Artists

Thomas Baines was a British artist, naturalist, and explorer of Southern Africa and Australia. He was born in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, England in 1820. As a teenager, he was apprenticed to a coach painter who focused on ornamental painting and coats of arms. At the age of 22, Baines left England for South Africa and settled in Cape Town, where he became a portraitist and landscape painter. Baines became the official war artist during the Eighth Frontier War, which lasted from 1850 to 1853. In 1855 he accompanied Augustus Gregory on an expedition across northern Australia as the official artist and storekeeper, sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society. In 1858, he joined David Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition in the same capacity. However, the two men did not get along and Baines was forced to return to Cape Town before the party reached Victoria Falls. In 1861, Baines teamed up with James Chapman on his journey from South-West Africa to Victoria Falls along the Zambezi River. This trip was fruitful, producing numerous paintings of the falls by Baines, photographs by Chapman, and each published their account of the journey; Baines’ was Explorations in South-West Africa (1864). He returned to England in 1865 but found his way back to Africa in 1868, where he continued to explore Southern Africa until his death in Durban in 1875. Baines’ works are held in the collections of institutions such as the British Museum, London; Royal Geographic Society, London; National War Museum in Edinburgh, Scotland; National Library of Australia, Canberra; and National Archives of Zimbabwe, Harare.