Augustus Baker Peirce also known as Gus Pierce (7 October 1840 – 1919), was an American sailor, actor, raconteur and artist in several mediums, who spent some 10 years in Australia.
In 1869 in Echuca, while a riverboat captain, and in a period when low river heights forced Jane Eliza to be laid up, Peirce commenced the first of his panoramas,[6] His series of scenes, representing a sea voyage around the world, painted in distemper on canvas, were well received.
The panorama was exhibited in Echuca's Town Hall from October 1869, with musical accompanied by local musicians and singers, including Peirce himself.
[11] In the 1880s, still living in Geelong, and running a "cigar divan",[12] he was making portraits in oils, especially of horses and sportsmen[13][14] One which survives is of the Melbourne Hunt Club.
His farewell benefit was a disaster – he had prepared some lithographed handbills advertising the event, which featured caricatures of leading Geelong citizens which were not well received, and several artists who had promised to perform withdrew their support, and the local MP, John Rout Hopkins, took umbrage and set the law onto the printers.
[23] Peirce was a versatile and prolific performer on stage: he appeared with various troupes as a ventriloquist and comic singer (though his choice of songs did not please one reviewer of a variety show at Melbourne's Theatre Royal).
Knocking About: Being some adventures of Augustus Baker Peirce in Australia, his autobiography, edited by Mrs. Albert T. Leadbeater was published posthumously by Yale University Press in 1924, the third in a series funded by a foundation established in memory of Ensign Curtis Seaman Read (1895–1918), USNRF.