Two rare portraits by one of Australia’s most notorious and talented convict artists are for sale for the first time since they were created 179 years ago in the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land. The works are by Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, English dandy, aesthete, essayist, suspected murderer, and the inspiration for Oscar Wildes’ most famous character, Dorian Gray. Wainewright was sensationally considered a serial killer, believed to have poisoned his mother-in-law and sister-in-law to cash in on insurance policies. He was never nailed for these crimes but the much-mythologised Wainewright was dispatched to the colonies for the lesser crime of fraudulence. Before his fall from grace, Wainewright was an esteemed painter of mythological scenes and portraits, exhibited at the Royal Academy and the British Institution.

Born in Chiswick, London, in 1792, into a cultured and literary family, Wainewright loved the high life and lived beyond his means. As the debts piled up he forged documents to gain early access to money he had inherited from his grandfather, Ralph Griffiths (publisher of England’s first pornographic novel, John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, also known as The Adventures of Fanny Hill).