Francis Nixon

Francis Russell Nixon (1803-1879) photographer, artist and Anglican clergyman, arrived in Hobart in 1843 to take up the role of Bishop of Tasmania. Nixon was the son of a clergyman who exhibited watercolours at the Royal Academy and was a friend of JMW Turner. After graduating from Oxford, Nixon worked as a chaplain in Naples; then at parishes in Kent before being consecrated Bishop of Tasmania in 1842. In addition to his pastoral duties in the colony, Nixon took an interest in matters such as education and convicts and became very active in intellectual and artistic circles. He recorded his extensive travels around the colony in sketches and watercolours; and with men such as John Skinner Prout, James Bicheno and George Boyes formed the Hobart Town Sketching Club. He was on the organising committees for exhibitions in 1845 and 1846, in which examples of his own works were exhibited. He lent works from his private collection to later exhibitions and in October 1858 held a show of his own at the Mechanics Institute. He was one of the first in Tasmania to show a keen interest in photography, showing daguerreotypes to Thomas Bock in 1843. Nixon was a very competent wet-plate photographer, though very few of the many photographs he took in Tasmania are extant. His photographs of the Oyster Cove residents are his best known works.