Design and Art Australia Online

lithographer, engraver, printer and surveyor, was born in Hereford, second of the five artist sons of George Clint ARA, a popular English miniature painter and engraver. Like his father and brothers, Raphael Clint exhibited at the London Royal Academy, showing mainly casts of intaglios from 1817. These included a self-portrait (1826) and a portrait of Horne Took after the bust by Chantry (1827). Raphael Clint migrated to Western Australia in 1829, arriving at King George Sound in the Calista on 5 August. Initially employed as a clerk in the Survey Department, he became an assistant surveyor in 1832. On 21 January he left on an overland expedition under Lieutenant Robert Dale , accompanied by three soldiers and the Aboriginal guide Nakina.

A Roman Catholic, Clint apparently married while in Western Australia. Later in 1832 he and his wife left for Van Diemen’s Land. While he was surveying at Bridgewater in 1834 Mrs Clint was accused of illegal trafficking in sly grog with the soldiers and Clint was dismissed from his government post. They went to Sydney and set up an engraving shop. It was probably at 36 Hunter Street since an advertisement in the Sydney Times of 14 February 1835 states that Clint was quitting this address for 12 King Street. Initially business prospered and Clint played an active role in the social and public life of Sydney. In 1836 he announced that he had recruited an engraver from London and early the following year he was advertising 'a complete lithographic establishment, which will be put in operation forthwith under the conduct of an Artist of eminent talent’. In March he was offering lithographic portraits 'full length £1, half length 10s. 6d, and as many copies as they may require at 1s. each’.

Clint, however, did little original drawing or printing himself. He always employed assistants, including John Carmichael and Josiah Allen , with none of whom he managed to establish long or harmonious relationships. Nor did offensive public insults endear him to his colleagues. E.D. Barlow , who shared premises with Clint before taking over J. G. Austin 's lithography business in 1837, accused him a few months afterwards of having pirated the technique of zincography (for which Barlow had the exclusive patent) and making dishonest claims to have purchased all Austin’s lithographic presses. (Barlow said he retained two.) He took out advertisements in which he labelled Clint a 'Quack??? Quack??? Quack???’.

On 30 October 1838 Thomas Bock came to Sydney, apparently having been invited to join Clint as artist and lithographer. But, after lithographing G.A. Robinson 's portrait at Clint’s rooms (presumably directly onto the stone), Bock abruptly returned to Van Diemen’s Land on 7 December and the lithograph, Robinson noted, 'could not be printed, none to do it’. Bock’s reason for leaving Sydney is undocumented, but in 1840 his employee J. Price publicly accused Clint of being unqualified as an engraver and printer, of not paying him anything for three months when he was ill, and of assaulting another of his printers and driving him 'almost to madness’ when he refused to reveal trade secrets. Price also claimed that Clint had petitioned the Governor to close down a competitor’s shop. In spite of such imperfect industrial relations, numerous prints were issued from Clint’s premises, particularly maps, charts and plans of Australia and New Zealand. Tom Darragh states that the first published map of Melbourne, issued in October 1839, was drawn by James Williamson , a local surveyor, then sent to Sydney to be engraved and printed by Clint. In the early 1840s, however, Clint fell victim, first to illness then to the general economic depression. He moved several times until reopening his old Hunter Street premises in November 1842, where he advertised: 'Lithographic Printing in all sizes from circulars to large charts or maps. Copper-plate engraving and printing. Seal engraving on stone or metals. Every description of mercantile forms on hand. A collection of the most recent heraldic works, &c.’

In December Clint had a specimen book on view which, he claimed, contained 1000 lithographic plans of estates he had printed and proved his superiority to the 'bad work and smeared lines, and obscured figures’ of 'the inferior tradesmen of the city’. To no avail. Nine months later he was forced to close the Hunter Street shop and work from his home in George Street. He announced in December 1843 that he had been 'almost totally unemployed’ for the previous two years and was going back to England. He may even have carried out this threat, for he did not advertise again for three and a half years. He published a chart of the recent Barrier Reef survey in 1844 and his undated caricatures of Gother Kerr Mann and Governor Gipps, the latter titled Don Quixote’s Remarkable Adventures with the Cattle and Don Quixote’s Returning Home Again , probably date from then too, but nothing else is known until May 1847. Then he advertised that he had 'resumed his business in all its branches … To meet the still continuing depression of the Colony in the taste for art, he has reduced his charges 50 per cent’. In June he claimed to have dropped his charges by 80 per cent and was again threatening imminent departure. It certainly did not eventuate. In August, presumably in order to reduce costs, Clint was sharing premises with the engraver and printer Henry Cooper Jervis but, as usual, the arrangement was brief. Later that year Clint was declared insolvent. He died in Sydney on 13 September 1849, survived by his wife, whom he left in penury unable to cover even the burial costs. She publicly solicited 'a little aid to enable her to continue her own support’ and by April 1850 had opened a millinery and dressmaking sho

At the 1849 Sydney exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia, Clint exhibited two of his intaglio seals: heads of Lord Byron and von Weber. He had shown a sketch of the latter at the Royal Academy in 1828, described as Impression from an Intaglio . According to Nancy Gray, he designed and engraved the first signed armorial bookplates produced in New South Wales. More than twenty survive (Mitchell Library [ML]). He would undoubtedly have been directly involved in the firm’s engraving of gems, seals, silver, copper plaques for cornerstones of buildings, tombstones, doorplates and sundials. (Several of the last are known, one in the garden of Lindesay, Darling Point.) Clint’s father’s obituary in the July 1854 issue of the London Art Journal noted that Raphael had been a gem-cutter of considerable talent – a talent unfortunately in little demand in penal Sydney.

Clint signed a version of Ways and Means for 1845 (ML SV*CART 14). Edward Winstanley also signed a version of the same print (ML SV*CART 16)

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989