Watercolour on paper illustration of a city scape featuring the Beehive Corner and surrounding buildings.

Samuel Thomas Gill's watercolour The Beehive, Corner of King William and Rundle Streets, Adelaide depicts a landmark Adelaide site, providing a unique view from a period before surroundings were recorded by photography.

In 1840, Gill established a studio in Adelaide and advertised for those desirous of obtaining correct likenesses of themselves, families or friends, animals, local scenery and residences, to contact him. He captured detailed scenes of colonial life in the streets of Adelaide and Melbourne, in the South Australian countryside and on the Victorian gold fields.

The artwork is signed in the bottom left corner S.T.G. 1849 - at that time, the Beehive Corner was owned by John Rundle. The Gothic Revival style building with gold bee adornment that stands at this intersection today was built in 1895. As a compositional component, Gill has highlighted the idyllic picturesque scene by adding a decorative frame-like border around the artwork.

Gill was one of the most prolific watercolour painters working in Australia in the nineteenth century. He was an artist who was often out in the field in the Adelaide Hills or the Flinders Ranges, and on the spot at mine sites, in city streets, at Port Adelaide, the races or at the Agricultural and Horticultural Society's annual show.

Gill worked with fluidity and dexterity, using techniques he acquired in England in his youth and developed during his years in Australia. The immediacy of approach and freshness of colour that are typical of watercolour painting were ideally suited to the style of an artist who loved life and enjoyed recording it.

Although Gill mostly restricted himself to the watercolour sketch, perhaps as it was portable and convenient (apart from his 'Heads of the people' lithographic series), his work contains the hugeness of the land and the bounce of its inhabitants. Gill has qualities of imagination, delicacy, and poetic feeling but is often only known as the artist of the gold fields.

Gill, S.T. (Samuel Thomas), 1818-1880

Appleyard, Ron S.T. Gill, the South Australian years 1839-1852 Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 1986

Bowden, Keith Macrae Samuel Thomas Gill: artist. [Collaroy, N.S.W.]: K.M. Bowden, [1971]

Dutton, Geoffrey S.T. Gill's Australia South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1981