c.1826, unknown – 1890, Brisbane

Little is known of itinerant artist Charles Gordon Sebastian Hirst, who sketched mainly in southeast Queensland from the early 1870s. His earliest Queensland subject is in the collection of Brisbane’s John Oxley Library and is titled Jerriestown: The farmstead of Mr John Campbell, at Laidley Creek: 26 miles fm Ipswich, Queensland. Austa, 1873. A sojourn on the Darling Downs produced additional works now in the collection of the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery. Hirst died in a boarding house in Brisbane in 1890 from an overdose of laudanum (a solution containing opium).