1844, England – 1921, Brisbane

George Seymour Owen was an engineer by profession and also likely a pupil of the renowned British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Owen spent his life building bridges in Australia, South Africa and North America, and as his watercolours show, he was also an adept draftsman. As an engineer, he would have been expected to provide accurate drawings of sites being considered for construction projects. Owen’s watercolours are of considerable significance to Queensland — they are among the earliest depictions of the Brisbane settlement in the 1880s and its expansion in the late nineteenth century.