PROUT
JOHN SKINNER
“A very fine piece of highland scenery”
“Your own huge mountain (Mount Wellington) has produced in my mind on one day the most powerful sensation of the presence of beauty and grandeur, and on the next of the presence of a leviathan ugliness which has been both painful and oppressive.”
The precis above was also reported: “He himself [Prout], for instance, sometimes felt when gazing on Mount Wellington a mental impression of its majestic beauty, while at other times its aspect was forced upon the mirror of his memory as if it were a model of leviathan ugliness.”
J. S. Prout was prolific in Tasmania in the mid 1840s. His influence on Tasmanian painting during this time was striking. His portrayal of the mountain varies from a wildly romantic, picturesque aspect, through to simple backdrop to the city.
In 1846 a Sydney Morning Herald review of John Skinner Prout's Tasmania Illustrated praised his painting of Mount Wellington (entitled The Female Factory, from Proctor's Quarry)
“We like [this] better perhaps than any of its companions because it gives us a very fine piece of highland scenery’. In a diorama of Australian views exhibited extensively in England from 1850 to 1855 Prout included a painting of the same subject, commenting that the bold and rugged sides [of Mount Wellington] present a magnificent appearance’. ”