Description

Extended Data

DAAO URL

https://www.daao.org.au/bio/william-moffitt

Birth Place

Liverpool, England, UK

Biography

engraver, stationer and bookseller, was born in Liverpool, England, where he served his apprenticeship as a bookbinder. On 21 July 1823 he was sentenced to seven years’ transportation for stealing tea, although it was not until July 1827 that he arrived at Sydney on board the Guildford . Stated to be single and literate, he was assigned to the Colonial Engineer’s Department as a clerk. In December 1829 he married Mary Anne Galliott, a 16-year-old free immigrant, and they had six children, three of whom survived infancy. After the expiry of his sentence, Moffitt established a successful business as a bookbinder, stationer, engraver and copperplate printer, first at 8 King Street and then, from August 1833, at 23 Pitt Street. His business did well in the prosperous 1830s, capitalising on the increased market resulting from the rise in free immigration that supported a local, permanent and self-sufficient printmaking industry. In the 1830s and 1840s he was active as a bookseller, publisher and distributor of books, especially directories and almanacs. His Australian Sheet Almanack for the Year 1835 was embellished with several illustrations, a 'neatly engraved view of Darlinghurst, Sydney College (as completed), The Catholic Chapel and surrounding scenery’. Moffitt was also a successful city businessman. His interests centred on city property and finance and for a time he was a director of the Australian Joint Stock Bank. Part of his printing business involved the design and engraving of trade cards, billheads and banknotes, although in many cases it is clear that he simply copied conventional designs used by English engravers to signify particular occupations. For instance, an advertisement he engraved for Edward Fagan’s Wellington Brewery in Sydney shows a Bacchanalian figure astride a barrel, a conventional English symbol for a brewery. Moffitt also did work for the Australian Grand Lodge of Independent Oddfellows of which he was a founding member (in 1836). He appears to have employed other engravers, including John Carmichael , for some of his commissions. Moffitt was interested in the fine arts and helped promote them through his shop. He also had a private collection of paintings. In August 1842 he had on display a collection of oil and watercolour views of Sydney and neighbourhood to be raffled; a decade earlier he had sold tickets in some of John Lhotsky 's art unions, winning first prize in one. For five years he allowed his city rooms to be used to exhibit engravings from the Scottish Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts and sold tickets in their raffles. These art unions were immensely popular in the 1840s and he personally participated in them too, winning a major prize, R.S. Lauder’s oil painting, The Gow Chrom Reluctantly Conducting the Glee Maiden to a Place of Safety , from the London Art Union. Its arrival in the colony was an event, the Sydney Morning Herald of 16 March 1847 gave more than a column to describing it and declared it 'decidedly the best modern work of art we have seen in the colony’. Moffitt exhibited his trophy in his shop, apparently gratis, together with 'several other good oil paintings’ on view to 'respectable persons after 2 o’clock p.m.’. In 1847 Moffitt lent his Glee Maiden and five other paintings to the first exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia. The others were rural landscapes by an unidentified artist named Smith, which he could have purchased in Britain, which he revisited in the early 1840s. He contributed nothing to the 1849 art exhibition but showed his Glee Maiden and another London Art Union prize, Plucking Ducks at the 1857 Fine Art Exhibition held at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts. (In the 1847 exhibition his contributions were the property of 'Mr. W. Moffitt’, but by 1857 they belonged to 'W. Moffitt Esq.’) Early in 1874 Moffitt sold his business to Thomas R. Yeo, but he continued to live in Pitt Street until his death on 31 July 1874. Survived by his three daughters, he was buried in Camperdown Cemetery (now St Stephen’s, Newtown). His estate was valued at £230,000, an immense fortune at the time. Writers: Neville, Richard Date written: 1992 Last updated: 2011

Born

b. 1802

Summary

Engraver, stationer and bookseller. After the expiry of his convict sentence, Moffitt established a successful business as a bookbinder, stationer, engraver and copperplate printer in Sydney.

Gender

Male

Died

31 July 1874

Age at death

72