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watercolour painter, sketcher, professional photographer, lithographer, art teacher, inventor, assistant gold commissioner and police magistrate, born in Portsmouth, England, on 3 December 1815, eldest of the ten children of Joseph Francis Gilbert and Jane, née Snelling. Early in 1816 the family moved to Chichester, Sussex, where they lived for many years. His father, a landscape painter who exhibited at the Royal Academy, the British Institution and the Society of British Artists (Suffolk Street), taught George art – and an enthusiasm for mechanical inventions. George Gilbert arrived at Melbourne in November 1841 on board the Diamond with his wife Ann, née Birch, the two children of Ann’s previous marriage to Sir John Byerley, and George’s brother Francis Edward Gilbert. He immediately established himself in Melbourne as a drawing master, teaching at schools, taking private pupils and holding drawing and lithography classes at the Melbourne Mechanics Institute. In June 1844 he became the institute’s honorary secretary. He also taught dancing and gave drawing lessons at his wife’s ladies’ seminary.

Soon after his arrival Gilbert helped found the Melbourne Debating Society. He was co-founder and co-editor of the Port Phillip Magazine in 1843 (the first magazine to be published in Victoria) and drew and put on stone some of its lithographs: Williams Town, from the Beach , Lighthouse and Entrance to Port Phillip Harbour and a view of the Melbourne court-house and gaol. The magazine was short-lived and in 1844 Gilbert was declared bankrupt. That year he did the lithographic illustrations for Thomas Ham 's Australian Drawing Book and in 1846 Ham printed Gilbert’s lithographs of fossil teeth after Mrs E.C. Hobson 's drawings, which also appeared as a foldout double plate in the Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science . Gilbert lectured on lithography at the Mechanics Institute in August 1845.

The earliest known resident photographer in Melbourne, Gilbert was advertising from his home on Eastern Hill from late November 1845 to early February 1846 claiming to have developed a new technique for producing better likenesses by daguerreotype. In 1848 John Cotton , whom he appears to have taught photography, noted that Gilbert had 'tried the daguerreotype, oxyhydrogen microscope, and various other things’, being 'always engaged in trying mechanical experiments … [but] unfortunately seldom perfects anything’. In any case, Gilbert had found that drawing brought most 'grist to the mill’, wrote Cotton, adding: 'He is a very intelligent person and will talk from morning to night, always in a fluent and agreeable manner. He appears to have studied every subject that may be started, or, at all events, plunges into the midst of it, and dives to the bottom of it in a short time’. Cotton’s son William and his daughters Eliza and Caroline ( Le Souëf ) learned drawing from Gilbert at school in Melbourne in 1844 and, when visiting the Cotton property Doogalook, Gilbert ('a sort of naturalist’) encouraged John Cotton to make a collection of the insects in the district.

Gilbert held two exhibitions at the Melbourne Mechanics Institute. The first, in 1847, consisted of his own 'crayon’ (pastel) landscape views of Port Phillip and the Goulburn, Barwon, Yarra and Plenty Rivers; the second, in 1849, included the work of his pupils. The former was described in the Port Phillip Patriot of 15 April as 'decidedly the best delineation of Australian scenery yet produced, possessing the semi-tropical peculiarities of colouring in depth and tone, which the description of crayon used and manufactured by the artist (Mr Gilbert) alone can communicate’. In March 1849, when the Governor of Victoria viewed and praised some original drawings, Gilbert was reported as being about to publish a pictorial work on Victoria called Australia Felix Illustrated . It is not known to have eventuated. In 1851 he participated in the Victorian Industrial Society’s first exhibition, showing 'beautiful crayon drawings’ of well-known scenery in Melbourne and Geelong that were highly commended by the judges, 'not only on account of their intrinsic merit, but from the circumstance also of their subjects being so perfectly appropriate to the occasion’.

Competing with his various cultural pursuits was an obsessive interest in mesmerism and clairvoyance. He established a reputation as a lecturer and demonstrated his clairvoyant skills to large, enthusiastic audiences. As soon as the gold-rush fever began in 1851, Gilbert left Melbourne and headed for Bendigo. In February 1852 he was appointed assistant gold commissioner and police magistrate for the Bendigo area, but resigned in May 1853. Back at Melbourne he revived his artistic pursuits. He showed two works in the 1853 exhibition of the Victorian Fine Arts Society: Happy Valley near Geelong and View of the Barrabool Hills . A silver tea service presented to him by the Bendigo diggers and a salver commemorating his work as secretary of the Port Phillip Academical Institution were displayed in a Melbourne shop window in 1854. He was at Geelong in 1856. After this, details of his life become increasingly imprecise. He was apparently painting at Rotorua, New Zealand early in 1857 en route to England; a drawing of Mokaia Island is dated 24 April (Dixson Library). Soon afterwards, a friend who met him in London wrote that he was now involved in 'the Spirit World’, passing on this news and a Gilbert drawing to his brother, the Victorian grazier George Hobler, then in California, who wrote in his diary on 1 June 1857: 'I don’t like his drawing of the Bunyip made when in the Spirit, for I do not believe any animal of the kind exists’.

By 1859 Gilbert was back in Melbourne, employed in colouring photographs for Richard Daintree. In 1861, at the Victorian Exhibition, Thomas Ford exhibited a set of photographs of colonial scenery coloured by Gilbert. He died some time before 1889 (when referred to as 'the late’), but his final years are buried in obscurity.

Writers:

Creelman, A. E.

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011