WILLIAM CHARLES PIGUENIT (1836 -1914)
Mount Olympus (1,472 m - 4,829 ft)
Australia (Tasmania)
In Mount Olympus, Lake St Clair, Tasmania, the source of the Derwent
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Art Gallery of New South Wales
The mountain
Mount Olympus (1,472 m - 4,829 ft ) - not to be confused with the most famous mount Mytikas -Mount Olympus in Greece - is a mountain peak within the Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park in central Tasmania, Australia. It ranks at the 12th highest mountain in Tasmania and the 68th highest mountain in Australia. The nearest peaks are Mount Byron, Mount Cuvier, Mount Ida, Mount Manfred, Mount Hugel, and Mount Gould. Mount Olympus belongs to the Tasmania Connoisseurs Peaks Challenge peak list. The nearest towns, villages or cities to Mount Olympus are the town of Queenstown (46.7km), the village of Tullah (53.4km) and the town of Rosebery (56.4km).
The nearest road to Mount Olympus is a sealed road that is un-named (9.18km ). The nearest sealed road to Mount Olympus is the Lyell Highway (13.6km away).
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The painter
William Charles Piguenit also known as W.C. Piguenit or Bill Piguenit was a australian landscape painter, amateur photographer, draughtsman and explorer, born in Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land. The family can be traced back to Pons, in the province of Saintonge, France, from which, as Huguenots, they escaped after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 to settle in Bristol, Somerset. William Charles attended Cambridge House Academy in Hobart; a school report of 18 December 1849 praises his 'mapping, particularly that of Van Diemen’s Land’. In September 1850, as an assistant draughtsman, he joined the Tasmanian Lands and Survey Department where much of his time was spent preparing maps of Tasmania.
When Piguenit exhibited at Melbourne in 1870, showing a watercolour sketch of Mount Wellington from the Huon Road, the Daily Telegraph of 20 July called him 'a young artist who gives promise of better things’. His love for the Tasmanian landscape and his improved artistic ability led to his being invited to accompany James R. Scott’s expedition to Arthur Plains and Port Davey in March 1871 as official artist. The results of the trip formed the basis for later illustrations in the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia and in R.M. Johnston’s Systematic Account of the Geology of Tasmania. Having won another silver medal from the academy in 1875 for Mount Olympus, Lake St Clair, Tasmania (see above), Piguenit sent five of his Grose Valley oil landscapes to the academy’s 1876 exhibition and was awarded a certificate of merit for one, though the Sydney Mail critic was tepid in his praise: 'It would be enough to say that they are all very nicely painted and that all have about the same colour and tone’.
Regarded as the leading Australian-born landscape painter in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Piguenit was a founding committee member of the Art Society of New South Wales (elected Vice President in 1886) and regularly showed work in its exhibitions. He was represented in many major exhibitions, such as the 1880 Melbourne International, and he received many awards, including silver medals in 1874 and 1875 from the NSW Academy of Art, two second prizes at the 1888 Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition and gold medals from the 1883 Calcutta International and the 1888 Queensland Art Society and Tasmanian Juvenile Industries exhibitions. He was hung in the Paris Salon in 1893 and at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1894 (Scene on the Upper Nepean River, now AGNSW). A Tasmanian view near Prince of Wales Bay was presented by the Government House Literary Society to their founder and patron, Lady Hamilton, on her departure in 1892.
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