sketcher, amateur photographer and army officer, was born in France in March 1807, second son of Captain George Thomas Wingate RN of Stirling, Scotland, and Thomasina, née Devonshire. He entered the British army as an ensign in May 1826 and served in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from October 1828 to November 1832, where he was promoted lieutenant in the Queen’s Royal Regiment. He was in India from March 1835 to January 1842. Many small watercolour sketches of his life in India are included in an album in the private Hamilton collection. His sketch of the fortress of Ghuznee, which as company commander in the 2nd Queen’s Royal Regiment of Foot he had stormed in July 1839, was published as a lithograph in London that same year, one of fourteen large coloured lithographs by Weld Taylor after Wingate in an album entitled The Storming of Ghuznee and Kelat (published 1842: copy British Library Oriental and India Office Collections).
In 1842 Brevet Captain Wingate was granted sick leave. The following year he was appointed to the army recruiting staff in Glasgow, where he continued drawing and painting; sketches of young women dated 1843 and a couple of caricatures are in the Hamilton album. Having retired from the army with the rank of captain (promoted March 1846, resigned and retired the same year. Sometime afterwards Wingate came to Australia; his earliest known painting in the colony, Bark Hut near the Murrumbidgee (ML) is dated 1852, suggesting that he travelled around the country before settling in Sydney. His watercolour of a gentleman leaning on a Benham piano beside an open door giving a view of Sydney Heads, painted at Sydney in March 1853 (sold in 1985), is perhaps a self-portrait. In 1854 he was recorded as major commanding the 1st New South Wales Rifle Volunteers. That year he showed portraits of Charles Plummer and Professor [Isaac] Nathan, the composer and musician, at the Australian Museum Exhibition. His undated portrait of Llewellyn Lloyd (ML) is another early work, and his delicate watercolour view of Morning, Woollmoloo [sic] Bay (p.c.) is dated 6 May 1855.
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 Rouse Hill House on the Terry rural property were taken in 1859 (ML). His photographs of Sir James Martin and his wife and their adjacent Sydney property, Clarens (Hamilton album), were probably taken that same year. A photographic panorama taken from his Potts Point home was shown at the 1862 London International Exhibition.
One of two photographs Wingate took of Government House, Hobart Town, is stamped with his initials, and other Tasmanian photographs are in the Hamilton 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
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
