Brier, Frederick William

BRIER, Frederick William (1852–1922) was born at Liversedge, Yorkshire, son of Robert Brier, a shoemaker, and Charlotte Fiddymont. After migrating to Australia with his family in 1871 he worked as a steward on the Qld Steam Navigation Co.’s “Lady Bowen” before he was employed on trial in the Colonial Architect’s office in Brisbane for two months, demonstrating sufficient aptitude for the work for his services to be retained as a pupil at a lowly salary of £40 pa. Brier designed “a neat and attractive” certificate of merit for the Queensland Exhibition, Brisbane in 1875 and a lithograph of FDG STANLEY’s Exhibition Building in the following year. After studying in Victoria he returned to Queensland to work as draftsman and lithographer. In January 1883 Brier produced an illuminated address “architectural in character” and including a perspective of St Stephen’s Cathedral, for Dr Cani, the Roman Catholic Bishop-elect of Rockhampton, on Cani’s departure from Brisbane. Brier was a member of the Victorian Lithographic Artists and Engravers Club in 1889 before he and his wife travelled to Britain. On his return he lived in South Australia. While employed as an artist by the Adelaide publishers Vardon & Pritchard in 1900-1 he exhibited landscape paintings with the Society of Artists and in a Centenary Art Exhibition and won a competition for the design of a brandy label for Tolley, Scott & Tolley. He moved to Sydney in 1901 where his first wife Martha died in 1903. His death at Trevallyn, Launceston, Tasmania in 1922 was commemorated by an exhibition of his work later that year at the Mechanics Institute.