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sketcher, amateur photographer and army officer, was born in Verdun, France in March 1807, during the Napoleonic wars. Both his parents – his father, Lieutenant George Thomas Wingate from Stirling, Scotland, and his mother Tamzin/Thomasina (nee Devonshire) – were made prisoners of war when Lieutenant Wingate’s Royal Navy gun-brig The Biter was wrecked near Etaples in November 1805. He entered the British army as an ensign in the 78th Regiment in May 1826 and served in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from October 1828 to November 1832, where he was promoted lieutenant in May 1830. In November 1833 he transferred to the 2nd or the Queen’s Royal Regiment of Foot, travelling to India on the transport ship Henry Tanner via Sydney where the ship landed 220 male prisoners in late October 1834. He arrived in Madras in late February 1835 and served with the Queen’s Royals in India and Afghanistan from March 1835 until he returned to Scotland on furlough in February 1842, having been made brevet captain in May 1841. He was appointed to the British army recruiting staff at Glasgow in April 1843 and remained in that post until November 1844.

Many small watercolour sketches of 'life in India’ and at least one sketch from Sri Lanka in 1831 are included in an album held in the Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection (CSL&RC). One drawing is closely related to an unfinished sketch in the Anne S.K. Brown collection of 49 drawings by Wingate held at Brown University Library in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1839 Wingate made a series of watercolour drawings of the opening campaigns of the First Anglo-Afghan War, the storming of the fortress of Ghuznee [Ghazni] in July 1839 and the subsequent assault on the fortress of Kelat [Qalat] in November 1839. He was awarded the Ghuznee medal for his role in the campaign. A volume of lithographs drawn from Wingate’s sketches was published in London in 1842, announced in The Art-Union issue for 1 January 1843 as a 'new work on Afghanistan’ titled 'The storming of Ghuznee and Khelat’. The advertisement in the Art-Union advised subscribers to the work that they could now have their copies.It was also advertised in the Naval and Military Gazette on 18 February 1843 as 'Thirteen views representing the storming of the fortresses of Ghuznee and Khelat, Shah Soojah’s entry into Cabul, &c, from sketches taken on the spot, by Lieutenant Thomas Wingate, of the 2nd or Queen’s Royal Regiment, with plans of both places, and the General Orders published on both occasions’. The newspaper listed all 13 plates, describing them as “vigorous and spirited views” with a breadth and force of style “highly creditable to Lieutenant Wingate as an artist”.

Wingate’s regiment went into new quarters at Deesa in the state of Gujarat in April 1840, after returning from Qalat, and within a fortnight of their arrival Wingate was reported as having “made a great number of sketches of the most interesting places, including a panorama of the Indus.” [Asiatic Journal, May-August 1840 p.333] Another Wingate panorama, more than 5 metres in length, depicts Bombay from the top of Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy’s house. It is now in the Royal Commonwealth Society Library collection in the University of Cambridge Library, having been originally given to the Mitchell Library, Sydney, in 1953 by Mrs Eileen Cadell, great-granddaughter of Eleanor Wingate.

Wingate was promoted to captain (without purchase) in April 1846 and retired from the army through the sale of his commission in May 1846. The Wingate album includes several drawings dated to 1843-1844 during the time that Wingate was stationed in Glasgow. Details of Wingate’s movements and employment in the late 1840s are elusive but they probably included a visit to Sweden where he seems to have made the acquaintance of expatriate English sportsman and writer Llewellyn Lloyd (1782-1876). His watercolour portrait of Lloyd (ML) is dated 1849. Wingate provided a number of illustrations for Lloyd’s memoir Scandinavian adventures published in London in 2 volumes in January 1854.

In early 1851 he was living in Newman Street, off Oxford Street in the centre of London, a street with a long-held reputation as an artists’ quarter. Wingate’s fellow lodging house residents included two artists and a portrait painter, and his near neighbours included another portrait painter, an historical painter and a landscape artist. In November 1851 he sailed for Sydney, arriving in February 1852. In January 1853 he was appointed as a magistrate and in 1854 he was commissioned as a major commanding the 1st New South Wales Rifle Volunteers.

Wingate’s earliest known Australian drawing, Bark Hut near the Murrumbidgee (ML), is dated September 1852, suggesting that he travelled around the country before settling in Sydney, perhaps visiting his sister Elizabeth Turner who was then living near Gundaroo. Other Australian pictures include a watercolour of a gentleman leaning on a piano beside an open door giving a view of Sydney Heads (CSL&RC), painted at Sydney in March 1853. This picture has previously been thought to be a self-portrait but this suggestion can be discounted by reference to Wingate’s depictions of himself in a number of drawings in the Anne S.K. Brown Collection. An undated watercolour titled Bush Fire Potts Point probably dates to the 1850s and his watercolour view of Morning, Woolomoloo [sic] Bay is dated 6 May 1855. In November 1854 Wingate exhibited two portraits, Charles Plummer (a shipwreck hero) and Professor [Isaac] Nathan (composer and musician) as well as a watercolour at an exhibition in the Australian Museum organised by the Paris Exhibition Commissioners. He was a member of the Sydney Sketching Club, formed in 1856 with Conrad Martens as president and was also a member of the Philosophical Society of NSW, several members of which were keen amateur photographers.

On 18 June 1856, at Christ Church, Sydney, Wingate married Eleanor Terry, seventh child and fourth daughter of Richard Rouse and Elizabeth, née Adams, and widow of John Terry who left her an independent income. They lived at Percy Lodge, 22 Wylde Street, Potts Point, the city home of Eleanor’s family. Wingate appears to have begun taking photographs there, producing salted paper prints. Two photographs of a family group posed in front of the Rouse family property, Rouse Hill House near Windsor, were taken in 1859 (ML & CSL&RC). His photographs of Sir James Martin and his wife and their adjacent Sydney property, Clarens (CSL&RC), were probably taken that same year. Other photographs by Wingate in public collections, including those in the Wingate album, range in date from c1858 to 1866. He exhibited a photographic panorama of the view from Potts Point in the London International Exhibition of 1862.

One of two photographs Wingate took of Government House, Hobart Town, is stamped with his initials, and other Tasmanian photographs are in the Wingate album. Eleanor’s sister Jane Kennerley lived in Hobart and the Wingates made several visits there. On one trip Thomas took a view of one of the tableaux vivants designed and produced at Government House by Louisa Anne Meredith on 18 January 1866. Charles Woolley took the others, and the set of eight original photographs was made into a souvenir book, published to accompany a second, public, performance. Rather too distant to be fully appreciated, Wingate’s No. 5, Second Tableau – Left Group is an outdoor photograph of five of the vice-regal set dressed up as Maoris.

Thomas Wingate died at Percy Lodge on 18 May 1869, aged 62.

Writers:

Staff Writer
Megan_Martin

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2017