Georgina, Emily and Augusta Rose

This family scene portrays the artist’s three daughters, dressed in their Sunday best, and is one of only seven known oil paintings by Martha Berkeley. Its informality and affable interactions between the sitters and the viewer follow the British portraiture convention of the ‘conversation piece’.

Possibly painted to celebrate the occasion of the girls’ baptism into the New Church in January 1848, the portrait shows Georgina, the oldest sister, offering a sprig of honeysuckle to the youngest, Emily, with Augusta Rose on the left. The work, which expresses motherly love, depicts the girls posed on the terrace outside their home, with the landscape beyond suggesting Adelaide’s Torrens River and the Adelaide Hills. The strange-looking object on the right is a quadricycle, a forerunner of the bicycle. The scene suggests material comfort and social success in the new British Province of South Australia.

Martha Berkeley, her husband Charles, and her sculptor sister Theresa Walker arrived in South Australia in early 1837. Having previously exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, Berkeley was South Australia’s first European-trained painter and rendered many fine colonial miniature watercolour portraits.

Tracey Lock, Curator of Australian Paintings and Sculpture