Alexander Schramm, South Australia's first European-trained artist, captures reality of Aboriginal plight

From Alexander Schramm's large painting, Adelaide, a tribe of natives on the banks of the river Torrens (1850).
Image courtesy National Gallery of Australia

Alexander Schramm, the most accomplished professional artist active in colonial South Australia from 1849, devoted most of his creativity to depicting Aboriginal people with sympathy at a time when Europeans were destroying tribal life. Schramm had travelled from Hamburg to Adelaide on the Prinzessin Luise in 1849, aged 35, and was South Australia’s first painter to be trained in Europe – at the Berlin Academy of Arts.

With an established reputation in Germany, he won prizes at the South Australian Society of Arts exhibitions of the 1850s and 1860s. He died in 1864, aged 50.

Unlike his colonial contemporaries, Schramm produced markedly different styles and genres from a wide sophisticated background. Schramm did finely-wrought oil portraits of Adelaide gentry, outstanding religious paintings, small chalk lithographs of colonial scenes, and a plaster bust of an Adelaide notable.

His range of styles was matched by an intellect sharply critical of colonial realities, especially regarding Aboriginal people.

Adelaide, a tribe of natives on the banks of the river Torrens (1850) is Schramm’s first and largest known painting. It shows Kaurna and possibly other local people in Adelaide parklands. Schramm was the first South Australian artist to depict the distinctive red river gum trees.

Several works were initially lithographs that Schramm produced for a wider market from 1854, using the Adelaide firm Penman and Galbraith.

Schramm won first prize for another important Aboriginal-theme painting in the South Australian Art Union Exhibition in 1859 in the House of Assembly chamber on North Terrace, Adelaide. The exhibition committee’s initial choice, James Hazell-Adamson, was eliminated as he didn’t live in South Australia. Schramm, who’d become a naturalised citizen soon after arriving in Adelaide, then received first prize for Bush Visitors that a newspaper report had previously called "Blacks at a Cottage Door".