John Skinner Prout was a British painter, writer, lithographer and art teacher who worked in Australia in the 1840s.
Biography
John Skinner Prout was born on 19 December 1805 in Plymouth, Devon, England. He is the eldest child of John Prout and Maria Skinner. His father was the elder brother of watercolourist Samuel Prout. Skinner Prout married Maria Heathilla on 19 June 1828. They had eight children; four daughters and four sons. On 3 December 1838, in London, Prout was elected a member of the New Society of Painters in water colours. Hoping to improve his fortunes Prout emigrated to Australia with wife and eight children, arriving in Sydney 14 December 1840. Amongst the possessions that he brought with him to the colony of New South Wales was a lithographic press, which enabled him to set up the 'J. S. Prout and Co. Australian Lithographic Establishment.' In the first four years of his residence in Sydney, between 1840 and 1844, Prout undertook a number of sketching tours in the districts around Sydney. Prout followed the route of many artists of the period, journeying west across the Blue Mountains towards Bathurst, south to Broulee and the Illawarra district, and north to Newcastle and Port Stephens. Returning from these travels, Prout would work up his sketches into finished works in lithographs, watercolour and oil paintfor sale. Whilst Prout was a resident in Sydney held exhibitions and presented lectures on the technique of drawing and painting in watercolour. His works original watercolours sold well and he produced a series of lithographic views of the colony, a number of which were in the 1842 publication Sydney illustrated. Due to the lacklustre market for his works, competition by more established artists such as Conrad Martens, and the depressed economic circumstances of Sydney during the 1840s, Prout and his family moved once more. After a visit to the colony of Van Diemen's Land in January he arrived with his family in April 1844. Here Prout was more successful, drawing the patronage of the Governor Sir John Franklin and his wife and held his first exhibition there in 1845. Prout returned to England in June 1848. Upon his return, at the Western Literary and Scientific Institution, Leicester Square, he exhibited his work on life in the Australian colonies, and lectured on convicts, bushrangers and Aboriginals. In the 1850s he produced illustrated handbooks detailing his travels in Australia. Among them , 1852 and A Magical Trip to the Gold Regions, 1853. These publications have raised the question as the whether Prout returned to Australia, as he claimed the sketches for the illustrated volumes were made on site in 1852. Prout died at Kentish Town, London, on 29 August 1876. His grandson was the illustrator Harold Copping who married in 1888 his cousin Violet Amy Prout daughter of son Victor Albert.
John Skinner Prout, Journal of a voyage from Plymouth to Sydney, in Australia: on board the emigrant ship Royal Sovereign, with a short description of Sydney. Online at National Library of Australia and the State Library of New South Wales
John Skinner Prout, Prout's dioramic views of Australia, illustrative of convict and emigrant life: exhibited in the theatre of the Western Literary and Scientific Institution. National Library of Australia
Broadsides promoting Prout's moving panorama of a voyage to Australia and visit to the gold fields exhibited daily at 309 Regent Street, London, 1853-1854. Online at State Library of New South Wales,
John Skinner Prout, An illustrated handbook of the voyage to Australia and a visit to the gold fields. Online at State Library of New South Wales .
Brown, T., Kolenberg, H., & Tasmanian Museum Art Gallery.. Skinner Prout in Australia, 1840–48, Hobart: Tasmanian Museum Art Gallery..
