John Richardson Glover

The artist
His sister, Mary Bowles; thence by descent
Private collection, United Kingdom

David Hansen (ed.), John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, Hobart: Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery and Art Exhibitions Australia, 2003, p. 95 (illus.)

Paper watermarked 'Whatman 1828'. Generally good condition. Tears upper right and lower left (small loss l.l.). Creased. Old green spilled liquid stains upper right, centre and lower right, but drawing and text still clear and fully legible.
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John Richardson Glover (also known as John Glover Junior) was the eldest (and illegitimate) son of the celebrated Anglo-colonial artist John Glover Senior, and was his father's companion and devoted assistant both on the latter's voyage of emigration and in his life at 'Patterdale' farm, Mills' Plains, Van Diemen's Land. John Richardson's letters (one of which appears in this sale) are important documents of early colonial settlement and are the main primary source for our knowledge of his father's life and work in Tasmania.

A skilled watercolourist, Glover Jr's drawings were for many years confused with those of his father, largely due to his having made in later life numerous close copies from landscape views in Glover Sr's sketchbooks. With their crisp outlines and broad grey washes, these works, and various original sketches taken in and around Patterdale and its nearby villages, are now recognised as stylistically quite distinct and as possessing considerable artistic and historical interest and value in their own right. Several more substantial works referred to in John Richardson's letters are now (sadly) lost, including a detailed watercolour of the full moon painted from the 'Patterdale' farmhouse roof, and 'a panoramic sketch of the harbour'1 at Hobart Town.

 This latter reference clearly indicates John Richardson's familiarity with the contemporary rage for panoramas. Pioneered by Henry Ashton Barker in the 1790s, these techno-artistic entertainments consisted of large-scale, 360-degree views of major cities, exotic landscapes and famous battles. They were shown in circular rotunda theatres, dispensing with art's frame and thereby creating a convincing illusion of 'being there.' The panorama's great popularity persisted well into the second half of the nineteenth century. The handbills which accompanied both Barker's and later shows commonly depicted the horizontal view compressed within the compass of a circle, and this anamorphic, 'fisheye' perspective was rapidly assimilated and widely adopted; the Van Diemen's Land surveyor Henry Hellyer made just such a view from the summit of Valentine's Peak, in north-western Tasmania (1827, National Library of Australia, Canberra).

 John Richardson Glover's drawing is also typical, presenting 'an encyclopedic gaze midway between that of some aeronautic insect and that of a real­ estate sales agent.'2 Taken from the perspective of the 'Patterdale' farmhouse roof, the work presents a comprehensive view of the property: house, studio, stockyards, garden, outbuildings and distant bush and hills. The legend includes no fewer than 43 distinct features, and in the margins there are plans and sketches of house, hut and stable.

The present work is both testimony to the artist's own long-undervalued skill, and a unique representation of the Mills' Plains property, permitting accurate location and dating of many of John Sr's celebrated 'Patterdale' paintings.

1.  John Richardson Glover, letter to Mary Bowles, 15 September 1833
2.   Russell A. Potter, review of Stephan Oettermann's The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, from website Iconomania: studies in visual culture (http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/arthist/icono/rapotter/panortxt.htm), accessed 23 June 2009

We are most grateful to John McPhee for his assistance in cataloguing this work.