Description

Extended Data

DAAO URL

https://www.daao.org.au/bio/eustace-reveley-mitford

Birth Place

England, UK

Biography

cartoonist, illustrator, journalist, sailor and farmer, was a relative of the popular English novelist Mary Russell Mitford. He married Eliza Sanders in England and they came to South Australia in 1839 on board the Katherine Stewart Forbes . There he had a varied career (and ten children), turning to farming and to professional illustrating in the 1860s. Mitford made copious contributions to the Adelaide press, especially to Pasquin , a satirical weekly of which he was founder, editor, proprietor, publisher, writer and occasional cartoonist from January 1867 until he died. According to Stuart (122), this Adelaide satirical weekly (1867-70) was not illustrated, but NLA has Log Rolling , a lithograph 22 × 28.5 cm (#S10481) from the issue of 8 July 1868 (see file), while the 1882 reprint (with a Woodbury-type frontispiece after a photo of Mitford by Townsend Duyrea ) has a full-page lithographic cartoon inserted. (original copies SLSA, SLV only.) Mitford, who adopted the name 'Pasquin’ as his nom de guerre , has been called 'South Australia’s first inspired graphic satirist’ by Mahood, exemplified in his pencil and watercolour parody of an elaborate classical monument, Design for a Trophy To Be Erected at Tipara in Honour of the “Tax upon Grass” by the Grateful Squatters (Mortlock Library, ill. DAA ), which was probably intended for a lithograph, though none is known. Dealing with accusations of corruption against Surveyor-General George Goyder , it brings wit and irony to the neo-classical fashion for erecting monuments to great men (the summit of Pasquin’s monument is a gallows) in a comparable manner to English satiric caricatures by Gillray or Cruikshank. Another of Pasquin’s visual political satires, Priests of the Temple in Legislative Assembly (1864), incorporates references to Egyptian, Graeco-Roman and Persian mythology in its depiction of squatter-parliamentarians gambling away the future of South Australia. A published cartoon given to 'M.T. Mitford’, Satan’s Factory (1864), is doubtless also his, the initials a misprint. In 1993 Michael Treloar was selling two original albumen print photographs mounted on card of political satires by 'E.R. Mitford’ : Priests of the Temple and The Prophets who found Honor in their own country and none elsewhere (1864), each with a slightly damaged sheet identifying the caricatured men with chamber pots on their heads waiting for Satan to finish mixing his 'Honor’ mixture out of various vices, etc. As Mahood points out, 'The particular interest of these ingenious prints is that they show not merely the erudition of the artist, but also the cultural level of the colonists to whom they were addressed, and who, judging by Pasquin’s fame and popularity at the time, thoroughly appreciated them.’ Mitford died on 24 October 1869, aged fifty-eight. He was buried in St Mary’s Cemetery in the Adelaide suburb of Sturt, where a monument was later erected to his memory. Writers: Bruce, CandiceKerr, Joan Date written: 1992 Last updated: 1989

Born

b. 1811

Summary

Colonial era Adelaide cartoonist, illustrator, journalist, sailor and farmer

Gender

Male

Died

24 October 1869

Age at death

58