Background
William Charles Duke was born in Cork, to Catherine, wife of carpenter Charles Duke. He was baptised on 16 July 1815 in Street Anne, Shannon, and followed his father into carpentry.
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William Duke
Edit ProfileCareer
Duke worked as a scene-painter and mechanist at Sydney’s Royal Victoria Theatre until 1844, when he spent several months in New Zealand. When he returned to Australia it was to Hobart, where he landed on 7 May 1845 aboard the Sir John Franklin. Lucy and their now two children joined him from Sydney in September, by which time he was established as a scene-painter at the Hobart Town Royal Victoria Theatre in Campbell Street.
In Tasmania, Duke first began to work as a portrait painter.
His earliest painting is a portrait believed to be of Mrs Wilkinson, née Eldridge, signed and dated October 1845. In 1846, Duke produced some of the earliest painted depictions of individual Māori when he finished two small portraits apparently begun in New Zealand, and undertook a larger-scale portrait of one of the Māori men transported for imprisonment in Tasmania"s Maria Island in November 1846, during the early New Zealand wars.
Duke worked with mechanist Richard Johnson on two moving, circular cityscape dioramas (views of Constantinople, Florence, Jerusalem and Venice) which were exhibited in Sydney and Hobart in 1847 to paying audiences. At the same time, he came to local notoriety with the publication of four paintings of local whaling operations, and began to take commissions to produce paintings of ships to be used in advertising.
In 1852, Duke followed the lure of the Victorian gold rush, relocating with his growing family to country Victoria, where he continued portrait painting and theatre work.
Duke"s last commission was for Joseph Andrew Rowe, an American circus owner who spent two years touring in and around Melbourne from 1852. Rowe had commissioned paintings and decorations from Duke for his American Circus and Duke was into his fourth week of work when he became ill and went home. The generous Mr Rowe initiated a "subscription-paper" contributing ten pound to the fund.
