HENRY MUNDY Australian, c. 1798-1848

Henry Mundy, or Munday (both spellings were used), worked modestly as an artist in London before emigrating to Australia in 1831. Arriving at Hobart Town as a steerage passenger, he soon found employment teaching at a private school for young ladies. After leaving that position, he established himself as a portrait and landscape painter in Launceston.

Mundy’s career is documented in The Dictionary of Australian Artists to 1870, where Geoffrey Stillwell and Carolyn Von Oppeln explain: ‘He never seems to have signed or dated his paintings and identified works rely largely on provenance and style. Nevertheless he is known to have painted oil portraits of several well-known residents of northern Tasmania’.¹ Although his work was very well regarded in the 1840s, he was badly affected by the economic depression of 1844 and he died by his own hand four years later. This large and attractive portrait has previously been attributed to Robert Dowling 1827-1886). However both the style and canvas size are more typical of Mundy’s work; and the sitter’s costume appears to date from the 1840s rather than the 1850s.

Mary Ann Raven – or Polly as she was also known – was born in 1819, the second daughter of John and Mary Swan. She married James Raven of Launceston on 8 August 1840, in St David's Church, Hobart, and later moved with him to Melbourne where he was agent for the Tasmanian Steam Navigation Company. It would seem likely that her portrait was painted in the 1840s, when she was in her twenties, after her marriage but before she left Launceston and before Mundy’s sad decline. Unfortunately her husband died suddenly in 1856 and she returned to Tasmania not long afterwards to live with her mother. She remained in Tasmania until her mother’s death in 1869, moving then to England. She came back to Australia in 1891 and died at ‘Sunnyside’, New Town, in 1893.

Dr Paul Paffen has discovered that Thomas Bock produced a crayon on paper portrait of Mary Ann’s mother, Mrs John Swan. The third Swan daughter, Catherine, was painted with her husband, Thomas Daniel Chapman, by Conway Hart. ‘It seems this family were all in favour of dynastic portraits and having a likeness produced of loved ones’.²

We are most grateful to John Jones and Dr Paul Paffen for assistance in cataloguing this work.

1. In Kerr, J. (ed.), The Dictionary of Australian Artists, Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 553f.; information about Mary Ann Raven, née Swan, is from her family and Dr Paffen.
2. Paul Paffen’s Ph. D. thesis catalogue also lists a miniature ‘Portrait of a woman’ possibly depicting Mary Ann Swan (later Mrs Raven), which he attributes to William Paul Dowling. Eve Buscombe had previously attributed that work to Thomas Bock in her Artists in early Australia and their portraits, p. 290.1.