James Gay Sawkins

James Gay Sawkins (1806–1878), born in Southampton, was a painter and geologist whose life moved between the two disciplines. Trained by no school but his own travels, he supported himself as a portraitist and landscape painter in Mexico, Cuba, and the Caribbean during the 1830s and 40s, teaching drawing and selling views in St Thomas, where his work is said to have left an early impression on the young Camille Pissarro. He later worked mines and surveys in Hawaii, Australia, and Peru, and painted a portrait of Queen Sālote of Tonga after an 1854 earthquake.