Snapshots on the Coast of Queensland

This watercolour of a rare subject is a quite large and quite lovely work by Frederick Elliott, one of Australia's more romantic and accomplished artists of maritime interest working around the 1900s.

Elliott's work depicting the islands off the coast relates to longstanding traditions of coastal profiling, where he has blended topographical recording with pictorial conventions, with the addition of steam ships, lighthouse and birds for instance.

While altogether the work is a concise pictorial summary 'snapshot' of Queensland islands around the time of Federation, each one of these images is a unique work of art and a delight. The work was most probably painted when Elliott as an assignment for the Queensland Government Printer where he worked from 1896-1903.