painter, photographer (?) and art teacher, was said to have been a portrait and house painter from Nottingham, England when he arrived in Australia, although Lake and Mulford were unable to find any artist of this name in Nottingham. It may have been an alias assumed when he was tried at the Essex Quarter Sessions in Colchester on 22 June 1837 for breaking into and robbing Mr Craske’s grocery shop in High Street. The offender, who gave his name as 'Frederick Strange’ and was said to be 'a stranger to the town’, was sentenced to transportation for life for several robberies, having admitted to the capital crime of 'Burglary and stealing a Watch at Colchester’. His gaol report read 'Character and Connexions Bad’ but he behaved well in the hulks and he caused little trouble during the voyage to Australia and after he arrived at Hobart Town on 18 January 1838 by the Neptune . He was then said to be 31 years old, 5 foot six and a half inches tall, with dark brown hair, red whiskers, light brown eyebrows and dark blue eyes.
Henry Allport said that Strange worked in Hobart Town in the early 1850s for a man called Graves, who kept a paint shop, but Lake and Mulford point out that this could only have happened in the late 1830s when Strange was still a convict. (By the early 1850s John Woodcock Graves had long given up his paint shop.) Early in 1841 Strange was employed as a messenger in the government service. When granted a third-class pass later that year he moved to Launceston and set himself up as a portrait painter and drawing master in a small brick cottage in York Street. In Launceston he painted a portrait of the Scot John Nicolson, who worked for the Commissariat (c.1845, QVMAG), then a portrait of Nicolson’s wife (c.1845, QVMAG), as well as 'nearly life size’ portraits of Jonathan Stammers Waddell and Ann Waddell (1846 47, QVMAG). The Waddells’ nephew Henry Button had a smaller portrait painted about the same time (now lost). Later Button wrote of making progress in drawing under Strange’s tutelage until pressure of work forced him to discontinue.
Strange’s portrait of a Launceston boy, William Tyson (c.1843), was offered for sale by Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne in 1988. A pair of unsigned and undated oil portraits of Mr and Mrs James Austin (of Austin’s Ferry) attributed to Strange (VDL Folk Museum) were probably also done about this time. Strange received his ticket of leave in 1845. This allowed him to travel farther afield, but he still had difficulties in making a living as a portrait painter. On 4 June 1846 William Williamson of Launceston wrote to Walter Davidson of Riccarton, Campbell Town:
…The person I have referred to is Mr. Strange a portrait painter, he is badly off and from the specimens I have seen of his abilities in his profession only requires to be known to be patronized. I do not consider Munday’s [ Henry Mundy ] paintings at £20 without frames superior to his at £5-5/- with frames – his unassuming deportment and extreme desire to give satisfaction has interested those who know him in his behalf – I wd strongly recommend you to have your own & your family’s likenesses’ by him.
Davidson took some years to patronise Strange, but other members of the Scottish community in North Tasmania commissioned portraits more rapidly, including surveyor James Scott who had portraits of himself and his wife done about 1846 (p.c.). Nevertheless, his support remained limited – largely confined to the Northern Tasmanian Scottish community – even after Strange added landscape painting to his repertoire in the late 1840s. He received his conditional pardon on 4 December 1849 and may have returned to Hobart Town for a short stay in the early 1850s – after participating in an 1851 Launceston exhibition and before the end of 1854. Hobart Town from Knocklofty (o/c, TMAG)
In 1851 Strange exhibited several local landscapes and views at the St John’s Bazaar and Exhibition of Pictures and was cited by the Launceston Examiner (15 March 1851) as among three 'artists long resident in this town’, the other two being J. W. Cook and [Philip] Barnes . On 11 January 1855 he advertised 'Lessons given in Landscape Drawing, Portraits painted in oil, or taken by Daguerreotype’ in his Paterson Street studio opposite Stewart’s coach-building establishment. No photographs are known, but during the next few years he painted many views of Launceston and its surrounds in oil and watercolour, from a studio in Launceston’s main thoroughfare, Brisbane Street, in 1856-58, where he also taught. His best-known works date from this period. Although rarely signed, identification is possible through consideration of style and provenance. Firmly attributed are Brisbane Street, Launceston, May 1858 (w/c, QVMAG), which includes the building he occupied with merchant David Murray, Tyson’s Saw Mill (c.1858, w/c, ALMFA) – his only known signed painting – and his largest work Launceston from the Westbury Road (1859, o/c, QVMAG), with a watercolour version in the Launceston Club, and Launceston 1860 (o/c, ML).
Public Buildings and St. John’s Episcopalian Church, Launceston are inscribed respectively as plates 9 and 11 in a collection of watercolours in an album (p.c., on loan QVMAG), a large portfolio completed in 1856 'to be published as soon as practicable, with a view of affording to the people of England, and the world at large, better information respecting this highly favoured colony’ ( Launceston Examiner ,22 May 1856, p.3). The collection also includes a large oval watercolour View of Launceston over the River Bar and the watercolour Upper St John Street, looking North. View taken from opposite the residence of H. Dowling . However, no publication eventuated. A two-colour lithograph, City of Hobarton. From Knocklofty (ALMFA; TMAG), published by Robin Vaughan Hood at some time before 1854, is his only certain venture into the field of printmaking. In 1859 he fell back on the then fashionable ploy of an art union to supplement his income, announcing in the Launceston Examiner (15 January 1859) that a raffle of an oil painting was to be held in his studio with 20 tickets at £1 15s each.
On Christmas Day 1861 Strange, aged about 50, married widow Elizabeth Campbell, another former convict who was aged about 57. In March 1862 his Cameron Street studio was taken over by the portrait photographer C. A. H. Williamson and although he may have continued working there for a time as colourist and retoucher of daguerreotypes for Williamson (perhaps this was also his role in his earlier foray into photography), he later joined his wife in shopkeeping. In 1867 he was listed in the Directory of Tasmania as a grocer of Charles Street, Launceston, modest rented premises where the couple also lived that can only have provided a marginal living. Strange died in Launceston on 31 March 1873 of rheumatic fever. His death certificate gives his profession as 'artist’. Elizabeth Strange continued the grocery store after his death.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
Stilwell, G. T.
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 1989
