Where are the Kaurna?
William Light’s
1837 view near the site for Adelaide
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In this article I consider the recent
find of a picture said to be by William Light. I examine the relationship
between various works that represent this famous scene. Light painted a
watercolour which was engraved and published in London in 1838 as “A view of the country and of the
temporary erections near the site for the proposed town of Adelaide in South Australia”. But the recently found picture leaves out the Kaurna, the
Aboriginal people of Adelaide. And there are other questions.
Click on this link to a Trove list: William Light
- Near the Site for the Proposed Town of Adelaide in South Australia to
see resources for this article, including art works and news reports both old
and new and other references.
News: 9 September 2019
On 9 September 2019 the City of Adelaide announced:
A newly-discovered 180-year-old painting by Colonel
William Light will be on show today by Lord Mayor Sandy Verschoor in Adelaide Town
Hall at 10:00am. Created in 1837, in the same year Colonel Light surveyed and laid
out Adelaide, Elder Fine Art has described the
discovery of The Commencement of Colonisation in South Australia as
hugely significant. The painting has been safely held in private hands for
182 years – and in a local garage since the 1980s – before its discovery and
transfer to Melbourne Street’s Elder Fine Arts for valuation… The Art
Gallery of South Australia owns the only other known watercolour of this
scene but recent investigative work indicates this particular work was
painted earlier.
The Lord Mayor
tweeted a photo of the painting (see right).
Unknown Painting of a Well-known Scene
Although this is
a newly rediscovered painting, its scene is familiar to many. It is near the
River Torrens and the proposed town of Adelaide, then being surveyed by Light. The scene is of a clearing ringed by
tents and pisé and wooden huts surrounded by tall gums. The Mount Lofty Ranges are in the background.
This particular
scene has several versions, represented by a watercolour in the Art Gallery
of South Australia (AGSA 0.670), an oil painting in the Dixson
Galleries, State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW DG 157), a print engraved
in London in January 1838 and a reprint in 1890 in
the illustrated Adelaide newspaper Pictorial Australian.
You may want
to look for differences in the pictures before I reveal them below. If
you haven’t already, I suggest you click on this link to a Trove list: William Light
- Near the Site for the Proposed Town of Adelaide in South Australia
which includes links to the pictures.
How are these Works Related?
It’s clear that
the AGSA watercolour was sent to London where it
was used as the basis for the January 1838 engraved print. (See advertisement
at right.) The watercolour remained in London until it returned to Adelaide in December 1889 and its return prompted
the January 1890 local reprint. All these scenes are the same.
The SLNSW oil
differs in that it is squarer. To achieve this, the artist has removed a
vertical slice from the original watercolour (about a third in from the
left). The cart is gone and so is a tent. To balance the picture, a tree has
been added in the foreground. Except for these changes, the scenes are much
the same.
So what came
first, the squarer oil or the more rectangular watercolour/print? One can’t
tell just by looking at the scene. But the context gives us a likely
explanation. As a military officer, Light was trained in pencil and
watercolour. His sketchbook was his companion. In the hectic period of
identifying and surveying the site for Adelaide, Light is unlikely to have had the luxury of time to paint in oils.
So the oil was most likely executed after the watercolour. The oil omits just
a cart and tent from the watercolour.
That leaves the
2019 find to consider. It differs further from the others. It too is
squarer than the AGSA watercolour and London print. I first noticed how the artist has tried to create balance by
framing the scene with a dead tree at right and a felled one in the
foreground. It feels a bit clunky to me.
Being squarer
means something has to be omitted and the left of picture has been squashed.
The leftmost tent has been brought in and the artist has omitted a mounted
horse and three Aboriginal people.
The Tent, the Grey and the Aboriginal Family
The watercolour
and engraving show a man mounted on a grey visiting a tent. An Aboriginal man
and woman – the latter with a baby on her back – are just outside the tent.
Horses were rare
at the time of this scene – early 1837 – and the settlement had only two
horses before the February arrival of John Barton Hack. So rare were horses
that Mary Thomas reminisced:
For so long had we been unaccustomed to the sight of
the animals of our own country, except that a few of the settlers had dogs
which they brought with them from England, that when Mr Hack, an early
colonist, rode up to our tent on a fine grey, which I believe had been
imported from Sydney and was the first horse brought into the colony, we all
ran out to look at it, as if we had never seen a horse before.
Some of the natives with whom we had become familiar
at Glenelg seemed to follow us to Adelaide, for we often saw the same faces
of both men and women, and occasionally availed ourselves of the services of
the former to fetch water from the river and suchlike.
For nearly two
centuries we have known this picture as a scene. But now we can actually
identify some of the subjects with a good deal of confidence.
Mary Thomas, her
husband Robert, and their four children arrived in November 1836 on Africaine.
J.B. Hack, his family and imported stock arrived on Isabella in
February 1837. All were prominent colonists.
In Light’s
picture, the grey is not just any horse; its top hatted mount is not just any
colonist; his top hatted interlocutor not just anyone. William Light knew who
was who. He has painted J.B. Hack mounted on his newly imported grey visiting
Robert Thomas outside his tent. (Thomas’s eldest son, Robert George Thomas,
was a surveyor under Light.) And he has painted an Aboriginal family who
likely had met the Thomases at Glenelg. These identities are a revelation.
(In the above passage Mary Thomas does not mention the names of the Kaurna.)
(There is an
alternative possibility that Mary Thomas’ recollections are influenced by the
1838 print. She also recalled corroborees and mentions such a painting by her
later to be son-in-law, John Michael Skipper. But I think this is less likely
to be the case.)
The 2019
Picture
In contrast, the
2019 picture has omitted these significant characters from the scene.
Although the
grey has been retained, it has been ridiculously demoted to pulling the cart
at centre of picture. (The cart is pulled by a pair of bullocks in the
watercolour and engraving.)
The top hatted
gentlemen – who were well known to Light – have been left out. This suggests
the artist did not realise their significance.
Where are the Kaurna?
As well as the
Kaurna family near the tent, there appear to be two other small Aboriginal
groups. One group is towards the back of the park like area and in the 2019
picture has been replaced by grazing cattle. (Although the characters are
small in the 2019 picture’s image, the third group no longer seems to be
Aboriginal.)
It’s not that
Light usually painted Aboriginal people – he didn’t. It’s just that in this
case someone has removed them from this scene. Omission of the
Aboriginal groups from the picture is not a space saving measure. It suggests
the possibility that this was painted later – in the second half of the
nineteenth century – at a time when Aboriginal people were being left out of
colonial art.
Copied from Print?
Could the 2019
picture have been painted in 1890 at the time interest was revived in this
scene by the newspaper reprint? The 1890 print seems to have retained all
three Aboriginal groups. But the 2019 picture has removed them.
Or could the
2019 picture be a copy of the 1838 print? The South Australian Society of
Arts competition had prizes for best and runner-up "copy of a
water-colour drawing or chromo-lithotint" (at least in the 1860s and
1870s).
Style
I have barely
mentioned the style of the painting as it is not my specialty. However I
don’t think the 2019 picture looks like Light. In particular the heavily
outlined clouds don’t look like his, the people too are heavily outlined and
the foreground axes are out of perspective. The style can be contrasted with
14 Light watercolours held by The City of Adelaide and displayed via
watercolourworld.org (see the Trove list for the link) and works held by
AGSA.
More to Come?
15 September: The
painting is expected to be auctioned by Elder Fine Art (EFA) in November
2019. I have not seen the picture in person, nor have I seen a high
resolution scan. I contacted EFA and they expect more information on this
picture to become available closer to the auction. The provenance will be of
particular interest. I can update this article when more information comes to
hand.
Auction Catalogue 
14-15
November: The auction
catalogue is now online and has lengthy notes accompanying the picture – see Internet Archive snapshot. The picture carries a sale estimate
of $90,000-120,000. There is a stark absence of evidence and an abundance of
flawed logic.
Absence of
evidence: “It is quite a
story and a wonderful interweaving of South Australian history.” And that’s
all it is – a story and an interweaving of prominent names. A story is not
provenance. Provenance requires evidence and the painting’s provenance is
only to “the early 1990s”. A family tree may be the “provenance” of a person
but not a painting!
Flawed logic: The auction description compares the
well-known picture and the “garage find”: “The dead trees are gone.” The
auctioneer concludes that because the scene looks earlier – the timber has
been felled but not yet removed – the picture was painted earlier. This logic
works for photographs, but not for paintings. The auction description claims
“both studies were painted plein-air by Light from the same spot”. In dating
the picture, the auction description’s unstated assumption is that Light
painted exactly what he saw – including the felled tree. That implies the
following sequence of events:
*
Mid-January 1837: Light painted the “garage find” on the spot (with felled
tree and a two horse cart in the scene)
* 9 February 1837: J.B. Hack imports arguably first horse
*
the felled tree was removed, the Kaurna moved in, the Thomas family occupied
the timber cutters tent, the cattle left, the cart returned to the exact same
spot but under horse- not bullock-power, Hack rode up on his grey horse, the
people outside the pise hut changed clothes and returned to their same
position; then
*
Light painted the scene again on the spot and sent that watercolour to England for printing.
This
photographic logic is absurd.
A Cart and
the Weight of Evidence
I want to return
to the evidence of the cart. In Light’s original 1837 watercolour and print,
the cart is pulled by two bullocks. In the January 1890 newspaper
reproduction the motive power is indistinct – it’s hard to tell what’s
pulling the cart. This suggests the possibility that the “garage version” was
painted from the newspaper reprint and the copyist mistakenly assumed
horsepower.
The auction
description fails to provide sound evidence of the authorship, date and
provenance (beyond the early 1990s) of the 2019 picture. Instead of evidence
there is speculation.
The weight of
content, historical and stylistic evidence is that the “garage find” was
probably painted about 1890 by an (as yet) unidentified amateur artist, an
artist not from an 1837 milieu of Kaurna, Thomases, Hacks and grey horses.
Post Script
My tweet a week
before the auction caught the attention of Keith Conlon whose quote tweet
reached a larger audience. This led to a TV interview with Tim Hatfield on “Today
Tonight”. The painting was passed in at auction "following media reports
of an art historian’s doubts about the work". It was subsequently sold
to an unnamed buyer for unnamed price. Jim Elder: “I am particularly
disappointed that a commercial television station last week chose to air an
item from an interstate amateur art historian debunking the provenance of
this work.” EFA’s media campaign continued throughout. I predict this sketch will resurface one day.
David Coombe
15 September 2019 – 11 December 2019
CITE THIS: David Coombe, 2019, Where are the
Kaurna? William Light’s 1837 view near the site for Adelaide, accessed dd mmm yyyy,
<http://coombe.id.au/research/William_Light_1837_view_near_Adelaide.htm>
Original: 15 September 2019. Updated: 11 December 2019.
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