Robert Neill arrived in Van Diemen’s Land from Edinburgh in 1820 with his free-settler parents and two siblings. He became a public servant, working for the commissariat in Hobart while also developing his proficiency as a natural historian. While in Hobart he joined the Van Diemen’s Land Society, which advocated the establishment of a museum and botanical garden and sought to develop scientific research in the colony. Neill worked at Maria Island and Port Arthur in the early 1830s and from 1835 was based in Launceston, where he was promoted to assistant commissary-general. In 1839 he left for Western Australia and by 1841 was stationed at Albany. Fifty-eight of his paintings of the marine and reptile specimens he collected there were presented to the British Museum in 1845, and plates of some of ‘the admirable drawings made from life, by J. Neill Esq. of King George’s Sound’ appeared as illustrations in the published account of Eyre’s expedition. In addition to the drawing of Wylie, Neill also supplied images of Eyre’s arrival in Albany in July 1841 and other illustrations which were mistakenly attributed to ‘J. Neil’ by the British Museum keeper who authored the introduction to Eyre’s text. Neill was keenly interested in the Aboriginal cultures of both Van Diemen’s Land and Western Australia and collected artefacts as well as making portraits and studies of Aboriginal subjects. Neill left Australia in 1848, accompanied by his wife, whom he’d married in Hobart in 1834, and his son Robert junior, the only one of their six children to that date to survive infancy. Neill later served as an assistant commissary-general in the West Indies, where he died in 1852.
Neill’s original drawings and paintings are held by the National Library, the State Libraries of Tasmania and New South Wales, the Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, the Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Australia. The works previously held at the British Museum are now in Neill’s hometown of Edinburgh, at the National Museum of Scotland.
