natural history painter, sketcher, botanist and Anglican clergyman, was born and bred in England. He came to Australia on the Southern Cross ,sent out by the London Society for the Propagation of the Gospel as Anglican missionary to the Clarence River Aborigines in northern NSW. C.W. Dicker’s watercolour and pencil Part of Blacks’ Burial Ground, Milmeridien c.1870 (which is highly reminiscent of Thomas Mitchell 's Tombs of Mileridien , drawn 1835 and published 1839) is in the National Library of Australia, along with Dicker’s A funeral, Clarence River Blacks c.1870, a crude watercolour and pencil drawing of a procession of Aboriginal Australians carrying a dead person tied onto a pole (see website and file).
In Melbourne, Dicker met Baron von Mueller and became one of von Mueller’s army of botanical 'spotters’. He travelled widely throughout mainland Australia and Tasmania, sketching places, flowers and insects from Brisbane to Victoria. He sent von Mueller two copies of many of his drawings of the wildflowers of Tasmania, Victoria, Queensland and NSW annotated with what he believed to be their botanical names. At the age of 32 (c.1887) Dicker was appointed rector of the parish of Hamilton, Tasmania. He and von Mueller made an excursion on foot and horseback searching for botanical specimens in one of the wildest parts of the north Tasmanian bush. One of Dicker’s most vivid sketches, Swaggers (lot 338, Christies April 1996, ill.), shows von Mueller and himself with packs on their backs – the only known portrait of von Mueller in the field. His undated watercolour, Boathouse Bay, Lake St Clair, Tasmania , offered as lot 332 in Deutscher-Menzies Australian and International Fine Art Auction at Melbourne on 28-29 August 2002 (estimate $650-850), was presumably also made around this time (previously cat. 93 in the Maas sale of Dicker drawings).
Dicker later returned to Dorset, became a country vicar and published his Australian botanical research in a local scientific journal. In 1971 the Dicker sketchbooks were found in an English country house by the London art dealer Jeremy Maas.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1999
- Last updated:
- 2011
