- Also known as
-
Thomas Bock
-
primary name: Bock, Thomas
- Details
- individual; printmaker; painter/draughtsman; British; Australian; Male
- Life dates
- c.1790-1855
- Biography
- Draughtsman, painter and etcher, chiefly known for his portraits in crayon, watercolour and oils. Transported to Australia as a convict. According to his convict records, at Hammerwich near Litchfield, Staffordshire, England, he was born in 1793. The burial register of the Holy Trinity Church, records that Bock was sixty-five years old when he died which suggests that he was born in 1790.
Bock, according to his son Alfred came from Lichfield, where he was at the choir school, before being bound to the Birmingham engraver ‘Brander’, i.e. Thomas Brandard (d.1830). Thomas Bock, engraver, married Charity Broome, a minor, in St Philip, Birmingham, in 1814. Moved to work in London for a time, but at Warwick Assizes in 1823 sentenced for transportation for 14 years for administering a drug to a young woman called Yates with the aim of procuring an abortion. Arrived in Hobart in 1824 and as well as working as an engraver developed into a remarkable artist, whose depictions of Aboriginal people are among the earliest European representations.
See AOA Christy Correspondence (File B) unsigned note dated 28 August 1862 re 'Visit Mr G A Robinson'. The paper appears to be embossed with the name of W Parkins, 25 Oxford Street (presumably a dealer). The note reads:
'He has 12 Drawings of Tasmanians by Bock, which are in frames, and a few others not framed.
Besides those I have are
one seated pointing a spear
A man with a lower jaw tied round his neck, a fire stick & waddy.
[Tomlaboma?], shaved head.
Another woman.
Cumarak, a chief.
The difference in their colour arises from some being ochred and others not.
{Truggernana?] is not ochred.
[Probelatena?] is not ochred
Mr. R. has another etching by Duterreau.
This could not be found when I went to purchase the collection.'
- Bibliography
- Ikon Gallery and Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, "Thomas Bock", exh. cat., 2017.
Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, 'Thomas Bock, Convict Engraver, Society Portraitist', 1991.
H & J Kolenberg, 'Tasmanian Vision, The art of nineteenth century Tasmania', Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart 1987.
William Bryden, 'Bock, Thomas (1790 - 1855)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 1, Melbourne University Press, 1966, pp 123-124.
N J B Plomley Thomas Bock's Portraits of the Tasmanian Aborigines, Records of the Queen Victoria Museum N.S. 18, 1965, pp.1-25
N J B Plomley Portraits of the Aborigines of Tasmania (Van Diemen's Land). The Burlington Magazine Vol.102, No. 682 Jan. 1960 p.36
