Home » History » Australian History » The Convict Artist

The Convict Artist

© John Harman

Very few of the convicts that were transported to Australia were frothing at the mouth killers, hiding in dark alleys, waiting for a victim to come past. Many were certainly rough and tumble people, mostly victims of the class structure of Britain at the time. Many women were forced into prostitution, and men into theft, simply to survive, in an era where there was no social security system. Even some of the more talented and educated fell 'by the wayside', as the saying goes, Joseph Lycett was one of those people.

When the convict artist Joseph Lycett, published his 'Views in Australia' in London in 1824, he described them as 'faithful pictures' and expressed the hope that they 'may convey to Australians in the year 4000 more correct ideas of its Aboriginal state, than it is in the power of the most eloquent historian to impart'.

Whether any of his work will survive that long is hard to say. Even now, many of his aquatinted views are hard to find. Lycett's claim that correctly drawn pictures are worth a thousand words is valid enough, but his pictures, though beautifully composed and executed, can hardly be described as accurate portrayals of their subjects.

Lycett was certainly a good enough artist to render the Australian landscape accurately, surviving watercolours in various collections prove that he could, but somewhere in the process of turning his drawings into prints, something went wrong.

Lycett decided to give the English public what he thought it would want to see; idealised pictures of the harsh Australian outback, that looked like a landscaped garden of the English country gentry. It was this subtle deception that brought Lycett to grief in the beginning.

He was born in Staffordshire in about 1774, and became a painter specialising in portraits and miniatures, a most lucrative trade in the days before photography, but not lucrative enough. At Shropshire Assizes in 1811 he was sentenced to 14 years transportation for 'uttering' forged notes, and after serving two years in England, he landed in Sydney in 1814 on the 'General Hewitt'.

He must have been tough to reach Sydney at all, because the prisoners on his ship were kept below decks for weeks, in another nightmare voyage, one in nine died of disease, mainly dysentery, many more died on arrival.

He was also fortunate to meet Captain James Wallis, who commanded a company of marines on the same ship, and who was a keen amateur artist. There is little doubt that it was through Wallis's influence that Lycett gained his ticket of leave within a few weeks of his arrival, and gained employment as a clerk in the police office.