Circle of John Scarlett Davis (British, 1804-1845) - Portrai...

Estimate

£800 - £1,200

Circle of John Scarlett Davis (British, 1804-1845) - Portrait of Commander Matthew Curling Friend, RN, FRS - Oil on canvas - 73.5 x 62cm - Together with an oil on board of his wife Helen Dyball by a different hand, 35 x 28cm (2) Matthew Curling Friend (1792-1871) was an Australian inventor and public servant. He joined the Royal Navy as a Midshipman in July 1806 and was promoted to Lieutenant in February 1815. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars he was put on half pay. Friend then pursued scientific interests and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1820. He subsequently entered Cambridge in 1822. In April 1830, as master of the Wanstead, he arrived in Hobart Town with his wife and his brothers Daniel, Charles and George. He decided to stay and applied for a grant of land, but having no sanction from the Admiralty to settle, he left for England in May. By his belated return in July 1832 as master of the Norval with his wife and her mother, he almost forfeited his grant but in September 1832 he became port officer at Launceston, where he had built Newnham on a beautiful 250-acre (101 ha) block. Soon after settling in Launceston he was elected vice-president of the Cornwall Auxiliary Bible Society, and later chairman of the Launceston Sunday school several times. Though an Anglican and active in building a church and rectory at George Town, he helped Rev. Charles Price and his Independent church, and signed a petition for a Presbyterian church in the West Tamar, later erected at Sidmouth. He opposed transportation and was keenly interested in George Augustus Robinson's work with the Aboriginals. He was an original member of the Launceston Horticultural Society in 1838 and in 1840 he became a shareholder and member of the local committee of the Hobart Town, Launceston and Port Phillip Steam Ship Co. However, it was for his public lectures on astronomy in the 1830s in the Launceston Court House and in the 1840s at the newly-formed Mechanics' Institute that he was best remembered. He married first, in 1826, Mary Anne, daughter of John Ford, of Hampstead, and second, at Kelso, West Tamar, in 1840, Helen Sarah Burrington, second daughter of William Carter of Essex, and widow of Lieutenant Thomas Cooke Dyball, R.N.