Art Gallery of South Australia: Part One

The Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide contains the largest collection of Australian art in the world, so of course I went to look at it. Photography is allowed without flash, so I recorded the panel explanations of favourite artworks, to study them later. Here are some of them.

Portrait of Captain Matthew Flinders, RN 1774-1814 (1807) by Toussaint Antoine de Chazal de Chamarel

This portrait painted by the French amateur painter de Chazal is the only known life-size oil portrait of Captain Matthew Flinders.

Matthew Flinders made a voyage to Australia in 1801-03 as captain of the Investigator. It was on this expedition that the South Australian coastline was charted for the first time by a European explorer. Returning to Britain in 1803, Flinders was detained, for almost seven years on the French colony of Mauritius on charges of being a British spy. It was during his detention that this portrait was painted.

I've become fascinated with explorers' exploits and I particularly like Flinders because of his affection for his ship's cat, Trim, about whom he wrote a book (as did Bryce Courtenay several years later). I think this portrait, hinting at sensitivity and secrecy, makes him look like the type of chap who could love a cat.

Self Portrait (1815) - Colonel William Light

Colonel William Light arrived in South Australia in 1836 to survey the colony. As well as a meticulous draughtsman, he was regarded as an excellent watercolourist. The first European artist in South Australia, he made numerous drawings and watercolours that recorded the first landing and the first settlement. He designed Adelaide, the colony's capital, and surveyed more than 600,000 hectares of surrounding land.

I like how he has portrayed himself nonchalantly leaning against a rock with suitably craggy and romantic scenery in the background and a folded-up telescope in his hand. Apparently this style is representative of the Regency fashion - studied or calculated informality designed to make "young upwardly mobile dandies look dashing or at least interesting in a Byronic way.'

Captain Cook on the coast of New South Wales (1860) by Joseph Blacker

Joseph Backler was a talented forger in London before he was caught making false money orders in 1832 and transported to New South Wales for life. Once in Sydney his talent for drawing marked him out as a special convict and he was assigned to the Surveyor general's department as a draughtsman. After he was pardoned in 1847 he made his income as a landscape and portrait painter.

This portrait of Captain James Cook was made from copies as Cook died in 1779. He is depicted standing on a rocky legde with cliffs in the distance, suggesting the East coast ocean cliffs near the Heads of Sydney Harbour, resting his hand on a globe of the world, on the northern hemisphere, likely to be England.

Fish Catch and Dawes Point, Sydney Harbour (1813) by John William Lewin

This is the earliest known oil painting to have been painted in Australia. John Lewin, Australia’s first professional artist, arrived in Sydney in 1800 after training as a natural history painter in London. The arranged fish catch from the harbour waters is positioned on the shore at Kirribilli Point. The view looks south across Sydney Harbour to Dawes Point, from which the Harbour Bridge spans today. This painting is an oddity being neither a straight forward natural history painting, nor simply a decorative still-life, nor a sporting painting of a proud fisherman’s catch – all popular subjects in Britain in the early nineteenth-century. Rather, it is a combination of all of the above.

A View of the artist's house and garden, in Mill's Plains, Van Diemen's Land (1835) by John Glover

This painting of Glover’s Patterdale farm at Deddington in Northern Tasmania depicts the artist’s new shingle-roofed stone house and wooden studio-gallery surrounded by his flourishing garden in bright sunlight in the summer of 1934-35. Glover has delighted in depicting each of the English annuals in the new squared garden of his farmhouse, and he has also taken pains to depict accurately the distinct qualities of the native Australian trees beyond.

Group of natives of Tasmania (1860) by Robert Dowling

Robert Dowling was Australia’s first locally trained professional artist. He arrived in Tasmania with his parents in 1834 at the age of seven, and later settled in Launceston. In the 1840s he studied in Tasmania, under several artists including Thomas Bock. Dowling relied heavily on Bock’s 1830s watercolour portraits of Aboriginal Tasmanians to create this group composition when most of the sitters had passed away.

The painting depicts notable Aboriginal Tasmanians who, due to their connection to G.A. Robinson’s Friendly Mission, were the repeated subject of major Tasmanian artists.

In the Sassafras Valley, Victoria (1875) - Isaac Whitehead

Isaac Whitehead’s detailed paintings provide some of the most evocative depictions of natural forest stands in Australian art. In this painting ancient eucalypts create a towering, protective canopy through which dappled sunlight filters onto the fronds of tree-ferns and the creek beneath. The giant scale of the trees is emphasised by the inclusion of bushwalkers and figures seated around a campfire, dwarfed by their surroundings.

Whitehead worked as a framemaker in Dublin before arriving in Victoria in the late 1950s where he established himself as Melbourne’s leading framemaker. He made frames for the leading Melbourne painters Nicholas Chevalier, Thomas Clark, Louis Buvelot and Eugene von Guérard. This painting is framed by an example of his 1868 international prize-winning frame.

Evening Shadows, backwater of the Murray, South Australia (1880) by H.J. Johnstone

This painting was the first work of art acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia. Since it was first displayed at the Gallery’s opening in June 1881, it has been one of the most reproduced and copied paintings in the collection.

H.J. Johnstone arrived in Victoria in 1853. After an unsuccessful attempt at prospection on the Victorian gold fields, he established himself in Melbourne as a photographer and then as a landscape painter of scenes of Victoria and South Australia. Johnstone left Australia in late 1876 but continued to paint Australian landscapes, often from his photographs, in the United States, London and Paris for the Australian market. Evening Shadows, painted in either London or Paris, is typical of Johnstone’s landscapes, all of which are characterised by an uncanny photographic stillness.

Australian Portraits 1880-1960 (Part One)

Australian Portraits 1880-1960
Canberra Museum and Gally, Canberra, ACT
17 August - 21 October

This exhibition promised to contain "a compelling and diverse representation of Australians" including 54 portraits and self-portraits by 34 leading Australian painters. I don't know much at all about Australian art so I am beginning to familiarise myself with it. The exhibition is divided into chronological sections, so I just strolled around, taking notes on the pictures I liked.

Montgomery, Esquire (1885) by Bernard Hall is part of a series of his 'late night images' of his friends. I like the way he sits casually with his leg crossed over, smoking a cigarette, with a drink balanced behind him. His look, however, is anything but casual and is, in fact, almost disturbingly frank - the way things can get late at night...

Seated outdoors, perhaps in a walled garden, the model for Robert Dowling's Miss Robertson of Colac (Dolly) (1885-86) presents quite a different prospect. Although in a relaxed setting, she appears stiff and focused on something beyond the canvas, almost as though she were eavesdropping on a private conversation and completely ignoring the stylised accessories of the Japanese tea service and the spaniel. These may have been added later as her posture and mien suggest absolutely no interaction with them.

I love Tom Roberts' An Australian Native (1888) and can well believe this is a classic of Australian art. In her pink dress/ coat with a bustle and feathered hat, clasping her umbrella before her with both hands, the subject is clearly meant to be a 'type': a young, healthy, vigorous Australian-born woman of Anglo-Celtic descent.

She, in turn, is in contrast to Miss Myra Kemble (1888) by Girolamo Nerli, who is painted with swathes of theatricality. She was, according to the catalogue notes, 'one of Australia's best-loved stage actresses.' Teasing her audience from behind her ostrich fan, we glimpse her coy expression, direct eye and amused mouth. The artist has painted her as if spot-lit on a darkened stage, focusing our attention on her playful character, flair and beauty. His attentive eye has picked out her plush red cloak with intricate detail on the lining, and her ruched water-silk gown with high neck and button and dart detail.

And so we move on to the next section - The Edwardians 1900 - 1920. Apparently many Australian artists of this era spent a substantial amount of their time living and working abroad. Many subjects appear dressed up or acting out roles, as many families commissioned portraits in historical style to give themselves credibility.

I love the Study of Lena Brasch (1893) by Tom Roberts. The artist has used rapid brush-strokes and bold colour, capturing the subject galncing down in her hat trimmed with tartan ribbon or perhaps even shiny bon bon wrappers. The charming combination of auburn hair, pale pink lips and the delicate blush on her cheek make this painting seem alive, although it is incomplete. One almost expects the subject to turn, to look up and burst out laughing any minute.

George W Lambert's Chesham Street (1910) is altogether more serious. This is a dramatic self-portrait in which the subject lifts his shirt to reveal a fairly skinny torso, presumably to a doctor. The blinding white flesh lightens the canvas, although judging from the serious expressions contained in the portrait, it is unlikely to have lightened the mood.

Many artists painted self-portraits because they saved money by not hiring models. This proceedure also allowed them a degree of critical self-analysis and introspection.

In Hugh Ramsay's Self Portrait Bust Showing Hands (1901), his hands are jointed like the wooden mannequins often seen in artists studios. With the long face and aquiline nose, this may equally be a study in antaomy or the effects of light and dark, as his half-smile is emphasised by the shadow cast on his lopsided lips.

Charles Wheeler can also afford to be less than flattering in Apres le bal (1910) in which he paints his self-portrait in a turban; his facial features contorted in an exaggerated yawn.

The full-length portrait of The Boy with the Palette (1911) by Violet Teague is of Theo Scharf, who at this time was a child prodigy. He betrays a nonchalant stance in his dark polo neck, long shorts, and knee-high socks. With his supercilious expression, his eyes really do follow you about the room, while never looking directly at you. He appears to be looking down on you with a sneer.

The artist has totally captured his assertive gaze and conveyed his confidence in himself and his artistic talents.

Bright colours against a studio background capture the attention in Max Meldrum's Poland (Madame de Tarczynska) (1917). The subject is dressed in traditional costume which seems more important than her strong but ill-defined features.

Meldrum was an adherent of the tonalist theory which maintained that the contrasting light and dark was the most important component of a painting.

E Phillips Fox takes a more impressionist approach with The Green Parasol (1912). Luminous colour abounds in this portrait of a seated woman in a green dress and parasol with a small black dog on her lap. Her auburn hair and the flowerful garden enhance the sensuous and stylish work celebrating light and colour. The warmth of the dappled, diffused afternoon fairly spills out of the canvas.

George W Lambert's Weighing the Fleece (1921) is another classic to behold. It is painted as a tableau with focus on the structure and pattern. The men are engaged in business  (with a record-priced fleece being weighed) while a woman sits casually on a woolsack. One sheep is shorn while the other stands by beneath a heavy fleece hinting at further riches. The painter has captured minute details such as the brand on the wool bale and the swallow droppings on the beams, while the overall projection is one of wealth, success and good fortune.