![]() ![]() He often used dogs as personifications through which to create a commentary on human society. It was his practice to include his own dogs in the scenes he was drawing. We know he owned dogs for most of his life and frequently inserted them into his paintings and lithographs. He was particularly fond of dogs, and felt a certain affinity with them. Gill loved animals and the bush, and he seemed more at home in the saddle in rural Australia than he did in town. Not only did he solicit ‘the attendance of such individuals as are desirous of obtaining correct likenesses of themselves, families, or friends’, he also advised that he could create ‘correct resemblances of horses, dogs, etc. He soon established himself in Adelaide as a portrait painter, placing several hundred advertisements for his studio in the South Australian Register and other newspapers. Gill was to spend 41 years in Australia before his death in Melbourne in October 1880. As a boy, he had some training as an artist since his parents recognised his extraordinary talent, but after the death from smallpox of two of his siblings, the Gill family emigrated to South Australia. Samuel Gill and his schoolteacher wife Winifred. Born in Somerset on, he was the eldest of five children of a Baptist minister and schoolmaster, Rev. ST Gill was 21 years old when he arrived in Adelaide from England on board the ‘Caroline’ with his parents and younger brother and sister in December 1839. Michael Cannon, has written that Gill was a born reporter, and much more than that, he was a creative interpreter of human existence – and especially life in colonial Australia. Gill is renowned for his many sketches and watercolours depicting the daily life of diggers in Australia in search of that elusive metal - gold. The Old Treasury Building Museum’s current exhibition Gold Rush: 20 Objects 20 Stories presents the turbulent tale of Victoria’s gold rush through the individual stories of 20 objects, and three of S T Gill’s paintings are there to convey the story through his eyes. This is the most recent major publication to be devoted to Gill and presents a radical reassessment of one of the most important figures in Australian colonial art. Gill & His Audiences by Emeritus Professor Sasha Grishin of Australian National University, who had also curated the exhibition. The exhibition was accompanied by a wonderfully-researched book S.T. This was the first-ever retrospective to focus comprehensively on the life and work of Gill, and through his art, it provided a window onto everyday life on the goldfields and in the bush, cities and towns of 19th-century Australia. Fast forward to 2015, and State Library Victoria and the National Library of Australia joined together to present a major touring exhibition Australian sketchbook: Colonial life and the art of ST Gill. In 1986, the Art Gallery of South Australia released S T Gill: The South Australian Years 1839-1852. Gill’s engravings for Victoria Illustrated 1857, originally issued by Melbourne publisher Sands and Kenny, were published as a reprint with Nicholas Chevalier’s 1862 companion volume by the Lansdowne Press in 1983. ![]() This focused on 40 watercolours by Gill, commissioned by the State Library in 1869. The following year (1982), The Victorian Gold Fields 1852-3, edited and introduced by historian Michael Cannon, was published by Currey O’Neil with the State Library of Victoria. Almost a decade later in 1981, literary historian Geoffrey Dutton’s liberally illustrated ST Gill’s Australia coincided with a revival of interest in Australia’s colonial art, ensuring that Gill reached his rightful place in the story of Australian art. Gill’s Australian Sketch-Book of 24 lithographs, first published in 1864-65, was reissued to great acclaim by the Lansdowne Press in 1974. The next history to be published was not until 1971 when Keith Macrae Bowden privately published his monograph Samuel Thomas Gill, Artist. Greig first launched the artist in the public domain by publishing an article about him in the Victorian Historical Magazine, published by the Historical Society of Victoria. ![]()
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