Townsville, Queensland

Biography:

James Howe Carse (1819–1900)

Carse was a British landscape painter born in Edinburgh and his father is said to have been Alexander Carse, a well-known painter of Scottish scenes and was enrolled at the new Royal Scottish Academy, where his father, having returned to Scotland from London, was a founding member.  

By 1869 Carse had visited both Australia and New Zealand, and exhibited work from these trips at the Melbourne Public Library. By 1876 he had helped to found Melbourne’s Victorian Academy of Art and the New South Wales Academy of Art, and he had been awarded numerous prizes and awards. In that year he was described in New South Wales as the “perhaps the best painter in the colony” . In 1880 he joined a group who left the Academy of Art to create the Art Society of New South Wales.