Young woman holding a book

The British-born artist William Strutt arrived in Melbourne in 1850. His paintings, drawings and prints, made at the time and on his return to England, capture the remarkable and dramatic life of the new British colony of Victoria. In his short, but eventful, sojourn in Victoria he witnessed many of the major events of the time: the disastrous bushfires of 1851 (Black Thursday), the frenzy of the gold rushes – travelling to the Victorian goldfields himself – and the ill-fated expedition of Bourke and Wills, in 1860–61, recorded by him in oils. He was attuned to the hazards faced by the colonisers and made these the subject of his most ambitious paintings: the 1851 bushfires, the threat of bushrangers, and the fate of lost children in the bush. These paintings were instrumental in shaping the emerging visual culture of the new society and establishing its foundational narrative.

Strutt supported himself through portrait commissions, and his superior draughtsmanship is evident in this sensitive drawing from 1853. The technique and composition owe much to Strutt’s French training – he studied at the studio of Michel-Martin Drölling, where he was

a pupil of the leading neoclassical artist Jacques-Louis David and later worked under Joseph-Nicholas Jouy, a former pupil of Ingres. Executed in thin pencil, the drawing relies on Strutt’s masterful control of hatching and cross-hatching to build areas of volume and to describe the texture of the young woman’s woven silk dress and embroidered net shawl.

Maria Zagala, Associate Curator, Prints, Drawings & Photographs