Art
‘The sun is still shining’
(until 11 July). Both the book and the exhibition admirably explain the international origins of, and the processes involved in, this mass-circulation image production. Bringing A.H. Fullwood into the light Fullwood paints blossoming orchards en plein air near the Jane Clark Hawkesbury at Richmond with Julian Ashton and the precociously accomplished Charles Conder. He is a friend and close colleague of Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton when both move north from Melbourne in the early 1890s. He joins the bohemian Curlew Camp at Little Sirius Cove, and exhibits watercolours Picturing a Nation: The art and life and oils with some success. Regrettably, many of his paintings of A.H. Fullwood are now untraced, but, to judge from contemporary reviews and by Gary Werskey the surviving works, he doesn’t appear to have achieved anything approaching the magisterial large-scale figure in action of RobNewSouth erts’s A break away! or the colour, drama, and bravura brushwork $49.99 hb, 416 pp of Streeton’s Fire’s On and ‘The purple noon’s transparent might’, ar too few Australian artists have been the subject of com- which all have such timeless appeal. Werskey’s exposition of the prehensive biographies. Gary Werskey mentions Hum- rather toxic art politics of 1890s Sydney (continued later among phrey McQueen’s 784-page Tom Roberts (1996) as an in- the expatriate community in London) is fascinating. spiration. Of course, there are art monographs and retrospective Fullwood was a self-proclaimed ‘bully optimist’ – ‘I feel the exhibition catalogues, but those are not life stories. With seven- sun is still shining somewhere’ – but was always in financial ty-six colour plates and another fifty-one images in the text, Wer- straits. His impoverished father had died of cirrhosis of the liver skey’s thoroughly researched Picturing a Nation, set in rich his- in 1883. His widowed mother, Emma, died in 1895 at sixty-three: torical and social context, is most welcome. As he observes, A.H. a boarding-house servant very unlikely to be the flaming redhead Fullwood’s life was ‘as full of pathos and plot turns as a three- portrayed in Fullwood’s beautiful Dolce far Niente of 1896 (as volume Victorian novel’. Werskey curiously suggests). We meet English-born Albert Henry, called Jack by his Perhaps that young woman is Clyda Newman, whom family, arriving in Sydney from Birmingham late in 1883 and be- Fullwood married in 1896 but whose subsequent life was utcoming the talented and genial terly tragic. In 1900, with no storytelling ‘Uncle Remus’ to his confirmed employment, he many Australian artist friends. took her, their two-year-old, The nickname probably comes and their infant of six months from his close association with to New York to live on a farm the imported team of American more than thirty miles out of black-and-white graphic artists town and then on to London and engravers working on the the next year. Within months, Picturesque Atlas of Australasia: Clyda, pregnant again, was produced in forty-two parts committed to Bethlem Hosbetween 1886 and 1889 and pital. Inexplicably, Fullwood offering a proud ‘centennial’ took off on a twelve-week trip celebration of settler-colonial to South Africa, followed by a Australian history, achievespell in Windsor with Streeton. ments, and prospects. FullThe baby died. Their eldest son wood’s key role in the shaping died of meningitis at thirteen. of settler-Australia’s self-image, Clyda suffered fifteen years in ‘picturing a nation’ to the world a series of asylums before she through newspapers, magazines, died in 1918, a ‘pauper lunatic’, and postcards – feeding an while Fullwood was in France ‘image consumption’ arguably as an official Australian war as influential as today’s social artist. Werskey’s painstakingly media – becomes even clearer researched and deeply empain the exhibition currently at the thetic account of this family’s National Library of Australia, dissolution is also important A Nation Imagined: The Artists for understanding the lives of the Picturesque Atlas, which of so many other dependent is curated by Werskey with women and their children in Natalie Wilson from the Art those days. (More happily, and Prince Regent’s Glen, Wentworth Falls, 1888 Gallery of New South Wales equally interesting as social (Macquarie University Art Gallery: Denis Savill Collection)
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64 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021
