Item #106001 The Adventures of a Bohemian. Henry Stow PINCOTT.
The Adventures of a Bohemian

The Adventures of a Bohemian

Geelong, Steven Wrathall & Co., Printers and Publishers, 'Evening News' Offices, 1891.

Duodecimo (168 x 118 mm), [3]-93 pages (but complete - the first and last blank leaves line the flyleaves).

Flush-cut red cloth lettered in black on the front cover; cloth a little marked, lightly stained, and rubbed at the extremities, with trifling wear to the foot of the spine and minimal loss to silverfish at the rear; endpapers lightly marked; inner hinges a little cracked and tender, with the staples a little rusty at the rear; trifling signs of use; overall a very good copy with the early ownership signature of E. Clarksdale.

Henry Stow (Harry) Pincott (1848-1893) was a painter, teacher and scene-painter. He arrived with his parents from England in 1853, and the family settled in Geelong. He began his schooling at Geelong Grammar. From the late 1860s, he was a regular exhibitor of his artworks. In January 1881 he embarked from Sydney for New York, little dreaming 'that I was destined to be away seven years, and that I would go through a variety of ups and downs such as most Bohemians have to endure'. This book is his account of those wandering years in America and Britain. He spent three years in America, 'painting scenery and transparencies as well as landscapes in oils. He then sailed to Britain and toured the English counties, first as a scene-painter and actor for a theatrical group, then as an itinerant painter. He was back in Geelong by 1889' ('The Dictionary of Australian Artists ... to 1870'). A short article in the 'Western Mail' (Saturday 4 March 1893) reports his death from delirium tremens five days earlier in Fremantle Prison. 'He was brought in from North Fremantle ... in an unconscious condition. It appears that deceased [sic] was a heavy drinker, and that latterly he had had several fits, and was in a state of delirium' from which he never rallied. Not in Ferguson; Trove records only the Deakin University and National Library of Australia copies.

Item #106001

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