portrait 49, winter 2015

MAGAZINE OF AUSTRALIAN & INTERNATIONAL PORTRAITURE WINTER 2015$19

.95

9 771 446 360003

14 AUGUST - 15 NOVEMBER 2015 NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

Untitled #21/09 ( after Ricci, 1700; featuring Matthew Mitcham ) 2009 Ross Watson

DEGREES

of UNDRESSBare

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03 Observation point Jude Rae

04 Regarding Henrys Sarah Engledow ponders the divergent legacies of Messrs Kendall and Lawson.

10 Country man Angus Trumble’s tribute to the late Right Honourable Malcolm Fraser.

12 Arthur as Alyosha? Patrick McCaughey explores a striking Boyd self portrait.

16 Enigma Grace Carroll contemplates the curious case of Christian Waller.

20 Painting them gently Penny Grist on motivation, method and melancholy in the portraiture of Darren McDonald.

26 Sitter still Jaynie Anderson reflects on her experience as sitter for Reshid Bey’s 1962 portrait.

29 Alternative virtue Joanna Gilmour presents John Kay’s portraits of a more infamous side of Edinburgh.

41 Of jumpers and river gums, red Diana O’Neil on Noel Counihan’s vivid 1971 portrait of Alan Marshall.

44 Secure the shadow ere the substance fade The tragic tale of Tom Wills, the ‘inventor’ of Australian Rules Football. By Joanna Gilmour.

50 Stigma stigmata Angus Trumble provides poignant context for Aña Wojak’s portrait of Tony Carden.

52 A feast of friends John Singer Sargent: a painter at the vanguard of contemporary movements in music, literature and theatre. By Richard Ormond.

60 On show International and national portraiture exhibitions.

62 Tribute Betty Churcher ao

2 portrait 49 winter 2015

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angus trumble (“Country man” p. 10)

(“Stigma stigmata” p. 50) is Director at the National

Portrait Gallery

dr sarah engledow (“Regarding Henrys”

p. 4) is Historian at the National Portrait Gallery

grace carroll (“Enigma” p. 16) is a

PhD candidate at the ANU and Executive Assistant

to the Director at the National Portrait Gallery

diana o’neil (“Red jumpers and

river red gums” p. 41) is Director External

Relations at the National Portrait Gallery

penelope grist (“Painting them gently”

p. 20) is Assistant Curator at the National Portrait

Gallery

professor jaynie anderson

(“Sitter still” p. 26) is foundation Director of the Australian Institute

of Art History at the University of Melbourne

joanna gilmour (“Alternative virtues” p. 29)

(“Secure the shadow ere the substance fade” p. 44) is Curator at the National

Portrait Gallery

richard ormond (“A feast of friends” p. 52)

is an Art Historian and former Deputy Director of the National Portrait

Gallery, London

patrick mccaughey (“Arthur as Alyosha?” p. 12) is a former Director of the

NGV, Melbourne. His latest book is Strange Country: Why Australian Painting

Matters (MUP, 2014)

The cover: Angel Street (Adam Cullen) 2010 (detail) Darren McDonald Purchased 2012

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Portraits take many forms, from official statements of power and status to deeply personal testaments of affection and insight. Artists’ self portraits are a very particular category, one that has always attracted the interest of institutions

and collectors as documents of artistic process and subjectivity. For artists it is enduringly compelling, not only because it articulates the self reflection that is critical to an art practice, but because the subject is always available!

In 2008 I was in Madrid on a mission to learn from the great seventeenth-century painters of Spain, Diego Velásquez and Francisco Goya. It was a journey marked by distress. My marriage had recently ended, amicably enough, but I was at a loss. My husband and I had grown together over eighteen years and when we split I felt like an old vine that had lost the post it grew around – able to stand upright but with a hole at the centre.

I was drifting around the Prado in that dreamlike non-verbal state painters enter when they are looking at work and found myself in the contemporary wing surrounded by Cy Twombly’s Lepanto Cycle, the series of twelve three-metre wide paintings commissioned for the 2001 Venice Biennale. The integrity of form and content, the beauty of Twombly’s paintings, astounded me. The metaphorical force of the vertical rills and veils of acrylic paint, evoking rather than depicting water, reflections, fire and blood, is extraordinarily powerful. A week later I saw more Twombly paintings as well as his remarkable sculpture in the Tate retrospective in London.

On my journey back to Australia I thought about Twombly and Velásquez, about Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas, about painting, realism and subjectivity. I think I was a little crazy at the time, desperate to make changes in myself and my work, and not knowing where to start and this was what I painted. It seems a little embarrassing now, putting myself in Velásquez’ shoes and substituting the

princess and her servants with my dog, but in retrospect I see it was the beginning of a reconstruction that would take years.

When I decided to enter the painting in the Portia Geach Memorial Award it

was so last minute that I had to roll it up, drive it to Sydney (from Canberra) on the last day of submissions, and re-stretch it under the stairs at the collection depot in Mascot. I doubted it would be hung and I

never imagined it would win. When I gave a floor talk during the exhibition, someone asked if the dribbles of paint represented tears. Funny how the obvious can elude one – it had never occurred to me …

OBSERVATION POINT

JUDE RAE

Self Portrait (the year my husband left) 2008acrylic and oil on linenprivate collection

portrait 49 winter 2015

by sarah engledow.

When the poet Henry Kendall died in the winter of 1882, aged just forty, journalist Francis J Donohue acknowledged that it was ‘pleasanter to review our poet’s works than his

Regarding Henrys

life.’ At that time, Kendall was lauded as the first poet to extol the colonies; he had even received a smidgin of patronising attention in England. Few twenty-first century Australians could name Henry Kendall; and pressed to give them a go, few could be induced

to persevere with the perfumed verses of the ‘Australian Shelley’. From this distance, it’s certainly more interesting – if not pleasanter, exactly – to review his life than his works. His obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald sets the tone: ‘Mr Kendall’s career was chequered and gloomy, and overshadowed by great troubles, of which he may have been partly the victim, and partly the creator, but the few who gained an insight into his inner life knew that he often went out into the wilderness and wrestled terribly with his temper in a mental and physical struggle of which, happily, few know the terrors.’ Apart, perhaps, from the bit about the wilderness, exactly the same words could have been used about the life of Henry Lawson on the occasion of his death in Sydney fifty years later.

Henry Kendall, born in Ulladulla, lost his father at 13 and lived at his grandfather’s with his mother and siblings before spending two years on a whaling boat. When he returned at the age of 18, he had enough funds to enable his family to move to Newtown. He started submitting poems for publication while working as a law clerk in Grafton, and pressed on as he served as a clerk in the Department of Lands and the Colonial Office. By the early 1860s he had a volume of verse to his name and, at 29, he was in a position to marry 18-year-old Charlotte Rutter. Clerical work was an affront to his refined sensibility and his siblings were a drain on him, financially and reputationally; he moved to Melbourne. There, his reputation for poetry grew with the publication of Leaves from Australian Forests, but he returned to Sydney poor, sick and a drunkard. Just on four years after his marriage, he was consigned to the Gladesville Hospital for the Insane. At that time, as luck would have it, the facility was beginning to modernise, formulating treatment plans for patients rather than serving as a waystation on the road to a wretched death (it’s now estimated that 1 228 people were buried there in unmarked graves between 1838 and 1888). After four months, the gentle bard emerged, fostered by two brothers from Gosford and in due course working with a timber firm in that district. Surprisingly, by 1876 he’d recovered sufficiently for Charlotte and their children to return to him; he began to augment his income with pieces published in the Freeman’s Journal and, in 1880, his Songs from the

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Portrait of Henry Kendall c. 1890-94S. Milbourn Jnralbumen silver photograph on cabinet cardPurchased 2008

Henry Lawson c. 1919Lionel Lindsaypencil, charcoal, pen and ink on paperPurchased 2010

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Mountains was a success. The following year, Henry Parkes, the premier, but also a poet, tried to help Kendall further by making him New South Wales’s first Inspector of Forests – an exceptionally remunerative appointment. ‘When much that is ridiculous and impolitic on the part of the present Ministry shall be forgotten, this graceful recognition of genius will be recalled as an instance of a worthy and commendable public spirit,’ wrote Donohue. However, Kendall’s frail form was not equal to the forestry job, which involved punishing travel, and he died of phthisis (tuberculosis) in Bourke Street, Surry Hills, at forty. The village of Camden Haven, where he lived when he was happiest, was renamed Kendall in his honour.

Soon after Kendall’s death, public funds were collected for his wife and five children; later, they received a pension. In 1884, in an attempt to raise funds for a fitting memorial to the poet himself, politician Daniel O’Connor appealed to a Hungarian violinist, Edouard Remenyi, who was then performing in Sydney: ‘Two years ago the laureate of these lands, Australia’s best and sweetest singer, Henry Clarence Kendall, passed out of a troubled life, and, with a discreditable apathy and shameless indifference to his claim upon their eternal gratitude, his countrymen have up to this suffered his bones to lie unmarked, unhonoured, and unnoticed in the quiet cemetery at Waverley’, he wrote. Remenyi, gratified, prefaced his reply with some personal reflection: ‘Intercourse with lofty minds constitutes the real oasis of life for one thirsting after science and the beautiful. I am always thirsty.’ As Australians had treated him so well, he said (finally) that he would be pleased to mount a benefit concert when next in Sydney. O’Connor published his exchange with the foreigner to embarrass his own colleagues and countrymen into action, too. In 1886, Kendall’s remains were disinterred, and placed under a very substantial monument funded partly by a concert given by Remenyi at Sydney University. Evidently flushed with the success of this project, O’Connor orchestrated the re-burial of the alcoholic orator Daniel Deniehy at Waverley in 1888; that year, Remenyi dropped dead on the job in San Francisco’s Orpheus Theatre.

Henry Kendall was a pioneer interpreter of the Australian landscape;

it was he who ‘lent articulate voice to the mute harmonies’ of its plants, rivers, rocks, dells and glades; the ‘dim mystery and eloquent silence, which had hitherto appealed mutely for expression, spoke first in his poetry, and reverberated in his song’. As late as 1926, when the Historic Memorials Committee decided that a national gallery of portraits would be established in Canberra, Kendall was amongst the five portrait subjects men proposed, along with WC Wentworth, Charles Sturt, Sir Thomas Mitchell and Sir Joseph Banks. Yet imagine a game-show question, now, beginning ‘Australia’s celebrated nineteenth-century writer is Henry … ?’ Almost any and every Australian adult would fire back with confidence: ‘Lawson!’ Some could even recite some facts about Henry Lawson’s life, or name one of his works. Many would recognise his face – or even, simply, his moustache – in a picture, though they would probably think that he lived earlier than he did, in the bush, without electricity or other infrastructure; his renowned stories describe life in the hazy era of those pictures by Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Frederick McCubbin that used to be reproduced on the walls of

country motel rooms. Lawson, in fact, was exposed to the latest in modern living in New Zealand and London, where many would be surprised to know he spent some years before 1903; and, of course, he saw the machinery of capitalism grinding in Sydney – the downtrodden and itinerant inhabitants of which he wrote about, too. Lawson wrote through a time of profound change in the social fabric of New South Wales. In an outstanding example of his urban stories, ‘Going Blind’, the narrator tells of his encounter with a bushman who ‘seemed as if he had forgotten to grow old and die out with [the] old colonial school to which he belonged.’ Like many of Lawson’s stories, ‘Going Blind’ begins in confidently unadorned style: ‘I met him in the Full-and-Plenty Dining Rooms.’

Henry Lawson, born in a goldfields tent in 1867, spent his childhood on a poor selection in the Mudgee district in New South Wales. During his brief schooling at Eurunderee, he lost most of his hearing; an other-worldly child of delicate appearance, he was bullied. His mother, a girl from Guntawang who became a quarrelsome, disillusioned wife and apparently a fairly neglectful parent, nevertheless encouraged him to read widely while she dragged herself up by her own bootstraps. In 1884 she left Henry’s father, a commonsensical teetotaller who shrank from unpleasantness in the home, and moved to Sydney, where in 1888 she founded the women’s newspaper The Dawn. Before she left, Henry had been working with his father as a carpenter and painter, but he moved to Sydney before stints in Newcastle and Melbourne, the Blue Mountains, Western Australia and Brisbane. Though he came to hate the women in his mother’s circle – especially Rose Scott, who viewed him squarely from the perspective of what he would be like for a woman and children to live with – he was strongly influenced by Louisa, and took a nationalist, egalitarian and pro-union stance that made him a natural contributor to the Bulletin in the 1890s. Fatefully, in 1892, the journal’s proprietor, Jules Archibald, gave him a train ticket to Bourke and a five-pound note. Arriving in Bourke in January 1893, he walked to Hungerford on the Queensland border; later, he walked back to Bourke. He was away for about six months. This experience, combined

Portrait of Henry Lawson190-?gelatin silver photographParamount National Library of Australia

Henry Lawson 1900John Longstaffoil on canvasArt Gallery of New South WalesPurchased 1901


with his early life on the diggings, informed scores of stories and vignettes that were to be collected in evocatively-titled volumes including In the Days When the World Was Wide, While the Billy Boils, On the Track, Over the Sliprails and Joe Wilson and His Mates.

Lawson’s mother published his first book in 1894; he married Bertha Bredt, and had two books published, in 1896; he was first hospitalised for alcoholism in 1898. Having ‘got straight’, he was painted by John Longstaff in Melbourne on the way to London with his wife and their two children. Manning Clark wrote that he saw the painting only once outside the studio; never again could he face it, Clark wrote, ‘because of the tragedy of his life which began in that year’. That said, in Lawson’s tragic years, he was to sit for many more portraits.

London crushed Lawson – as it did several other Australian expatriates of the period. Bertha Lawson was hospitalised there, and after two years in the city the blighted pair set out for Sydney in separate ships. She left him in fear of violence; stupefied by alcohol, he toppled over a cliff at Manly at the end of 1902. At thirty-five, his best work was over. Thenceforth, subject to catastrophic bouts of depression and alcoholism, Lawson shambled around Sydney, sometimes confined to

Darlinghurst Gaol or its mental annexe, sometimes nurtured by a kind admirer, Isabel Byers, failing to pay family support, growing more bitter and more paranoid, still writing but detracting from his reputation with every word. In 1915 he and Mrs Byers moved to Leeton, where alcohol was supposedly unavailable; but he got some, and then

Cities soil the life with rust; Water banks are cool and sweet; River, tired of noise and dust, Here I come to rest my feet.

The poet’s feelings are inseparable from the language in which he evokes the natural world; we feel his emotions running in its river, sucked up by its moss and vulnerably exposed in its

he got some more. After publishing a poem supporting conscription he was repudiated by the Labor movement. Pained by his terrible decline, friends again tried to send him to sanctuary in the country near Gundagai, but he returned to Sydney in the January heat of 1920 and was back in the Darlinghurst mental hospital by the winter that year. While he was there, his mother died in the Gladesville Hospital for the Insane. In the wake of a cerebral haemorrhage the following year, he had all his teeth removed. Having staggered around his old haunts for a few months more, a ghastlier ghost than ever, he was found dead, clad in just a singlet, in the back yard of a house in Abbotsford on the morning of 2 September 1922.

Henry Kendall’s poems pulsate with descriptions of Australia’s trees, flowers and creeks, the relief they offer from its cities and the rueful memories of happier times they evoke. A snatch from ‘Araluen’ – commemorating Kendall’s dead daughter – is, well, not atypical:

River, myrtle-rimmed, and set Deep amongst unfooted dells – Daughter of grey hills of wet, Born by mossed and yellow wells; Now that soft September lays Tender hands on thee and thine, Let me think of blue-eyed days, Star-like flowers and leaves of shine!

flowers. By contrast, Henry Lawson’s prose ‘sketches’ and stories introduce the landscape like elements of stark stage sets, on which actors’ exchanges take place. So, the first paragraph of ‘Our Pipes’ reads:

The moon rose away out on the edge of a smoky plain, seen through a sort of tunnel or arch in the fringe of mulga behind which we were camped – Jack Mitchell and I. The ‘timber’ proper was just behind us, very thick and very dark. The moon looked like a big new copper boiler set on edge on the horizon of the plain, with the top turned towards us and a lot of old rags and straw burning inside.

The rest of the 4-page piece comprises description of the men’s preparations for camp, and their after-dinner dialogue; it ends with a soft question, and a sad response, underplayed.

The hectic brilliance of ‘The Loaded Dog’ notwithstanding, that farcical yarn of bumpkins’ shenanigans is unusual in Lawson’s body of work. Anyone assuming that the author merits credit or blame for ratifying such clichés of Australian identity as the nobility of the bushman and the primacy of mateship might well take a fresh look at the stories, which simultaneously honour and call into question the sincerity of relationships between men. Frequently, they comprise sketches of awkwardness, frustration and fragile moments of empathy between people unfitted, from childhood, to talk over a matter from a variety of perspectives; now, the very terseness of the stories makes for their impact. Many of Lawson’s sparely-delineated images, such as this in ‘The Drover’s Wife’ might lodge in the imagination for a lifetime:

All days are much the same to her; but on Sunday afternoon she dresses herself, tidies the children, smartens up baby, and goes for a lonely walk along the bush-track, pushing an old perambulator in front of her. She takes as much care to make herself and the children look smart as she would if she were going to do the block in the city. There is nothing to see, however, and not a soul to meet.

Lawson strikes a clean blow at cliché (and adjectives) in one of his great elliptical stories, “The Union Buries its Dead”, describing the internment of a young stranger, unknown to every man

Henry Lawson c.1915William Johnsongelatin silver photographPurchased 2012

Henry Lawson c.1915William Johnsongelatin silver photographPurchased 2009

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who accompanies his coffin through the glare to the grave:

I have left out the wattle – because it wasn’t there. I have also neglected to mention the heart-broken old mate, with his grizzled head bowed and great pearly drops streaming down his rugged cheeks. He was absent – he was probably “Out Back”. For similar reasons I have omitted reference to the suspicious moisture in the eyes of a bearded bush ruffian named Bill. Bill failed to turn up; and the only moisture was that which was induced by the heat. I have left out the “sad Australian sunset” because the sun was not going down at the time. The burial took place exactly at mid-day.

Another story of a funeral, ‘The Bush Undertaker’, gestures persistently at the uncanny, although all its spookiness is rationally explained. A bushman struggles with two dead bodies on a hot Christmas day. One, an Indigenous person’s, he hunts out and exhumes, placing the bones in a bag. The other, his old friend Brummy’s, he finds sitting under a sapling, as dry as a mummy. Wrapping the carcass in bark, he carries Brummy home, drinking rum from the dead man’s flask, grappling with the bag of bones and shadowed by a ‘great greasy black goanna’ that he believes to be several different reptiles – comprising a strange flock. Although ‘used to the weird and dismal’, during the night in the slab-and-bark hut he and his dog Five Bob fear the noises they hear. It transpires that it’s the ‘gohanner’. Towards daybreak, he shoots the beast, and observes its violent convulsions on the ground, shouting that the ‘cuss-o-God wretch has a-follered me ‘ome, an’ has been a-havin’ its Christmas dinner of of Brummy, and a-hauntin o’ me into the bargain, the jumpt-up tinker!’ Determined to give Brummy a comfortable burial, he digs a hole and drops his stiff corpse into one corner like a post before settling him in. Then, with a solemnity that unsettles Five Bob, he intones ‘Hashes ter hashes, dus ter dus, Brummy – an’ – an’ in hopes of a great an’ gerlorious rassaraction!’

Lawson’s own funeral could not have been more different. A state affair, held in St Andrew’s Cathedral, it was attended by hundreds of mourners including both Billy Hughes and Stanley Bruce; the crowd on George Street was such that those in the

church found it difficult to leave, and people lined the route from the city through Paddington and Bondi Junction to Waverley Cemetery. There, oddly enough, the poet’s skinny 55-year-old body was buried in the grave initially occupied by Kendall. Lawson’s accommodation has never been upgraded. In 1920 there were

reports in the Herald of a movement to erect a statue of Kendall in the Domain. That plan came to naught; in Sydney, Kendall is commemorated in a bench in the Botanic Gardens. Though it virtually killed its procrastinating, harried sculptor, George Lambert, it’s Henry Lawson whose statue stands in the Domain.


Malcolm Fraser, Randwick Racecourse 1975 (printed 2002)Roger ScottPurchased 2012

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by angus trumble.

The Right Honourable Malcolm Fraser, ac ch, who died in Melbourne on 20 March, was the last surviving prime minister of the Commonwealth of Australia to have been sworn of H.M. Privy Council (in 1976) – hence the ‘Right Honourable.’ Many years ago, a veteran Commonwealth public servant told me that, of all the prime ministers he had served – and he had served half a dozen – in his view Malcolm Fraser was the one most likely to say about a situation, an issue, or a problem, whatever it was: ‘This is plain wrong, we absolutely must act to set it right,’ and duly exercised his executive function with despatch.

The death of a former prime minister is always a moment for national reflection; it necessarily forms a milestone, and with the passing of Malcolm Fraser the dramatic events of 11 November 1975, now retreat farther from the realm of living memory into that of history. Malcolm Fraser was the member for Wannon from 1955 to 1983 and served as our twenty-second Prime Minister from 1975 to 1983. In Canberra, his government committed huge sums to the construction of Parliament House, the High Court of Australia and the Australian National Gallery. He granted self-government to the Northern Territory; passed Aboriginal land rights legislation; proclaimed the Kakadu National Park; stopped sand mining on Fraser Island; forged what the United Nations later described as the most comprehensive and effective bilateral trade and economic cooperation agreement in the world (between Australia and New Zealand). Malcolm Fraser created the Australian Federal Police, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), the Refugee Advisory Council of Australia, the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Australian Institute of Sport, and the position of Commonwealth Ombudsman.

In retirement he instituted and led CARE Australia, and spent several anxious weeks in Belgrade negotiating for the release of two Australian CARE workers while the city was bombarded by NATO forces. He passed the Racial Discrimination Act; overruled Treasury by committing large sums in support of Papua New Guinea; appointed two of the finest governors-general we have ever had, the late Sir Zelman Cowen and Sir Ninian Stephen, and made sure that tens of thousands of refugees from Vietnam and Indochina were resettled with dignity. He was passionately opposed to Apartheid, white Rhodesia, anti-Semitism, all other forms of racism, and to both wars in Iraq. His sense of duty and the call to public service was squattocratic, and driven in part by the legacy of his redoubtable grandfather Senator the Hon. Sir Simon Fraser. Certainly Fraser’s heart belonged to rural Australia – he is perhaps the last such Prime Minister we will ever have.

Country man

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by patrick mccaughey. Arthur Boyd was in his mid-20s when he painted this vivid, thoughtful self portrait.

Although conscripted into the army during World War II, leaving him with relatively little time to paint, Boyd found his artistic voice during those years. Those early pictures spoke urgently and forcefully about the fallen state of man. Gargoyles on the roofs of a South Melbourne street could spring to

life and terrorise a crippled man. Lovers outstretched in an orchard reflected more agony than ecstasy. Boyd's vision of the Australian landscape was equally grim. The bush took on a primeval quality, sunless and sullen, inhabited by anonymous hunters more lost than purposeful. Boyd, along with his friends and fellow artists Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester and John Perceval, felt oppressed by the war. All save Hester and Perceval were conscripted, but none saw any action. Boyd was

Arthur as Alyosha?

assigned to the Cartographic Unit and never got closer to the front than Bendigo.

This self portrait catches Boyd awakening from that long oppression, looking cautiously ahead to see what peace might bring. The war and its aftermath were deeply unsettling times. Rarely before in Australian art had a generation produced such a succession of self portraits as Nolan, Tucker, Boyd, Hester and Perceval did during the 1940s. All of them have a self-questioning quality. All of them would have known the famous lines by Stephen Spender, then a much admired British poet:

Who live under the shadow of a war,What can I do that matters?

Each artist found an answer to that question in their work. Nolan would

Self portrait 1945-46Arthur Boydoil on canvas laid on composition boardPurchased with funds provided by the Liangis family 2014

In the mirror: Self portrait with Joy Hester 1939Albert Tuckergelatin silver photograph Gift of the artist 1999


start his first Ned Kelly series in 1946. Tucker became ever more deeply engrossed in his Images of Modern Evil series. Boyd, who stands on the cusp of his early career in this self portrait, would launch into his first major biblical series. The Expulsion from Eden would be re-enacted amongst the scruffy ti-tree of the Mornington Peninsula. The Money Changers would be thrown out of a suburban church.

The landscape of the Mornington Peninsula had a profound and personal importance for Arthur Boyd. Unhappy at school, he left when he was 14 and, with a difficult and financially stressed family background, Boyd escaped to the Mornington Peninsula at the age of 16 to live with his grandfather, Arthur Merric Boyd, also a fine painter. The young Boyd began to paint the landscape and the seashore under the gentle

Van Gogh was an early guide and source of inspiration. Boyd took from him the lesson of painting directly from the landscape, in colour.

Self Portrait in red shirt 1937Arthur Boydoil on canvas on cardboardNational Gallery of Australia, CanberraThe Arthur Boyd Gift 1975

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tutelage of his grandfather. These early landscapes had a precocious brilliance.

Van Gogh was an early guide and source of inspiration. Boyd took from him the lesson of painting directly from the landscape, in colour. The Dutch master’s celebrated self portraits equally affected the young artist. Between the ages of 15 and 18, Boyd painted a group of self portraits, at times painfully truthful. The most accomplished and best known of these early explorations of the self is Self-Portrait in a Red Shirt 1937 (National Gallery of Australia). Painted when he was 17, it looks forward strikingly to the later Portrait Gallery self portrait. The red shirt in the 1940s designated, in a loose and generalized way, a rebellious and revolutionary spirit. How subtly the mood changes from the defiant yet vulnerable stare of the 17 year old to the averted, self-questioning gaze of the 1945-6 self portrait. The chiaroscuro that plays so sensitively over Boyd’s face in the later work shows a marked expansion of method and approach, compared to the bluntness of the earlier work. The defiant youth has become the perplexed young man.

Between these two self portraits lies another disguised self portrait. In 1938, Boyd painted himself and his two brothers, Guy, a sculptor and ceramicist, and David, potter and painter, in a dark and swirling expressionist manner. Titled Three Heads, Boyd added in brackets (The Brothers Karamazov). Dostoevsky was widely read in the 1940s by Melbourne artists and writers. Boyd's affinity for the Russian’s ultimate novel, with its internalized struggle between good and evil, (“God and the Devil are fighting and the battlefield is the heart of Man”) ran deep and lastingly. Dostoevsky opened up to Boyd a sense of the tragic in the human condition. The brother with whom Arthur Boyd most clearly identified was the dreamer, Alyosha. In Book I, Dostoevsky introduces Alyosha as follows:

In his childhood and youth, he was by no means expansive, or talked little indeed, but not from shyness or a sullen unsociability, quite the contrary, from something different, from a sort of inner preoccupation, entirely personal … But he was fond of people, he seemed throughout his life to put an implicit trust in people … he did not care to be a judge of

others that he never took it upon himself to criticize and would never condemn anyone…

Anyone who knew Arthur Boyd (or even knew about him) would see how closely this description fits the artist. It is not too fanciful, I hope, to see the National Portrait Gallery’s fine and moving self portrait as a portrait of the artist as Alyosha Karamazov, a man seeking and emerging into light.

Driving out the money changers 1950Arthur Boydceramics, earthenware, earthenware, coloured slips, clear glazeNational Gallery of Australia, CanberraThe Arthur Boyd gift 1975

Three heads (“The brothers Karamazov”) 1938Arthur Boydoil on canvasNational Gallery of Australia, CanberraThe Arthur Boyd Gift 1975


Enigma

the curious case of christian waller. by grace carroll.

In 1932, Napier Waller painted his wife Christian on the lawns of their home in the outer-Melbourne suburb of Ivanhoe. Guarded by her three pet Airedales – Baldur, Undine and Siren – she looks out of the painting. Her expression has a Mona Lisa effect: one cannot be sure of the secrets behind her smile. Some see this as a portrait of a melancholy woman, comforted by her dogs, while others are struck by the intensity of her gaze, and the sheer scale of the painting.

Nothing was straightforward in the lives of Christian Waller née Yandell (1894–1954) and Mervyn ‘Napier’ Waller (1893–1972). Each from regional Victoria, the couple

met when they were students at the National Gallery Art School in Melbourne in the years leading up to the First World War; they married in 1915. Nicholas Draffin, the late author of Napier’s monograph, wrote that the Wallers were drawn together by shared interests in folklore and mythology that had been advanced by British artists and writers during the Victorian Age, in particular by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the proponents of the British Arts and Crafts Movement. In their first two decades together, the Wallers produced bodies of work with strong parallels that engaged with the imaginative world; these can be seen in Christian’s watercolour Tristan and Isolde (c. 1925) and Napier’s print Hit (c. 1925). Napier’s experiences at war strengthened the couple’s disillusionment with modern life. In 1917, his right arm was amputated at the shoulder, the result of a wound he received whilst serving in Bullecourt, France. Miraculously, he taught himself to draw and paint with his left hand.

In the early 1920s, the couple moved into an Arts and Crafts home by the Darebin Creek, on a subdivided block of the Fairy Hills farming estate (surely the name is not a coincidence). Although the architectural plans were lost in a council fire several decades ago, Draffin and others speculated that Napier – and probably Christian – designed the home themselves, with guidance from an architect. It stills stands today, and lives on through the popular ABC TV series The Doctor Blake Mysteries; it is the

location for the exterior shots of Dr Blake’s house. Certainly, sketches I have uncovered confirm their involvement in the design of furniture and garden beds.

In planning their intriguing house, the Wallers created an environment that espoused their medieval ideals; it had a minstrels gallery, hand-combed walls in the living room, custom made furniture designed and painted by Christian with characters

from Arthurian legends, and an art studio (outdoor studios were added later). The house recalls William Morris’ Red House in England, designed by architect Philip Webb in 1859. Given the couple’s admiration for Morris and his circle, the house at Fairy Hills indicates a desire to embrace Arts and Crafts values in their personal life, as well as their art.

Napier’s portrait of his wife, entitled Christian Waller with


Christian and Napier Waller in Ireland c. 1929 unknown photographercourtesy Beleura House and Garden Collection

Christian Waller with Baldur, Undine and Siren at Fairy Hills 1932Napier Walleroil and tempera on canvasNational Gallery of Australia, CanberraPurchased 1984

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Baldur, Undine and Siren at Fairy Hills, hung in pride of place above the fireplace in the living room. This large portrait was viewed by many influential figures who gathered at the Wallers’ home. Their good friend, the composer Fritz Hart, was a frequent guest, as were the artist Rupert Bunny and newspaper proprietor Theodore Fink, amongst other prominent Melburnians (even Robert Menzies is rumoured to have

dined at Fairy Hills). One can only speculate as to what these visitors might have made of the curious home and the artist couple who shared it. Perhaps Napier, who was actively involved in the Melbourne art scene due to his role as a senior art teacher at the Working Men’s College (now RMIT University), was considered ‘one of the boys’, (he was, after all, a member of the Savage Club, an elite Melbourne gentleman’s club). Yet Christian,

who was described by her niece, the ceramicist Klytie Pate (whom she raised from adolescence) as “a very interesting person”, must have seemed something of an enigma.

Never an artist who catered to the art market, Christian synthesised her aesthetic and spiritual values in her creative undertakings. This included her illustrations for some half a dozen children’s books in the 1920s,

including Australian Fairy Tales (1925) by Hume Cook. Waller’s illustrations are not only marked by imaginative and symbolic expression, but suggest the interest in alternative spiritual philosophies that inspired her later work. As she matured, she became increasingly disinterested in the ‘real’ world, immersing herself instead, as Pate recalled in a 1992 interview, in theosophy and numerology. These arcane interests

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portrait 49 winter 201518 portrait 49 winter 201518

are expressed most powerfully in her exceptional hand-bound printed book, The Great Breath: A Book of Seven Designs, made in 1932, the same year as her husband’s portrait of her. The book, which features linocut prints imbued with arcane symbolism, was described by artist and critic George Bell as expressing “a metaphysical turn of thought”.

Napier Waller’s portrait of Christian captures her immersion in the spiritual realm. The symbolism of this portrait cannot be disregarded (her beloved Airedales were, after all, named

after mythical figures). As she sits on the lawns of their home in her stylish Callot Sœurs dress, he shows her clutching a long beaded necklace in her left hand, with her right hand touching the pages of an open book; another book rests in front of her. Her pose is reminiscent of that of a religious saint; her necklace could easily be mistaken for rosary beads and her white dress conjures associations of divinity. Her pet Airedales are presented as her disciples; two stand at attention, while the other flops restlessly on the grass. In this way, the portrait highlights

the spiritual path on which she had embarked. Indeed, Pate tells of people coming to her aunt for astrological readings and of the adolescents who would sit at her feet as she told stories of her travels to Ireland. Perhaps, during these occasions, she sat as she does in Napier’s painting of her?

In his insightful essay for the catalogue of the 1992 The Art of Christian Waller exhibition held at the Bendigo Art Gallery, art historian and curator Roger Butler proposed that Christian Waller’s linocut print, Morgan le Fay (c. 1927) is a self-portrait. So too, I

would argue, is her 1916 painting, Destiny. In this work, Waller draws on her likeness for the sorceress, intently guarding her cauldron. Upon close inspection, the impressive detail of the painting reveals human beings trapped in the bubbles of the mysterious potion. Each of these images reveals much about the way Christian saw herself: as a formidable, spiritual woman.

Artists in love often use their art to express and explore their passion for, and frustration with, their significant other. In 2008, the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, Germany mounted a major exhibition Artist Couples: Love, Art, and Passion that explored the relationships between modern artist couples, with a focus on the ways in which their relationship shaped their art. What the exhibition revealed was that art is like a mirror; it reflects the experiences of its creator, including those at the most intimate levels.

Albert Tucker’s photograph In the mirror: self portrait with Joy Hester (1939), in the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, is one example in an Australian context. In the photograph, Tucker captures his and his future wife’s direct gaze in a mirror; the composition reinforces their shared romantic and artistic vision. This notion of a shared vision was also seen with the Wallers through their medieval idealism. Yet, like Tucker and Hester, and many other artist couples, they ultimately grew apart as they began to pursue different goals. This was the case in the Wallers’ lives as much as in their art.

In his portrait of his wife, Napier may have been articulating his emotional distance from his spouse by 1932, as Butler has discussed. It highlights her idiosyncratic nature and presents her as a woman of the spiritual, not the physical, world. Never formally separating, the couple experienced a significant rift in 1937. Napier began a relationship with one of his former students, Lorna Reyburn, as Christian became more immersed in her spiritual beliefs. In 1939–40 she travelled across America without Napier and spent time in New

1919

There was no mention of her husband sharing this journey with her, and, judging by the themes of his art at the time, this was a solo mission. While Napier also produced ecclesiastical stained glass, this was part of a broader body of work that encompassed secular commissions.

In 1958, four years after Christian’s death, Napier married Reyburn, who had been working as his stained glass assistant for many years. The two lived out their lives at Fairy Hills. Following Napier’s wishes, the home is now preserved for posterity, managed

York, where she became a disciple of Father Divine, the leader of the International Peace Mission Movement. Upon her return to Australia in 1940, Christian assumed the role of spiritual emissary with greater vigour, and focused exclusively on making ecclesiastical stained glass windows to uplift and inspire the spirit.

In a 1948 interview published in Melbourne’s Argus newspaper, Christian stated that “work and God” were the two words printed on her mind, and declared her mission was to “get the message through… to make religion real”.

by Heritage Victoria; it is listed on the Victorian Heritage Database as Napier Waller House.

After Christian died, Christian Waller with Baldur, Undine and Siren at Fairy Hills was given to Pate, who hung it in her home in the Melbourne suburb of Kew. In 1984, it was sold to the Australian National Gallery (now National Gallery of Australia), where it is on permanent display. There, Christian’s portrait intrigues and perplexes an ever-expanding list of onlookers to whom the subject is just as mysterious as it has always been.

Study for ‘Christian Waller with Baldur, Undine and Siren at Fairy Hills’ 1931–32Napier WallerpencilNational Gallery of Australia, CanberraGift of Klytie Pate 2005

The man in black 1925Napier WallerlinocutNational Gallery of Victoria, MelbourneFelton Bequest 1927

Destiny 1916Christian Walleroil on canvasNational Gallery of Victoria, MelbournePurchased with funds donated from the Estate of Ouida Marston 2011 The house on the hill 1925Napier WallerlinocutNational Gallery of Victoria, MelbourneFelton Bequest 1925

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darren mcdonald’s portraits by penelope grist.

Melbourne artist Darren McDonald strips portraiture almost entirely back to the abstracted shape of the sitter. In the National Portrait Gallery’s new collection guide The Companion, Dr Sarah Engledow writes of Darren McDonald’s ‘characteristically gentle style.’ In a 2008 exhibition essay, Peter Fay identified ‘the distinctive McDonald eye, heart, mind.’ Reviews and catalogue essays for McDonald’s solo shows focus on the raw energy, tension and immediacy in his portraits. What is the nature of this style, eye, heart and mind that can gently suggest a sitter’s humanity and inner life with so few brushstrokes?

Meeting Darren McDonald for the first time in Sydney, we walked up to Juniper House to see the exhibition of finalists in the 2013 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize – McDonald’s portrait of ceramicist Stephen Benwell among them. On the walk, McDonald talked about his work: ‘I began to feel like getting friends into the studio – artists whose work I respect and who have been supportive.’ McDonald prefers to know his sitters, to ‘know them as artists’. McDonald didn’t start painting until his 30s. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) degree from RMIT in 2000 and was awarded the RMIT’s John Storey Junior Memorial Scholarship.

McDonald paused as we passed some lawyers’ offices – he knew there were some works by Adam Cullen on their walls. McDonald has a strong sense of his vocation – ‘I have an artist’s life and I choose it’. His deep regard and enthusiasm for other artists’ work is striking and enlivening – he enjoys

‘being about and discussing art’. We stopped on the opposite side of the street to catch a distant glimpse of Cullen’s violent colour and line through the high office windows.

The Portrait Gallery purchased McDonald’s portrait of artist Adam Cullen in late 2012. It is highly unusual in the Collection in not having been taken from life. McDonald ‘met him a few times, then approached him through a friend to paint his portrait.’ The National Portrait Gallery holds Cullen’s portraits of director Neil Armfield and the Mordant family of arts philanthropists. Reviewing the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s major exhibition of Cullen’s work Let’s get lost (2009) in Art Monthly, Alan Dodge wrote of Cullen’s ‘catalogue of macabre, brutish and at times frightfully cheerful characters’ and Ashley Crawford wrote of Cullen’s ‘savage, visceral force’. Cullen was increasingly exhausted by serious mental and physical illness, and arranging a sitting was not possible, so in 2010 McDonald asked if Cullen would mind if he worked on a portrait painted from memory. He didn’t mind. Cullen died in winter 2012.

In painting Cullen’s portrait, McDonald used as his ‘sitter’ – by accident or by instinct – a photograph of American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock that he happened to have in his studio. It makes sense: ‘I imagine they might have a few things in common. They both loved a drink and like a lot of artists were vulnerable in their art and life … Adam started working with the drip.’ Cullen’s figure is unsettled but not slumped or upright; he is balanced as if about to turn around. The sweeping brushstrokes belie its delicacy. The pinks and whites forming his ear and neck are almost a scar.

Painting them gently

Self Portrait with Stetson 2011Private collection

Steve 2013oil on linenCollection of Stephen Benwell

Painter, Model with Chair 2014oil on linenArtist’s collection


McDonald models the face with tiny strokes of green at his cheeks and blue at the eye. It was Cullen’s gentleness that first struck McDonald, and this comes through clearly in the portrait. ‘Gentle’ is a word that recurs in our conversations.

Cullen and McDonald were two of many young artists noticed by Peter Fay – Sydney art collector, mentor, curator, artist, arts writer and, as McDonald put it, ‘a real patron’. Fay told me that he just collected work he liked and was interested in artists making good work. Fay’s advice to McDonald was ‘You are your own critic’. Talking about his work, McDonald is serious and frank. His practice and process are settled: ‘I would call myself a painter’ he says matter-of-factly. McDonald’s Self-portrait with Stetson and bright orange collar capture his own straightforwardness.

Standing in front of his portrait of Stephen Benwell at Juniper House on Oxford Street, McDonald says: ‘He came and sat for me, a gentle unique soul. He is living the life of an artist – the creative life. He will question you and he doesn’t

suffer fools. There is always a discussion.’ ‘My sitters sit about a metre away’, McDonald explained, so Benwell ‘could see the painting being made through the linen.’ McDonald paints in oils direct to glue-sized Belgian linen and takes only an hour or so to complete a portrait.

McDonald’s is a fast, high-stakes process. ‘I work with a brush and if you make a mistake, you make it and it’s there’ McDonald calmly assures me. ‘There is a lot of room for error in my work due to it not having a background. Once the mark is made it cannot be removed’ he said in a 2014 interview for Artist Profile. When he is teaching, McDonald can’t stand students rubbing things out. He explained how he works: ‘Mostly I do an outline and then I fill it in. The outline takes the time and the filling in is very quick – the way a child would draw. There is very little walking away – it’s about looking.’

‘The first time someone sat for me was 2005 – that was Peter Fay – we did portraits together, sat for each other,’ he recalls. They worked in McDonald’s studio in Port Melbourne for five

John Patterson (Clerk of Course) 2013oil on linenCourtesy of the artist and Scott Livesey Galleries

Jimmy (James Smeaton) 2013oil on linenCourtesy the artist and Scott Livesey Galleries

Brent (Harris) and Andrew (Browne) 2013oil on linenCourtesy the artist and Scott Livesey Galleries

Drasko (Boljevic) 2013oil on linenCourtesy the artist and Scott Livesey Galleries

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days. Fay slept on McDonald’s lounge room floor – ‘made of wood – no mattress, just a blanket and pillow’. This experience introduced portraiture into McDonald’s practice. They became friends and he recalls this time fondly. Before this marathon portrait painting session, ‘I was more interested in the animal – but that led to people – the eyes of both are important’. One of McDonald’s portraits of Fay still hangs in Fay’s study.

Visiting McDonald’s studio in Melbourne last June, I asked whether a ‘psychological edge’ – noted first by Peter Fay and often quoted in essays and reviews – is deliberately part of his style. In a 2005 essay, Ashley Crawford described this aspect of McDonald’s work as ‘a shattered distorted prism where the viscous nature of the paint and the inevitable instability of colour take on lives of their own’. Peter Fay cast it as a discontent with surface detail. ‘Nothing’s deliberate … it’s just the way it is,’ McDonald replied. An imposing budgerigar Mauve was on the easel behind me: modelled in waves of blue and yellow, McDonald depicts the big attitude and parrot-

arrogance of this small bird. McDonald sees and represents the distinctive way each creature, human or animal, holds its body against gravity. His subjects appear momentarily paused in movement, despite complete balance. The ‘psychological edge’, energy, immediacy and tension in McDonald’s portraiture are bound up with his ability to represent an individual’s dynamic presence in the world.

One of the most influential art books published last century was Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954) by Rudolf Arnheim, the first Professor of the Psychology of Art at Harvard. Arnheim noted how bodyweight is distributed asymmetrically in human figures, with each limb ‘unbalanced in itself’, balancing the whole in a manner unique to every person: ‘We identify an acquaintance at long distance by nothing more than the most elementary proportions or motions,’ he observed. A face, Arnheim writes, can be ‘grasped as an overall pattern of essential components.’ It is this subconsciously collected spatial data that McDonald is able to capture.

Mauve 2014oil on linenCourtesy the artist and Scott Livesey Galleries


McDonald’s acutely observed portraits represent with disarming honesty how his sitters felt on the day. Hunched and leaning forward, Drasko Boljevic had been ill shortly before he came to sit for McDonald: ‘He was very drained. So he ended up looking sad in the painting, even though I know him as such a happy person.’ ‘He has one of the best artist’s minds,’ says McDonald, and his empathy and affection shine through the finished work. ‘James Smeaton took it very seriously,’ McDonald recalled. In the portrait, Smeaton leans on his right foot, one hand in his pocket, the fingers of the other poking tensely straight out of his jacket, like columns. ‘He is very pale and that is difficult to paint – I think he ended up a little like a skeleton, but he liked the painting.’

McDonald’s portraits convey layers in perceiving another creature’s presence. In his interview with Artist Profile McDonald explained that he is ‘drawn to the plight of human nature, the hardships, how we survive this, and one’s instincts.’ There are parallels with the psychological and observational intensity of Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud or Jean Michel Basquiat. However, McDonald’s is a gentler revelation of his sitters’ characters, personalities and inner lives. He recognises that ‘it is difficult sitting for a portrait’ and his sensitivity to how a body is held in space means some of this inevitable discomfort transfers to the portrait, injecting a poignant humanity. His line and form are emphatic and lively with a quiet assurance, rather than a frenzied exclamation.

Light Fingers with Roy Higgins 2013oil on linenPrivate collection, Queensland

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McDonald focuses closely on his subjects: ‘I’m not interested in the background – I’m only interested in the subject.’ Energy flows from the negative space of the linen, as it is drawn in to balance the figure. Arnheim wrote that ‘… Any line drawn on a sheet of paper … is like a rock thrown into a pond. It upsets repose, it mobilises space. Seeing is the perception of action.’ The space within the frame becomes an ‘interplay of directed tensions.’ This is why McDonald’s subjects do not float ghostlike against a Belgian linen sky. They stand firm on a ground against a horizon defined by their own balance and stability. This creates, as Peter Fay wrote in 2008, ‘a stillness … a moment when the subject is caught/trapped in its own vulnerability – its own private world.’

During our first conversation in November 2013, as we walked through Sydney, McDonald said he wanted to keep going with portraits of artists he knows, including painting his partner, the artist Robyn Astley. His portrait of Astley, Model, Painter with chair (2014) was shortlisted for the Benalla Nude Prize last year. He was also interested in exploring portraits of people with animals. His solo exhibition at Scott Livesey Galleries in Melbourne in February this year included several jockeys and their steeds, including some watercolours. His portrait Roy Higgins with Light Fingers warmly depicts a mutual understanding between creatures. McDonald’s practice in portraiture shows that an abstracted modernist revelation of a sitter’s inner life can be a gentle one. ‘This is what I want to do now,’ he told me.

Blue Chested Pigeon of Newport 2012oil on linenCourtesy the artist and Scott Livesey Galleries

Rupert 2012oil on linenPrivate collection, Perth


a sitter’s recollection. by jaynie anderson.

Reshid Bey asked me to sit for a demonstration picture for his class on portraiture at his studio in Selbourne Park Road, Toorak, in 1963. The portrait sketch was completed in one sitting. The invitation came from Reshid’s wife, Judy Chirnside, who was my mother’s best friend and whom I had known from childhood. I was then in my second year at the University of Melbourne, studying fine arts and history, becoming fascinated by Venetian portraiture, especially from around the beginning of the sixteenth century, which I had encountered in a course on Renaissance art. Reshid gave me the portrait some weeks after completion, which I have always treasured.

It remains challenging to put the two experiences together; that is, my

knowledge of Reshid as a portrait painter and my understanding of Giorgione and his contemporaries in Renaissance Venice. Could there be any relation between the two? These were the thoughts that went through my mind as I posed, high on a stool, before a class that attempted to catch my likeness. Likeness, I thought to myself, is not really the only criteria for portraiture. Rattling around in my head were ideas that I had read in the writings of Leonardo da Vinci about how you should leave behind ideas of conventional likeness in portraiture, and that the artist should introduce the provocative component of movement that might tell you something about the mind of the sitter. Indeed, I assumed a pose that was exceptionally original in the first decade of the sixteenth century, when Giorgione invented the ‘turning portrait’ in response to Leonardo’s

suggestions. Reshid was compliant at the choice, indeed enjoyed it. It is a picture that still has an exuberant, joyful feel about it for me. Photographs of the sitter taken at the time show that the portrait was a good likeness, but it was more than that.

For the first time in his portrait of Laura, (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) Giorgione introduced the conception of a turning portrait, a face in movement, which he adopted for other portraits, as did his followers, Sebastiano del Piombo and Palma Vecchio. Even Dürer, always attentive to Venetian inventions, appropriated it for a portrait drawing of his brother Endres (Nationalmuseum, Nurenberg). This was the Giorgionesque idea around the pose.

I had first sat for Reshid when I was five for a portrait commissioned by my mother, Bonnie Surridge, a pianist, who had firm and rather conventional ideas about art. For the first portrait I remember being dressed in a red velvet frock, trimmed with brown lace at the neck. To complete the French effect I was given a basket of multicolored roses to hold. My hair was arranged in long brown curls, having first been set painfully in rags. I sat for what seemed like an eternity while Judy read many Beatrix Potter stories. At times I was allowed to escape from the studio in Williams Road to play in Como Park, where I willfully played with mushrooms and toadstools, dirtying the velvet dress. When finished, the portrait remained prominently in our dining room, a reminder of how my mother wanted me to be.

There was a rather lengthy article about this first portrait in The Listener In (15-21 January 1949), entitled ‘Young Musician with many strings to her Bow’. The Young Musician in this instance was my mother who emerges in the article as a superwoman with many attributes. She was a pianist, who frequently played with Percy Grainger and Richard Taubner, as well as with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. She was also a painter on china, a hostess of notes, and a busy general practitioner’s wife. Our living rooms were filled with grand pianos where she and her friends played.

For the second portrait there were no allegorical attributes. I wore the softest cashmere brown jumper that I still remember caressing my skin in the freezing cold autumnal studio. I did

Sitter still

Photograph of Jaynie Anderson when she was an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne, taken by her father on the cliff walk on Beleura Hill, Mornington Peninsula. 1963.

Portrait of Jaynie Anderson 1962Reshid Bey oil on masonite Gift of Jaynie Anderson 2015


not want to be represented in a static pose, either a frontal view or a profile view, but in movement turning around. Reshid’s style of painting was puzzling and hard for me to define in relation to the portraiture in art that I was studying. It was definitely European, reminiscent of French impressionism, or more accurately still Salon painting, but could not really be characterized as that. I knew that he had once been a finalist in the Archibald Prize for a portrait of John Casson Esq. in 1953, but never a winner.

Reshid’s father Shefik Bey had been Turkish Ambassador in many European capitals, including Berlin, where Reshid was born, as well as Paris and London. Shefik was a gifted amateur artist who delighted in painting portraits of aristocratic women. In 1913 he married a great beauty, Florence Winter Irving, an Australian who came from a family in the Western District, where her father had been a member of parliament. She was then on the grand tour of Europe. When Turkey became a Republic, Shefik left the diplomatic service to become a portrait painter in Mayfair, London, where he celebrated beautiful women in pastels. Although Reshid was groomed by the Winter Irving family to become a wool buyer, he had been educated at home in various European embassies, and in painting schools in Paris and London. But at some point he decided to become a painter of portraits, still lives, and landscapes.

I had many memories of fabulous children’s parties arranged by Judy, who was an exceptional and daring hostess. One characteristic birthday party was held in Como Park where we practiced archery with real bows and arrows. We were aged ten and real weapons were never allowed at any other Australian party. At another we ate kebabs on real Turkish swords. Judy was a deeply generous person, who inspired creativity and energy in others. She was a classic beauty, and even as a mature grandmother was the sort of woman one focuses on across a crowded room. Like Florence Winter Irving, Judith Chirnside came from a Western District family and was brought up at her parents’ station, Carranballac, in Skipton, Victoria.

In some ways Reshid imitated his father’s career, although he had no direct experience as a child of the home countries in which his parents grew up, Turkey and Australia. In the end he

chose in favour of his mother. Reshid arrived in Australia in 1937 at the age of 21. His mother Florence Winter Irving returned too, after thirty-five years of absence, only to be diagnosed with cancer. Reshid had been educated as an artist in Europe at the Chelsea Polytechnic, but took a refresher course at the art school at the National Gallery of Victoria after his arrival. Yet Reshid’s conservative French Salon style always remained alien to the main traditions of Australian art and portraiture. He held his first exhibition with his father at the Hotel Australia, in the Gold Room, on 18 May 1945. Alan McCulloch noted in his somewhat condescending review in The Age, 17 May 1945: “Shefik Bey specialises in pastel portraits of leaders of society. His objective is to reveal them in the best possible light, an objective which sympathetic understanding and natural good taste enable him to obtain. An adequate technique, combined with the exotic flavour of his Eastern origins, further enhances his chances of success.”

Reshid’s portraiture emerged from his father’s, but he attempted to be more complex. His self-portraits are questioning images, such as Self-Portrait as a Clown, shown in the Paris Salon in 1949, and Self-Portrait as a Man in the Fog, exhibited in 1959, in which he appropriated the famous image from Gustave Caillebotte’s painting in the Art Institute of Chicago. Still he never managed to cut it in Australia. The history of Australian art in the 1940s is always a narrative of modernism and artists like Reshid are ignored. Other immigrant artists came from Europe, recognizing Melbourne as a safe haven, away from war torn Europe. As a child I remember that Reshid and Judy were well known in society, but artistic success was always to evade him. Would a twenty-first century viewer or art historian be able to reconstruct the ideas that were, for the sitter, a part of the portrait experience, as recounted here? Almost certainly such speculation would be regarded as fanciful unless there was an account such as this.

Laura c. 1506Giorgioneoil on canvas transferred from panelKunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

by joanna gilmour.

In the opinion of the author of one early twentieth century history of Edinburgh, the printmaker and miniaturist John Kay was something of an aberration within the city’s high-minded cultural tradition. Kay, being entirely self-taught, produced works ‘of negligible artistic merit’ which were rightly defined as cheap, quaint and curious and unfit for ‘public galleries and private houses throughout the country’. By this measure, upheld by art history for several subsequent decades, Kay’s work was classified as inferior for its modesty, simplicity and frankness, and for being created amidst what one scholar has described as the ‘raucous satirical vigour’ characterising the visual culture of the Georgian age.

A prolific artist whose career spanned some six decades, Kay (1742–1826) started his working life at age thirteen as an apprentice to a barber in his home town of Dalkeith. At nineteen he moved to Edinburgh to continue his trade, joining the association of barber-surgeons and around the same time beginning to create caricatures of local notables and identities. He exhibited his work in his barbershop until 1785, when an annuity from a patron enabled him give up barbering altogether. Kay engraved around 900 plates, depicting ‘every figure of note in Edinburgh at that period … except Robert Burns’, and selling his work from his print room in Parliament Close. Kay often chose his subjects from among the political, social and professional elite, and it is said that some of his best customers were those whose likenesses he had rendered most objectively – and hence unflatteringly – his subjects allegedly buying his prints specifically for the purpose of destroying them. Kay’s oeuvre included absurdly buxom and ridiculously coiffured ladies; pompous, corpulent gents; and military types bristling with braids and hubris. The unseemly sectors of society attracted Kay’s attentions too, with the courts and the scaffold providing an abundant source of subject matter. Consequently, in addition to courtesans, actors, quacks and street people, it is via Kay’s mischievous etchings that the features of some of the era’s higher-profile criminals have been preserved. Take William Brodie (1741–1788) a cabinetmaker hanged for theft in 1788. A guild leader and the occupant of a lucrative position on the city council, Brodie’s upstanding-man façade concealed his nefarious behaviour. During the 1780s he became inured to the ways of burglars, recruited a gang from cockfighting dens and proceeded to plunder various places – among them the Royal Exchange, the University of Edinburgh (he pinched the college mace), and several Golden Mile goldsmiths. In 1788, authorities curbed Brodie’s depredations by offering a pardon to any gang member willing to give evidence against him. Two accomplices caught in a botched robbery duly turned informer, and Brodie and his partner-in-crime, George Smith, a Cowgate grocer, consequently stood trial in Edinburgh in August 1788. Sentenced to hang, Brodie supposedly contrived to cheat death by wearing a steel collar, bribing the hangman to ignore this impediment to the noose and arranging for friends to rescue him from the gallows. This, unsurprisingly, failed but rumours of Brodie’s escape persisted as folklore for some years afterwards.

Occupying the more sympathetic area of Kay’s output are the likenesses of Australia’s first political prisoners – Thomas Muir, Joseph Gerrald, Thomas Fyshe Palmer, Maurice Margarot and William Skirving – the so-called ‘Scottish Martyrs’ transported to New South Wales for sedition in 1794 and 1795. Muir (1765–1799), perhaps the best-known of them, was

introduced to radical thinking while at Glasgow University, and as an Edinburgh-based lawyer became involved in the activities of reformist societies that, emboldened by the ideals of the American and French revolutions, were advancing such causes as freedom of speech, universal (male) suffrage and parliamentary reform. A skilled orator, Muir helped establish the Edinburgh Society of the Friends of the People, and was affiliated with various other organisations anathema to a government paranoid that certain Britons might attempt to convert their countrymen to the ways of revolutionary France. Muir was hardly the firebrand some thought him to be, but in a volatile climate even holding progressive beliefs might be construed as treason, and Muir was consequently arrested when he read out an inflammatory address at a British reform society convention in December 1792. Gerrald (1763–1796) and Margarot (1745–1815), both Londoners despite the ‘Scottish Martyr’ appellation, were the London Corresponding Society’s delegates to the convention; while Skirving (d. 1796) was its secretary. The fifth of them, Palmer (1747–1802), a Cambridge-educated clergyman, had moved to Scotland in the 1780s and in Dundee was introduced to one George Mealmaker (1768–1808), a weaver, member of the local chapter of the Sons of Liberty, and the author of a potentially seditious handbill. Printed by Skirving, this handbill became the cause of Palmer’s misfortune when he was arrested in relation to it in 1793. Though testimony (including Mealmaker’s) proved his offense to be nothing other than causing the document to be printed, Palmer was tried and sentenced to seven years’ transportation, arriving in Sydney with Muir, Skirving and Margarot aboard the Surprize in October 1794. Gerrald faced trial later, eventually making it to Sydney in late 1795 after several months in Newgate and suffering from an advanced case of tuberculosis.

Mealmaker’s political activity continued unabated. In 1794, he was questioned, but not charged, on suspicion of being involved in conspirator Robert Watt’s plot to seize Edinburgh Castle and overthrow the government – the offence for which Watt (c. 1768–1794), an erstwhile wine merchant and another of John Kay’s subjects, was later hanged and beheaded. In 1796, Mealmaker got involved with the clandestine Society of United Scotsmen, writing their constitution, publishing The moral and political catechism of man, and causing to be distributed various other subversive tracts. This caught up with him in November 1797 when he was found guilty of sedition and exiled ‘beyond the seas’ for fourteen years. By the time Mealmaker got to Sydney, in late 1800, Gerrald and Skirving were dead, Skirving succumbing to his illness (at Palmer’s house in Sydney) a few months after he’d arrived. Muir was dead too, having successfully petitioned governor John Hunter (another Scot) on the injustice of his situation and then escaped Sydney aboard an American fur-trading vessel in early 1796. Muir eventually ended up in Paris, where he was feted before his life ended amidst illness and poverty in January 1799. Palmer had become a successful trader and shipowner and a friend to certain of the colony’s eminent, liberal-minded gentlemen. He died while en route to England in 1801. Despite being implicated in rumours of rebellion again during his first eighteen months in the colony, Mealmaker received a conditional pardon in 1803 and was thereafter supervisor of the weaving work conducted at the Parramatta Female Factory. Following the near destruction of the Factory in a fire in 1807, Mealmaker lapsed into impoverishment and alcoholism, dying as a result of ‘alcoholic suffocation’ in March 1808. Margarot outlived all of them, serving his time between Sydney, Norfolk Island, Van Diemen’s Land and Newcastle before returning home in 1810.

In 1837–38 A series of original portraits and caricature etchings by the late John Kay was published in two volumes with further editions appearing in 1842 and 1877. Providing an alternative record of Edinburgh in its golden age, Kay’s caricatures, hitherto considered unworthy of the notice of art history, now enrich the holdings of many a public gallery and prestigious collection, not the least being those of the National Portrait Galleries in Canberra, London, and – of course – Edinburgh.

Alternative virtues

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Self portrait 1786 John Kay etching and aquatint © National Portrait Gallery, London

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William Brodie 1788 John Kayetching © National Portrait Gallery, London


George Smith; William Brodie 1788 John Kayetching and aquatint © National Portrait Gallery, London

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George Smith 1788 John Kayetching and aquatint © National Portrait Gallery, London


Thomas Muir of Huntershill 1838 John Kayengraving National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Purchased 2011

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Joseph Gerrald, a delegate to the British Convention 1794 John Kayetching Rex Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia


Citizen Margarot, delegate from the London Corresponding Society to the British Convention 1794 John Kayetching Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

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The Rev’d TF Palmer, New South Wales 1793 John Kayetching National Library of Australia


Citizen Skirving, Secretary to the British Convention, a tried patriot and an honest man 1794 John Kayetching Rex Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia

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George Mealmaker 1798 John Kayetching National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Purchased 2015


Robert Watt 1794 John Kayetching © National Portrait Gallery, London

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new to the national portrait gallery’s collection is a dazzling and dynamic representation of renowned author alan marshall am obe by noel counihan, most publicly seen as the cover art for the complete stories of alan marshall (1977). by diana o’neil.

Most people know – and love – Alan Marshall for his childhood memoir I can jump puddles (1955), but certainly for adults, These are my people (1944) is the most boldly authentic interpretation of the many voices Marshall captured for us in his books and stories over his eighty-two years.

These are my people is essentially a travelogue of Marshall and his wife’s travels around Victoria during the Second World War. Marshall set out to listen and recount the stories of those who stayed behind. Marshall was one of those who stayed behind; due to his disability – polio in childhood – he was scarcely mobile, even with

the use of crutches. There are eleven editions of the original 1944 publication of These are my people, wrapped in admiration and attribution of the artists and writers of the day. For example, in 1957 there was an edition with a foreword by Vance Palmer and illustrated by Ron Edwards, and there is a sturdy, workaday 1984 edition which included a series of dark lithographs by Rick Amor.

Just as in I can jump puddles, Marshall’s descriptions in These are my people of living with his ‘brummy legs’ as he travels for miles and for months in a horse-drawn caravan, is wry, never sorrowful, but more than matter of fact. His anecdote of searching for the horses after they’ve wandered off in a morning of penetrating cold rain, crutches slipping in the mud, ripping the skin of his numb legs, brings some understanding to the reader of Marshall’s stoicism and acceptance. Similarly, in I can jump puddles, his description of months spent in a hospital for rehabilitation, at about ten years of

Of jumpers and river gums, red

Alan Marshall 1971Noel Counihanoil on masoniteGift of Barrie and Jenny Hadlow 2015


age, in the early years of the twentieth century will stay with the reader forever; the intuitive and sunny child is experiencing horrific pain and homesickness, and yet he is most occupied with the wish to cheer his fellow (adult) patients.

In his early adult life, Marshall lived and worked with the ‘ratbags’ of Melbourne; the left, the socialists, the communists – groups of people, often workers, who dreamed of a more equal paradise. He wrote for Worker’s Voice, the Communist Review and the Left Review; Smith’s Weekly, the Bulletin, ABC Weekly, Bohemia and Meanjin. He edited the anti-fascist review, Point, and was president of the Victorian Writers’ League; though he never joined the Communist Party, he attracted the interest of ASIO immediately upon its formation in 1949. His writing was rarely overtly political, but glorified honesty, earthiness, labour, charity, authenticity and simplicity. For many of his adult years he lived and worked in Eltham, and became one of the influences for the fertile period in that halcyon location.

Steven Murray Smith describes Marshall in

the introduction to The Complete Stories: ‘[He] not only holds a firm place in the thoughts of all who have known him ... but is a man who is regarded with national affection. This was partly because his art was never pretentious. He never tried to be trendy: on the other hand he was never self-consciously folksy either. Of course he has been punished for this, as Lawson was too, for two generations.’

Robert Sessions was the publisher at Nelson at the time of The Complete Stories publication. Sessions has fond memories of conversations with Marshall in the preparation of the book: ‘He seemed bemused, as though no-one would be interested in his stories.’ The decision was to produce a hardback, a paperback and a limited, slip case edition of 500 all at the same time, with all three using the stunning portrait as the key art; ‘it was what publishing did in those days,’ says Sessions.

He recalls the use of the Noel Counihan portrait of Marshall as a cover was Alan’s idea. Sessions says, ‘I can hear Alan’s voice, in that funny kind of gruff way … Alan put us

onto it and we knew instantly it was the right thing.’ Counihan also did ten drawings for The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall, including one that was for use only in the limited edition, tipped in as a frontispiece, with the plate then destroyed.

Marshall and Counihan had been friends for some years before the portrait was done. They seem to have known each other through family and friends before they found themselves in Swan Hill, Victoria, in 1970. Counihan had been there before and introduced Marshall to his local friend, Jenny Hadlow. For an outing, Hadlow drove them a short way to Goodnight, NSW, and there took Counihan and Marshall for a walk on the banks of the Murray River, under the famous River Red gums. The three experienced a significant few hours, where the natural surroundings brought about a kind of profound insight.

‘No tree can equal the River Red gum. The old red gums of the Murray are infinitely wise, a wisdom they can communicate to those who rest their hand upon them,’ Marshall wrote later.

That night Marshall was his garrulous and personable self, enthralling the group with his wit and storytelling. During the evening, Counihan saw that Marshall was full of a lively humanity, and madly sketched him; he seemed inspired by the place, the river, the people. Jenny quietly asked Counihan what he would do with the sketches; he said he wasn’t sure, he hoped it would lead to a portrait, but he’d ‘never got him’ (Marshall) before.

Weeks later Counihan wrote to Hadlow to thank her for their visit and enclosed a photograph of Hadlow and Marshall at that spot by the river, Marshall dressed in the distinctive red jumper that was soon seen in the portrait. Counihan wrote ‘I feel rather happy about a small portrait I am painting of Alan (he doesn’t know anything about it!). It’s rather fresh and sunny.’

Counihan sold the portrait to the Hadlows in 1971, and for almost all the years since, it has hung in the family home, much loved, a talisman of the friendship and admiration between the artist, the subject and the family, until its donation to the National Portrait Gallery in March 2015.

Counihan is not especially known for his portraits; indeed this is the first of his works to be included in the Portrait Gallery’s collection. There is his harsh, memorable 1983 Self-Portrait at 70 in graphite, and, held at the National Gallery of Victoria, another Self-Portrait, 1973 in oil, and one of Judah Waten. There is one of Vance Palmer at the National Library, and one of Katherine Susannah Prichard held at the National Gallery of Australia. He executed some commissions

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in the late 70s and early 80s, most of which are held privately.Counihan, born in Melbourne, began his career as a press caricaturist, freelancing in Australia, New Zealand and Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. In the early 1950s, between four and six-year stints as a staff artist for the Melbourne Guardian, he worked for the World Trade Union Movement in London. In Melbourne, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he exhibited pictures of miners, construction workers, demonstrations and other scenes of working-class life.

Between 1951 and 1960, his work was shown in London, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Moscow and Leningrad; during this period he won the Crouch Prize twice, the McCaughey Prize and the VS drawing prize as well as a bronze medal at the

International Graphics exhibition in Leipzig. In 1969, he exhibited in Poland and the USSR. The NGV held a survey of his work in 1973, in which year he also had a survey show at the Commonwealth Gallery in London; Marshall’s portrait was included in both. In 1974, he had a residency at the Cité in Paris. In 1982, he lived in France, based in the village of Opoul, southwest of Paris, and produced a body of work depicting French village life.

Marshall says of portraiture and the Counihan portrait in particular: ‘I like it ... one changes with the years, the face becomes shorn of irrelevancies, the lines deepen, the structure of the face becomes more prominent and the bare man looks out on the world. This is what Noel has captured. I think it is a masterpiece.’

Self-portrait 1973Noel Counihanoil on canvasNational Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Irving and Colleen Saulwick 2013

(Alan Marshall) 1984Rick AmorlinocutNational Gallery of Australia, CanberraGift of the artist 2007© Rick Amor Licensed by Viscopy

Jenny Hadlow and Alan Marshall on the banks of the Murray River 1970photograph by Noel Counihan courtesy of Barrie and Jenny Hadlow

One evening I walked from hill to hill reading stories from the tracks of the creatures that had passed that way. Here a fox had crept toward a clump of Spinifex, here he had leapt into a run, but, now a rabbit’s tracks stretched beside or merged with his own. Over the ridge they were lost in a patch of trampled sand from which the fox tracks continued alone.

I climbed a pine ridge and looked down into the wind-scooped hollow behind it. The uncovered skeletons of three Aborigines lay on the sand beneath me.

It was very still. I could not hear a bird. The day was empty of life, yet a breathing, a waiting, a listening was here.

I stood without movement, faced with countless eyes that watched me and waited. I moved down the steep incline, my crutches sinking deep in the sand. There was only the sun and the sand and a belah tree and a guard of Murray pines.

Extract from These are my people


by joanna gilmour. Tom Wills was forty-four years old when he met a pointless, violent death in circumstances a far cry from the propriety and comfort of his beginnings. His death certificate gave

his occupation as ‘gentleman’, yet he had for some time been subsisting on an allowance and the odd additional contribution from his brothers, and died in the rented house he shared with the woman who referred to herself as his ‘wife’ even though their partnership

Secure the shadow ere the substance fade

had never been formalised. With his domestic arrangements already the cause of shame to a respectable family, Wills added further insult through dying by his own hand at a time when many God-fearing, upright types saw suicide as sin, a deep moral flaw along the lines of cowardice and other varieties of disgraceful, unspeakable behaviour. The coroner’s finding that Wills ‘killed himself when of unsound mind from excessive drinking’ spared his family the further shame of a verdict of willful ‘self-slaughter’, but reiterated the ignominy of the condition that had so utterly undone the career of a man once numbered among the most illustrious Australian sportsmen of his era. First-hand accounts of Wills’s death make disturbing reading, describing how, in a state of delirium tremens and having absconded from Melbourne Hospital, he ‘possessed himself of a pair of scissors, with which he stabbed himself, inflicting three wounds on the left breast, immediately in the region of his heart’.

Born in Sydney in August 1836, Thomas Wentworth Wills was the eldest son of Horatio Spencer Wills (1811–1861), a landowner and erstwhile newspaper proprietor whose father had been transported to New South Wales for highway robbery in 1799. Named for his father’s good friend (and lawyer), William Charles Wentworth, Tom was not quite four years old when he took part in the journey by which Horatio relocated from Burra Burra, his holding on the Molonglo River, to the Port Phillip district in late 1839. The following year, Horatio selected a 120 000 acre run just east of the Grampians, the traditional country of the Djab Wurrung people, where the next five Wills children were born and where Tom, seven years older than his nearest sibling, made mates with the local children, picking up their language and developing an affinity that persisted, irrespective of the role of distant Aboriginal people in the tragedy that later claimed the Wills family. Insistent that his sons should receive the sort of education he’d never had, in 1846 Horatio sent Tom to Melbourne to the school established by the Oxford-educated William Brickwood ‘for the instruction of youth in the usual branches of Classical, Literary, Scientific, and Mercantile education’. At Brickwood’s, Tom made his first, albeit

Thomas Wentworth Willsc. 1859photographer unknownambrotypeGift of TS Wills Cooke 2014Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

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Tom Wills c. 1870William Handcock oil on canvasMelbourne Cricket Ground Collection


inauspicious, foray into cricket, scoring a duck in both innings of an intra-school match in September 1846. When his schooling in Melbourne finished three years later, it was decided that he would benefit from the instruction offered by an English public school, and at fourteen Tom was duly bundled ‘home’ to Rugby so that he might be further equipped for ‘the duties of the learned professions … or of the gentleman.’

It was, however, as a sportsman and not a scholar that Tom came to distinguish himself at Rugby School, his disinclination for the cultivation of his intellect being apparent from the outset. In August 1851, he wrote home admitting that ‘I have not been working hard enough to please a saint’, excusing his lack of application to study in claiming that: ‘One thing I know is that it does not please my health, I have been ill oftener the last 4 or 5 months than I have been for the last 6 or 7 years. I know that if I work too hard that I will become quite ill. We hardly get any play during school time’. Horatio’s sister, Sarah Alexander, living in London with her merchant husband and with whom Tom spent his summer holidays, considered her nephew to have been ‘very backward when he arrived in England’ in 1850, later instructing Horatio that ‘it would not be advisable to take him from school for some time yet … he has much yet to learn which could not be acquired with much ease and advantage as at present, when no other occupation interferes to attract his attention’. They were famous last words. By this time, May 1854, Tom had already proved himself in athletics and taken up the school’s own brand of football. To boot, his cricketing prowess was such that he’d taken 104 wickets and scored in excess of 800 runs in the space of one season (in 1851), graduating to the Rugby School XI the following year and to its captaincy three years later. In August 1854, aged eighteen, Wills made his first class cricket debut, taking a five wicket haul in bowling for the ‘Gentlemen of Kent’

against the ‘Gentlemen of England’ in Canterbury. On finishing school in 1856, Wills played further games for Kent, the Marylebone Cricket Club and for Cambridge University, managing the latter without ever actually being an undergraduate in spite of his father’s hope to the contrary. ‘Remember that everything you do is for yourself ’, Horatio had vented to his eldest son in 1853 on receipt of an unsatisfactory school report. ‘If you do not succeed in life and obtain the reputation of a clever gentlemanly fellow, no one will be to blame but yourself ’.

Perversely, Tom had managed to obtain the reputation of a gentlemanly fellow in certain respects, embracing the demeanour and the practices that came with the club, the pitch and the pavilion, so ubiquitous was the association between sport and booze, and so customary the assumption that agreeable chaps would partake of it. Accordingly, it was as this variety of gentleman – and not the learned

professional envisaged as the product of such a prestigious education – that Tom returned home to Victoria late in 1856. Again proving a disappointment in terms of solid employment prospects, he continued to pay greater attention to his on-field exploits and the congenial company that came with them, the last few years of the 1850s seeing the start of his association with several cricket clubs, including Melbourne and Richmond, and also seeing him make his first appearance as a member of the Victorian cricket squads that lorded it over bitter rivals New South Wales in seven of the ten intercolonial contests played throughout the next decade.

In 1858, Wills made the contribution to Australian sporting history that has since arguably eclipsed any of his cricketing achievements, writing in July to Bell’s Life in Victoria with his proposal to form a football club as a means of keeping cricketers fit during winter. ‘Rather than allow this state of torpor to creep over them, and stifle their now supple limbs, why can they not, I say, form a foot-ball club, and form a committee of three or more to draw up a code of laws? If a club of this sort were got up … it would keep those who are inclined to become stout from having joints encased in useless, superabundant flesh’. Having

In 1858, Wills made the contribution to Australian sporting history that has since arguably eclipsed any of his cricketing achievements, writing in July to Bell’s Life in Victoria with his proposal to form a football club as a means of keeping cricketers fit during winter.

Grand intercolonial cricket match 1858EL Robinson (lithographer) after Henry Heath Glover (1828–1904)lithographPictures Collection, State Library of Victoria

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subsequently coordinated several experimental football fixtures, Wills laid the groundwork for the formation of the Melbourne Football Club in May 1859 and led the ‘committee of three or more’ that, in an East Melbourne hotel three days later, set down the ‘code of laws’ for what later became known as Victorian or Australian Rules football. A modified version of the style of football Wills adopted at Rugby, in recent years some have also advanced the suggestion, an unproven and contentious one, that certain elements of the code might be owed to marngrook, a traditional indigenous game involving a possum-skin ball, and which Wills may have witnessed as a boy.

It’s this Tom Wills we see in portraits. The squatter’s son, equally au fait with the bush and the city, the scrub and the club. Urbane, handsome, sportsmanlike. A tad raffish, rough around the edges, yet at ease with clever, gentlemanly, like-minded

fellows. He can be seen, for example, in EL Robinson’s 1858 lithographed souvenir of ‘the recent trial of prowess between the rival cricketers of Victoria and New South Wales’, and in Edward Gilks’s souvenir of the 1860 intercolonial match, wherein Wills took nine wickets, bowled 24 maidens, and conceded a mere 39 runs from 183 balls. Then there is the Tom depicted in the series of cased family photographs taken around the same time, and which provide evidence of Tom’s origins in industrious, self-improving colonial stock, families that in classic ‘pulling-oneself-up-by-the-bootstraps’ fashion had escaped humble, ex-convict or bog-standard origins, achieving wealth or position, or both, through speculation, enterprise and hard graft. Cased photographic portraits – daguerreotypes and ambrotypes – were, on the one hand, a personal, tangible, astonishingly real transcription of a loved one’s features, and on the other, a typical way in which one might record

rites of passage, and material and social success.

Correspondingly, places like mid-nineteenth century Victoria, riddled with gold and flush with cash, attracted artists, and for some of them, Geelong, close by to where Horatio and his substantial family resided from 1852, was just as pleasing and promising a prospect as Melbourne. The state’s second most significant port had become, by the mid-1850s, the entry point for those on their way to the Ballarat goldfields and the exit point for the shiploads of wool grown in the Western District on vast holdings owned by men like Horatio. It was thus substantial enough to provide work for artists, especially those whose stock in trade was a facility in the depiction of houses, horses and self-made men. From the late 1840s onwards, Geelong appears to have been on the itineraries of various travelling photographers, and within a decade it was possible to procure a top-notch

Sketch of the Victorian Eleven and the Intercolonial Cricket Ground 1860Edward GilkslithographPictures Collection State Library of Victoria


daguerreotype or ambrotype from one of several established local studios. There was, for instance, the business operated by French-born ‘Daguerrean Artiste’ Amand Auguste Fortune La Moile from a chemist’s premises in Yarra Street, where painter Robert Dowling was employed to hand-tint photographs in 1854; or the ‘rooms’ occasionally occupied by Launceston photographer H. Husband, who in 1853 offered his Geelong clients ‘coloured daguerreotype portraits in the best style’. In 1856, Joseph Turner advertised his studio on Ryrie Street as being ‘fitted up expressly for taking portraits, either on silver plates by the daguerreotype, or on glass by the new collodion process’. Eugen Willhelm Ernst de Balk, active in Geelong from 1858 and Turner’s successor as the proprietor of his ‘Portrait Gallery’ on Moorabool Street, styled himself ‘Photographer to His Excellency the Governor’; while Charles E Johnson, who arrived in Geelong by way of Cleveland, San Francisco and Melbourne in 1855, touted a studio furnished ‘in such a manner as to combine both comfort and elegance; a separate dressing room being appropriated for Ladies’. Whether any of these was responsible for the photographs of Tom, his father and siblings is yet to be determined. But what is known is that they would have

been taken around the time that Tom’s brothers Cedric, Horace and Egbert (then only nine) were about to be sent to school in Germany, and before Horatio announced his departure from Geelong and the state parliamentary seat he’d held since 1855 so that he could take up his lease on Cullin-la-ringo, his new wool-growing venture in central Queensland. Unsettlingly, and inadvertently, they are portraits which secure the features of proud and fortunate folk whose blessings were soon to be blighted irretrievably.

Tom was among the group of 26 who left for Cullin-la-ringo in February 1861. Overlanding from Brisbane, they reached the station eight months later, Horatio exclaiming ‘Cullin-la-ringo at last!’ in a letter to his wife Elizabeth (who’d just given birth to their ninth child) written on 6 October. Much taken with his ‘magnificent station’, Horatio wrote of constructing fences and pens, ‘on one creek, I think called Spring Creek, alone 25 to thirty thousand sheep in fair seasons could be well kept’, he enthused. Less than a fortnight later, Horatio was among the nineteen members of his party murdered when a group of Aboriginal people camped nearby mounted a violent raid on the property. A stockman who’d managed to avoid being seen reported the atrocity soon afterwards, initiating a period of swift and thorough reprisal against the

Emily Spencer Wills c. 1859photographer unknowndaguerreotype

Horace and Cedric Spencer Wills c. 1859photographer unknownambrotype

Horatio Spencer Wills c. 1859photographer unknowndaguerreotype

Gifts of TS Wills Cooke 2014Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

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local indigenous people. Tom, who with three others had been sent by his father to a neighbouring station soon after the party had arrived, was one of the few survivors of the tragedy. His reaction, it can be easily imagined, was initially one of desolation and vengeance, but he remained at Cullin-la-ringo nevertheless, running the station until his brother Cedric (1844–1914) eventually took on this responsibility – Tom, suspected of managerial ‘irregularities’, having resorted even more to alcohol as a method of quelling the demons occasioned by the circumstances of his father’s death.

Back in Victoria permanently by 1864, Tom returned to sport and in 1866, despite the violence of sentiment he had a few years previously expressed in regards to Aboriginal people, was engaged as the captain-coach of a cricket team formed of indigenous men who’d learned the game while working as stockmen on properties in western Victoria. Members included Johnny Mullagh (1841–1891) and Johnny Cuzens (d. 1871), who both later played professionally with Melbourne and were part of the squad that went to England (the first team of Australian cricketers to do so) in 1868. Between 26 and 28 December 1866, Tom’s team played a match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the Argus reporting that ‘the interesting nature of the match drew together a large concourse of spectators’. Alerted to their profit-making potential, Wills helped conceive plans for an English tour, taking them on a series of warm-up performances in regional Victoria and in Sydney. The plan was abandoned when the team’s backer embezzled its funds, and amidst publicly-made observations on the questionable issue of ‘interesting’ Aboriginal players being exhibited for white commercial gain. Displaced as captain for the tour that eventuated in 1868, Tom’s declining financial form was underlined when he joined the Melbourne Cricket Club in 1867 as ‘tutor’, a title deftly disguising the matter of his slump from gentleman status to that of a professional; that is, someone who could not afford to play for mere sport. The arrangement, recorded in William Handcock’s famous portrait of Wills in MCC colours (gifted to

the club by former Test cricketer and MCC secretary Hugh Trumble in the 1920s), continued into the early 1870s, during which period Tom also played football for Geelong and represented his state again in intercolonial cricket. By this time, his form and reputation, gentlemanly or otherwise, was waning too. In the intercolonial match against New South Wales in March 1872, he was called for chucking (his bowling action having long been considered suspect), and in his final representative outing, in 1875, he failed to take a wicket in a demoralising 195-run defeat. With the prospects of earning a professional living getting slimmer, Wills slipped further into debt and drunkenness, in his late years playing the occasional game of club cricket, umpiring, and serving the Geelong Football Club in administrative roles before ultimately leaving Geelong for Melbourne again in 1878. ‘I should be glad to get news from you sometimes’, Wills wrote to his brother Horace in March 1880 from his final home in Heidelberg, ‘I’m out of the world here and the only news I pick up is from the newspaper and that’s been full of nothing lately but electioneering business’. Being isolated, skint, and no longer the stuff of scoreboard legend, had a magnifying effect on a sense of diminished substance, resulting in early May 1880 in his suicide.

In reporting his death, it was the

norm for newspapers to identify alcoholism only as the culprit. The Bendigo Advertiser, for instance, stated that his drinking was a consequence of the popularity earned in his ‘halcyon days of success’, the hero-worship often assuming ‘the shape of about the most ill-judged kindness that could have been offered to one of Tommy’s temperament. ... The great fault of Wills was that he had not the moral courage to say “No” ’, it lamented. Another obituary made reference to his having ‘latterly given way to a fatal indulgence’, and the Melbourne Evening Herald declared frankly that grog, ‘the curse of these colonies – the demon which has desolated so many homes and blasted the fair fame of thousands – got its hold upon him’. Recent scholarship, however – notably the biography by Sydney psychiatrist Greg de Moore – points to the fall from grace of the so-called ‘Grace of Australia’ as being attributable also to factors much darker than the longstanding partnership between booze, sport and spectatorship, with the psychological impact of the events and aftermath of October 1861 initiating what might be considered now as an affliction akin to post-traumatic stress. Such a condition could never have been anticipated around 1859 when an unknown photographer secured Tom's features at the peak of his gentlemanly and sporting glory.

The Aboriginal Cricket Team 1866photographer unknownalbumen silver photographMelbourne Cricket Ground Collection


Stigma, stigmata

by angus trumble.

In her foreword to Ted Gott’s landmark Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS (1994), the late Betty Churcher wrote: “HIV/AIDS is not an easy subject to broach, whatever your personal or political perspective on this

catastrophic epidemic … This book and the exhibition will challenge and confront our readers and our audiences. The seriousness of this issue demands nothing less.”

Twenty-one years later, it takes some effort to recover the sense of crisis in which those somewhat cautious words were written – to

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say nothing of the scale and character of the catastrophe – for in many respects we now inhabit a completely different world. In 1994, the number of diagnoses of HIV/AIDS in Australia peaked at 953 (more than eighteen per week); from about 1987, the drug azidothymidine (AZT) did many patients more harm than good, and antiretroviral therapies (the so-called cocktails), though developing rapidly in scientific laboratories abroad, were not yet available to doctors or their patients. Thousands of Australians had died, and were dying every day, of appalling AIDS-related illnesses. The difference seemed negligible between an HIV/AIDS diagnosis and a sentence of slow death without any avenue of appeal, and no possibility of reprieve. The LGBT community lived in fear – dwelt under a black cloud of loss – its members constantly attending one another’s funerals, and at times experienced extremes of stigma, discrimination and hate. Today approximately 25,000 Australians are living with HIV, and deaths from AIDS are rare. HIV has become a wholly manageable condition, not unlike diabetes. For those of us old enough to remember it, the decade of 1983–93 feels like a bad dream. Yet this is the context in which it is vital to see Acacius (Stigmata) – Portrait of Tony Carden, 1991, by AñA Wojak, lately presented to the National Portrait Gallery on behalf of the many members of Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian community by the sitter’s mother, Lesley Saddington.

Wojak’s Stigmata series explored the broad theme of sainthood and martyrdom, first by using materials and techniques that evoked Byzantine icons and early Italian Renaissance altarpieces: she painted on salvaged wooden supports such as crusty old doors and table-tops – used an outline or aureole of rich blue derived from expensive lapis lazuli, and applied a background field of 23-carat gold leaf. The visual effects are precious and liturgical. Wojak’s imagery, meanwhile, brought the ancient heritage of the catholic martyrology into tense alignment with men and women she saw being forced to play comparable roles in the midst of the AIDS crisis, and mostly driven into conflict with church dogma.

The concept of the stigmata, meanwhile, that is, marks or sores on parts of the body that correspond with the wounds inflicted upon the crucified Jesus, was a late medieval development in catholic spirituality – a physical manifestation of an ultra-mystical self-identification with the suffering of Christ and with the defining spiritual paradox of the cross: the instrument of torture; the tree of life. The connection between the stigmata and AIDS was, in the early 1990s, so obvious that it hardly needed stating. So often, patients were imprisoned by intravenous drips, catheters, ventilators, or worse, and their suffering was grievous. It was one such hospital

experience (with a bout of life-threatening pneumonia) that galvanized Tony Carden. “They put him on a trolley,” his mother recalls, “and placed him in not much bigger than a cupboard, and left him there. And people circled around him, terrified of AIDS, of course, and they had nowhere to send him – they had no beds for AIDS patients. And Tony got very angry.”

AñA Wojak met Tony Carden soon afterwards in 1991 at a meeting in Sydney of ACTUP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), of which he had become an active member, as well as a volunteer with the AIDS Council of New South Wales. He was thirty, and she was thirty-seven. On that occasion, Carden offered to sit for Wojak, posing not as himself but rather as a substitute for the early Christian martyr St. Acacius. Carden had had a background in professional theatre, film and television in Sydney and Melbourne, having studied in the early 1980s at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York, so playing the part of someone else came naturally to him. Still – it was especially enticing, even cheeky, given the venerable nature of the subject – for everything here centres on the halo. Tony sat once for AñA, but subsequently she worked from photographs.

St. Acacius is an elusive and probably mythical figure. According to Anastasius Bibliothecarius, an unreliable ninth-century C.E. Roman regurgitator of unattributed Greek chronicles, St. Acacius led 10,000 Roman soldiers who converted to Christianty but were crucified on Mt. Ararat when they refused to recant. The cult of the 10,000 martyrs gained strength in mid-fourteenth-century Europe in the aftermath of the Black Death, due to Acacius’s dying prayer that good health in mind and body would be restored to those of the faithful who undertook to venerate them. The resonance with the AIDS crisis could not have been clearer, or indeed the irony more bitter: Carden was himself HIV-positive, and had already suffered from AIDS-related pneumonia.

According to Catholic dogma, particular saints are not created by the church, but exist in heaven and therefore merely await formal recognition. In his relatively brief life, Tony Carden did much to make a difference to the society in which he belonged; he improved the lot of many of us who survive him, and we tread a path that is far easier than it would have been without the committed activism of scores of brave young people, who, like him, gave it their all and died far too soon. Tony garnered political support for Sydney’s then embattled LGBT community. He lobbied tirelessly for better standards of medical care, access to better treatment, improved hospital facilities (i.e. more, desperately-needed beds), and effective public safer sex education. He fought on many fronts against explicit discrimination against people

living with HIV and dying of AIDS, and other implicit, often subtle, forms of discrimination against LGBT people more generally. Together with Clover Moore, then the independent Member for Bligh in the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, Tony helped to raise the $1 million that was needed to refurbish and upgrade the AIDS ward (17 South) at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst.

In 1993 Carden began to assemble a work of art entitled Warrior Blood, which consisted of fabric swatches stained with droplets of blood donated or impressed by AIDS patients, doctors and other medical staff, academics, entertainers, religious figures (priests and nuns), and others. More an ongoing process of accumulation than a finished work, Warrior Blood was exhibited in Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra in 1994-95, as was Acacius (Stigmata). AñA Wojak remembers Tony Carden as a handsome young man of unusual warmth, gentleness and generosity, combined with fierce determination – a beautiful soul. They kept in touch after she finished Acacius (Stigmata), and in the middle of a Sunday afternoon excursion to the Hawkesbury, Tony came across an old scythe – no doubt remembering the original 1987 grim-reaper public-health AIDS awareness campaign. Tony picked it up and gave it to AñA, a typically theatrical gesture with a hint of mischievous gallows humour.

When at length he died of AIDS in 1995 at the age of thirty-four, more than 400 people attended Tony Carden’s funeral, and AñA Wojak arranged for her painting to be displayed prominently at the wake which took place afterwards in a crowded gallery in Glebe. On that occasion a general consensus immediately formed that Acacius (Stigmata) ought to belong in Ward 17 South at St. Vincent’s “in recognition of the Gay and Lesbian community’s struggle for acceptance and dignity for people living (and dying) with HIV/AIDS, and as a source of inspiration and comfort to patients.” In due course the painting was formally presented to and accepted by the hospital at an amply publicised morning tea. Some years later, however, the painting was returned, wrapped in a hospital-issue cotton blanket, to Tony Carden’s mother, Lesley Saddington, apparently because some members of the hospital’s Board strongly objected to the portrayal of a gay man as a catholic saint. Evidently it had not yet occurred to them that Wojak’s painting could be seen, even more compellingly, as the portrayal of a catholic saint as a young gay man, full of promise, with blond hair cut à la Depeche Mode, and a knack for getting a lot of important things done in what little time he knew he had left.

Acacius (Stigmata) - portrait of Tony Carden 1991 AñA Wojakoil and gold leaf on cedar panel Gift of Lesley Saddington 2015


exhibtion curator richard ormond writes that the show at the national portrait gallery, london, sargent: portraits of artists and friends, revealed a painter at the vanguard of contemporary movements in music, in literature and the theatre.

John Singer Sargent was born in Florence, Italy, in 1856 to expatriate American parents, forever on the move across Europe. He trained as an art student in Paris, and it was there that he first came to public notice. During the 1890s, Sargent, American by citizenship but English by residence, became the pre-eminent transatlantic portraitist of his generation, painting many of the great figures of the age.

In 1886 he exchanged Paris for London, and his first professional visit to the US in 1887 resulted in a swathe of commissions and established his reputation. In 1890 he was given a commission for a major scheme of murals, Triumph of Religion, in the

Boston Public Library, a project that would engross him for nearly thirty years. Anxious to complete his murals, and increasingly preoccupied with landscape painting, he gave up portrait painting (with rare exceptions) in 1907. Instead he offered his patrons portrait charcoals, of which he completed six hundred.

Sargent’s portraits are admired for their insight into character, for their sense of grand design, brilliance of light and colour and for their painterly fluency. The portraits that he painted of creative personalities are often a testament to friendship, but they also reflect the wide array of influences that formed his taste and aesthetic outlook.

Of formal education he had very little – he was largely taught by his father. The family moved with the seasons, from southern Europe to the Alps by way of Paris, Dresden and other northern cities. Along the way, Sargent acquired a wide knowledge of books, music, architecture and the fine arts. He was from the start a cosmopolitan,

at home in Europe, where he spoke French, German and Italian as well as English. The life of leisure adopted by his parents was not one that Sargent wished to emulate. He was ambitious and eager to make a mark in the world, and from his early teens he had determined to be an artist.

The contemporary painter whom Sargent admired above all others was Édouard Manet, the great outsider. For years, Manet’s pictures suffered rejection and ridicule at the annual Salon, but he continued to exhibit works on a grand scale, and to the young artists of Sargent’s generation, he was a hero. At the Salon of 1882 the two most talked-of pictures were Sargent’s Spanish dance picture, El Jaleo, and Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. While the first escaped the wrath of the critics for all its sketch-like handling, the second was generally condemned for its lack of narrative and meaning.

Sargent was regularly described in the press as Manet’s heir, but there is no record of them actually meeting, though they had several friends in common. With Claude Monet, Sargent led the campaign to purchase Manet’s picture of Olympia for the Louvre; he raised much of the money from his rich friends, while Monet squared officialdom. Sargent’s relations with the Impressionists are more problematic. He is said to have met Claude Monet in 1876 with French artist Paul Helleu, but this is uncorroborated. Monet was certainly a close friend by the mid-1880s and remained so throughout the 1900s. The high point of Monet’s influence on Sargent was in the period when Sargent was painting landscapes and figure scenes in the English countryside (1884–89). He not only looked on Monet as his mentor but also acquired no fewer than four of his landscape paintings. As a Salon portraitist, Sargent was regarded equivocally by members of the group: Camille Pissarro, whose London-bound sons were introduced to Sargent by the writer Octave Mirbeau, described him as very kind, ‘not an enthusiast but rather an adroit performer, and it is not for his painting that Mirbeau wanted you to meet him’. Mary Cassatt shared Pissarro’s view of Sargent, though Sargent was to paint her brother, the railway magnate Alexander Cassatt (whose portrait is in the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission, Strasburg, Pennsylvania).

A feast of friendsSargent in his studio at 33 boulevard Berthier, Paris, with the portrait of Madame Gautreau 1884 Private collection Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose 1885-86 John Singer Sargent Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1887 © Tate London 2015


Edgar Degas noted Sargent’s address in one of his notebooks but spoke disparagingly of him ‘as a skilful portrait painter who differed little from the better Salon painters then in fashion’.

Sargent was never in any doubt that the Salon was the arena in which he had to succeed. Like Manet, he wanted success on his own terms, but his fall when it came was all the more galling because the work that provoked it, Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), had been planned as a chef-d’oeuvre. Though a few critics spoke out in its defence, among them Judith Gautier and Henry Houssaye, the picture was

roundly condemned as decadent and bizarre. It placed Sargent firmly in the camp of the avant-garde.

One of Sargent’s earliest patrons was the popular playwright Édouard Pailleron, whose father-in-law, François Buloz, was editor of the powerful and influential journal Revue des Deux Mondes. Pailleron commissioned portraits of himself; his wife Marie; and his two children, Édouard and Marie-Louise. The portraits of the Paillerons led to new patrons for Sargent. One of these was the wealthy and cultivated Chilean vice-consul in Paris, Ramón de Subercaseaux. The portrait of his beautiful wife, Amalia, seated at

the piano, the epitome of Aesthetic elegance, won a second-class medal at the Salon of 1881. The Pailleron and Subercaseaux portraits may have been the spur for Dr Jean Pozzi to commission a superb and subversive full-length portrait of himself in 1881, dressed in oriental slippers and a bright red dressing gown. A distinguished gynaecologist, Pozzi embodied contemporary aesthetic values in his literary enthusiasms, his exquisite taste and his worship of the beautiful.

Sargent’s move to London in 1886 was not just an exchange of place and residence but also a profound shift in cultural landscape. He never entirely

Édouard and Marie-Louise Pailleron 1881 John Singer Sargent© Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa

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lost touch with Paris or the friends he had made there; its influence continued to shape his art and his taste. But over time, English culture, more conservative and provincial than in France, began to shape his outlook and ambitions. Through Vernon Lee, Sargent met Walter Pater, an Oxford academic; dined with Oscar Wilde, who had inscribed to him a book of poems by Rennell Rodd with the quotation: ‘To my friend John S. Sargent in deep admiration of his work. Oscar Wilde Paris April 5. Rien n’est vrai que le Beau’ [‘Nothing is true but beauty’]; visited the studio of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones; enthused about the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and sat at the feet of the Pre-Raphaelite beauty and artist Marie Spartali (by then Mrs William Stillman).

Sargent’s enthusiasm for English Pre-Raphaelitism was a consequence of the aesthetic tastes he had developed in Paris. It found expression in his early English masterpiece Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, where Aesthetic impulses – little girls dressed in white, lighting Japanese lanterns in a flower-filled garden – meet Impressionist principles of plein-air painting. The influence of Monet is strong at this period, as the

friendship between the two artists deepened. Sargent visited Giverny around 1885 when he painted the well-known picture of Claude Monet, Painting, by the Edge of a Wood. He was there again in 1887, and Monet reciprocated with a visit to Sargent in 1888. Sargent’s comments, in a letter to a friend of 1885, that his work in England was thought ‘beastly French’ and that he might have to abandon art for business point to the downturn in his professional prospects. But he had fallen among friends, and the camaraderie of the Broadway colony, as well as the support of a few enlightened patrons, helped him through this difficult period. Broadway is a picturesque village, lying at the foot of the Cotswolds in the west of England, where two American artists, Francis David (‘Frank’) Millet and Edwin Austin Abbey, invited their friends to join them for summer breaks. The place was soon a hive of artistic and literary activity. Sargent was an enthusiastic early visitor, and while there he painted the wives of his artist friends (Mrs Frank Millet and Mrs Frederick Barnard). He also painted landscapes en plein air, as he was to do at Calcot and Fladbury later in the decade. Sargent’s

picture, Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife, of the same period, is a brilliant invention, a charged moment in the life of a great writer and personality.

A second professional visit to America in 1890 confirmed Sargent’s status as the favourite portraitist of wealthy Americans. Three famous American actors sat for him during that year: Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson and Lawrence Barrett; all three were portrait commissions for the recently founded Players Club in New York. They were preceded by the magnificent portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, commissioned by Sir Henry Irving and displayed in the Lyceum Theatre in

Mrs Frank Millet 1885–86John Singer Sargent Private collection Dr Pozzi at Home 1881 John Singer SargentThe Armand Hammer CollectionGift of the Armand Hammer Foundation© Hammer Museum, Los Angeles


London. These portraits were followed by those of two great actresses, the American Ada Rehan and the Italian Eleonora Duse. This was the moment when Sargent’s involvement with the theatre was at its most intense.

The English took a little longer than the Americans to wake up to Sargent’s genius as a portraitist: Lady Agnew of Lochnaw and Mrs Hugh Hammersley shone above everything else on the walls of, respectively, London’s Royal Academy and New Gallery exhibitions of 1893. At the start of the 1890s, Sargent was associated with the New English Art Club, established in 1886 as an exhibiting society for progressive, mostly French-trained artists. The pictures he showed there were the daring, experimental landscapes he had painted in the English

countryside. Whistler, of course, looms large in this period as the hero of the avant-garde. He and Sargent had met in Venice in 1880, and possibly earlier, and in 1886 Sargent took over his studio at 33 Tite Street, Chelsea, London. Whistler inscribed a later edition of his booklet, Whistler v. Ruskin: Art & Art Critics, ‘to John S. Sargent - with friendship and sympathy [butterfly signature].’ He also sent him the catalogue of his exhibition of Venetian etchings and dry points. Sargent on his part made every effort to involve Whistler in the mural projects at the Boston Public Library and urged Isabella Stewart Gardner to buy his famous Peacock Room (now in the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC). Sargent’s surviving letters to Whistler suggest that the two

Paul Helleu sketching with his wife (An Out-of-Doors Study) 1889 John Singer Sargent © Brooklyn Museum of Art Museum Collection Fund Sargent painting at Fladbury 1889 Private collection

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men retained a guarded respect for one another and enjoyed cordial relations on a personal level only. The Royal Academy of Arts in London remained the focus of Sargent’s ambitions from the start of his residence in England, as the Paris Salon had been previously while he was living in France. It took the Academy seven years to overcome their objections to his radical funny-foreign style of painting and to admit him to their portals. Henceforth the Academy became the centre of his professional career, the place where he exhibited his most important works and where his reputation was forged. He was a loyal member of the institution, serving on committees and teaching in the schools. Sargent was followed into the Academy by younger, more progressive artists who changed its profile: Sargent’s friends from Broadway, Edwin Austin Abbey and Alfred Parsons, in 1894 and 1897, respectively; and two members of the New English Art Club, Frank Bramley and George Clausen, in 1894 and 1895.

Sargent’s contacts and networks extended beyond the confines of the British art world. He was associated with the international group of bravura painters that included the Italian Giovanni Boldini, the Swede Anders Zorn and the Spaniard Joaquín Sorolla. He continued to exhibit in Paris and to field French artist friends when they came to England. Monet, Helleu and Rodin all enjoyed his hospitality,

assistance and support; he promoted their work in England and America and found them patrons among his rich and influential friends. It was Rodin who dubbed him the ‘Van Dyck of our times’ when viewing The Misses Hunter (now at Tate), at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1902. Sargent had introduced the sculptor to Mary Hunter, and a marble bust of her was the result (also at Tate). He also acted as the intermediary in negotiations between the sculptor and the art dealer Asher Wertheimer, but in the event no commission resulted.

Sargent was more revered in America than he was in England. He had many friends and patrons there, his work was regularly exhibited in American institutions, and by 1903 the first two phases of his mural scheme in the Boston Public Library had been installed and opened to public view. As his visits were few and far between (1876, 1887, 1890, 1895, 1903), his links with the American art world were necessarily circumscribed.

He remained in touch with older artists from his student days in Paris, among them James Carroll Beckwith, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and William Merritt Chase, the latter painted by him in an imposing presentation portrait of 1902. When asked in Philadelphia in 1903 if there were anyone he would like to meet, he named the painter Thomas Eakins, to the amazement of his friends. Eakins, now seen as one

the pillars of the American school, was considered then in some quarters to be eccentric and morally unsound. Despite a heavy workload as a portraitist and muralist, Sargent lost none of his relish for other art forms. He was a frequent theatregoer, though details of what exactly he saw are lacking. He portrayed the handsome and talented Harley Granville-Barker in a sensitive charcoal drawing; he had some connection to the Irish theatre through WB Yeats and Lady Gregory, and he was present at a weekend party when he drew the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell peering over the shoulder of Gabriel Fauré. Not all was so high-minded, for Sargent is known to have had a penchant for Charlie Chaplin films and for music-hall reviews. In the

Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife 1885 John Singer Sargent © Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Akansas Photography by Dwight Primiano Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth 1889 John Singer Sargent Presented by Sir Joseph Duveen 1906 © Tate London 2015

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field of music, Sargent continued to be enormously influential in promoting the careers of younger composers, among them Percy Grainger, Cyril Scott, Roger Quilter, Richard Strauss, Francis Korbay and Charles Martin Loeffler.

As Sargent’s career in formal portraiture waned in the 1900s, landscape painting waxed strong. Out of doors he was his own man, with no expectant patrons breathing down his neck. His landscapes and figure scenes painted out of doors became meditations on the nature of art as much as representations of things seen. The people who accompanied Sargent on his painting expeditions to the Continent, to the Alps, to Venice, to Rome, Majorca, Corfu and other parts of southern Europe, were fellow artists and friends, who shared his passion for plein-air painting and with whom he felt at ease. Sargent’s most familiar companions included his sister Emily, a talented watercolourist in her own right, and their faithful friend and recorder of their travels, Eliza Wedgwood; two artist couples, Wilfrid and Jane de Glehn, Adrian and Marianne Stokes; the painters Peter Harrison and Ambrogio Raffele from Vigevano in northern Italy. The latter features in one of Sargent’s most brilliant and enigmatic figure subjects, An Artist in

His Studio. The bearded Raffele pops up in other Alpine scenes, for example in Reconnoitring, where, squatting on a stool, he assumes a monumental presence before a panorama of snow-capped mountains. The Great War ended Sargent’s sketching expeditions to Europe. He continued to paint out-of-doors on his travels in America and Canada, in the Rockies (1916) and in Florida (1917), and after the War along the coastline of Maine, but he never went back to Venice or the Alps or the Mediterranean. His last years were largely spent in Boston working on the mural commissions that he regarded as his most important artistic legacy. His bearded features and portly figure, those of a proper Edwardian, are captured in a photograph by the Boston photographer Henry Harper Pierce taken in the year before his death. He died in his sleep from a heart attack at his home, 31 Tite Street, in Chelsea, London, on the night of 12–13 April 1925, three days before his planned departure to Boston to install the last of his murals in the Museum of Fine Arts.

This extract of the essay ‘Sargent and the Arts’ from Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends is reproduced with the kind permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Gabriel Faure and Mrs Patrick Campbell 1898 John Singer Sargent © National Portrait Gallery, Washington An artist in his studio (Ambrogio Raffele) 1904 John Singer SargentMuseum of Fine Arts Boston


ON SHOW international

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Kewene Te H

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allery Toi o Tāmaki gift of M

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ancy 1968 (detail) Chuck Close private collection; Elaine de Kooning Self-Portrait National Portrait G

allery, Smithsonian Institution courtesy Elaine de Kooning Trust; Lee M

iller 1937 Pablo Picasso Private collection © Succession Picasso/D

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Gottfried Lindauer: Pilsen Painter of the New Zeland MāoriGallery of West Bohemia, Pilsen until 20 September 2015

The Gallery of West Bohemia in Pilsen presents forty-eight portraits by Gottfried Lindauer, born in 1839 in Pilsen. The aim of the exhibition is to present both European and New Zealand chapters of his Lindauer’s work side by side. Lindauer was trained at the Vienna Academy of Art but with the threat of being drafted into the military in the Austro-Hungarian War, emigrated arriving in Wellington in 1874, settled in the merchant city of Auckland, where he met his patron, the businessman, Henry Partridge, who commissioned Lindauer to record the Māori culture.zpc-galerie.cz

Chuck Close PhotographsParish Art Museum, Long Island until 26 July 2015

This comprehensive survey explores how Chuck Close has stretched the boundaries of photographic means, methods, and approaches. The photographic origin of each Close painting is well known; however, Close’s exploration of the medium extends far beyond the use of photographs as a programmatic tool. parishart.org

Elaine de Kooning: PortraitsNational Portrait Gallery, Washington until 10 January 2016

Elaine de Kooning’s gestural portraits of friends and family were much admired during her lifetime. De Kooning made both abstract and figurative paintings and drawings during the height of Abstract Expressionism in New York City. She is best known for her portrayals of men. In her portraits, de Kooning sought and worked to capture the ‘instantaneous illumination’ of recognition: What qualities beyond the attributes of the face make you recognize someone? npg.si.edu

Lee Miller and PicassoScottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh until 6 September 2015

Lee Miller and Picasso features 100 photographs focusing on the relationship between Lee Miller, Roland Penrose and Pablo Picasso. Lee Miller first met Picasso in the summer of 1937 at Hotel Vaste Horizon where she was staying with Roland Penrose. In the ensuing years she photographed the Spanish artist more than 1000 times and he in turn, painted her portrait six times. Lee Miller and Picasso features photographs by Miller and a painting and drawing by Picasso and reveals the love and experiences of their long-lasting friendship.nationalgalleries.org/portraitgallery

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Bare: Degrees of undress14 August - 29 November 2015

Bare: Degrees of undress is a National Portrait Gallery collection remix celebrating the candid, contrived, natural, sexy, ironic, beautiful, and fascinating Australian portraiture that shows a bit of skin. Fun and forthright, the exhibition includes portraits of Billy Slater, Matthew Mitcham, David Gulpilil and Megan Gale.portrait.gov.au

National Photographic Portrait Prize 2015Artspace Mackay 10 July – 30 October 2015

The National Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition is selected from a national field of entries that reflect the distinctive vision of Australia’s aspiring and professional portrait photographers and the unique nature of their subjects. The National Portrait Gallery offers a prize of $25,000 for the most outstanding photographic portrait.portrait.gov.au

Life and times: Portraits by Rod McNicol20 June – 23 August 2015

Born in 1946, Australian photographer Rod McNicol has consistently analysed the passing of time through the evidence of the photographic portrait. At once confronting and tender, McNicol’s portrait photographs are bold and intimate. McNicol founded The Photographers Gallery in South Yarra Melbourne in 1975. He was awarded the National Photographic Portrait Prize 2012 for his portrait of Indigenous actor Jack Charles. This exhibition is developed in partnership with the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne.portrait.gov.au

Uncommon Australians: The vision of Gordon and Marilyn Darlinguntil 14 June 2015

Uncommon Australians: The vision of Gordon and Marilyn Darling showcases portraits acquired through the generosity of the National Portrait Gallery’s Founding Patrons, L Gordon Darling ac cmg and Marilyn Darling ac; and pays tribute to the Darlings’ persistence in turning their private dream of a gallery of portraits of ‘uncommon Australians’ into a tangible collection in a purpose-built home.portrait.gov.au

All that fall: Sacrifice, life and loss in the First World Waruntil 26 July 2015

Focussing on the wide-ranging theme of loss and absence, All that fall: Sacrifice, life and loss in the First World War provides a moving ‘portrait’ of loss during the First World War on the Australian home front. Powerful symbolic images, including contemporary works, evoke the emotional intensity of loss. The exhibition opens with declamatory enlistment posters, conscription leaflets and satirical cartoons lampooning both sides of the bitter conscription debates. The private pathos of women’s and families’ sacrifice is detailed in delicate petit-point embroidery and the badges and medallions worn to indicate their sacrifice – the bodies of sons and husbands offered to the war effort. Contemporary works commissioned for the exhibition speak of transience and absence. portrait.gov.au

Betty Churcher ao (1931–2015), gallery director, author, painter and lecturer, was educated in Brisbane before studying art in London. In 1955 she married English artist Roy Churcher and two years later they returned to Brisbane, where throughout the 1960s Betty Churcher worked as a high school art teacher. From 1972 to 1975 she was an art critic for the Australian. A mother of four, at the age of 44 she returned to London to study art history at the Courtauld

Institute, and from 1981 to 1987 she taught at Melbourne’s Preston/Phillip Institute of Technology. In 1987, by which time she had

spent some years on the Australia Council and the Visual Arts Board, she was ‘headhunted’ to become director of the Art Gallery of WA, thus becoming the first female director of an Australian state gallery. After three years in Perth she moved to Canberra to succeed James Mollison as Director of the National Gallery of Australia. Having led the institution from 1990 to 1997, from 1998 she was an Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Cross Cultural Research at the ANU, and presented three beguiling television series on art. Her books include Understanding Art (1974), which won a London Times Literary Award, and Notebooks (2011).

Betty Churcher 2008by Adam Knott (b. 1966)inkjet printPurchased 2013


The National Portrait Gallery’s collection companion presents the great and the good amongst the flawed and the obscure in an anthology of the art of portraiture.

$34.95 Available from bookshops or online at portrait.gov.au

People have been meeting in Canberra to discuss government matters for over 100 years. Crowne Plaza Canberra welcomes the National General Assemby of Local Government.

The first responsible government of New South Wales

THE FIRST RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT OF NEW SOUTH WALES 1856 BY FREEMAN BROTHERS STUDIO

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY PURCHASED WITH FUNDS PROVIDED BY L GORDON DARLING AC CMG 2009

PROUD ACCOMMODATION PARTNER OF THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

portrait 49, winter 2015

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