William Buelow Gould

Biography

The sentence was passed in Northampton on 7 November 1826: “seven years beyond the seas”. In the language of the court this meant transportation to Australia, and the offence was stealing a coat “by force of arms”. By then Gould had already been before a court for “stealing colours”.

He was born in Liverpool, and at birth his name was William Holland. The year of birth is given as 1801 (one database also has 8 November 1803, which is hard to verify). Little is known of his youth. He is thought to have studied under the Irish painter William Mulready in London and the lithographer Rudolph Ackermann in the Strand, and later to have painted porcelain at the Spode factory in Stoke-on-Trent. By 1826 he was married and had two children.

In December 1827 the convict ship Asia brought him to Hobart. He had painted portraits of the officers on the voyage. In Van Diemen's Land he was sent to the brickfields, but he was soon in trouble again over petty theft and drunkenness. In June 1829 he was sentenced for forging a banknote to three years at Macquarie Harbour, one of the harshest penal stations in the colony, on the west coast of Tasmania.

It could be reached only by sea, around the rugged south and west coasts. On the way, the brig Cyprus, with Gould aboard, sheltered from bad weather in the uninhabited Recherche Bay, and half the convicts mutinied and seized the ship. Gould was left on shore with the officers and went with a party on foot to seek help. Lieutenant Governor Sir George Arthur commuted the sentences of those who had stayed with the officers, and Gould was assigned as a house servant to the colonial surgeon Dr James Scott.

Scott was an amateur naturalist and had Gould paint the native plants in watercolour; these sheets are still regarded as technically very accomplished. But in 1832 Gould was back at Macquarie Harbour. The reputation he had earned with Scott helped: on Sarah Island another amateur naturalist, Dr William de Little, took him into his house as a servant. There Gould painted still-life watercolours of botanical specimens, birds, fishes and other sea creatures collected on the nearby beaches, and drew landscapes of the surroundings, which are valuable today as evidence of life in the settlement. It was around 1832, too, that the sketchbook of fishes came into being: thirty-six watercolours on paper, each measuring 185 by 227 millimetres. Only six are signed and none is dated, but all are attributed to Gould. In 1833 the settlement was closed, and the remaining prisoners were moved to Port Arthur on the south-east coast of Tasmania.

He received his certificate of freedom at Port Arthur on 25 June 1835. He worked briefly for a coachbuilder in Launceston, then returned to Hobart, where in 1836 he married Ann Reynolds. He went on painting mostly still lifes, but the quality became uneven, and his life shrank to a cycle of drunkenness, poverty and prison sentences for theft.

Gould died on 11 December 1853 at his home on Macquarie Street in Hobart.

The sketchbook of fishes is held by the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, part of the State Library of Tasmania, and a digital copy is available to readers. In 2011 it was recognised as a document of world significance: it contains the first record of some species, and scientists still use it. The Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston holds 177 of his botanical works, and a self-portrait hangs in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart. Richard Flanagan's novel “Gould's Book of Fish” (2001) was written on the basis of his life.