portrait painter, engraver and professional photographer, was born at Sutton Coldfield, England in 1790, according to Alfred Bock , whose biographical notes on Thomas Bock are not entirely reliable. The convict records state that he was born at Hammerwich, near Lichfield, in 1793 (by calculation). The burial registry of Holy Trinity Church, Hobart, however, gives his age as 65, which points to 1790 as being the correct year.

Bock’s artistic life began with his apprenticeship to an engraver in Birmingham, probably Thomas Brandard (1779-1830). This apparently finished not long before he married Charity Broome at Birmingham on 2 January 1814; they had five children. Bock was in business as an engraver in Birmingham in 1814. Atkin has identified the premises where he worked as an engraver and miniaturist as: Upper Temple Street (1815), Duddeston Street (1816-17), then Hull Street (1823). Little else is known about his career in England, except that he was awarded a silver medal by the Society of Arts in 1817 for a portrait engraving, after which he set himself up as an engraver and miniature painter at 24 Great Charles Street, Birmingham. (Atkin notes that a trade card exists from this address.) A copper engraving of the Good Samaritan done after a picture by J.V. Barber for the cover of the programme for the Birmingham Musical Festival in October 1820 is held privately.

In April 1823 Bock and Mary Day Underhill were tried at the Warwick assizes for administering a drug to Ann Yates with the intention of bringing about an abortion. Both were sentenced to 14 years’ transportation, Underhill being sent to New South Wales and Bock to Van Diemen’s Land. He arrived in the Asia on 19 January 1824. Neither wife nor children followed him to the colony. Little is known of his personal life in Hobart Town until the early 1840s, by which time he appears to have been living with Mary Anne Cameron, the widow of a seaman, who had two children: Henry George, born July 1832, and Alfred, who adopted his stepfather’s name.

Bock’s first wife died at Birmingham on 28 June 1844. On 23 July 1850, he married Mary Anne Cameron in Holy Trinity Church, Hobart Town. The eldest of their five sons, born between 1843 and 1853, Edwin Morland Bock, was said to have shown great promise as an artist before his early death in 1853, aged 11. Afterwards Thomas Bock was said to have been a broken man, never fully recovering from the blow. His post-mortem sketch of Edwin is in the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery.

On arrival at Hobart Town in 1824 Bock was assigned to Dr E.F. Bromley, a naval officer. In November 1832 he was granted a free pardon for his exemplary conduct. He appears to have introduced engraving to the colony and his talents were soon put to use. In December 1824 he engraved a plate for a $4 banknote to be issued by the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land, the first of several plates he executed. Over the next few years, however, Bock’s engraving work seems to have been largely confined to letterheads and similar commercial productions, together with some illustrations for the almanacs issued by James Ross and Henry Melville in 1829, 1830 and 1834. His real work in the colony was portraiture, in which he built up a widely-spread clientele.

The directory in Andrew Bent’s Tasmanian Almanack for the years 1825 to 1829 lists Thomas Bock as a 'portrait painter, historical and writing engraver’ at various addresses, so his colonial career in portraiture appears to have begun then. The gallery where he exhibited his work and gave lessons in painting in 1831 was at 1 Liverpool Street, then he moved to 22 Campbell Street. He worked mainly in watercolour, pastel and pencil and combinations of these, little being executed in oils. His work is of a high standard and his pictures of colonial notables have not only considerable artistic merit but personal and social interest.

He is probably best known for the series of portraits he made for G.A. Robinson of 14 Tasmanian Aboriginal members of Robinson’s missionary party during the period 1823-35. Copies were commissioned by Lady Franklin and, with her permission, Bock also painted copies for Henry Dowling. With those painted by Nicolas-Martin Petit , these are the most useful pictures we have of the Indigenous Tasmanian population. Bock replicated them many times; the outline sketches which appear to have been used in preparing the various copies are now in the collections of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery. In 1842 Lady Franklin commissioned him to copy a portrait of Mathinna, the Aboriginal girl she adopted during the period she lived in Van Diemen’s Land, which she intended to send to London to be lithographed in order to show the English a 'degree of civilization’ as compared with Bock’s prints of 'wild natives’. However, no prints of the 7-year-old Mathinna in her favourite red dress are known to have eventuated. One of Bock’s watercolours of Mathinna is in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery; the other is represented in a private collection (UK).

On 30 October 1838, Bock arrived at Sydney in the Mary Ann Watson . At the request of Sidney Stephen he soon began work on a portrait of G.A. Robinson, undertaken in three sittings at the premises of the printer Raphael Clint , presumably so that Bock could copy it directly on to the lithographic stone. Robinson ordered 10 copies of the finished portrait, but no one in Clint’s workshop was able to pull the prints and the portrait is believed to have been sent to England to be lithographed. An attributed oil portrait of an unknown man in the Art Gallery of New South Wales may also have been made during the Sydney visit, but Bock rapidly abandoned Clint and returned to Tasmania.

The 1845 Hobart Town Exhibition included five works by Bock, all portraits of Hobart Town citizens and their families. He also sketched condemned prisoners both before and after death, a series of pencil portraits of bushrangers (ML) being of particular interest. A thorough study of Thomas Bock’s portraiture was made in 1991 in conjunction with a major travelling exhibition mounted by the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery.

Having become interested in the newly-invented photography after being shown English daguerreotypes by Bishop F.R. Nixon , Bock announced his intention to take daguerreotypes 'in a short time’ in the Hobart Town Advertiser of 29 September 1843. Threatened with legal action by George Baron Goodman , his venture into commercial photography was publicly delayed five years, then he included photography as part of his business. He introduced painted backdrops to his studio portrait daguerreotypes from about 1850 and most of his dozen or so surviving daguerreotypes have these, a characteristic feature being, as Newton points out, a piece of trailing ivy. His price list and some notes he compiled on various photographic processes also survive (Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts). He produced portraits by the daguerreotype process until his death, when Alfred took over the studio.

Thomas Bock died in Hobart Town on 18 March 1855. A posthumous exhibition of his paintings and drawings was held at Hood 's Gallery from late April to early May. Catalogues were sold 'at the door’ for sixpence, but none are known to have survived.

Writers:

Plomley, N. J. B.
Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989