painter and house painter, eldest surviving son of Robert Burnard and his first wife, Jane, came to South Australia with his father, step-mother and their children in 1840 and lived with the family in Plympton, Adelaide. He apparently inherited both the Plympton house-painting business and the painting and exhibiting of still-life easel paintings on his father’s death. Late in life, presumably when the step-brothers and step-sisters were self-supporting, he became a professional fine artist. He was listed as a portrait painter of West Torrens in the Adelaide Almanac for 1867 and 1869. He married a widow, Catherine Harvey, nee Rousevell on 4 July 1867. Robert Burnard died a widower on 31 August (?) 1874.

Two works by Burnard, Birds and a print of Fruit , were shown in Adelaide’s second exhibition of colonial art in 1848. Although these could still have been by his father (whose painting Fruit had been shown posthumously the previous year), they appear to have been the lender’s own work. In December 1855 Burnard was called 'an artist well known to the old colonists for his fruit and flower pieces’. He had then just completed a 6 × 4 foot (182 × 121 cm) painted silk banner for 'The Ancient Order of Foresters, Court Australia’s Pride, No 2308’, said to consist 'of the usual emblematical devices, which are portrayed in gorgeous colours and skilfully finished’.

In 1859 another Fruit was shown with the Society of Arts (catalogued as by 'Barnard’). In 1861 the exhibition committee awarded Robert Burnard the prize of 20 guineas (donated by George Fife Angas) for the best recently executed oil painting of a colonial subject in the society’s annual exhibition. It was an acquisitive prize, so Burnard’s work, another fruit painting, became the property of the society.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989