Joseph Docker was an English surgeon, politician, landowner and amateur photographer who moved to Sydney in 1834. He settled on a property near Scone in the Hunter Valley, naming it Thornthwaite. This is one of two landscape scenes of the Lower Hunter Region produced in oil by Docker in the 1840s.

Joseph Docker’s greatest interest, however, was photography. He experimented with early forms of photography and is thought to have taken the earliest surviving Australian example of a calotype, which used paper coated with silver iodide to capture the image.