Captain Haughton Forrest

Place: Boulogne-Sur-Mer

Born: 1826

Death: 1925

Biography:

Haughton Forrest was a French-born Australian artist who specialized in landscapes and maritime scenes. He was born in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France in 1826 and died in Melton Mowbray, Tasmania in 1925. He was one of ten children born to a military family and spent his early years in France, Jamaica, and Germany. He obtained a commission in the Honourable Artillery Company of London and later in the 31st Royal Monmouth Light Infantry, advancing to the rank of captain before resigning to take a civil service position with the British Post Office. In 1858, he married a widow, Henrietta Bunce, and they had two sons and two daughters. Forrest began painting in southern England and is believed to have been self-taught. In 1875, he took up a land grant in Kittoland, an English settlement in the state of Paraná, Brazil, but found the environment unamenable. The following year, he took up a similar land grant in northeastern Tasmania on the Ringarooma River, but soon abandoned that enterprise as well. He then moved to Sorell, where he held a number of municipal positions including Bailiff of Crown Lands, Inspector of Nuisances and Superintendent of Police. In 1881, he surrendered all of those offices and moved to Wellington Hamlets, a suburb of Hobart, to devote himself entirely to art. In 1899, his views of Mount Wellington and Hobart, some based on photographs by John Watt Beattie, were chosen for Australia's first set of pictorial stamps. Forrest produced over 3,000 paintings in various formats and media during his almost seventy-year career. His estate was very modest and it is only in recent years that interest in his paintings has revived.