Thomas Bock
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Thomas Bock (born Warwickshire, England, 1793, died Hobart, Tasmania, 1855), was an Australian artist.
An engraver from Birmingham before being transported to Tasmania as a convict, Bock was set to work preparing plates for banknotes, and then to official assignments making portraits of recently executed criminals and of Tasmanian Aborigines. His official work produced private commissions, and by the time of his death in 1855 he was a successful portraitist specialising in miniatures. Bock was one of the most highly skilled of the early convict artists. Much of his apparently voluminous output remains lost, or at least unidentified, but he can be credited with two Australian 'firsts': he left behind a small body of nude studies, rare in early colonial art; and he was one of the first in the colonies to experiment with photography.
