Queensland dairy farmer artist Wyclif Huston – an artistic casualty of World War II?, Kevin Lambkin
Abstract:
Always on the lookout for those rare early paintings of Brisbane, Kevin Lambkin located a highly accomplished oil of a Brisbane River scene at auction in Sydney in 2024. The painting was simply signed ‘Huston’, a name unknown to Kevin and to the painting’s Sydney auction cataloguer who suggested a New Zealand artist. The 1930s style of the painting’s original frame was a starting point for an intensive search of Trove. ‘Huston’ was Wyclif Emmanuel Huston, a highly talented youth from a dairy farm on Queensland’s Darling Downs whose art was much acclaimed in Queensland in the 1930s. His promising future, however, was interrupted by the war and after army service and moving to Melbourne his name virtually disappears from the record of Australian artists. Was he, as art historian the late Glenn Cooke suggested, yet another artistic casualty of World War II?
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