Anna Frances Walker

Anna Frances Walker (1830–1913), botanical artist and collector, was one of the thirteen children of Thomas Walker, a high-ranking colonial public servant, and his wife Anna Elizabeth, the daughter of merchant and landowner John Blaxland. It is said that Anna Elizabeth Walker 'was interested in natural history. She stuffed animals and bred silkworms. Some of the silk she produced was taken to China and woven into a scarf which she wore on her wedding day in 1823.' Anna Frances was born at her father’s property, Rhodes, on the Parramatta River and was two when her father moved the family to an estate (also named Rhodes) near Longford in Van Diemen's Land. Anna made regular return visits to Sydney, however, and growing up spent much time at Newington, the riverside estate established by her maternal grandfather in the early nineteenth century. Her maternal grandmother, Harriott, instilled in her a love of nature and the bush, and Newington House 'being a centre where all the greatest people in the colony visited, Miss Walker had opportunities of getting floral specimens for her work from explorers, naval and military officers, scientific men generally, and learned travellers, whom she was constantly meeting, and who … gladly supplied her with the material for her great work'. In Sydney, she received lessons in watercolour painting from Henry Curzon Allport, a contemporary of John Glover’s and the brother-in-law of artist Mary Morton Allport, who is described as Australia's first professional woman artist. She corresponded with botanist Ferdinand von Mueller and collected New South Wales specimens for him between 1892 and 1895.

Walker exhibited with the New South Wales Academy of Arts from 1873, in which year she was awarded a gold medal for the flower paintings she submitted to the London International Exhibition. Her watercolours of Australian flowers were shown at the Sydney International Exhibition in 1879 along with fifteen panoramic landscapes awarded a first degree of merit; and she exhibited seven separate groups of flower paintings at the Melbourne International Exhibition in 1880. Her Flowers of New South Wales – an album of ten lithographs of her botanical drawings – was published in 1887, at Walker’s own expense. Also a writer of songs and verse, Walker produced series of postcards illustrated with her botanical illustrations, and in her garden at Rhodes 'she took a delight in growing the old-fashioned species which are rarely to be met with in modern borders'. Walker never married and following her father's death in 1861 she returned to live in the house she’d been born in. 'Although she lived almost in retirement for the past years, she led the busiest of lives, and was every moment occupied', her obituary in the Sydney Mail read. Some 1700 examples of her illustrations of specimens she'd collected in Tasmania and New South Wales were acquired by bibliophile David Scott Mitchell and, consequently, are now held in the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Though proudly and resolutely an 'amateur', Walker was prolific. An article about the Blaxland family published in a Sydney newspaper in 1910 stated that 'Miss Anna Walker … has painted every specimen of Australian wildflower, fungi and berry. She may be considered the pioneer delineator of our flora and has received letters of thanks and admiration from the late Queen Victoria upon her sending watercolours of our choicest flowers to Her Majesty.' Walker is now counted alongside contemporaries such as Louisa Atkinson, Louisa Anne Meredith, and the sisters Harriet and Helena Scott as one of Australia's most significant colonial women artists, and one of our most productive botanical artists full stop.

Purchased 2022