Fine Books & Manuscripts

BULL, Knud Geelmuyden, artist (Norwegian, 1811–1889). –– WALKER, Elizabeth, engraver (1800–1876). City of Hobart Town. 1855. London: Day & Son, Lithographers to the Queen, 1855. Hand tinted lithograph after Bull by Walker, 432 x 654 mm, laid down on archival paper, image toned, some browning to margins, few professional repairs to lower margin and image. A RARE ENGRAVING BY AN AUSTRALIAN PRISONER. In 1845 while visiting London, Bull was arrested for “feloniously making part of a foreign note for 100 dollars”. Bull was sentenced to 14 years deportation to Australia and in May 1846 he left London aboard the prison ship John Calvin where he was given an opportunity to paint during the journey (See The Wreck of the Waterloo at Cape Town in 1842, now hanging in The Mitchell Library in Sydney). In 1847, he was transferred to the penal colony Saltwater River, Tasmania where he spent several years in Hobart. On 8 December 1850, Bull absconded to Melbourne from Hobart Town under the assumed name Thomas Evans. He would later be recaptured on 22 January 1851 and sentenced to only 20 days solitary confinement. After his release in 1853, Bull was considered the only professional landscape painter in Hobart, noted for his scenes of early colonial Hobart from 1853 and 1856. His most notable being the City of Hobart Town oil painting done in 1854. Walker published this painting as a tinted lithograph in 1855 and in 1859, 53 of the prints supplemented with statistical details of the colony were framed in muskwood and huron pine and sent to London to encourage emigration to Tasmania. OCLC locates only one copy institutionally (National Library of Australia). Bull is still regarded as a pioneer of Australian landscape painting. Craig, Old Tasmanian Prints, p. 144; Kerr, The Dictionary of Australian Artists: painters, sketchers, photographers and engravers to 1870, p. 108.