Ludwig Becker (explorer)

Ludwig Becker ( born September 5, 1808 in Roedelheim in Frankfurt am Main, † April 29, 1861 at Koorliatto Waterhole, Bulloo River, Australia ) was a German painter, scientist and naturalist.

Life

Sources Beckers training, his life in Germany and Australia are sparse and incomplete. He worked as a bookbinder in a Frankfurt operation and apparently learned in that time the production of lithographs. So he illustrated, inter alia, Works of the zoologist Johann Jakob Kaup, with the years he kept up a correspondence. In 1840 he painted genre paintings and miniature portraits for the court of the Grand Duke Ludwig III. of Hesse- Darmstadt.

For political reasons, he left Germany and traveled to England and Brazil, embarked there to Australia, where he arrived on 10 March 1851. He then went on for about 20 months after Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania, where he made scientific observations and recorded contacts with the Royal Society of Tasmania. In 1852 he went back to Australia, where he quite unsuccessfully searched for gold in Bendigo 1852-54, while also meteorological observations, notes and sketches made ​​, which were shown in 1854 in Melbourne in an exhibition. In 1856 he became a member of the Victorian Society of Fine Arts, and in 1859 the Philosophical Institute of Victoria. With the ornithologist John Gould he maintained a correspondence over the slaty- lyrebird, tried a lyrebird chick rearing and sent his drawings of lyrebird eggs to ornithologists in Germany and France.

As more than 50 - year-old he took part in the organized amateurish and finally catastrophic verlaufenen expedition of Burke and Wills, on which the Australian outback should be explored. About the stages of the expedition, he wrote detailed reports and documented animals, plants, rocks and meteorological and astronomical observations in precise drawings in his sketchbooks. He died on Koorliatto Waterhole, Bulloo River, weakened by the hardships of the expedition, and was buried there. Since 1987 a memorial stone to Ludwig Becker, Charles Stone and William Purcell, who died within a few days at Koorliatto Waterhole.

The scientific and artistic estate

Becker's sketchbooks, diaries and scientific records and the reports of the expedition are kept in the La Trobe Library in Melbourne. A number of his drawings located in the Bendigo Gallery.