Thomas Balcombe | Study of William Balcombe's grave, Turon River Feb. 1852
Pencil on paper
Sheet size: 32 x 25 cm
Inscribed lower right: Monday 10 Feb.ry 52
Provenance: Balcombe family collection
$4,400
Thomas Balcombe was born at the family home, “The Briars”, on St Helena, 15 June 1810*. As a child he and his brothers played with Napoleon, who was in exile on the island. His father, William Balcombe, was appointed as the first NSW Colonial Treasurer. Thomas arrived in Sydney in April 1824. In 1831 he was appointed a draftsman in the Surveyors General’s Office, a position he kept until his death in 1861. He was a noted artist in the colony, known for animal paintings, especially of horses.
In 1850 he and his brother William went off to the NSW goldfields (apart from the rumours of gold, it’s uncertain what prompted the move; they held land in the Hunter Valley, but it was heavily drought affected at the time). E.H Hargraves found the first large gold deposit at Ophir in February 1851. Thomas produced three sets of sketches from the goldfields.
The first was as an illustrator to the poetry of G F Pickering, published by W.Moffitt in Sydney in 1852, entitled “Gold and Pencil Sketches, or, The Adventures of Mr. John Slasher at the Turon Diggings”, a fictional account of the adventures of a gold prospector.
In 1852 Thomas also published an album of 9 pencil and wash drawings, entitled “Sketches at the Gold Diggings”, one of which is “Graves of Turon” (exhibited at “Cooee”, National Library of Australia, 14 June – 9 September 2007), for which this is a study. The album was well reviewed at the time by “Bells Life” newspaper in Sydney.
On August 21, 1852 The illustrated London News published “Sketches from the Turon Gold Field, New South Wales” which included a picture “Gold Seekers Graves on the Turon”.
In 1840 Thomas had an accident which resulted to a blow to the head. He also suffered from gout, then untreatable. As he got older, his mental state deteriorated. On 13 October 1861, near his home in Paddington, he shot himself in the head, and died instantly.
Study for The Graves of Turon (Held in The National Library Of Australia): This study is bigger than the final drawing, which is 24 x 17.7. The final version also shows more bush surround. Our Study is dated Tuesday 10 February 1852. The month looks like July, but that is incorrect. In verso on the final sketch in the National Library records the following inscription “I.I. died 29 Jany 1852 I.r. sketched 10th Feby 1852”. Using a day date calculator proves that 10th February 1852 was a Tuesday, as per the Study (the 10th of July was a Saturday).
Thomas’s brother William died on 29 January 1852 of dysentery at the home of L W Campbell, Mundy Point, Turon River. Thomas had been caught on the wrong side of an unfordable River Turon and had been unable to be at his brother’s bedside when he died. It seems most likely that this is a sketch of his brother’s grave.
Sources:
Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, Canberra; and
National Library of Australia, Canberra.
Biography of Thomas Balcombe (1810-1861)
painter, lithographer, sculptor and public servant, was born at The Briars on the island of St Helena on 15 June 1810, second son of William Balcombe, merchant and public servant, and Jane, née Cranston, brother of Betsy Abell and Alexander Beatson Balcombe, a pioneer settler on the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria. Thomas came to Sydney aboard the Hibernia in April 1824 with his family, his father having been appointed Colonial Treasurer of NSW.
After attending Sydney Grammar School, Balcombe worked for the Australian Agricultural Company at Port Stephens until he badly injured his head in a riding accident. He joined the Surveyor-General’s Department under Thomas Mitchell in September 1830 as a draughtsman, but his dedication to his job does not seem to have been great. Governor Bourke, replying to a memo from the colonial secretary concerning patronage for the recently bereaved Balcombe family, noted that Thomas was 'not well spoken of by his superior and it was in consequence my intention to have him reduced at the first opportunity’. Balcombe, however, kept his job and his £150 annual salary. Later he was promoted field surveyor, and he remained in the department for the rest of his life. He was surveying in the Murray River area around 1835-6, presumably with Mitchell, and made sketches on the trip that formed the basis for several later paintings. An attributed oil study, Scene on the Murray River, N.S.W. , dated 1849, is in the Queensland University Art Museum. On 27 June 1840 Thomas Balcombe married Lydia Stuckey; they had three children.
Balcombe’s professional artistic life seems to have begun after his marriage. His earliest identified work – a rather crude lithographic Kangaroo of New Sout [sic] Wales – was put on the stone and printed in 1842 by T. Liley (who also published John Skinner Prout ). Two years later, Balcombe made a set of four lithographs after Edward Winstanley 's drawings, The Five Dock Grand Steeple Chase . In April 1847 he drew and lithographed Big Ike the Port Phillip Pet , a portrait of Isaac Read, champion boxer of New Holland, which sold for a guinea. By the end of the 1840s he had achieved some local reputation. Heads of the People 's article of 28 August 1847 on the recent exhibition held by the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia singled out Balcombe, Winstanley and T. Newall as 'animal painters of no mean merit’ – even though Balcombe seems not to have contributed to the exhibition.
He was, however, well represented at the society’s second exhibition in 1849. Four of his 'clever equine portraits’ were lent by Mr Downes, a prominent pastoralist and racing man, while the artist himself showed Evening , New Hollander Cutting Out a Kangaroo Rat and Talambee, a Native of the Bogan River . The last, an oil painting relating to an illustration of an Aborigine with a remarkable confection of fruit in his hair in Mitchell’s 1848 Journal , was highly commended in the Sydney Morning Herald of 2 June 1849. Balcombe, the critic declared, 'has long been known in the colony as a very spirited animal painter, but he has now taken a higher flight, and this picture affords an undoubted proof of his ability as a painter of the human figure. It is without exception the best attempt in this style and on this scale that we remember to have seen from the hand of a colonial artist’.
Similar praise was lavished on another figure study, Aboriginal Native in Pursuit of Game , which received an award at Grocott’s third art union in 1850. The 'drawing and colouring are both admirable’, observed the Herald on 20 July 1850, 'and this strikes us as being the best colonial painting that has come under our notice’. Balcombe’s second entry in this art union, a handsomely framed oil painting titled Australian Stockmen , won the first prize of £30 and a silver medal. At some stage he also modelled a wax figure of a New Hollander (ML). It depicts a wary Aboriginal hunter sitting beside a tree stump with his booty – including a shee
Balcombe’s surveying trips provided further opportunities for landscape sketching and he also enjoyed considerable success as an illustrator. From the late 1840s his drawings and lithographs appeared in several colonial publications, including the Australasian Sporting Magazine . Bernard Smith calls Mr E.H. Hargraves, the Gold Discoverer of Australia Feby 12th 1851 Returning the Salute of the Gold Miners on the 5th of the ensuing May 'one of the best drawings that has been preserved of this period’. It later appeared as a lithograph, being advertised for sale in the Sydney Morning Herald of 13 June 1851 with a companion print, Gold Diggings of Ophir . On 14 August 1851 the Herald mentioned an oil painting of Hargraves by Balcombe. The Mitchell Library holds all three versions.
In October 1851 Balcombe joined his brother William at the Turon River goldfields, outside Bathurst, and may also have visited neighbouring Ophir. Sketches at the Gold Diggings, 1852 , an album of nine pencil and wash drawings (NLA), records the visit. Badly affected by William’s sudden death, he soon returned to Sydney where he produced the illustrations for G.F. Pickering’s Gold Pen and Pencil Sketches. Adventures of Mr John Slasher at the Turon Gold Diggings . Reviewing this volume, the Sydney Morning Herald of 5 July 1852 paid great attention to the illustrations, noting that Balcombe’s engravings deserved the 'high reputation which that accomplished artist has earned for his delineations of Australian scenery and character’. This and related works are also in the Mitchell Library.
Not a great deal is known about Balcombe’s subsequent activities. Stylistic evidence and subject matter both strongly indicate that Balcombe was also the artist T.B. . Balcombe’s known late works include the sketches he provided of swan hunting and sheep shearing at Mummell Station, near Goulburn in 1853-54, from which engravings were made for the Illustrated Sydney News along with views after J.R. Roberts. He also drew a portrait of the horse Cossack for Bell’s Life in Sydney . He painted two excellent oils in 1853, both of which carry the title Kangaroo Dog Owned by Mr Dann of Castlereagh Street, Sydney , and a portrait of Reverend John Joseph Therry , Sydney’s pioneer Catholic priest. Revisiting the Turon in February 1853, he made a pencil sketch in his album, Graves at Turon , obviously in memory of William. On 21 March 1859, the Herald mentioned a 'beautiful oil painting by Mr Thomas Newall, after a sketch by Mr. J. [sic] Balcombe, of a female aboriginal of one of the distant coast tribes of this colony’. His last known works are dated 1857: a watercolour of an Aborigine hunting fish with two figures splashing in a pool behind (NLA) and a pen-and-ink sketch, The Paddington Omnibus (ML).
Due to domestic upheavals and the death of his eldest daughter, Balcombe’s emotional instability intensified in the late 1850s. At his home, Napoleon Cottage in Paddington, on 13 October 1861, he shot himself. Bell’s Life in Sydney reported the inquest at some length and described Balcombe as an 'artist of considerable repute and a gentleman in the most refined sense of the word’.
Writers: Laverty, Colin
Date written: 1992
