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Five early watercolour sketches of Penang & Malacca. J. Bastin and C.A. Gibson-Hill

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Five early watercolour sketches of Penang & Malacca. J. Bastin and C.A. Gibson-Hill

J.S. Bastin and C.A. Gibson-Hill published this short note in 1958, identifying and reproducing five watercolour sketches of Penang and Malacca executed by the American-born artist Augustus Earle in late 1828 during his passage from Sydney to Madras via the Straits Settlements. The article’s central thesis is that these works, now held in the Nan Kivell collection at the Commonwealth National Library, Canberra, constitute reasonably authentic visual records of the settlements at a formative moment in their colonial development, and that the absence of a Singapore sketch from the surviving collection may be explained by its sale to the panorama trade.

Summary

The article begins by establishing the provenance of the five watercolours: they form part of a collection of one hundred and sixty-six sketches of landscapes in Australia, New Zealand and South America, now in the Nan Kivell collection, Commonwealth National Library, Canberra (p. 163). The authors then trace Earle’s career from his Royal Academy training (1806–13) through his sojourns in Rio de Janeiro, Tasmania, Sydney and New Zealand, to his final departure from Sydney on 12 October 1828 bound for Madras (pp. 159–160). It was on this voyage that the five Straits Settlements views were painted.

A substantial portion of the article is devoted to the context of the panorama industry. Earle had sent sets of sketches of Hobart and Sydney to Robert Burford in 1827 for use in the large rotunda of the Royal Leicester Square Panorama, and the authors speculate that further sketches sold after Earle’s return to England in 1830 may have included material for panoramas of Singapore and Penang harbours (pp. 161–162). This commercial context becomes crucial to the article’s most original argument: the unsigned lithograph of Singapore from Government Hill that appeared in Raffles’s widow’s Memoir (1830) is stylistically reminiscent of Earle’s watercolours, and the authors suggest it may well be the reason no Singapore sketch survives in the Canberra collection—having been sold to Burford for a panorama (pp. 170–171).

The authors verify Earle’s sketches against a range of independent visual sources. The Penang waterfall is cross-referenced with the tinted lithographs prepared by William Daniell from Captain Robert Smith’s 1817/18 watercolours (p. 167). The Malacca views are checked against engravings by George Cooke from E. H. Locker’s 1807 sketches (published in Pinkerton’s General Collection of Voyages, 1811), coloured lithographs from the Voyage autour du Monde de la Favorite (Paris, 1835), and a lithograph from the French corvette Bonite (1837) (pp. 167–169). One sketch (no. 118) is singled out as particularly valuable because it shows men actively remodelling the Stadthuis to give it the Dutch colonial appearance that still characterises the building (p. 169).

Key Findings

  • The five watercolours were executed in late 1828 and form part of a collection of 166 sketches now in the Nan Kivell collection, Commonwealth National Library, Canberra; the collection was sold by Sotheby’s on 4 May 1926 on behalf of H. Warington Smyth (pp. 163, fn. 2).
  • Earle left Sydney for Madras on 12 October 1828; the large rotunda of the Leicester Square Panorama measured 90 feet in diameter, offering 2,800 square feet of wall surface for each new picture (pp. 160–161).
  • Sketch no. 118 shows workmen remodelling the Stadthuis at Malacca in 1828 to create its Dutch colonial façade; the building’s pre-alteration appearance is documented by Locker’s 1807 sketch (p. 169).
  • Earle’s “Distant view of Malacca” (no. 119) exaggerates the height of Mount Ophir and places the hill too close to the town, though less conspicuously than James Wathen’s 1811 sketch (p. 169).
  • Earle sailed as draughtsman on HMS Beagle on 27 December 1831 but was forced to resign six months later while the expedition was on the east coast of South America; his death is placed between 1838 and 1840 (pp. 162–163).
  • The unsigned lithograph of Singapore from Government Hill in the Memoir of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1830) is stylistically reminiscent of Earle’s watercolours, and the authors propose it may derive from an Earle sketch sold to Burford (pp. 170–171).

Conclusion

Bastin and Gibson-Hill conclude that Earle’s Straits Settlements sketches, in so far as they can be checked against independent sources, provide reasonably authentic records of Penang and Malacca as they stood in 1828. Their most significant historiographical contribution, however, is the hypothesis that the missing Singapore view was absorbed into the panorama trade, which would account for the stylistic affinities between the Memoir lithograph and Earle’s known work and for the gap in the surviving Canberra collection.

Context

  • Primary archival source: the Nan Kivell collection of Augustus Earle watercolours, Commonwealth National Library, Canberra (formerly sold by Sotheby’s, 4 May 1926, from the estate of H. Warington Smyth).
  • The article contributes to the visual history of the Straits Settlements by identifying and verifying early European artistic depositions of Penang and Malacca, and by connecting the panorama industry to the dispersal of colonial visual material.

References