Liverpool-born William Buelow Gould (1803-1853) had worked as a draftsman for the London printmaker, Rudolph Ackermann, and as a painter for a Staffordshire pottery before being transported to Van Diemen’s Land for theft in 1827. His previous experience saw Gould put to work on the government brickfields soon after arriving in Hobart in December 1827, but within a month he had recorded the first of numerous alcohol-related misdemeanours that, combined with his absences from duty and incidences of theft and forgery, resulted in him being declared ‘a man of very bad character’. In June 1829, he was sentenced to serve three years at the penal station at Macquarie Harbour. Gould was among those marooned at Recherche Bay in September 1829 when some of the convicts on the ship transporting him and 30 other prisoners to Macquarie Harbour mutinied and escaped on the stolen vessel. Gould was rewarded for not taking this opportunity to escape with assignment to Colonial Surgeon, James Scott, for whom Gould produced what the Hobart Town Chronicle later described as one of the colony’s ‘most splendid collections of inimitable drawings’ of plants and birds. Despite this employment, Gould continued to reoffend and was sentenced to servitude at Macquarie Harbour again in 1832. Assigned to the settlement’s surgeon, William de Little, Gould collected and drew botanical specimens, creating the watercolours of Macquarie Harbour marine creatures now contained in his famous ‘Sketchbook of fishes’ as well as a number of portraits of Aboriginal people. Gould completed his sentence at Port Arthur and received his certificate of freedom in 1835. He then went to Launceston, where he was engaged by a coachbuilder as a painter of armorial decorations. Gould went back to Hobart in early 1836. In December of that year he married for the second time (he had abandoned his first wife prior to his being transported) and thereafter worked as a painter in Hobart. Though prolific, Gould’s practice was marred by poverty, alcoholism, ill health and further run-ins with the law. He died in Hobart in 1853, having, in addition to his output as a natural history artist, produced landscapes, seascapes, a small number of portraits, and still lifes in oil on canvas, the latter being those works for which he is best known. Gould’s work is held in major public collections such as the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery; National Gallery of Australia; National Library of Australia; Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office; Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery; and the National Gallery of Victoria.
