ELLIS, HORACE PAYNE (1808-1890)

**PRICE ON APPLICATION**
 
"Paper Mill, Lewes, UK" (c.1825)
pencil
16.5 x 22.5cm
initialled lower left
*Rev. Thomas Hassall (1794-1866) of ‘Denbigh’, Cobbitty, NSW
*Charles McIntosh (1805-1875), ‘Denbigh’, Cobbitty, NSW
*Charles McIntosh Jnr (1845-1938), ‘Denbigh’, Cobbitty, NSW
*Estate of Mrs Lorna Mary Inglis (née McIntosh, widow of Mr Richard Reginald Inglis), formerly of properties ‘Applewood’, Cobbitty, NSW and ‘Denbigh’, Cobbitty, NSW (the latter built by Charles Hook in 1822, purchased by the Reverend Thomas Hassall in 1827 and purchased by Charles McIntosh in 1867)
 
Ellis H.E.I.C.S (Honorable East India Company Service) is a forgotten English Soldier, Artist and Convict transported to Australia in the early 19th century. Little is known of Horace Payne Ellis’ early years or education in England, though his level of skill is clearly indicative of some sort of formal art training. Certainly, he claimed to have been occupied as an artist and portrait painter in his youth. Ellis joined the Honourable East India Company’s Madras Artillery Service at an entry rank of Acting Corporal in Westminster on 10 April 1829. On his attestation papers he described his former occupation as artist. He sailed from England to British India aboard the ship Minerva, arriving in Madras on 13 August 1829. There is much to suggest that the military career of Ellis was an abject failure. By 1836, his rank had slipped to that of gunner in the 2nd Artillery Battalion. In September of that year, he faced his first East India Company court-martial at St Thomas Mount, Madras, for the alleged crime of ‘refusing to attend divine service’. Found guilty, Ellis was sentenced to twelve months’ solitary confinement. In mid-October 1837, he faced a second court-martial, this time for ‘disobedience and mutinous conduct’. The military court at St Thomas Mount again found him guilty, but this time he was sentenced to be executed by gunshot. His death sentence was later commuted to seven years’ transportation. Ellis was one of eighteen ‘European prisoners of the Crown’ transported from Madras aboard Captain Thomas Symers’ ship Caledonia on 20 August 1838. The Caledonia arrived into Port Jackson, or Sydney, on 17 December 1838. The ship’s records recorded that Ellis was thirty years-old, Protestant, single, a labourer and a soldier in the horse artillery, and that he had received multiple prison terms and hundreds of lashes as punishment during the course of his career with the Honourable East India Company. The ship’s records also documented his prior occupation as ‘portrait painter’ and included a judgment by his military employer of his general character as ‘bad’. It is not known to which master Ellis was assigned during the first years of his sentence in New South Wales. However, the fact that it was the Parramatta Bench that granted him his first Ticket of Leave Passport on 9 June 1842 and that an 1843 newspaper list of unclaimed letters gives his address as Parramatta, suggests that he had been located in or in the vicinity of Parramatta for some time. The years of the mid-1840s appear to have been artistically productive for Ellis. He shipped a case of paintings home to England in December 1845, though sadly the ultimate destination of those paintings remains unknown. In 1847, his painting Rocky Scenery was hung at the Australian Library in Bent Street, Sydney in the Exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts, the first exhibition of its kind to be held in the colony. Two years later, in 1849, two Ellis paintings, North Rocks and Landscape were hung in a second Exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts, an exhibition to which Raphael Clint also contributed with two classical intaglios of the heads of Lord Byron and von Weber. Other exhibitors in these exhibitions included Conrad Martens, John Skinner Prout, George Edwards Peacock, Joseph Fowles and William Nicholas. However, Ellis couldn't stay out of trouble, and was imprisoned multiple times in Darlinghurst Gaol in the early 1850s before being transferred to Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum. He died at the Parramatta Hospital for the Insane on 29 June 1890 and was buried at the Church of England Cemetery in Rookwood. His family evidently continued to maintain a pride in their father’s association with the Honourable East India Company Service.