John Skinner Prout

(British, 1806-1876)

Tom Thumb's Lagoon, 1844

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Sotheby's, Melbourne, 22 October 1986, lot 49, as Aboriginals by a Lake, Tasmania
Leasfin Corporation Ltd, Melbourne
Christie's, The Leasefin Sale of Australian Pictures, Melbourne, 28 July 1991, lot 19
Private collection, Melbourne

RELATED WORKS
Tom Thumb's Lagoon, 1844, pencil, opaque white highlights on buff paper, 18.9 x 32.9cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Tom Thumb's Lagoon, New South Wales, c.1847, watercolour on paper, 23.5 x 37.9cm, in the collection of the National Library of Australia, Canberra

John Skinner Prout was born in Plymouth, England. He was the nephew of the famous English watercolourist Samuel Prout (1783-1852). Accompanied by his wife and seven children, Prout arrived in Sydney on the 14th December 1840. Largely self-taught, Prout had hopes of establishing a career as a professional artist and printer.

'During a rather brief, four year residence in New South Wales between 1840-44, Skinner Prout travelled widely throughout the settled districts around Sydney, seeking subjects for his pen and brush. Like most artists of the period, he journeyed west across the Blue Mountains towards Bathurst, south via steam and sail to Broulee and the Illawarra district, and north to Newcastle and Port Stephens. Following these travels through the then sparsely settled districts, he returned to his Sydney studio where he produced finished works in watercolour and oil for sale, along with various lithographs.

Illawarra was a part of the Colony of New South Wales which was very popular with visiting artists such as Augustus Earle (1827) and Conrad Martens (1835). It possessed a truly picturesque landscape - comprising a thin coastal strip covered with lush, temperate rainforest, bound to the west by a steep, mountainous escarpment and on the east by long, sandy beaches with jutting, rocky headlands. Illawarra therefore offered much of interest to the travelling artist who sought the picturesque and sublime in nature. Though located relatively close to the Sydney metropolis - just fifty miles to the south - this district was physically isolated by dense bush, a steep escarpment which lined its western flank and formed an almost impenetrable barrier to horse and buggy, and the lack of any substantial harbour, though Wollongong was the main 'port' at the time. Illawarra was widely known during the 1820s and 1830s as the 'Garden of New South Wales', due to its botanical riches and ample crops. Later the moniker the 'Brighton of the south' was applied when it became a popular holiday destination during the 1850s. The area was therefore something of an unspoilt wilderness in 1843-4, and an ideal locality for an artist such as Skinner Prout, ever in search of picturesque scenery and especially attracted to areas of lush vegetation and mountainous topography.'1

Tom Thumb's Lagoon, now known as Port Kembla, was originally named after the boat that George Bass and Matthew Flinders sailed south on exploring the coast of Sydney in 1796. On John Skinner Prout's excursion in 1844 he produced a number of important ethnographic accounts of a once fertile land, many of which are now housed in major museums and institutions. The present work, one of the largest known recordings, is a rare example showing the native aboriginals camping and fishing along the shoreline that they once inhabited.

Alex Clark

1. Michael Organ, accessed online: https://documents.uow.edu.au/~morgan/prout.htm