painter, sketcher, botanical artist, engraver, naturalist and explorer, was born in Offenbach-am-Main near Darmstadt, Germany, on 5 September 1808, eldest son of Ernst Friedrich Becker, a civil servant. As a boy he attended the Ludwig Georg Gymnasium where teachers from the Darmstadt gallery taught him painting, and where he met Johann Kaup whose book Gallerie der Amphibien (1826), like Kaup’s three-volume Das Tierreich in seinen Hauptformen Systematisch Beschrieben (1835-37), he helped illustrate. From 1829 he worked as a painter for the publishing firm of Heinrich Ludwig Brönner at Frankfurt-am-Main. He studied lithography at the Städelesche Institut under Peter Vogel and later began to paint portraits; unfortunately, none from this period are known. From 1840 to 1844, when Becker went to Mainz, he was court-painter to the Archduke of Hesse-Darmstadt; in his spare time he collected many bronze and bone artefacts, Roman figures, medieval engravings and both Roman and medieval coins.

It seems that Becker supported the unsuccessful German liberal revolutions of 1848. 'Whenever I have indigestion I swallow something bitter, that is, I think of Germany’, he wrote to Kaup from Melbourne, and it was probably for political reasons that he moved to England in 1850. That summer he read papers to the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Edinburgh, then decided to move to the New World. In October he sailed from Liverpool for Australia. After a few weeks’ stay at Rio de Janeiro en route, he reached Launceston in March 1851.

'Paying his way by taking likeness-miniatures which he does very nicely’, as Lady Denison remarked, Becker remained in Tasmania for nearly two years, sketching, painting and indulging his scientific interests in botany, zoology and geology. A splendid miniature of Philip Oakden (NGA) was painted not long before Oakden’s death on 31 July 1851, and others, also of excellent quality, are held privately in Tasmania. He became an intimate of Lieutenant-Governor Sir William and Lady Denison, the latter labelling him 'one of those universal geniuses who can do anything; is a very good naturalist, geologist &c., draws and plays and sings’.

In November 1852 Becker moved to Victoria and spent two years on the Bendigo goldfields. On his return to Melbourne he held a one-man exhibition of his Bendigo sketches. These were shown again in Melbourne in 1854 along with 'specimens of Australian Algae and Fish designed to furnish new designs for paper hangings’. The Argus called the former 'remarkably clever’ and added: 'The view of the Seven White Hills is a gem, and the sketch of Golden Square Bendigo after sunset is highly characteristic and natural. Mr Becker is evidently an artist of no ordinary calibre; many of his pictures are most ingeniously contrived. The charred trunks of trees, in the outlines of which a resemblance to the human figure is sometimes detected by the fanciful, are made the subject of three or four admirably executed sketches. The idea is essentially German and is well carried out by the artist, whose Bishop of Bendigo, Monk and Lubra and Philosopher of Golden Gully are most comically devised and cleverly executed’.

Becker was active in the Melbourne German Club and in 1859 helped organise celebrations in honour of von Humboldt and Schiller. He took an active part in the Philosophical Institute, founded in 1855, which became the Royal Society in 1860. He also collected specimens for Professor McCoy, one of the four founding professors of the University of Melbourne, and prepared lithographs for him and for the government botanist, Ferdinand von Mueller . He studied the local Aboriginal people, sketched indefatigably, sent botanical drawings to Sir William Hooker at Kew, and prepared papers for publication in Germany and London as well as for the Philosophical Institute.

Drawing was an integral part of Becker’s life. His letters to Dr Kaup written in 1850-55, for instance, are studded with thumbnail sketches (including a probable self-portrait). He took an active role in the formation of the Victorian Society of Arts in 1856 and sat on several of its committees during the following three years. He also seems to have experimented with plaster casting, sending his Australian Lizards, Cast from Nature to the 1856 Victorian Exhibition of Art. He favoured a romantic light for many of his landscape subjects. Old Princes Bridge and St Paul’s by Moonlight (c.1857, LT) is a rare and dramatic night painting, as much a celebration of the recent installation of gaslight in the town as of the obscured moonlight.

In June 1860 Becker was appointed artist and naturalist to the Victorian Exploring Expedition to the Gulf of Carpentaria which, led by Robert O’Hara Burke, left Melbourne on 20 August. En route he sent five full reports and made some 70 sketches as well as carrying out meteorological observations and making notes on the Aborigines, including specimens of their songs. Unfortunately, the expedition’s organising committee failed to provide him with the proper equipment, while Burke, who was completely uninterested in scientific observations, refused to allow him to ride and made him work like a porter, loading and unloading the camels and carrying packs. The result of this was that he had to sit up late, without sleep, to complete his writing and sketching. As the party moved north from Menindie to Cooper’s Creek, Becker gradually succumbed to over-exertion, poor water and a diet which produced scurvy. He took his last readings on 1 April 1861 and died on the 29th at Bulloo in the south-west corner of Queensland.

The most gifted member of the Burke and Wills party, he carried out his work 'with much devotion and ability’ which his contemporary William Strutt insisted 'was not…suitably acknowledged’. His miniatures, his landscape sketches and his Aboriginal drawings have been numbered by Sayers as 'among the finest watercolours to be produced in Australia in the nineteenth century’. Those made on this fatal expedition (LT) are possibly his most important contribution to Australian art, in many ways the most significant product of the ill-managed affair. A watercolour, said to be a self-portrait, is in the La Trobe Library and he included himself as an incidental figure in several watercolours and sketches: for instance, Blowhole, Tasman’s Peninsula, Van Diemen’s Land (1851, w/c and gum arabic, NGA).

Writers:

Shaw, A. G. L.
ecwubben

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2012