Our eleventh treasure is a beautiful illustration of the Townsville Hospital, situated on Ross Island. Created by the mysterious P.D., from the JCU Art Collection comes the Townsville Hospital watercolour.
Trisha Fielding discusses this treasure
This beautiful watercolour depicts an early view of the Townsville Hospital on Ross Island. The artist, who signed the work with the initials ‘P.D.’, is thought to have been Percy Dodgson (1838-1886).
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| P.D., Townsville Hospital circa 1875, watercolour, 14 x 19 cm. James Cook University Art Collection. Photograph by Michael Marzik |
Percy Dodgson, the second son of Hassard Hume Dodgson, a solicitor, was born in Surrey, England, in 1838. He was a cousin of the author Lewis Carroll (whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). Around 1865, Percy and his elder brother, Francis Hume Dodgson, emigrated to Queensland in the hope of making their fortunes in the pastoral industry. An entry in Lewis Carroll’s diary in 1864 suggests that he thought his cousins’ move to Australia was unwise – calling it an ‘extraordinary plan’. For a time, the brothers settled on pastoral stations in the Aramac region of central western Queensland. Francis later branched into mining and later became a successful newspaper editor in regional Queensland. The brothers may have gone their separate ways after their pastoral ventures failed.
It is not known when Percy Dodgson took up art, though he appears to have travelled to Queensland coastal towns in the mid-to late-1870s, producing sketches and watercolours in Townsville, Cairns and Cooktown. Photographs of his sketches of Trinity Bay, Cairns, and Finch’s Bay, Cooktown, both dated 1876, suggest that Dodgson regularly moved from town to town in an attempt to earn a living from his art. An advertisement for lessons in watercolour painting, given by Percy Dodgson, appeared in the Mackay Mercury and South Kennedy Advertiser in 1877 and Dodgson is known to have produced drawings representing landscapes on a rural property in central Queensland.
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| Newspaper advertisement for watercolour painting lessons by Percy Dodgson. |
Dodgson’s watercolour of the Townsville Hospital on Ross Island dates to around 1875, and information held by the James Cook University Art Collection indicates he also produced watercolour paintings of Castle Hill, Kissing Point and The Rocks in 1875. The painting appears to be a reasonably faithful representation of the hospital, which was built in 1868. An early photograph of the hospital that pre-dates Dodgson’s watercolour reveals comparable architectural characteristics, particularly the front-facing double-gabled roof. Dodgson’s painting is likely to be the only colour depiction of this hospital in existence.
In 1882, the Rockhampton Morning Bulletin described a series of six drawings in sepia by Dodgson:
‘The drawings represent various landscapes on the Tooloombah Estate (Mr O.C.J. Beardmore’s). The first showed a black’s camp on the side of a knoll, and with the homestead in the background. Another gives a front view of the house and farm buildings. These are pleasantly situated on the side of a range. Another represents some of the splendid Tooloombah paddocks, with mustering yards in the centre, and behind which rises a tree-crowned slope with bare peaks in the background. A fourth is a view of the creek running below the homestead. A mob of cattle are in the act of coming down to water. The fifth is a landscape on the other side of the house, and here the cattle are basking lazily under the shady clump of trees in the foreground to the right. The sixth, is in our opinion the best. It is an excellent drawing of one of the turnings in the creek with trees on either bank. In the foreground, cattle are standing in the small stream of water in the bed of the creek, whilst others are gingerly making their way down the steep bank on the right.’
In 1883 The Capricornian reported on a series of sketches by Dodgson:
‘The art of transferring from nature to canvas, the inspiration created by the prospect of beautiful scenery, is so little understood, and so seldom practised in this colony, that we derived peculiar pleasure on Friday in examining a series of sketches in sepia from the brush of Mr Percy Dodgson. A glance at these show that Mr Dodgson is a true artist. He has an eye to the elements of beauty in a landscape; the skill required to transfer these to paper or canvas; and the taste necessary to impart a realistic finish to his pictures.’
Percy Dodgson died in 1886, in Stanthorpe, Queensland, at the age of 48.
Over the course of 2020, JCU Library's Special Collections will be unveiling 50 Treasures from the collections to celebrate 50 years of James Cook University.
Author Biography
Trisha Fielding is an historian and writer whose published works include the books 'Neither Mischievous nor Meddlesome: the remarkable lives of North Queensland's independent midwives 1890-1940', 'Queen City of the North: a history of Townsville', and the history blogs 'North Queensland History' and 'Women of the North'. She holds a Master of History degree from the University of New England and a Bachelor of Arts with Distinction from the University of Southern Queensland. Trisha also works part time in JCU Library's Special Collections.
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