William Westall - Career

Career

By 1809, the Admiralty were feeling pressure to show some results of the voyage; yet Flinders still had not been released by the French, so a published account of the voyage was still some years off. To fill the void, the Admiralty commissioned Westall to produce nine oil paintings of Australian scenes. These took Westall three years to complete. A selection were exhibited in 1810, and again in 1812, and as a result Westall won election as an Associate of the Royal Academy. When work on Flinders' A Voyage to Terra Australis got underway in 1811, it was Westall's oil paintings that became the basis of the engravings to be published therein. Westall himself took responsibility for squaring down the paintings to drawings of the actual size to be published, and these were then handed over to engravers, who produced intaglio plates using a combination of etching and direct engraving. A Voyage to Terra Australis was eventually published in 1814, and shortly afterwards Westall published the engravings separately under the title Views of Australian Scenery.

In 1811 Westall published Foreign Scenery, a collection of landscapes depicting Madeira, the Cape of Good Hope, China and India. This was a financially successful venture, and attracted the attention of publisher Rudolf Ackermann, who approached him to contribute to several of his works. Westall ended up doing a good deal of work for Ackermann, including views of several universities and public schools for Ackermann's series of school histories; and over a hundred drawing for Great Britain Illustrated (1830). He also worked for John Murray, such as several contributions to A Picturesque Tour of the River Thames (for which he shared authorship with Samuel Owen 1828).