(b Plymouth, 1806; d London, 29 Aug 1876). Painter and printmaker, also active in Australia, nephew of (1) Samuel Prout. During the 1830s he toured the west of England, making watercolour sketches of its historic buildings and publishing several of them in Castles and Abbeys of Monmouthshire (n.p., 1838). In 1838 he was elected to the New Society of Painters in Water-Colours, but his membership lapsed during his extended stay in Australia from 1840. He became one of the most important artists active in the Australian colonies in the 1840s. He travelled extensively in New South Wales, rendering the strange and picturesque qualities of its unusual vegetation, and in Sydney prompted the first serious public attention to the fine arts with two series of highly successful lectures at the Mechanics Institute. In 1843 he moved to Hobart, Tasmania, and founded an art school. He also imported a lithographic press from England and over the next few years issued collected volumes of lithographed views, including Sydney Illustrated (Sydney, 1844) and Tasmania Illustrated (Hobart Town, 1844–6). In 1845, with the English-born colonial administrator and amateur watercolourist G. T. W. B. Boyes (1787–1853), Prout organized Tasmania’s first art exhibition at the Legislative Council Chambers in Hobart. He also visited the state of Victoria for the purpose of producing a volume of lithographs, Views of Melbourne and Geelong (Melbourne, 1847). After he returned to England in 1848, he lived in Bristol and London and continued to earn a living from paintings of Australian scenery, done possibly with the aid of photographs, and from writing articles on Australia. Among the most celebrated of his topographical subjects were his depictions of Australia’s giant tree ferns (e.g. In the Valley of Ferns, Hobart Town, Tasmania, c. 1851; Sydney, N. A. G. NSW). Between 1849 and 1853 he exhibited dioramic views of New South Wales and Tasmania (e.g. at the Western Literary and Scientific Institute, London, 1850). In 1852 he produced an imaginary panorama of the newly opened Australian goldfields. Re-elected as an associate of the New Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1849, he became a full member in 1862. He spent most of his working life in Bristol.

Part of the Prout family