Charles Rodius

Charles Rodius (born Joseph Meyer, 1802 – 9 April 1860) was a German-born artist, printmaker and architect. Trained in France before moving to England, he was transported as a convict to the Australian penal colony of New South Wales for theft in 1829.

While not as well known as other convict artists, such as Joseph Lycett and Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, Rodius has received praise for his works, and he is represented in several major Australian galleries.

Early life and education Rodius was born in 1802 in Cologne, Germany; other sources give Hamburg as his place of birth as part of the large Jewish population of that city. As a teenager he moved to Paris, France, where he studied art and worked as a teacher of "music, painting, drawing and languages in families of the first distinction".

He move to London in 1927 where he changed his name to Charles Rodius. Having established himself as an artist with the reputation of a dandy, Rodius, with the support of his patronage, was granted a ticket of exemption in 1832—the year he began to earn his own living as an artist—which was changed to a ticket of leave two years later. She died just 4 days later. His third wife was Elizabeth Harriet Allen and they married 1 April 1841. He was survived by his third wife who remarried in 1863.

His works were shown in a group exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, in 2012 The State Library of New South Wales held the first ever retrospective of his works in 2023–2024.