Oswald Walters Brierly

Sir Oswald Walters Brierly (19 May 1817 – 14 December 1894), was an English marine painter from an old Cheshire family and he was born at Chester. Life He was the son of Thomas Brierly, a doctor and amateur artist, who belonged to an old Cheshire family, was born at Chester on 19 May 1817. After a general grounding in art at the academy of Henry Sass in Bloomsbury, he went to Plymouth to study naval architecture and rigging. He exhibited drawings of two men-of-war at Plymouth, and , at the Royal Academy in 1839. He then spent some time in the study of navigation, and in 1841 started on a voyage to Australia with his friend Benjamin Boyd in the latter's yacht Wanderer. Boyd established himself in New South Wales as a merchant banker, pastoralist, shipowner, whaler and member of parliament. Brierly lived in southern New South Wales in a new settlement named Boydtown where he managed Boyd's whaling operations until 1848. Boyd even went so far as to have a house named "Merton Cottage" built for him. Brierly Point, on the coast of New South Wales commemorates his connection with that colony. His familiarity with the whaling industry led to a number of paintings of whaling subjects. In 1848, Captain Owen Stanley, elder brother of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, then in command of , invited Brierly to be his guest during an Admiralty survey of the north and east coast of Australia and the adjacent islands, in which Thomas Henry Huxley took part as biological observer. Brierly accompanied the survey during two cruises and took not only sketches, but notes of considerable value, which, however, remained unpublished. His name was given to an island in the Louisiade archipelago.