James Waltham Curtis (c. 1839 – 18 September 1901), possibly born Charles James Waltham Curtis, was an English-born painter, illustrator, and photographic colourist who became an early practitioner of a distinctively Australian style of art.
Early life
Details of the early life of James Waltham Curtis are sketchy. His death record in Melbourne in 1901, indicating he was born in 1839, states his father’s name as James Curtis and his mother's only as Sarah.Victoria Death Registrations, 1901, No. 11365. Births, Deaths and Marriages Victoria Early 21st Century family trees published online by some of his direct descendants name his father as farm labourer James Curtis and his mother as Sarah Elizabeth Crouch. They cite UK census information to show that he was born in Andover, Hampshire, and was the second eldest son among six children. The child in question was named Charles, whose birth is recorded in Andover in February 1839.UK 1841 Census: Class: HO107; Piece: 411; Book: 4; Civil Parish: Andover; County: Hampshire; Enumeration District: 4; Folio: 18; Page: 30; Line: 12; GSU roll: 288810; UK 1851 Census: PRO Class: HO107; Piece: 1683; Folio: 377; Page: 29; GSU roll: 193591; England & Wales, Christening Index, 1530-1980 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2008. No other supporting evidence is offered, and there is no reference to the name ‘Waltham’.
The Melbourne journalist James Smith (1820-1910), who had known James Waltham Curtis quite well, gave some details of his early life in a posthumously written booklet. Presumably some details must have been based on what Curtis told him, and at least in part, they contradict the family historians. According to Smith, Curtis came from "an old family in Devonshire" who had been "sea-faring people" until after the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. "The artist’s father found himself obliged to take up with mercantile pursuits, which were as uncongenial to him, as they afterwards proved to be to his son, who inherited from his mother a marked fondness for the use of the pencil and the brush," wrote Smith. "This she encouraged, so that it became his solace and delight. He spent much time in such picture galleries as were accessible to him, and also became an omnivorous reader." Some of Curtis’ early art works, Smith recorded, attracted the attention of the wife of an eminent London barrister, who discerned in them "the promise of genius". The unidentified woman commissioned a series of water-colour paintings from Curtis, and was so pleased with them she employed him as a painter. It was after the death of his benefactor a number of years later, Smith wrote, that Curtis decided to migrate to Australia.4. Smith, An appreciation of the late James W. Curtis (1901), pages 2-3, https://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/165153
Death records in Victoria confirm that Curtis married Maria Farrant, the daughter of a William Farrant, and his wife Emma (nee Lascelles).Victoria Death Registrations, 1922, No. 3261. Births, Deaths and Marriages Victoria. However, no record has been found of any marriage between a Maria Farrant and a Charles or a James Curtis. The family trees published by descendants seem unanimous in accepting that the marriage took place in December 1866 in St. Mary’s Anglican church in Bryanston Square, London. Some details of the marriage do fit, including the names of the bride and her parents. But if indeed this was the correct marriage, for some reason Curtis in the register gave his name as ‘Charles James Brown’. He stated that his own occupation was a clerk, while his father was a naval officer.London, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1932, p. 123, Ref. 1866/246.
In any event, one ‘James W. Curtis’, described as a merchant, is recorded as arriving in Melbourne aboard the ‘Norfolk’ from Gravesend in July 1868.Unassisted passenger lists to Victoria, 1852-1923, PRO Victoria. If this was the artist, it is unclear when Maria arrived, though apparently not on the same ship. Curtis would travel widely through other parts of Australia, but Melbourne would be his home base for the rest of his life.
Career in Australia
Photographic colourist
Whatever the truth of his early years, it is clear Curtis had already gained considerable experience in artistic work before he arrived in Australia. It was enough to land him a job as a colourist with Melbourne’s leading firm of portrait photographers, Johnstone, O’Shannessy & Co. Around the time he joined the firm, it advertised it had gained "the additional assistance of a highly competent operator of extensive London and Parisian experience", though it’s unknown whether this was a reference to Curtis. He later described this period of his life as his "business probation in Melbourne". Smith recorded that Curtis worked for the studio for eight or nine years and developed a friendship with co-owner Henry James Johnstone (1835-1907), an accomplished landscape artist as well as a portrait photographer. Certainly, Curtis and Johnstone would later often exhibit their work together, and served alongside each other for some years as council members of the Victorian Academy of Arts.Smith, An appreciation of the late James W. Curtis (1901), page 3; Argus 31 January 1870; Illustrated Australian News, 20 Jan 1881; Argus 20 April 1872; Argus 1 Sept 1876.
Illustrator
For many years from the early 1870s, Curtis worked as an illustrator. The State Library of Victoria has published an online collection of more than 100 examples of Curtis’ drawings for the Illustrated Australian News, to which he contributed from 1874 until at least 1891. None carry his actual signature, only his monogram engraved in the image. Many of the drawings depict bush scenes, mainly in Victoria. Examples are ‘Clearing Timber, Mount Macedon’ (1880); ‘The Wannon Falls’ (1880), and ‘On the Goulburn, near Shepparton’ (1886).State Library of Victoria online catalogue However, news of the day often shaped his choice of subjects. Some events allowed Curtis to use his own eyewitness sketchings. ‘Football match by electric light’, depicting an experimental match at the MCG between Melbourne and Carlton in August, 1879, could be an example.SLV online catalogue; The Age, 14 August 1879; The Weekly Times 16 Aug 1879; Illustrated Australian news, 30 August 1879. Clearly there were other times when Curtis had to use his imagination after reading newspaper reports, like when he was depicting bushfires or shipwrecks, or when he drew ‘A strange apparition: Ned Kelly’s fight and capture’ (1880)SLV online catalogue, Illustrated Australian News, 17 July 1880. There is no evidence of him travelling outside Australia, so for South Pacific and South American scenes he presumably copied photographs. Curtis also drew illustrations for books published in Australia, as well as for The Age, The Australasian Sketcher with Pen and Pencil, the Illustrated Sydney News, and for several British publications, including the Illustrated London News, the Graphic and the Sketcher.Smith, An appreciation of the late James W. Curtis (1901), pages 4-5; The Illustrated Sydney News and NSW Agriculturalist and Grazier 3 Feb 1877
Painter
Dating from the period when was working as an illustrator, Curtis produced many paintings in Australia. Working in both oils and watercolours, the majority of his works were landscapes. An article by Curtis in the Illustrated Australian News in January 1881 gives insights into his inspiration. It describes his excitement at having made his first Cobb and Co coach trip out of Melbourne on an unspecified date. Curtis admits he used to be envious watching the arrival and departure of coaches from the Melbourne post office, just around the corner from the photographic studio where he’d first worked. "Many a time have I watched in Melbourne these phases of the locomotive public, and formed many glorious ideas of distant explorations when fate should have relieved me of business shackles," he wrote. To appreciate the natural landscape around Melbourne, Curtis suggested, the observer must be prepared "to admire the gaunt, the grey and the dim – nature in fact in an iron-like frame of mind without the charms of the brightness and glory of colour, but exulting in a fierce and sturdy opposition to climatic conditions; having foliage that can repel the scorching rays of midsummer; roots than can extract nourishment from a soil burnt hard as stone; gnarled trunk and knotted boughs that defy lightning, drought and tempest". The artist expressed particular admiration for gum trees, which featured so often in his work. "Some of these much slandered gum trees, viewed when detached by mist or fog from the confusion of the outline of their fellows, appear as one of nature’s most perfect studies of balance. Bold and erratic as may be the sweep of stem and branch, or irregular the masses of foliage, yet every accidental abrasion of bark by bird or insect, damage by fire or storm, is so unerringly renewed and compensated from Nature’s great storehouse that the result as a whole has an untamed harmony and rugged beauty that dwarfs the pine of Europe to a plaything, and reduces the oak, elm and chestnut to cabbage-headed commonplaces by comparison."Curtis, James W. ‘A Holiday Ramble on the Yarra Track’, Illustrated Australian News, 28 Jan 1881, page 2
The art historian Tim Bonyhady remarked that the subjects of Curtis’ works were "quite removed" from the "domesticated landscapes" of Swiss-born Abram-Louis Buvelot (1814-1888), regarded around the 1870s as the leading landscape painter in Victoria. Yet Bonyhady observed that "in his depiction of rugged, storm-blown gum-trees", Curtis emulated Buvelot more than any of his contemporaries.Bonyhady, Australian Colonial Paintings in the Australian National Gallery (1986) page 58. It was a similarity of style noted at the time, with one Victorian magazine reviewer commenting that of all artists in the colony, Curtis was the one who came closest to Buvelot "in his delineation of Australian foliage".Once a Month: an Illustrated Australasian Magazine, Melbourne, 2, 15 June 1885 page 474. According to Bonyhady, both Buvelot and Curtis could be seen to be influenced by the 17th Century Dutch master Jacob Isaackszoon van Ruisdael (c. 1629-1682). Curtis’ works could be viewed as keeping within "the great traditions" of European painting, the historian suggested, with aged gum trees "seen as Australian counterparts to the conventional storm-blasted oaks in northern European landscapes".Bonyhady, Australian Colonial Paintings in the Australian National Gallery (1986), page 58.