Design and Art Australia Online

cartoonist, painter and publican, was the licensee of the Post Office Hotel in York Street, Sydney, in the mid-1850s. Later he held the license of the Café de Paris in King Street then moved to what became known as Wangenheim’s Hotel in Castlereagh Street. In 1855 he married a fellow Jew, Elizabeth Simmons (died 1925), daughter of an Australian-born mother and of Joseph Simmons, an English trader and proprietor of the Jerusalem Warehouse, Sydney (later David Jones). They had ten children, including a son, Joseph, and four daughters, including Emma (Mrs J.A. Carroll) later a well-known opera singer.

Pencil sketches by Wangenheim dated 1881 are in the Mitchell Library (Px*D104). Mitchell Library also has an original cartoon, Trunk versus Drunk : 'Duke of Edinburgh’s Young Elephant taking his sailor-keeper home to HMS The Galatea’, presumably of 1868 and possibly for Sydney Punch where Alfred Clint drew Wangenheim’s portrait as 'our cartoonist’ in December 1878. Peter Dart notes that some early comic cartoons by William Macleod in the Bulletin were 'after Wangenheim’.

Alfred Clint’s 'our cartoonist’ portrait in the December 1878 issue of Sydney Punch – which Mahood said was the first known cartoon of a cartoonist in Australia’s history but identified as being of Monte Scott – was actually of Wangenheim, according to the annotation accompanying the portrait in the Holt collection, Mitchell Library.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007