William Westall (1781-1850), grew up in London and was taught to draw by his elder half-brother Richard, who was drawing master to Princess Victoria. In 1799 he was admitted to the Royal Academy School, but the following year he was appointed landscape artist to the Investigator expedition, led by Matthew Flinders. During the voyage, for which he was paid 300 guineas, he made many pencil-and-wash landscapes, a series of coast profiles in pencil, some representations of Indigenous people (such as Keppel Bay, A Native) and the first known European copies of Aboriginal cave paintings. In 1803, when the Porpoise ran aground on Wreck Reef, Westall's sketches were 'wetted'; when he laid them out to dry, sheep scampered over them. Westall proceeded on the Rolla to China, while the drawings, as official records of the voyage, were taken by Lieutenant Robert Fowler to England. There, at the suggestion of Sir Joseph Banks, they were handed to Richard Westall to be restored (many of them are now in the library of the Royal Commonwealth Society, London). After spending some time in China and India, Westall returned to London in 1805 before travelling to Madeira and Jamaica. Meanwhile, Flinders languished in Mauritius. On commission from the Admiralty, Westall painted nine oils from his Investigator sketches that were later engraved to illustrate Flinders's A Voyage to Terra Australis (1814). Opinions are divided on Westall's facility as an artist; at the time of the voyage he whined about the monotony of the Australian landscape, and later, when painting up his sketched views, he manipulated geographical features to enhance his compositions. The best of Westall's illustrations have been judged to be those in A Picturesque Tour of the River Thames (1828). Elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1812, he exhibited regularly but was never elevated to academician.
