William Westall

landscape artist, was born in Hertford on 12 October 1781, youngest of the five children of Benjamin Westall, a Norwich brewer, and only child of Benjamin's second wife, Martha Harbord. William's early drawing lessons were given to him by his half-brother Richard, a Royal Academician and instructor in drawing and painting to Princess Victoria. In 1799 William was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. Early in 1801, on the recommendation of Benjamin West, President of the Royal Academy, he was appointed landscape artist on Matthew Flinders's Investigator expedition to Australia. During the voyage along the south, east and north coasts of Australia from 1801 to 1803, Westall produced pencil and pencil and wash sketches of coastal profiles, landscapes and Aborigines and a small number of natural history subjects. When the Porpoise ran aground on Wreck Reef on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef, Westall's drawings were 'wetted and partly destroyed' but were nevertheless forwarded to the Admiralty as part of the official record of the voyage. On their receipt in London, Sir Joseph Banks had them sent to Richard Westall to be 'restored to a proper state'.

William Westall, meanwhile, had gone from Wreck Reef to China and India and did not return to London until 1805. He subsequently visited Madeira and Jamaica and showed watercolour views of these places in a Brook Street gallery and at the Associated Artists' Exhibition in 1808. Early in 1811 Flinders collected Westall's sketches from the Admiralty and, in conference with Westall and Sir Joseph Banks, chose nine subjects for oil paintings, commissioned by the Admiralty to be engraved as illustrations for Flinders's Voyage to Terra Australis... (1814). These oil paintings now hang in Admiralty House, London.

Westall married Ann Sedgwick (1789-1862) in 1820 and they had three sons: William entered the church, Thomas the navy, and Robert became an engraver. Westall retained his Australian sketches and after his death they passed to William and Robert. In 1889 Robert sold some to the Royal Colonial Institute and, at the same time, both he and William presented a number to the Institute (now the Royal Commonwealth Society), which subsequently sold them to the National Library of Australia. This collection now constitutes the major part of Westall's Australian work. A relatively small number of drawings remain in private hands, a few with Westall's descendants.

After completing the oil paintings for the Admiralty, Westall worked largely in watercolour, producing views to be reproduced in aquatint in topographical and travel books. Some of his best views are those in A Picturesque Tour of the River Thames (1828), while some of the best known appeared in Rudolf Ackermann's histories of Oxford, Cambridge and some of the better-known English public schools. Westall's watercolour style lent itself well to aquatint and consequently he was in constant demand by publishers, but he himself found the work unsatisfying and considered that he had given up 'hope of fame for a trade'. He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1812 but was never elected an Academician, despite showing some seventy pictures in Royal Academy exhibitions between 1801 and 1849.

T. M. Perry.