WILLIAM CHARLES PINGUENIT (1836-1914)
Mount Ida (1,176 m - 3,858ft)
Australia (Tasmania)
In Mount Ida and Lake St Clair Tasmania, watercolor, 1881 Art Gallery of New South Wales .
Although this watercolour was awarded second prize in the John Sands competition of 1881, its three judges, E L Montefiore, Eccleston Du Faur and John Garbett, were reported in the 'Telegraph' as stating that for 'purely artistic qualities' they considered it better than the work to which they gave first prize, C E Hern's 'Govett's Gorge looking towards the Valley of the Grose'. However, they believed that Hern's work (also purchased by the Gallery in 1881) suited the requirements of the prize better – 'being an excellent representation of a well-known and very characteristic scene, familiar to all tourists in New South Wales.'
The painter
William Charles Piguenit was born in Hobart, the son of a convict of French Huguenot extraction. He was employed as a mapmaker by the Tasmanian Lands and Survey Department in 1850 and learnt lithography there from the painter Frank Dunnett (1822-91) and Robin Vaughan Hood (best remembered now as a framer, 1802-88) and developed an interest in photography.
Piguenit accompanied James R Scott's expedition to Arthur Plains and Port Davey in 1871, to Lake St Clair in 1873 and exhibited photographs and paintings throughout the 1870s. He moved to Sydney in 1880, settled in Hunter's Hill and travelled extensively in search of landscape subjects. He visited England and Wales in 1898 and 1900. He is perhaps best known for his Tasmanian landscapes and his monumental painting 'The flood on the Darling 1890' (1895) in the Gallery's collection.
About the mountain
In Greek mythology, two sacred mountains are called Mount Ida, the "Mountain of the Goddess": Mount Ida in Crete; and Mount Ida in the ancient Troad region of western Anatolia (in modern-day Turkey) which was also known as the Phrygian Ida in classical antiquity and is the mountain that is mentioned in the Iliad of Homer and the Aeneid of Virgil. Both are associated with the mother goddess in the deepest layers of pre-Greek myth, in that Mount Ida in Anatolia was sacred to Cybele, who is sometimes called Mater Idaea ("Idaean Mother"), while Rhea, often identified with Cybele, put the infant Zeus to nurse with Amaltheia at Mount Ida in Crete. Thereafter, his birthplace was sacred to Zeus, the king and father of Greek gods and goddesses. Several Mountains around the world still have the name of Mount Ida : there is one in Antarctica, British Columbia (Canada),
in United States of America (Colorado), in Greece (Crete), in Turkey and in Australia (Tasmania).