sketcher, medical practitioner, journalist, critic and poet, was born in Doncaster, Yorkshire, son of James Neild and Sarah, née Bilton. He was educated in a large private school at Leeds run by a liberal principal, Richard Hiley. The art teacher, Richard Lucas, gave him a thorough grounding in the elements of drawing, both in technique and theory, which 'inspired him with a love of the beautiful’ and a desire to 'make art of some kind the business of his life’. To oblige his mother, however, he adopted medicine as a career and the next eleven years were spent in training and general practice.

After migrating to Melbourne in 1853, Neild worked on the goldfields for a time before joining the chemist D.R. Long . In 1855 he began writing for several Melbourne journals under various pseudonyms. As 'Christopher Sly’, he wrote reviews in the Examiner and Melbourne Weekly News . As 'I’, he wrote dramatic, musical, literary and artistic criticism for My Note Book , which he is said to have edited for a time. He also wrote for the Argus and at one stage appears to have been simultaneously contributing articles to five newspapers, one of them French. His reviews were mostly written in the first person singular, an original style that distinguishes him from his colleagues.

Often satirical and almost always outspoken, Neild made many enemies. One such case in July 1858, involving the showman and magician 'Professor’ Anderson who styled himself 'The Wizard of the North’, resulted in a leading article in the Argus and in the Wizard publicly attacking Neild in the dress circle of the Theatre Royal. The incident became the subject of a cartoon in My Note Book , which depicted Christopher Sly, quill on one side and mortar and pestle on the other, being dismembered by the sword-wielding and armour-clad Wizard. Soon afterwards, the visiting German violinist Miska Hauser wrote that Neild fought a duel with a lover of the performer Lola Montez after reviewing her notorious 'Spider-dance’ unfavourably; he was wounded in the left arm.

An adherent of Ruskinian naturalism, Neild always favoured an independent Australian school of painting over mere imitation of foreign styles, encouraging readers to approach differences in the Australian landscape without prejudice and calling on artists and writers to put behind them irrelevant traditions of the Old World. He was the first to criticise (many years before his contemporary, James Smith) the work of von Gué rard for 'photographic exactness’ at the expense of poetic feeling, while almost single-handedly he made the career of the now little-known watercolourist Henry Davies , whom he called a 'poet-painter’: 'Skies, trees, rocks and cataracts, he scatters upon the paper with a force and an intensity which prove the active workings of his imagination; his sunsets tell a story and his clouds are a poem; a tree of his reveals a history and each dark fissure in the mountain is suggestive of caverns full of mystery’.

On the other hand, Neild could be scathing about artists he thought should be nowhere near a canvas and expressed himself vividly. For instance, he once wrote almost an entire review using culinary ingredients to describe palettes: 'no. 12, “Valley of the El Dorado” by J. Murphy [q.v.] ... has made ingenious use of pickled cabbage, burnt crust and yolk of egg’. His victims included William Dexter , George Peacock and Eleanor Davitt . Frequently his own poetry, much of it comical, was published in journals alongside his prose.

In 1857 Neild married Susannah, daughter of his pharmacy partner Daniel Long. Between 1865 and 1890 he contributed articles to the Australasian , the Herald and its off-shoot Bell’s Life , the Weekly Review and the Victorian under the pseudonyms 'The Grumbler’, 'Jaques’, 'Tahite’ and 'Cleofas’. Concurrently with his literary career he established himself as a forensic specialist, lecturing at the University of Melbourne from 1865 to 1904 while also participating in the medical and cultural communities of Melbourne. An important member of the Melbourne bohemian clique that included Marcus Clarke, Henry Kendall, R.H. 'Orion’ Horne and others, he frequently entertained actors, artists and writers at his home in Spring Street on Sunday afternoons. Described by Gandevia as 'keen-eyed and beetle-browed’, with an alert look 'suggestive of a terrier saying “who said cats?”’, Neild died on 17 August 1906 survived by his wife and nine children.

When attending the theatre, Neild made pencil sketches in the margins of his libretto books: La Traviata (1859), I Puritani (1864), L’Africaine and Roberto il Diavolo (1866), and The Bohemian Girl (1867) are privately owned. His libretto from Garnet Walch’s 1873 pantomime Australia Felix (Moir Collection, SLV), which he reviewed for the Australasian , contains a few rough sketches of the scenery and costumes, including the costume of Mirth (played by Lydia Howard en travestie in short jerkin, trunks and tights), which he thought 'pretty elegant dress’. Otherwise he was a weekend sketcher, mainly drawing places around Melbourne. One of his sketchbooks was sold at auction in Melbourne in 1971. His album of 179 cartes-de-visites collected between 1862 and 1883 (LT) includes photographs of litt?rateur Caroline Dexter and fellow-critic James Smith. A medallion profile portrait of Neild by Charles Summers is held by the Australian Medical Association.

Writers:

Bruce, Candice
corinnefs

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2012