George Baird Shaw (1812-1883), painter and printmaker, arrived in Australia in 1856. Born in Scotland, Shaw received his first training in art from his father, an amateur painter who later sent George and his brother James to train at the Academy of Fine Arts in Trieste. Back in Scotland, Shaw produced engravings for publications such as Chambers Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen (1835), as well as engraved portraits of Sir Walter Scott and others. In 1850, Shaw emigrated to New Zealand , remaining there six years before coming to Australia. He exhibited with the South Australian Society of Artists in 1857 before moving to Sydney where he completed a series of engravings of portraits of politicians, clergymen and others. Shaw also worked as a watercolourist, specialising in landscapes, and exhibited three landscape works in the Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition of 1870. It is also thought that Shaw trained as a photographer in Edinburgh, although it is still to be established whether he practised photography in Australia. Examples of his portrait engravings are held by the National Library and the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.
