Summary

This item is one of our 50 Treasures: Celebrating 50 years of James Cook University.

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).

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. 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'.

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 in sepia representing landscapes on a rural property in central Queensland. In 1883 The Capricornian reported on a series of sketches by Dodgson:

'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.'

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.

Percy Dodgson died in 1886, in Stanthorpe, Queensland, at the age of 48.