Description: what we see in this image

This left facing, ½ length, seated portrait depicts emancipist convict Mr Tompson (aged 52) as a respectable gentleman farmer of substance.

He is posed in a domestic setting, seated on an elbow, or carver, chair (probably of colonial manufacture) with an elaborately tasselled, deep yellow [velvet] curtain draped across the wall behind him.

He wears a three-piece ensemble of unmatched suiting, as was typical of the period, comprising a long-tailed, single-breasted dark wool jacket or coat, with notched lapels, peaked shoulders and fitted sleeves with turn back/button-fastening cuffs, over a double-breasted fawn-coloured waistcoat fastening with flat [brass] buttons, notched lapels and two pockets, with a black ribbon watch fob and winding key just visible above a pair of mid grey trousers. His [finely pleated] white linen shirt is high-collared, wrapped with a pleated black stock, or neckcloth, and worn with a small rectangular gold pin set with a brown stone or hair, perhaps a sentimental token. Mr Tompson is clean shaven and his own dark hair has been fashionably groomed and brushed-forward in the romantic style favoured during the early 19th century.

Context: what we know about this image

Charles Tompson (1784?-1871), emancipist farmer, was convicted at Warwick, England, in March 1802, and arrived in Sydney in the Coromandel in May 1804. Employed for four years in the office of Commissary John Palmer; he later kept a shop at the corner of Pitt and Hunter Streets, and owned ‘Clydesdale’, a 700-acre (283 ha) farm near Windsor, between 1818 and 1851. Tompson married Jane Armytage on 25 August 1822, following the death of his first wife, Elizabeth, née Boggis.

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What we see in this image

This left facing 3/4 profile portrait miniature shows Eber Bunker at about 57 years of age. He is elegantly portrayed in a dark blue, double-breasted woollen jacket with double-notched lapels and brass buttons, worn over a white waistcoat and linen shirt, with a stand collar and finely pleated, ruffled front, a white stock wrapped around the throat, tied in a small bow at the neck. Bunker is clean shaven; his dark grey hair has been left in long curls on top, cropped close around the sides, and brushed forward at the front, with a curled fringe arranged across his brow.

What we know about this image

Captain Eber Bunker (1760-1836) was a master mariner and landholder who has been called the ‘father of Australian whaling’. Commander of the William and Ann, one of three whaling ships chartered for use as convict transports for the third fleet in 1791, on arrival in the colony Bunker took his ship, and another vessel of the Third Fleet, Britannia, on the first whaling expedition in Australian waters, returning to Port Jackson with a whale each which they then boiled and processed on shore. Bunker made several return whaling expeditions to New South Wales before bringing his family to the colony in August 1806, and set up home at a place known as Bunker’s Hill in the Rocks overlooking the Harbour. Following the death of his first wife Margrett in March 1808, Bunker married Margaret Macfarlane. After the death of his second wife while he was away at sea. Bunker was married a third time, on 28 April 1823, to Ann, widow of William Minchin. By this time Bunker had become a landholder at ‘Bulanaming’, Bankstown and the Hunter Valley. He made a final whaling voyage in the Alfred to the Santa Cruz Islands in 1824-25, and died at ‘Collingwood’, near Liverpool, on 27 September 1836, aged 74.

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