Samuel Thomas GillPrint Page

The headstone over grave, erected by the Historical Society of Victoria, commemorates artist Samuel Gill (1818 - 1880). The grave was restored circa 1939 and in 1997. 

In 1852 the painter Samuel Thomas Gill went to the Victorian gold diggings, and in the next twenty years produced drawings of Victoria and New South Wales, many published as lithographs.

Evidence of visits to New South Wales in 1856 and 1861 exists in the form of lithographs of scenes in that colony in those years. Twenty-four lithographed sketches by Gill, Victoria Gold Diggings and Diggers As They Are, were published in Melbourne and London in 1853. He has been called the `Artist of the Goldfields.`

After 1870 Gill fell into obscurity, though he continued to produce work, some of it in the nature of cartoons which were coarse in execution. On 27 October 1880 he collapsed in Post Office Place, Melbourne, and was found to be dead when taken to hospital. The next day an inquest was held and the cause of death was found to be 'rupture of an aneurism of the aorta'. His grave in the Melbourne General Cemetery was unmarked until 1913 when his body was moved to a private plot in the same cemetery and a stone erected, paid for by funds collected by the Historical Society of Victoria.

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