North Bondi Bay

Samuel Thomas Gill arrived in Sydney on 20 May 1856 and stayed for eight years, settling in Woolloomooloo. He began working almost immediately upon arrival, making harbour and city views with the aim of publishing a suite of lithographs on the subject, as well as taking students at a studio on George Street.

His watercolours were admired – a writer in the Sydney Morning Herald noted on the occasion of an exhibition of his work in 1861 that ‘Mr S T Gill has made for himself a reputation in the Australian colonies as a water-colour artist such as is seldom attained by an individual in any country. There is no spot of interest in New South Wales, in Victoria, or in South Australia that his skillful pencil and his artistic taste have not invested with a fresh charm to those acquainted with the localities, and have not made them as old familiar scenes to those who have never visited them.’ (Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday 26 October 1861 p.7).

Gill’s great strength as an artist was his observation of human character, and it was rare for him to exclude the figure from his work – this romantic view of the Sydney coastline includes two men on the clifftop, in part to convey scale, but also to emphasise the occupation of nature by people, suggested also in the trail of smoke from a departing steamer on the horizon.