William Pitt Wilshire

painter and merchant, was the second of 11 children and eldest son of James Wilshire, a successful tanner, and Esther, née Pitt. The place and year of his birth - Sydney 1807 - have given him legendary but dubious status as Australia's 'first native-born artist', i.e. white male oil painter. Sir William Dixson claimed that Wilshire had no formal art training apart from some early drawing lessons: 'his first attempts at colour painting were made about 1829-30, when he copied some of Skinner Prout's work'. Since Prout did not come to Sydney until December 1840, Wilshire must either have copied English engravings or have begun painting much later than Dixson suggests. Dixson also said that Wilshire was a photographer but may have confused him with J.W.F. Wilshire, a professional photographer working in the Sydney suburb of Waverley in the 1870s.

Nevertheless, William Pitt Wilshire undoubtedly used photography in his work. Some of his paintings appear to be little more than coloured photographs. Initially, he specialised in portraiture, but later he also painted landscapes perhaps because of the threat photography posed to the portrait painter. Most of his known paintings appear to be copies, e.g. The Coming Simoon, shown at the 1854 Australian Museum exhibition, which was a copy of a well-known English painting (possibly an art union winner though the artist is unknown) in Sydney. He showed seven paintings in the 1857 Fine Art Exhibition at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts. Three were portraits - Sir Daniel Cooper, Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, an Australian Aboriginal woman and an unidentified sitter - but the rest (at least) were copies: Beatrice Cenci, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Laughing Boy and Cottage Girl. He exhibited original oils and more copies with the NSW Academy of Art in 1872 as an 'amateur'.

Little more is known about Wilshire's art except that he never seems to have worked professionally. A pencil portrait of a deceased uncle, Robert Pitt (Mitchell Library [ML]), copied from an oil painting brought to NSW by Pitt's widow, was drawn on a visit to his aunt some time before October 1859, when the painting was lost in a shipwreck. In October 1853, Wilshire charged Thomas Lane with the theft of various articles, including a paintbrush, but the charge was dismissed. He spent most of his life as a merchant, including running a preserved meat business ('preserved by his entirely new process') in October 1874, but apparently painted as a hobby for most of his life. His oil painting, Aborigines of Queensland (ML), was done in 1886 when he was 78 and is inscribed on the back of the canvas as being after a photograph. A complementary painting, Camp of 'Blanket', Aboriginal Visitor (unlocated: photograph Archives Office of New South Wales), with figures formally posed in a row, also seems to have been copied from (or painted over?) a photograph.

Wilshire married Catherine Maria Robertson, a sister of John Robertson (later NSW Premier) at Sydney on 21 February 1829. They had a large family, although only two sons and a daughter survived him. Late in life he retired to Kurrajong in the Blue Mountains but died in Surry Hills on 12 March 1889 and was buried in the Church of England section of Rookwood Cemetery. His brother Joseph gave Wilshire's occupation as 'gentleman' on his death certificate.

Staff Writer.