Nicholas Chevalier

Nicholas Chevalier (1828–1902), Swiss by descent, Russian by birth and British by adoption, had preceded them, in 1870, with Adam’s Peak, Ceylon, in which the sacred mountain ascends from the surrounding jungle and mist in the tradition of European Romantic landscape. The military topographers had measured Ceylon, and the botanists had catalogued it; Chevalier made of it something approaching the sublime.

Chevalier was born at St Petersburg in 1828 to a Swiss father, and his training was as cosmopolitan as his parentage, carrying him through Lausanne, Munich and London before he emigrated to Australia in 1855. In Melbourne he became a leading figure of the colony’s young art world: his The Buffalo Ranges of 1864 was the first painting by a resident artist bought for the National Gallery of Victoria, and he worked as a busy illustrator and lithographer besides.

His Ceylon came by way of the sea. In 1867 he joined HMS Galatea as the artist attending Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, on a long homeward voyage that took in New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii, Japan, China, Ceylon and India before reaching London in 1870, and from that passage he brought a great quantity of sketches, watercolours and oils, the pictures of the voyage being afterward shown at South Kensington. It was on the strength of the Ceylon leg that Adam’s Peak, Ceylon was made. Settled in London from 1870, Chevalier enjoyed the favour of the royal family and painted, among other commissions, the marriage of the same Duke of Edinburgh; he continued to travel and to paint in Switzerland, and he died in London on 15 March 1902.