Augustus Earle
Australian Painter , 1793-1838
Nephew of Ralph Earl. He exhibited at the Royal Academy in London between 1806 and 1815, when he began travelling. He visited the Mediterranean between 1815 and 1817, and lived in North America (1818-20) and South America (1820-24). In February 1824, en route to India, he was accidentally abandoned on Tristan da Cunha for eight months. The passing ship that rescued him took him to Australia. Here he lived from 1825 until 1828, a period broken by a seven-month residence in New Zealand. During all of his voyages he made watercolour sketches, particularly of places 'hitherto unvisited by any artist', apparently with the intention of publishing a series of aquatints. These drawings, such as a Bivouac, Daybreak, on the Illawarra Mountains (1827; Canberra, N. Lib.), have a robust autobiographical quality. In Sydney he obtained a number of commissions, including a full-length portrait of Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane (1825-6; Sydney, Govt House). Earle returned to England in 1829 and produced a series of prints, Views in New South Wales, and Van Diemen's Land. Related Paintings of Augustus Earle :. | Past and Present No 3 | A Bivouac of Travellers in Australia in a Cabbage Tree Forest,Day Break | Solitude, watching the horizon at sun set, in the hopes of seeing a vessel, Tristan de Acunha | Punishing negroes at Cathabouco | Portrait of Bungaree, a native of New South Wales, with Fort Macquarie, Sydney Harbour, | Related Artists: Gilbert Stuart1755-1828
Gilbert Stuart was born in North Kingston, R.I., on Dec. 3, 1755. At the age of 13 or 14 he studied art with the Scottish painter Cosmo Alexander in Newport. With Alexander he made a tour of the South and a journey to Edinburgh, where Alexander died in 1772. For about a year Stuart remained, poverty-stricken, in Scotland, but finally, working as a sailor, he managed to get back to America. There he executed a few portraits in a hard limner fashion. With the Revolutionary War threatening, his family, who had Tory sympathies, fled to Nova Scotia, and Stuart sailed for London, where he remained from 1775 to 1787. For the first 4 or 5 years, Stuart served as the first assistant of American expatriate painter Benjamin West, who had rescued him from poverty. From the first, Stuart showed an interest only in portraiture and had no desire to go into the branch of history painting West practiced. After his apprenticeship, Stuart became London's leading portrait painter, next to Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, whose style he emulated, as in a rare full-length portrait of William Grant of Congalton as The Skater (ca. 1782). For a while Stuart lived in splendor, but being a bad businessman and a profligate spender, he was in constant debt. He lived in Ireland from 1787 to 1792 and then returned to America to make a fortune, Osborne, WilliamIrish, 1823-1901 brianchon
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