John Lewin was Australia's first free-settler professional artist. He arrived in Sydney in 1800, intervention from influential patrons having secured him the assurance of rations. He remained here until his death, examining the continent's plants and animals. His first book was an illustrated volume of moths of New South Wales, Prodromus Entymology (1805). Although it was the first book to contain Australian-engraved plates, it was published in London, as there was neither suitable paper, nor a naturalist capable of describing the moth specimens with accuracy, in the colony. Lewin's next production was Birds of New Holland. Published in 1808, it is a record of bird species common in Sydney in the decades after colonisation. Lewin successfully attracted sixty-one local subscribers to buy seventy-three copies of his book. However, the consignment was lost on the voyage to Australia; only a few copies of the book remained, in England; today, only six copies of the English edition are known to exist. Lewin published Birds of New South Wales in Sydney in 1813. It was the first illustrated book and the first natural history book to be published in Australia, as well as the country's first private publication. Lewin is also thought to have made the first oil painting in Australia, Fish catch and Dawes Point, Sydney Harbour. In the estimation of art historian Andrew Sayers, 'the work only partially fulfils its disparate ambitions to describe several fish species, to locate them geographically (on the shores of Sydney Harbour), and to create a cabinet picture in emulation of the European genre of the fish painting.' Few of Lewin's drawings of Aboriginal people have survived.
