Jacob Janssen was not considered the best of the artists who depicted the early days of Sydney colonial life in the 1850s, but he was among the most colourful.
Janssen scraped by doing anything that paid, including portraits, miniatures, landscapes and, less successfully, politicians. Unlike those of more serious artists of the time, Janssen's watercolours depicted early Sydneysiders and its first middle classes at play, said Richard Neville, the Mitchell librarian at the State Library of NSW. "The limits of his talents were often reached," Mr Neville said tactfully.
"Sometimes the two directions happily coincide, like our Glover paintings, or Tom Roberts’ portrait of Edward Ogilvie, but often we acquire material which would not pass muster for an art gallery, but for us is a container of really valuable information.”Unlike the work of Conrad Martens, whose landscapes rarely depicted people, Janssen's watercolours showed Sydneysiders - including convicts and free citizens - enjoying themselves.
"They go to Double Bay, Rose Bay, Parsley Bay and, all of sudden, artists found a market for these picturesque highways and byways of the harbour," Mr Neville said.
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