John Alexander Gilfillan
British painter (1793-1864)
John Alexander Gilfillan was a professor of painting at the University of Strathclyde who migrated to Whanganui, New Zealand in 1841. He settled on a farm in Whanganui but when this was destroyed in 1847 he moved to Australia. While there he worked as a Customs Agent and painted a number of significant historical paintings.
Life
John Alexander Gilfillan was born in 1793 in Jersey, an island located near the coast of Normandy, France. John spent eight years in the Royal Navy before deciding to take up art as a profession. He was later trained as an artist in Scotland and was Professor of Painting at the University of Strathclyde (then known as the Andersonian University) Glasgow.
In 1841 he migrated to New Zealand arriving in Wellington on Christmas Day. Gilfillan secured an allotment of 110 acres (45 ha) in the Matarawa Valley near Whanganui, moving onto it in late 1845. Pākehā settlement on traditional Māori land created unrest in the area and on 18 April 1847, Gilfillan's farm was attacked. John escaped and headed for Whanganui believing he was the real target and that his family would not be harmed.
“John Alexander Gilfillan” enters the record as british painter (1793-1864). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what John, Alexander and Gilfillan can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q21460090. VIAF identifies the subject as 56115776. The Library of Congress control number is nb2001036640. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1841, 1847, 1793 and 1845.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Alexander Gilfillan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.