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Freelance Artist
Augustus Earle was probably the first professionally trained freelance travel artist to tour the world. His unrivalled watercolours painted during his long journey in the 1820s, faithfully describe his ‘rambling ... peregrinations’ from South America to the southern Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha, Van Diemen’s Land, New South Wales, and New Zealand, before he ‘found his way home’ via several Pacific islands and then Manila, Singapore and Madras. His sympathetic depictions of the dispossessed indigenous peoples he encountered around the world, and his written criticism of zealous missionaries, all point to an artist determined to paint it as he saw it, regardless of the criticism this sometimes engendered.

The watercolours selected for Travellers Art are intended to show both the physical progress of Earle’s travels and his interest in recording the occupations and customs of both the settler and indigenous peoples he encountered. Earle’s great skill lay in his ability to imbue these genre scenes, portraits and landscapes with not only an observational accuracy but also his own highly original, anecdotal sense of atmosphere and social interaction. Even when Earle does not include himself within the scene, there is no mistaking his presence as the first hand witness. Earle was clearly an artist who loved to travel and who travelled in order to make art.

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