An evening at Yarra Cottage, Port Stephens

Maria Caroline Brownrigg came to New South Wales in 1852 when her husband became superintendent of the Australian Agricultural Company’s operations in the Hunter Valley. In 1856 the family moved to Yarra Cottage at Carrington on the north-west shore of Port Stephens, where she made this portrait of her six children. For many women of Maria’s class, painting and sketching were both a useful form of personal recordkeeping and a signifier of leisure and propriety. ‘Ladies might do much to assist their husbands in the arduous task of establishing themselves securely and agreeably in a new country,’ stated a 1849 guide for Australian Agricultural Company employees. ‘The good conduct of home matters must depend on them just as much there as anywhere else.’ Accordingly, Maria Brownrigg’s only known work documents a dignified Victorian drawing room, and in its meticulous, time-consuming execution it speaks volumes about notions of femininity. For this reason, and despite their supposedly ‘amateur’ status, works like this are highly prized by curators and historians for their richness of detail about costume, interiors and decorative arts; and for what they reveal about the colonists’ aspirations to gentility.

Purchased 2017