Martha Sarah Butler

Martha Sarah Butler (née Asprey, 1811–1864) married Edward Butler in London and travelled with him to Van Diemen's Land, arriving in July 1835. Her first child, Edward Charles, was born the same year; and another four children, three sons and a daughter, were born between 1837 and 1842. According to a Butler family historian, Martha was 'by all accounts a highly cultured, elegant and frivolous woman.' The same writer relates an anecdote about a close call Martha experienced when the ship on which she and Edward travelled to Hobart was wrecked in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel: with the vessel (named The Enchantress) sinking, Martha is said to have risked her life by returning to her cabin to retrieve her jewellery, only to lose it when, as she climbed into a life boat, it slipped out of the handkerchief she had wrapped it in. Martha returned to Europe after Edward's death in 1849. She never remarried, living in London and Paris for a number of years before returning to Hobart. She died at the Butler family home, Stowell, in Battery Point, in July 1864.

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright was among the most talented artists working in Australia before 1850. Born in Surrey, he was raised in an intellectual milieu and had established himself as an artist, collector and essayist by the time he was in his twenties. His man-about-town lifestyle, however, came at a cost. During the 1820s he took to fraud and was suspected also of having poisoned three relatives by whose deaths he stood to benefit financially. In July 1837 he was convicted of forgery and sentenced to transportation to Van Diemen's Land for life. In Hobart, however, he proved a model prisoner and was enabled to continue his work as a painter. His 'superior talents as an Artist' contributed to his being recommended for a ticket of leave in 1845, after which he was commissioned to create portraits for a number of prominent citizens.

Purchased 2009