Design and Art Australia Online

Peter Smith Templeton was born in Glasgow on 1 December 1875, the youngest child of two boys and a daughter born to John Templeton and Blane Rankin nee Smith. He arrived in Brisbane on the Closeburn in October 1889, having travelled with his siblings and widowed mother to stay with her cousin in West End, Brisbane.

Templeton studied under Godfrey Rivers and Martyn Roberts at the Brisbane Technical College, exhibiting in the Queensland National Agricultural and Industrial Association exhibition in 1896 as a technical student. He worked as senior artist in the Government Printing Office in Brisbane for approximately thirteen years. There he formed a lifelong friendship with fellow artist Lloyd Rees who was some twenty years his junior. Later he flatted with Rees and Walter Taylor in Mosman for a time. He married Fannie Myrtle Hutchison in 1920 and moved back to Sydney where he worked as a commercial artist for twelve years. Both their children, a son Alaistair and a daughter Blane, were born in Sydney.

Templeton was a lithographic artist, and designed several posters for the tourism industry such as one of Brisbane dated 1909, and later several of Dunk Island including Dunk, the romantic isle, Great Barrier Reef, Australia (1935).

Templeton came from a musical family. He was an organist/choirmaster in Presbyterian churches in Sydney and Brisbane for over 50 years, a baritone soloist in performances of the Messiah and other oratorios and taught music from his rooms in Pitt Street, Sydney. When the family returned to Queensland he continued teaching music from a studio in George Street, Brisbane. He also taught painting to students and gave art lectures at the Brisbane Boys Grammar School. Templeton was commissioned by the Brisbane Boys College to produce a series of drawings for the school journal The Portal.

At the same time he began to exhibit his watercolours with the Royal Queensland Art Society, contributing more than one hundred and thirty works between 1933 and 1960. He was made a life member of the Society. The subjects of his watercolours focus largely on Brisbane city and suburbs with forays to the north and south coasts, the Darling Downs and as far south as Sydney.

Templeton received numerous commissions for illuminated addresses. For example, All Hallows Convent commissioned an address to be presented to the Pope. An Albury grazier, FBS Faulkner, commissioned a memorial 'Book of Remembrance’, listing the names of the men from the district who served during World War One. The Boy Scouts Association of Queensland requested him to inscribe a photographic presentation of scouting in the state on the departure of the Queensland Governor, Sir Henry Able Smith, in 1966.

Templeton died in Brisbane, 11 June 1971.

Writers:

Cooke, Glenn R.

Date written:

2009

Last updated:

2012