Heritage through art

PERCY FROM THE PEWS

Hobart City Council Alderman Helen Burnet made a significant observation in her continuing strong support for the restoration of Holy Trinity Church.
In welcoming the National Trust’s listing of the North Hobart icon church being at heightened risk if action isn’t taken on its deteriorating sandstone exterior, she noted the 1840s building’s importance to Hobart’s history, adding that as a dominant landmark it has featured in “the paintings of old”.

How right she is – the colonial artists certainly recognised its worth and appropriately recorded it numerous times.

Look to the work of convict artist Knut Bull, one of a group most strongly associated with 19th Century Tasmania. His Hobart scenes featured Holy Trinity, most notably in a painting of the town as seen from the Domain, circa 1854. That he should have depicted the church as a centrepoint in an aura bathed in an almost holy light might have been due to his personal attachment to Holy Trinity.

For it was there, on May 14, 1852, having received his ticket of leave on March 16, that he married Mary Anne Bryen (he received a conditional pardon in November the following year).

The nuptials were celebrated by Reverend Joseph Gould Medland, himself an artist, and Knut Bull had been assigned to him.

There was another prominent colonial convict artist with a Holy Trinity affinity, and we have been given an indirect reminder of this with the National Trust’s recent buying (through its Hobart Macquarie Group) of a child’s portrait painted in 1839; the painting had been offered to the Trust by a London dealer.

The portrait was the work of Thomas Bock, and like Knut Bull he was also married at Holy Trinity.

Bock had gained his conditional pardon in June, 1832, and a free pardon the following November. In the early 1840s he was living with a widow, Mary Ann Cameron, and her two sons. On July 23, 1850, Thomas and Mary Ann were married at Holy Trinity.

While he did many portraits of early Hobart notables, Thomas Bock is best remembered for those of Tasmanian Aborigines, condemned prisoners and bushrangers. In particular, there is his 1842 watercolour of Mathinna, the Aboriginal girl adopted by Lady Jane Franklin, and this is another painting that has been the focus of public interest in recent times.

The portrait was presented to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in 1951 by a granddaughter of Thomas Bock. There are other family ties to Holy Trinity, through one of Thomas Bock’s stepsons, Alfred Cameron, who took the name Alfred Bock with his mother’s marriage – and Alfred had witnessed the laying of the church’s foundation stone in 1841 by Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Franklin.

Alfred also happened to have been baptised by Reverend Philip Palmer, the clergyman who was such a driving force in establishing Holy Trinity.

Alfred Bock became a noted photographer and artist in his own right, and inherited his stepfather’s business near the church at 22 Campbell Street, Thomas Bock having taken an interest in photography in his later life.

Yes, one doesn’t have to look far to find the lives of the artists entwined with Holy Trinity.

Footnote: in the context of the above, I quote from Clyde Selby’s Gallery Watch column in the Mercury’s Inside Arts section this past weekend. In reviewing the Winter Collection at the Masterpiece Gallery he wrote: “It took the colonial artists like Knut Bull to assure the public that their little town huddling under Mount Wellington was a place of which to be proud.” Certain people of the present could well take that to heart and recognise the pride factor very much includes protecting our built heritage – not let it decay.