner and J. and C. Walker; 47 etched plates after P.P. King, A. Earle, C. Martens, R. Fitzroy and others by T. Landseer, S. Bull, T.A. Prior and others. (Some faint offsetting to a few maps, some minor foxing to plates, faint offsetting to a few maps.) Original blue cloth (Freeman variant a), covers blindstamped, gilt-lettered on spine (volume I partially split along rear hinge, volume II with two repaired tears at head of spine, spines lightly faded). FIRST EDITION OF DARWIN'S FIRST PUBLISHED BOOK, with the First Issue of vol. III. The first volume contains King's account of the expedition in the Adventure made between 1826 and 1830, which surveyed the coasts of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. The second volume (and its appendix volume) describes the narrative of the Beagle's second voyage under Capt. Fitzroy made between 1831 and 1836 to South America, the Galapagos Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and other islands and countries. "The five years of the voyage were the most important event in Darwin's intellectual life and in the history of biological science. Darwin sailed with no formal scientific training. He returned a hard-headed man of science, knowing the importance of evidence, almost convinced that species had not always been as they were since the creation but had undergone change... The experiences of his five years... and what they led to, built up into a process of epoch-making importance in the history of thought" (DSB). Freeman 10; Hill I, pp.104-05; NMM 163-5; Norman 584; Sabin 37826. (4).
