'Colonel Paterson's Scrapbook'

When, in 1809, he knew he would be returning to Britain, colonial hand, Colonel William Paterson, took great care to commission watercolours from John Lewin and George Robert Evans, arguably the leading artists in the colony.  This comparatively ambitious project involved importing both drawing paper and watercolour paints into New South Wales, and the resulting work offers an intriguing snapshot of how what was meant as a penal colony, a place of punitive retribution,  could be perceived as something very different as it had thus developed.  Besides this issue, the  lecture will investigate the role of scrapbooks more generally, and how the watercolours commissioned by Paterson for his own have a significant biographical significance.