William Westall (artist) - Assessment of His Work

Assessment of His Work

Westall's work during the voyage of the Investigator has been the subject of much analysis and comment, most of it critical. In terms of output, the 140 drawing he produced during the voyage compares unfavourably with the 2000 sketches produced by Bauer in the same period. Moreover some of Westall's drawings are so lacking in detail as to appear almost cursory. He has also been criticised for his choice of subjects: his primary task was to record landscapes, but in the latter half of the voyage he mostly neglected them in favour of portraying people and events.

But the main criticism levelled against Westall's Investigator work relates to his taking of artistic license. There was an expectation that Westall's pictures would be serve as accurate objective records, and in many cases they are: his coastal profiles in particular have been praised for their accuracy. In some cases, however, Westall has introduced substantial inaccuracies. When an Aborigine was shot in the back, Westall's sketch showed the gunshot wound in the chest; and his sketch of Wreck Reef shows emergent coral reef, when in fact the coral remained always underwater.

These inaccuracies were compounded when Westall came to convert his sketches into oil paintings. A devotee of the picturesque aesthetic ideal, Westall sought to impose this ideal upon the Australian landscape. To this end he manipulated the foreground of his paintings heavily, rearranging and inserting features to obtain a desirable composition. Examples include his Entrance to Port Lincoln from behind Memory Cove, February 1802, which superimposes the foreground from one sketch of Port Lincoln upon the background of another; and his Part of King George Sound, on the South Coast of New Holland, which is based upon his drawing of King George's Sound, but has a completely revised foreground, including the insertion of a Eucalyptus that Westall sketched at Spencer Gulf, 1800 kilometres to the east.

Westall's later work has not been subjected to much critical analysis, but his contemporary and friend John Landseer considered that he was under-rated, and a better artist than William Hodges and John Webber, the artists on James Cook's second and third expeditions respectively. Landseer thought that Westall would have received more recognition, were he not "a mild and unobtrusive man, whilst the others were pushing and solicitous".