Chapman's Hobart

Image details: Thomas Evans Chapman, The entrance to the Derwent from Brown's River (detail), 1847, pencil and watercolour on paper. Presented by Sir Ernest Clark Bequest

A selection of sketches by Thomas Evans Chapman (1788-1864) of Hobart in the 1840s and ’50s.

Chapman arrived in Hobart on 31 December 1834.

While little is known about his earlier life, there is evidence that he spent a great deal of time sketching landscapes in the west country of England.

Many of these sketches are now in the collection of Hobart’s Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts.

Chapman was an accomplished draftsman who sketched assiduously as he moved around Hobart and Tasmania.

Today, his legacy rests in the hundreds of surviving drawings which are an excellent record of the colony during the mid 19th century.