Jane Clark

Far too few Australian artists have been the subject of comprehensive biographies. Gary Werskey mentions Humphrey McQueen’s 784-page Tom Roberts (1996) as an inspiration. Of course, there are art monographs and retrospective exhibition catalogues, but those are not life stories. With seventy-six colour plates and another fifty-one images in the text, Werskey’s thoroughly researched Picturing a Nation, set in rich historical and social context, is most welcome. As he observes, A.H. Fullwood’s life was ‘as full of pathos and plot turns as a threevolume Victorian novel’.

We meet English-born Albert Henry, called Jack by his family, arriving in Sydney from Birmingham late in 1883 and becoming the talented and genial storytelling ‘Uncle Remus’ to his many Australian artist friends. The nickname probably comes from his close association with the imported team of American black-and-white graphic artists and engravers working on the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia: produced in forty-two parts between 1886 and 1889 and offering a proud ‘centennial’ celebration of settler-colonial Australian history, achievements, and prospects. Fullwood’s key role in the shaping of settler-Australia’s self-image, ‘picturing a nation’ to the world through newspapers, magazines, and postcards – feeding an ‘image consumption’ arguably as influential as today’s social media – becomes even clearer in the exhibition currently at the National Library of Australia, A Nation Imagined: The Artists of the Picturesque Atlas, which is curated by Werskey with Natalie Wilson from the Art Gallery of New South Wales (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.

Fullwood paints blossoming orchards en plein air near the 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 and oils with some success. Regrettably, many of his paintings are now untraced, but, to judge from contemporary reviews and the surviving works, he doesn’t appear to have achieved anything approaching the magisterial large-scale figure in action of Roberts’s A break away! or the colour, drama, and bravura brushwork of Streeton’s Fire’s On and ‘The purple noon’s transparent might’, which all have such timeless appeal. Werskey’s exposition of the rather toxic art politics of 1890s Sydney (continued later among the expatriate community in London) is fascinating.

Fullwood was a self-proclaimed ‘bully optimist’ – ‘I feel the sun is still shining somewhere’ – but was always in financial straits. His impoverished father had died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1883. His widowed mother, Emma, died in 1895 at sixty-three: a boarding-house servant very unlikely to be the flaming redhead portrayed in Fullwood’s beautiful Dolce far Niente of 1896 (as Werskey curiously suggests).

Perhaps that young woman is Clyda Newman, whom Fullwood married in 1896 but whose subsequent life was utterly tragic. In 1900, with no confirmed employment, he took her, their two-year-old, and their infant of six months to New York to live on a farm more than thirty miles out of town and then on to London the next year. Within months, Clyda, pregnant again, was committed to Bethlem Hospital. Inexplicably, Fullwood took off on a twelve-week trip to South Africa, followed by a spell in Windsor with Streeton. The baby died. Their eldest son died of meningitis at thirteen. Clyda suffered fifteen years in a series of asylums before she died in 1918, a ‘pauper lunatic’, while Fullwood was in France as an official Australian war artist. Werskey’s painstakingly researched and deeply empathetic account of this family’s dissolution is also important for understanding the lives of so many other dependent women and their children in those days. (More happily, and equally interesting as social

‘The sun is still shining’

Bringing A.H. Fullwood into the light

Jane Clark

Picturing a Nation: The art and life of A.H. Fullwood

by Gary Werskey

NewSouth $49.99 hb, 416 pp

Prince Regent’s Glen, Wentworth Falls, 1888 (Macquarie University Art Gallery: Denis Savill Collection)