Edmund Edgar (1804–1854), engraver and portrait painter, was convicted of robbery in London in 1825 and sentenced to transportation for life. When he reached Sydney in 1826 he was assigned to the artist Augustus Earle, who required a skilled printmaker’s assistance with the production of Views in Australia – an album containing the first lithographic views printed in the colony. Edgar worked for a time as a teacher at Gilchrist's School for boys and was recalled by one student, the artist Samuel Elyard, as being 'glad to impart a knowledge of Art to anyone who had a taste for it'. Edgar received a ticket of leave in 1838 and a full pardon in 1844, but the few known surviving works by his hand confirm that he was working as a portraitist before this time. In the late 1840s, he was listed as occupying an address in The Rocks and he is also believed to have lived for a time in Parramatta. He died a pauper in the Sydney Benevolent Asylum in June 1854.
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