John Lewin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Lewin (1770 - 1819) was an English-born artist active in Australia from 1800.
The son of a professional scientific artist (his father, William Lewin, was the author of a seven-volume work on the birds of Great Britain), John Lewin came to Australia in 1800 to record ornithological and entomological life for a British patron, Dru Drury, becoming the first resident professional artist in the colony. The resulting books were intended to fund his passage home, but the fashion for Australian natural wonders was already fading by the time he published Prodromus Entomology, Natural History of Lepidopterous Insects of New South Wales, in 1805. A further book, Birds of New Holland, published in 1808, met similarly disappointing sales. (An 1813 edition of the latter was the first illustrated book to be engraved and printed in Australia). Lewin and his wife were granted a small farm near Parramatta, but by 1808 they were living in Sydney where the artist advertised his services as a portraitist. Governor Macquarie, recognising the usefulness of a professional artist to his schemes for the colony, and to guarantee him an income, appointed him city coroner in 1814, and commissioned him to record the Governor's official inspection of new lands discovered beyond the Blue Mountains and the plants collected by the surveyor-general, Henry Oxley, in his explorations of the country beyond Bathurst, the Liverpool Plains and New England.
His background as a scientific artist made Lewin an acute observer of the reality of the Australian landscape and its fauna and flora: critic Robert Hughes comments that he was the first to record the distinct 'look' of Australia without being blinded by European art conventions, and according to art historian Bernard Lewis, "Lewin grasped the nature of the eucalyptus, its light translucent foliage through which the horizon may be seen, and the nature of the slender and feathery grasses of the interior. He succeeded, too, in portraying an authentic bush atmosphere."
