Heritage Treasures (Number 84)

By Brian Andrews, Archdiocese of Hobart Heritage Officer

The interior of St Joseph’s Church, Hobart, is graced by three precious oil paintings set into the wall behind the altar. Dating from 1830 and painted in London, the central painting depicting the Resurrection is by the expatriate American artist Mather Brown and has occupied this location since the church’s opening in 1841.

Flanking the Mather Brown work are the two best-known paintings by William Paul Dowling (c.1824–1877), namely, Our Lady and St Joseph, both dating from 1856. Dowling arrived in Hobart Town from Dublin on 29 November 1849 as a political prisoner convicted to a life sentence for sedition, giving his profession as ‘artist’. He was granted a ticket of leave upon arrival and received a full pardon in 1857, working at various times in Hobart and Launceston as a painter, engraver and photographer.

The Dowling paintings came as a consequence of Bishop Willson’s efforts in 1856 to make St Joseph’s, his humble pro-cathedral, into one more attuned to his ecclesiological ideals and those of his close friend Pugin, England’s greatest early-Victorian architect and designer. The works included a new sacristy along the Harrington Street flank of the church and the enlargement of the sanctuary. This latter necessitated removal of two small sacristies and a gallery for the organ and choir situated above and behind the high altar. The gallery was entered by two doors from the presbytery adjacent to the rear wall of the church. With the removal of the gallery the doors lost their function, opening halfway up the wall into space. A clever solution was found to these doorways open to nowhere by commissioning Dowling to paint the aforementioned Virgin & Child and St Joseph, their frames having pointed tops so as to exactly cover up the former openings.

To the current eye, the gilt frames around the Dowling paintings seem very slender compared to the proportions of the works themselves. As completed in 1856, the appearance of the church was very different by virtue of elaborate Puginesque painted decoration on the sanctuary walls. This included decorative ‘frames’ around the paintings having the typical dimensions of conventional wooden frames, thereby ‘anchoring’ the paintings to the wall. Surmounting these frames were painted scrolls bearing the texts ‘Mater Christi Ora pro nobis’ (Mother of Christ Pray for us) and ‘Sancte Iosephe Ora pro nobis’ (Saint Joseph Pray for us). All this was painted out last century.