MR JW Lewin, Painter & Naturalist

By Richard Neville

Author, illustrator, printmaker, and natural historian John William Lewin was the first professional artist to arrive in Australia as a free man. Featuring more than 150 exquisite artworks, this record takes a fascinating look at Lewin's life and work, his place in colonial Australian society, and the enthusiasm for natural history that swept the world in the 1800s. Visually stunning, this biography is a testament to Lewin's artistic legacy, which includes the first ever illustrated book published in Australia—Birds of New South Wales in 1813.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Mar 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781742241357

Book preview

Index

Introduction: A singular character

Australia’s first export commodity was its natural history. Literally from the very first days of European settlement in 1788 colonists began collecting. On 22 January 1788, just two days after he had arrived at Botany Bay, Arthur Bowes Smyth spent all day ashore ‘collecting different natural productions …’ His, and the treasures of many his contemporaries, filled ships returning to Europe, where they astounded natural historians, collectors and lovers of the curious and bizarre. Kangaroos, black swans, insects, plants and vibrantly coloured parrots poured into Europe, intriguing England’s passionate natural historians.

This is the story of John William Lewin, one of natural history’s foot soldiers, who helped facilitate this unprecedented movement of specimens, and supply the voracious community of English naturalists and collectors.

In 1800 Lewin became the first professional artist to emigrate to New South Wales. He was also its first printmaker and the first person to publish an illustrated book in Australia (now an immensely valuable rarity, selling for $500,000), and one of the country’s first professional naturalists. Botanist Allan Cunningham described Lewin in 1817:

There is here (I mean in Sydney) a singular Character, greatly in favour at Government House, his name is Lewin, he is a Painter. He has for a series of years set himself up for a Botanist, Zoologist, Entomologist, Ornithologist, Mineralogist, Conchologist & Artist.

He is certainly excellent in his Birds, Beasts, Butterflies & fishes of this country, however he excels in Birds. His botanical subjects are fair but not up to Character, more for Show, than for Correctness, botanically speaking … His paintings decorate the walls of the best rooms of the Government House.¹

Despite Cunningham’s somewhat arch summation of his capacity, Lewin did have talent, and successfully established himself as a respected, and respectable, colonist. Unfortunately, stories about Lewin are also unfairly dominated by what went wrong in his lengthy colonial career. It didn’t begin well when he missed the boat to Australia in 1798; the one on which his wife Maria remained. Inexplicably, in 1808 the entire New South Wales print run of his Birds of New Holland went missing. Then there is the hint of cronyism in his appointment as Sydney’s coroner in 1810, a position for which he held few qualifications.

However, these are only elements of his story, reconstructed from slivers of information scattered across newspapers and archives, and only occasionally illuminated by richer sources. Lewin arrived in New South Wales in January 1800, intent on pursuing natural history publication and collecting.

Although it is tempting to view Lewin’s story through the prism of his profession of an artist, and all that this implies about artistic responses and creative temperaments, it is more appropriate to see him as he no doubt saw himself, someone working hard to make a living in New South Wales, who hoped for, and often found, a life better than was possible in England – an original aspirational Australian!

The other less obvious aspect of Lewin’s story is what it says about how Europeans began to think of Australia as their own place, not something foreign and different, but a country in which they had invested both emotionally and physically. For Lewin’s son, William Arden, it was proudly ‘the land of his birth’. For many colonists, New South Wales was not a landscape of alienating barrenness and savagery, but a place of great physical attraction and significant social opportunity. For John Lewin, New South Wales was literally inspiring. Arriving in the colony schooled in generic natural history illustration – in which the specimens sat in the centre of the page removed from all context – he unexpectedly discovered his own visual language. His work was transformed by precise observations of Australian vegetation, and an innovative approach to the illustration of natural history that was simply without precedent.

Moses Harris, Dragonflies, 1770, engraving

The heyday for natural history

John Lewin came to New South Wales because of a passion for natural history. His family – his father William and his some of his brothers – were natural history collectors, illustrators and authors, immersed in the burgeoning community of natural historians in Europe in the second half of the 18th century. It is tempting to see this passion as being about the rational and logical interrogation of the physical world to facilitate its description and exploitation. In truth the natural history world was much more complex and nuanced than that. For some, the classification and naming of the natural world was all that mattered; for others, the study of nature was a moral and theological pleasure that brought them closer to God. For many, there was simple pleasure in the crazy and amazing diversity of the world.

Natural history was a broad church, embracing those who worshiped at the altar of orderly classification through to those lay people, like writer Oliver Goldsmith and no doubt most colonists, who saw nature as a ‘magnificent theatre, replete with objects of wonder and surprise’, and who rejected the ‘systematical, dry, mechanical’ researches into taxonomy.² The natural history world had yet to harden into the distinct tertiary-educated disciplines of modern-day science, such as ornithology, zoology or entomology, which began to emerge in the middle of the 19th century.

Kenelm Digby, Peaceable Kingdom, c. 1815, watercolour

However, it is no coincidence that this movement towards the ordering and description of the natural world should parallel the emergence of England as a dominating power across the globe. The pursuit of resources, and the collection of political and economic information, went hand in hand with the pursuit of natural history. While it was not always blatant or as direct, nonetheless the vast accumulation of data, specimens and information that poured back into Europe from collectors, colonists, invaders, explorers and sailors created a warehouse of desirable and exploitable knowledge upon which empires could be built.

Enthusiasm for natural history is often said to have been initiated by the publication of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae of 1735. This hugely influential book, and its many subsequent editions, attempted to provide an ordered and comprehensive schema for all life on earth, describing nature hierarchically into which all specimens could be located within a defined position. The tenth edition of Systema Naturae, published in 1758, regularised the now familiar binominal taxonomy to describe plants, animals and minerals. His system of using two words – Latin words – to describe a specimen, provided certainty and confidence to naturalists that an international language could be applied to the natural world, and encouraged both professionals and amateurs in a frenzy of list-making, tabulation and ordering. Participation in natural history at the higher levels required competency in this language. Lewin’s inability to master it defined the course of his career.

Histories of natural history tend to focus on its brightest stars, men like Sir Joseph Banks, one of the dominating figures in the English scientific community, who shaped its direction and progress. Banks was perhaps the best-known naturalist of his day and a leading figure of Australian natural, and political, history. Wealthy, educated and curious, as a young man he developed excellent networks of naturalists, which he fostered and nurtured throughout his long life. His fame and influence were established when he accompanied Lieutenant James Cook on the HMS Endeavour expedition to the Pacific and Australia between 1768 and 1771. As President of the Royal Society between 1778 and his death in 1820, Banks was an instrumental figure in connecting naturalists and collectors across the globe. Indeed, he corresponded with 126 collectors outside Europe between 1770 and 1820 alone.³ Such was his influence that Lewin’s lack of a relationship with Banks significantly affected the direction of his colonial career.

Yet the English natural history milieu was much more than the circle of naturalists and scientists surrounding Banks. It was an enormously complex, multi-faceted web of correspondents, publishers, book sellers, illustrators, professionals, amateurs and collectors of a range of a wide range of class, education and commitment. Working-class naturalists met in public houses, shared basic natural history libraries, and explored their local counties. Artisans, like Lewin and his family, supported themselves through servicing wealthier collectors, underwritten by continued engagement in a trade; wealthier and better resourced collectors pursued specimens through exchange with fellow enthusiasts or purchase through dealers and professional collectors; while gentleman (and women) collectors tended to set the agendas for the broader natural history community.

William Lizars, Drury, 1858

The credibility and authority of the gentlemen collectors was derived from the depths of their collections, the extent of their networks and willingness to share information and specimens, their education and membership of societies, and the confidence of their class. They were also the biggest consumers of books and periodicals about natural history, and the principal employers of assistants and helpers. The Dowager Duchess of Portland, for example, whose famous collections of natural history specimens, drawings and portrait prints took 38 days to disperse at auction after her death in 1785, was supported in the management of her collection by botanists the Reverend John Lightfoot and Daniel Solander, natural history artist Georg Ehret, and gardener and artist John Agnew, a later collaborator with the young John Lewin.

The great strides natural history is making in this kingdom … is a circumstance that must give every man of a liberal mind the greatest satisfaction.

Gentlemen collectors such as Dr John Latham, a medical doctor, England’s leading ornithologist and a prolific writer on birds; Dru Drury, a silversmith, entomologist and author; Aylmer Bourke Lambert, independently wealthy, passionate about botany and author; Alexander Macleay, a senior civil servant and entomologist; and Thomas Marsham, a gentleman entomologist, were acknowledged and respected leaders in their fields, and all in some way engaged the services of the Lewin family.

Dru Drury was Lewin’s most important patron. A wealthy London silversmith and passionate entomologist, he was the principal financial sponsor of Lewin’s voyage to New South Wales in 1798, providing him with a range of insect-collecting apparatus, guns and copper plates. Indeed, Lewin’s four letters to Drury from New South Wales, written between 1800 and 1803, and now in the Entomological Library of the Natural History Museum, London, are among the richest surviving resources about his early life in the colony.

Richard Browne, Insects, 1813, watercolour

Drury’s own insect collection was said to number 11 000 specimens when he died in 1804. It was his habit to provide kits to people travelling to the new worlds, containing equipment and instructions on collecting insects with the idea that he would be repaid in insects.⁴ He gave away more than 100 of these in 1768 alone. Drury thus hoped that travellers, whom he complained were more motivated by making a fortune than observing natural history, might be encouraged to look out for new insects.⁵

Drury’s enthusiasm also encouraged him to publish his collection, and in 1770 he issued the first volume of his three-volume Illustrations of Natural History, a selection of non-descript, or previously undescribed, insects. Like many of his contemporaries, Drury saw natural history as an amusement, a science and, importantly, a commercial national benefit. He noted,

the great strides natural history is making in this kingdom … is a circumstance that must give every man of a liberal mind the greatest satisfaction. We see persons, skilled in natural history, receiving encouragements and rewards from men of rank and property, according to their respective abilities. Some are encouraged to pursue their studies in foreign parts, and investigate the secrets of nature among the trees and plants; others are employed in discovering countries, and searching the shores of coasts, hitherto unknown, for subjects that will afford either profit or speculative pleasure.⁶

Drury’s view that the pursuit of natural history brought one closer to God was pervasive. God’s omnipotence was revealed, rather than challenged, by the study of natural history: ‘How happy are ye men that can thus converse with the great Author of the Universe! For certainly this [collecting and studying insects] is holding conversation with him.’⁷

This was the kind of natural history that young Kenelm Digby, in his mid-teens in Dublin in the 1810s, was celebrating in his Peaceable Kingdom frontispiece to his The Naturalist’s Companion, in which he drew, apparently for his own interest, ‘a vast variety of Quadrupeds, Birds, Fishes, Serpent and Insects; & accurately copied either from Living Animals or from the stuffed Specimens in the Museums of the College and Dublin Society’. Here was the drama of nature, thrown together on the one page, with the kangaroo, giraffe and elephants in a triumph of peaceful cooperation. This idyllic display of the sheer diversity of God’s creation was paralleled in New South Wales by Richard Browne in Thomas Skottowe’s Select Specimens from Nature of 1813.

Collections and specimens poured into Europe from Africa, the Americas and Australia in the 18th century – exotic, non-descript and unbelievable – challenging orthodoxies and demanding the rethinking of conventions. Said one visitor after a day with Banks’ Pacific collections: ‘I passed almost a whole day here in the utmost astonishment, could scarcely credit my senses … I was lost in amazement …’⁸

Australian material could be found in public and private gardens, in private collections as specimens or as drawings, or published in both specialist or generalist publications. It could also be purchased in London shops, or seen in menageries and museums. The first kangaroo to be exhibited in London in 1792 was said to be valued at £500;⁹ by 1800 so many were living in England that they were said to be almost naturalised. In 1793 Robert Jameson found a Banksian Cockatoo (a Red-tailed Black Cockatoo, no longer seen around Sydney) for sale in Little St Mart Lane for 24s, a Tabuan or King parrot for £2 25s and a small kangaroo for £2 11s 6d, while in 1810 Dr Joseph Arnold spent 10 December in William Cork’s museum where he saw three Australian parrots.¹⁰ Cockatoos and kangaroos had also made it to Dublin menageries, as Kenelm Digby’s The Naturalist’s Companion attests.

The painter of Mile End Old Town

Peter Mazell, after William Lewin, Cancer Raninus under side, 1789, engraving

Little information has survived about John Lewin’s life before he moved to Australia in 1800. It is known that he was the son of pattern drawer and naturalist William Lewin, who was born in London in 1747, the son of a rate mariner.¹¹ William grew up in Stepney, near the East End of London and married Susanna around 1768.

Their first child, our John William, was born in 1770, around 29 March, and was baptised on 19 April, four days before Lieutenant James Cook first sighted the east coast of New South Wales.¹² Another son, William Thomas, was baptised on 18 November 1771. Thomas Lewin followed, baptised on 9 March 1774. Then came James, born in 1776, Anne in 1783, Sophia in 1786, George in 1788, Sarah in 1790, Charles in 1792, and finally, Benjamin in 1796, after his father had died.¹³

For most of this time the family seems to have remained around the East End of London, which was a busy community, dominated by its substantial silk-weaving industry and allied trades of weavers, dyers, retailers and merchants. East Enders were a mixture of working poor, wealthy merchants and comfortable artisans. A good skilled job in the fabric industry paid an artisan well. An 1760 advertisement for an apprenticeship for a pattern drawer in the calico-printing industry described this career as ‘one of the genteelist Businesses in England’ with an expectation of an annual income of £100 per year or more, a very comfortable salary for a skilled tradesman.¹⁴

In the early 1760s William Lewin took up an apprenticeship with Edward Hodgson, and although it is not known what form this took, it was presumably to prepare him for a role in the fabric industry. Part of his training involved learning to draw, but he may have also been instructed in the art of copper-plate printing, a process used to transfer designs to fabric.

Hodgson ran drawing schools at Mitre Court, next to St Paul’s Cathedral, where he advertised his services as teaching ‘this most necessary Branch of Education being equally useful to the Gentleman, Scholar, Man of Business, Mechanic and

Reviews for MR JW Lewin, Painter & Naturalist

[untraveller · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Quite good....not being an Aussie, the place names hung me up a bit, but the pics were great and the writing smooth.