painter, scene-painter, cartoonist, caricaturist and lithographer, seems to have worked both as a scene-painter and lithographer at Melbourne in 1854, since the 'F. Varley’ who lithographed views after Edmund Thomas that year appears to be the same person as the Frank Varley who painted the drop-curtains for St James’s Hall and the Lyceum Theatre at about the same time. He may then have worked as a scene-painter at the Criterion Theatre in Sandhurst (Bendigo), which opened in 1856, the year Thomas Flintoff drew Varley’s portrait in crayon ( Mr Frank Varley, Son of the Earl of Glinton [sic]).

In 1857 Varley went to Auckland, New Zealand, with a touring theatrical company but may have been in Adelaide by 1859. In that year an artist called Varley exhibited two pictures with the South Australian Society of Arts: Sunrise and Moonlight . In August 1862 Frank Varley was working with Benjamin Tannett at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne. In December, he and Henry Holmes painted 'new and superb Scenery’ for the pantomime Harlequin Arabian Nights at the Theatre Royal. 'The scenery, generally, is good’, commented the Illustrated Melbourne Post ; 'the last picture gorgeous’.

Settling permanently in New Zealand, Varley founded the Auckland Punch in November 1868 in partnership with R.J. Morressy. Several caricatures in the first volume are signed with his initials, including the cover and Encouragement to Emigrants (chorus of loyal maori subjects) “Ah! Ah! Pakeha, if we kill you it’s nothing; but if you kill us, by ——, it’s Murder!”’ (ill. Grant p.17). Gustavus von Tempsky had submitted a cover design for Wellington Punch in 1868 (ill. Grant, p.9) and Varley cribbed the centrepiece group of soldier, businessman, lawyer, Maori and clergyman from it for his own (different) final design (not. ill.). Examples by 'FH’ in Auckland Punch (1868-69) include The Cry of Justice (a very wooden group of women with dead child/doll at base demanding revenge in Maori Wars). By 1874 he was at Wellington, according to Platts. In 1875 a fellow-artist, Charles Palmer, loaned one of his paintings to the Auckland Society of Artists’ exhibition.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989