Henry Charles Prinsep= Also known as Harry b. 5 September 1844

The following link is at this time one of the best descriptions on Henry Charles Prinsep

http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p290761/html/Text/ch0...

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Artist (Cartoonist / Illustrator), Artist (Draughtsman), Artist (Photographer), Artist (Painter)

Harry Prinsep was active in many parts of Western Australian society. Trained in Law and associated with the east India Company he worked as a draughtsman among other thing, producing numerous amateur and professional sketches, paintings and photographs.painter, scene-painter, topographical draughtsman, amateur photographer, settler and public servant, was born on 5 September 1844 in Calcutta, India, where his father Charles Robert Prinsep was British agent-general. Educated in England under the care of his uncle Thoby Prinsep, Henry (known as Harry) was given art lessons by George Frederick Watts in company with his older cousin, Valentine Prinsep. Later he studied law at Oxford and art at Dresden and Heidelberg. His father died in 1865 and in January 1866 Prinsep set sail in the David and Jessie for the Swan River Colony (WA), where his father had bought land in 1857. He arrived at Fremantle from Singapore on 20 May 1866, having made many sketches on the voyage. In October he met Charlotte Josephine Bussell (1847-1929) – known as Josephine – the youngest daughter of Charlotte and John Garrett Bussell . They married on 26 February 1868 and settled at Prinsep Park, Dardanup, near Bunbury, one of the East India Company’s properties that Henry managed.

At Prinsep Park, Henry supplied the Nygungar George Coolbul with drawing materials and encouraged him to do coloured pencil and crayon drawings in a sketchbook entitled 'West Australian Native Art’ (AGWA). He wrote: 'The drawings in this book are a few among many drawn by a West Australian native known as George Coolbul, of the Vasse district during his service with me on a horse station at Prinsep Park, Dardanup in 1868 and 1869. He came to an untimely end in 1871 being speared through the body by another native at night during a feast which prevented his further progress in art.’

Following the almost total loss of a cargo of horses and railway sleepers in 1870 when the Heimdahl (with Prinsep, his wife and eldest daughter, Carlotta, on board) ran aground on the mudbanks of the Hoogley River, Prinsep was forced to abandon pastoral pursuits. In February 1874 he joined the Lands and Surveys Department as a draughtsman. The family settled in Perth, in a house next door to the Royal Mint known as 'The Studio’. By 1894 he was head of the Mines Department and, in 1898, Chief Protector of Aborigines. He retired in 1907, lived in England until 1912 and died at Busselton on 20 July 1922.

Prinsep’s artistic training served him well in obtaining employment as a draughtsman, but there were few other professional outlets for his talents. He painted the scenery for a dramatic performance at Perth soon after his arrival as well as for later performances in both Perth and Geraldton, but these efforts, like the scenery and drop-curtains he painted for an 1878 Mechanics Hall production for the St George’s Cathedral organ fund, were probably purely voluntary. He was also a keen amateur photographer; one of his photographs shows Perth Town Hall under construction and is thus dated 1869. The house to which he retired at Busselton, named Little Holland House after his uncle Thoby’s London home, had its own darkroom.

Prinsep’s sketches for John Forrest’s Journal of Proceedings of the Western Australian Exploring Expedition (1875) and Ernest Giles’s Australia Twice Traversed…1872 to 1876 (1889) were commissions from the Lands Department. Although adequate for their purpose, the illustrations betray their official origin. (It is interesting to note that in the introduction to Giles’s book he is conflated with his more famous artist-cousin and called Mr 'Val’ Prinsep of Perth.) Far more expert are his watercolour views of Perth, Geraldton and Rottnest Island; these charming works are deceptively simple. His diary for 1876 records the execution of one such sketch: 'Mrs Hocking and I would take our blocks and Josephine would read to us as we painted and I have brought home a trophy in the shape of a rather nice water colour sketch of the Falls’.

Prinsep helped found the Wilgie Club, WA’s first art society, and was connected with the short-lived illustrated paper, Possum . He was a member and vice-president (1904 05) of the Western Australian Society of Arts, with which he exhibited from 1901 to 1908. Of his three daughters, Virginia Mary (1880 1958) and Carlotta Louisa (1869 1960) also sketched and painted. Extant sketches by Prinsep himself are largely topographical, but they include an unusual and amusing black and white sketch of a fancy dress ball on roller skates apparently taking place in the Perth Town Hall, the central participant being disguised as a (rather wobbly) Egyptian obelisk (BL).

Writers:

Callaway, Anita

Kerr, Joan

Date written:1992
Last updated:2011

Source https://www.daao.org.au/bio/henry-charles-prinsep/biography/

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Prinsep, Henry Charles (Harry) (1844–1922)

by A. C. Staples

Henry Charles (Harry) Prinsep (1844-1922), estate manager, horse-trader, artist and civil servant, was born on 5 September 1844 at Calcutta, India, son of Charles Robert Prinsep, standing counsel to the East India Co. government and occasionally acting advocate-general of Bengal, and his wife Louisa Anne, née White. Charles invested in Australian colonization—the Adelphi estate in Van Diemen's Land and the Belvedere estate in Western Australia.

Harry completed his schooling at Cheltenham, England. He was left motherless at 9, and at 11 his father returned to England in the advanced stages of paralysis; Harry's care fell to his uncle and aunt Henry Thoby and Sara Prinsep. His late teenage years were spent at Little Holland House, Kensington, where his aunt conducted her artistic and literary salon, around her resident 'lion', the artist George Frederick Watts, and family friend Alfred (Lord) Tennyson. Watts gave art lessons to her son and to Harry. The lads enjoyed lasting friendship with Tennyson's children. Harry's sister May became the second wife of Hallam, Lord Tennyson.

After his grand tour of Europe, Harry visited his late father's Belvedere estate, Western Australia, in 1866. His meeting with Charlotte Josephine, daughter of J. G. Bussell, persuaded Prinsep to remain: they married on 26 February 1868 when he took over the estate's management.

Charles Prinsep had bought Belvedere estate in 1838 to breed cavalry remounts for the Indian Army. As a supplement, Harry Prinsep exported jarrah sleepers for the Indian railways. Unfortunately in 1870, after he had loaded the Hiemdahl with sleepers and horses, and accompanied them to India, the ship was wrecked when entering the Hooghly; insurance for the cargo had been overlooked. In Western Australia Prinsep struggled for another three years; falling prices in India and the colony defeated him and the estate was sold by his creditors in 1874 to H. W. Venn.

Prinsep had been able to maintain his interest in art and literature. After 1874 he lived in Perth where he was a draftsman in the Lands and Survey Office. He led a small but influential cultural group engaged in sketching excursions, literary discussions and the theatre. With Herbert Gibbs, another artist, he published several numbers of Opossum, a humorous journal. Prinsep's 1875 and 1876 drawings of incidents in the explorations of (Sir) John Forrest and Ernest Giles were included in the published accounts of their expeditions.

In 1894, from the position of chief clerk in the Lands Department, Prinsep became under-secretary of the new Department of Mines under the minister, (Sir) Edward Wittenoom, to supervise the later stages of the gold rush. He urged the government to recognize the shift from alluvial to reef-mining and to revise mining and company laws, with little success.

After four demanding years, administrative indiscretions by Wittenoom, which caused riots on the goldfields, led Premier Forrest to transfer Wittenoom to London as agent-general, and Prinsep to the new sub-department of Native Affairs as chief protector (1898), with one assistant but the same salary. The alternative explanations, incompetence or political pressure due to Prinsep knowing too much about the shady side of mineral promotion, are not yet resolved. There was no suggestion of incompetence in the 1898 royal commission into gold-mining, nor in the coverage of the incident by cartoonist Ben Strange, who relished Forrest's dilemma, Wittenoom's blunder and his hasty translation. A shadow of scandal, in which even Governor Sir Gerard Smith became involved, settled on the mining industry.

In 1898 control of native affairs became wholly the concern of the elected parliament, which sliced funding. Prinsep's concern for Aboriginal welfare was thwarted by lack of staff and by the Aborigines Act (1897) which left him powerless to alleviate their ill-treatment and neglect. He spent five years trying; the Act was amended in 1906 and then only because of support from the 1905 Roth royal commission on the condition of Aborigines. Increased powers of direction led, under later administrators, to the disintegration of Aboriginal society in southern Western Australia.

Prinsep was a founder member in 1889 of the Wilgie Sketching Club (later the West Australian Society of Artists). He was its president in 1904-05 and exhibited oils and effective watercolours with it in 1901-08. He is represented in the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Battye Library and Little Holland House, Busselton. He took long service leave in 1908 and revisited England and Europe. He then lived at Busselton, where he spent a pleasant and useful old age, for some years as mayor. Prinsep died there on 20 July 1922, survived by his wife and three daughters, and was buried in the local cemetery with Anglican rites.

Source http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/prinsep-henry-charles-harry-8119

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Further reading

http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13wwvzc

http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn3542902-s11

http://www.artrecord.com/index.cfm/artist/5152-prinsep-henry-charles/

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=xIg9amq4nw0C&pg=PA221&lpg=PA22...

http://aeon.sro.wa.gov.au/Investigator/Details/Agency_Detail.asp?Id=67

http://www.virtualvolunteering.com.au/volunteer/scripto/transcribe/...

http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p290761/html/Text/cov...