Nicholas Chevalier

One of the first generation of academically trained artists to come to Australia, Nicholas Chevalier enjoyed a successful Colonial career as a painter, teacher, illustrator and cartoonist. Actively engaged in the promotion of art, he was a founding member of the Victorian Society of Fine Arts, and was awarded a medal at the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition for having introduced chromolithography to the colony. His monumental landscape The Buffalo Ranges, 1864 was awarded the government prize for the best picture by an artist resident in the Australian colonies and was the first Australian painting to be purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria. He also travelled extensively on sketching tours, accompanying the scientist Georg von Neumayer on his geological survey through the Western District, and crossing the Tasman to New Zealand on three separate occasions.

In 1867 Chevalier joined the entourage of the Duke of Edinburgh for His Royal Highness's tour of Victoria and Tasmania, and subsequently remained with the Duke's party, leaving Australia in 1869 on the royal yacht Galatea. After a year cruising the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Chevalier returned to England, where he showed 'clever representations of hunting scenes, public ceremonies, costumes, the manners and customs, characteristic scenery, architecture etc. of the various countries visited' ¹ at the Crystal Palace and the South Kensington Museum in 1872.
Indeed, the Galatea experience guaranteed the artist's future prospects. From his travels and sketches in Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, the Philippines and Ceylon, Chevalier condensed a domesticated, sentimentalised vision of the exotic 'South Seas' which (together with recurrent instances of royal patronage) sustained him through another 20 years of London exhibitions. It is notable, for example, that the shells and coral being displayed by Will you Buy?'s winsome wahine are exactly the same as those which appear in the back of the canoe in Chevalier's Race to the market, Tahiti, 1880 (Art Gallery of New South Wales).

This work bears several titles in various labels and inscriptions. It is also possible that it is one of the artist's Royal Academy submissions: Arcadia, South Sea Islands (cat. 555, RA 1882) or Sunny Clime, Tahiti (cat. 835, RA 1883). The title given here is that which was published with a wood engraving after the work by Samuel Calvert, printed by Charles Troedel and issued as a Christmas colour supplement in The Illustrated Australian News, November 1883.

1. The Art Journal, 1872, p. 60