A. Frances Johnson

Ihave frequented too often the gift shops of Australian Impressionism. Back in 1985, I mooned over David Davies’ Templestowe twilight scene before purchasing the corresponding tea towel (for my mum), Fire’s On placemats with matching coasters (for my dad), and lost child mugs (for my siblings, only one of whom took offence).We lived equidistant from Eaglemont and Warrandyte, sacred artist sites both. In our loungeroom, a print of Tom Roberts’s herculean Shearing the Rams hung above the recliners, a russet-toned paean to heroic masculine rural labour, divested of grime and abjection. None of us had ever come close to sheep or shearer, though we vaguely understood the sheep’s back as a metaphor of economic prosperity. My mother eventually removed the print to the hard rubbish, after decades of blasting western sun faded it to a fleecy moonrise.

In a house with few books, weighty Impressionist catalogues became the fifth leg of the coffee table, largely unread but too good to use as doorstops. Looking at a tower of older catalogues before me today, I can shallowly report that the box-office smash that was Golden Summers: Heidelberg and Beyond (Jane Clark and Bridget Whitelaw, National Gallery of Victoria, 1985) had a catalogue of modest heft compared to Terence Lane’s whopping Australian Impressionism (Australian National Gallery, 2007) and Anne Gray’s sizeable, magisterial Tom Roberts (NGA, 2018). What sticks in my mind is Victoria Hammond and Juliet Peers’s 1992–93 touring exhibition Completing the Picture: Women Artists and the Heidelberg Era (Heide Art Gallery and other venues). I remember standing gobsmacked before monumental Sargeantish interiors by Violet Teague (Dian Dreams [Una Falkiner] [1909]) and Alice Bale (Leisure Moments [1902] and Interior [Morning Papers] [c.1913]), feeling that until that point I’d been cheated of something important.

The 1980s and 1990s were a watershed time for scholars, curators, and artists to rethink the mythic cultural baggage that had accreted around the so-called Heidelberg School and Australian painting generally. Ann Galbally, Leigh Astbury, Janine Burke, Frances Lindsay, Hammond and Peers, David Hansen, and artists such as Julie Brown-Rrap, Joan Ross, Stephen Bush, Gordon Bennett, and Anne Zahalka variously added significant feminist, postcolonial, and biographical freight to twentieth-century hagiographies of landscape privileging masculine enchantments with rural labour and sentimentalised scenes of settler struggle.

Astbury wrote in City Bushmen (1985) that popular interpretations of the Heidelberg era – whereby a group of rebels (rejecting academic tradition embodied by Eugene von Guérard, Nicholas Chevalier and others) became the ‘discoverers’ of a new Australian painting reflecting a golden age of national idealism – were given impetus by the upsurge of nationalistic feeling during and after World War I. This, he argues, has coloured nearly all accounts of the period.

In the catalogue of the famed Golden Summers exhibition, Galbally bravely struck at the heart of local cultural myth, pointing out that academically trained artists in Brittany, Cornwall, Melbourne, Sydney and elsewhere were variously producing luminous, anti-urban naturalist painting. She notes that following World War I, ‘writers were tempted to … see the decades of the 1880s and 1890s as a golden age – a time of pure unsullied Australian nationalism’. Lionel Lindsay and Arthur Streeton, keen to look back from post-Federation vantage points, idealised the complications they’d lived through. The resultant typecasting, Galbally concludes, dominated ‘all aesthetic and historical discussion of the period until the 1970s’.

But those queueing for Golden Summers wanted to be welcomed to the gift shop – to take pleasure in pure paint but also to buy into foundational myths of Australian painting. Not for nothing did cartoonist Michael Leunig create his parodic Ramming the Shears (1985), attempting to awaken modern settlers from a golden-summered stupor. Bicentennial ‘celebrations’ loomed; artists began reconsidering landscapes bereft of women and Indigenous protagonists.

The above critiques contribute significant bedrock to the NGV’s beautifully researched new exhibition, She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism, curated by Anne Gray, former head of Australian Art, National Gallery of Australia, and an NGV team led by Dr Angela Hessen, Curator of Australian Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts. Named for a sensuous lozenge of a landscape by Tom Roberts (1889), the show elegantly situates the variegated local and European, social and artistic, influences that impacted the evolution of so-called Australian Impressionism, foregrounding urban subject matters and portrait genres alongside landscape. Whisperings of bohemian queerness and nascent suffragism, popular colonial illustration and high colonial landscape art, imported Whistlerian aestheticism, photography, and Barbizon school naturalism are shown as part of a mosaic of influence across boom and depression years, and shifting sands in relation to the enfranchisement of women and Indigenous peoples.

To wit, wall texts particularise the First Nations country where settler work was made, a respectful strategy that invites viewers to contest the dispossessing and proleptic assumptions underpinning settler landscape and portrait practices. The catalogue chronology also movingly situates Indigenous and suffragist political gains and losses alongside key biographical information. Roberts and Artur Loureiro painted portraits of Indigenous men, though only Loureiro’s King Barak last of the Yarra Tribe (1900) appears here, with limited contextualisation. As Hannah Presley, NGV curator of Indigenous Art, writes with Sophie Gerhard: ‘the general invisibility of Aboriginal people helped to erase the less appealing aspects of colonial expansion from Australia’s burgeoning national narrative’.

The informative texts also recalibrate Australian landscape’s central cultural imaginaries as they pertain to the Heidelberg School.1 The ‘Heidelberg School’ nametag, for starters, is rescinded. As Gray asserts, there was no school. McCubbin never painted in Heidelberg or Eaglemont, though he socialised there; and in the 1880s and, particularly, the 1890s, Roberts, Streeton, and Charles Conder worked extensively in Sydney. Certain women painters daytripped to Melbourne’s artist camps as propriety decreed.

Foundational myths

NGV paves the way for future breakaways

A. Frances Johnson

The exhibition mostly unfolds as a lucid intellectual and pictorial fugue, though the catalogue offers political and historical riches that certain sections of the exhibition sometimes struggle to articulate. Viewers are nonetheless diligently reminded that the artists and writers of the time were not stuck in mythic golden age cultural aspic, that gilded frames came later, idealising decades lived in multicultural cities bursting from their bricked sides. Although several artists came from affluent professional backgrounds, Roberts, Jane Price and others struggled as jobbing artists. Roberts’s painter friend Louis Abrahams suicided, though we know not why. Another friend of Roberts, Eileen Tooker, the subject of his sensitive, melancholy portrait Eileen (1892), left her husband and children in Queensland. Again, we don’t know why, but her net veil suddenly suggests an ambiguous cover over bruised skin tone.

Gray notes in her rich historical overview, ‘Friends and Rivals: A Quartet with Variations’, that Roberts and Streeton escaped Melbourne’s economic depression in Sydney; Roberts had no family support and, for all his magnanimous encouragement of women painters and young artists, no secure teaching work. He couldn’t marry his love, recognised carver and gilder Elizabeth ‘Lillie’ Wilkinson, until the age of forty, after notching up sales from the nascent Art Gallery of New South Wales and securing society portrait commissions.

The impressive catalogue features insightful essays by Gray and Hessen but also Mary Ann Stevens, Galbally, Presley, Gerhard, Elizabeth Kertesz, and Helen Ennis. Hessen navigates a panoply of local and international cultural influences, also reflecting how professional women artists risked misogynistic Ruskinian stoning by conservative critics for works designated sketchy or undisciplined, though this does not entirely explain why no professional women artists were included in the 1889 9 x 5 Impression Exhibition. Stevens is particularly acute at helping us understand the differences between French Impressionism and Australian Impressionism, though women are largely away beekeeping and doing the laundry in her otherwise deft comparative. Presley and Gerhard usher in important postcolonial Indigenous historical perspectives on Australian late nineteenth-century cultures, arguing that the ‘ingrained’ and ‘persistent’ idea that Australian painting was the invention of the Heidelberg School overlooks the thriving and dynamic art traditions of Australia’s First Peoples, whose diverse visual expressions over millennia recorded and continue to record language, cosmology, lore, identity, and particularities of country.

So how do ideas put forward in the catalogue translate as display? An immediate success of this show is its beguiling evocation of the 9 x 5 Impression Exhibition (1889). Most works were painted on wooden cigar-box lids. Around forty-five appear out of the original one hundred and eighty-odd works. An intimate salon on rich burgundy walls evokes the old and is a chance to view works rarely seen in concert, including Conder’s Going Home (The Grey and the Gold), Dusk, and other Whistlerian beauties, such as Roberts’s The Violin Lesson. I wonder if, one day, a similar reconstruction might interweave or mirror the small sketches and impressions made by those women artists who worked alongside Roberts at Grosvenor Chambers.

Elsewhere, one can map Conder’s artistic journey from light-suffused naturalism to bold aesthetic abstraction. His pastorale While Daylight Lingers (c.1890) counterpoints Price’s bleached Plough Land in Summer (c.1900), just as his sun-blasted timber-splitters counterpoint Streeton’s paled take on timber-getting. These works, often interesting from current environmental perspectives, suggest settler struggles with a country little understood beyond extractive paradigms. But other core-of-my-heart images inevitably return us to deep-seated, mistaken settler beliefs that nature’s bounty was there for the taking, existing in perpetuity. Streeton’s prettified vista of rampant gorse weed, Early Summer – Gorse in Bloom (1888), is a case in point, where even introduced weeds are subjects for visual poesy. His largescale arcadias are always blank, luminous illusions of peacefully conquered place.

The exhibition also foregrounds lesser-known professional women artists, building on their modest inclusions in Golden Summers (NGV, 1985), notwithstanding Hammond and Peers’s detailed revisionist corrective of 1992. We are introduced to Ina Gregory, Iso Rae and others, alongside the usual drawcards of the Janes (Sutherland and Price) and Clara Southern. Luminosity, gesturally made, is both theme and moody affect across pastoral works such as Sutherland’s Field Naturalists (c.1896), Price’s Plough Land in Summer (c.1900), and Southern’s An Old Bee Farm (c.1900). Southern’s painting suggests, in Hessen’s words, ‘a Romantic wistfulness for a kind of landscape, and a relationship with it, that modernity made vulnerable’.

These elegiac works hint at the erosion of rural life through industrialisation. Melbourne’s electric streetlights were switched on in 1894, but women were barred from the newly founded Savage Club, a space for men to speak of culture. Southern, however, attended the cultural debates at Young and Jackson’s Buonarroti Club, at Roberts’s invitation. Meanwhile, the women’s late-summer, crepuscular twilight scenes stand tall by those of Conder, E. Phillips Fox, Loureiro, and Davies. Southern, in particular, shines. Lyrical atmospheres cloak unmacho images of work: beekeeping, bug-catching, ploughing ruts. Women artists were scratching a living, but while Streeton and Roberts charged up to two hundred guineas for their works, Sutherland’s commanded a mere twenty pounds.

Valiantly, these professionally trained women painters pressed on, agitating for improved pay and enfranchisement. Phillips Fox’s remarkable painting Art Students (1895), exhibited here, is a tribute to women painters’ work well before the vote was secured in 1908.

Iso Rae’s monumental, electric-toned portrait Young Girl, Etaples (c.1892), acquired by the NGV in 2020, will not disappoint. The unusually high horizon line, abstracted composition, and bold splashes of overhead light enchant. Rae’s high-key green and pink chromatics offer something entirely different from Sutherland and Price. Rae worked for decades alongside French-influenced Impressionist artists in northern Brittany (including John Russell) and was one of the first Australian artists to be collected in France.

While the ‘She’ appears substantively returned to the ‘Oak’, this has not been a given in millennial accounts of local Impressionism – witness the NGA’s 2016–17 export show of rural and urban landscapes to London’s National Gallery, Australia’s

Impressionists, which, embarrassingly, included no women. Russell is described by Tim Bonyhady in said catalogue as ‘the odd man out’ alongside Conder, Roberts, and Streeton. If only Southern, Rae, or Teague had been even that.

This exhibition, therefore, makes important revisionist strides. But given its emphasis on the academic training and cross-genre practices, it seems a strenuous omission that the aforementioned best-practice works by Bale, Teague, Vale, and Muntz Adams are not included to counterpoint Roberts’s brilliant squarebrushed portraits. Were their works, located in public galleries, thought too academic? If so, why? A small, scrappy self-portrait by Teague (1899) is hung; we pass by Tudor St George Tucker’s cheesy backlit female portraits and an avalanche of Streeton’s prurient late works of An old bee farm, c.1900, by Clara Southern (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1942) mythological goddesses. (Look! No faces! It’s the aesthetic movement!)

The above omissions shape a powerful narrative of male and politically imaginative ways, nodding to the future. Imagine skill against the best intentions of this show. It’s an enduring The Pioneer set alongside Anne Zahalka’s McCubbinesque parody joy that Roberts cleaved to the restrained compositional grav- The Immigrants No. 2 (1985), or A Break Away! set alongside Bigitas of Courbet, and less so to the lambent-eyed rural subjects ambul woman Leah King-Smith’s Patterns of Connection (1991). of French Naturalist Jules Bastien-Lepage (see McCubbin’s The masterstroke of this scholarly exhibition is to construct sentimental theatres, staged on gorgeous, loose-painted vistas). a complex narrative with faith that viewers, as they proceed, will For that reason, I can’t get enough of Robert’s paintings. I have let go of time-honoured, simplistic mythologies of golden-age felt a similar rush on seeing Teague’s and Bale’s masterworks. In Australian art. Familiar, lushly painted works are, for the most 1920, Ethel Carrick and Rupert Bunny warmly congratulated part, gently reangled for new, future-looking conversations about Teague on her 1911 painting The Boy with the Palette, hung at Australian identity and culture, paving the way for bold and coveted eyeline level at the Salon des Artistes Francais.2 It doesn’t inclusive pictorial ‘break aways’ to come. g help that this catalogue opens with eleven full-page (in some instances double-page) reproductions of iconic works by male 1 See Bernard Smith’s chapter on the birth of Australian paintpainters, including Leon Pole (yes, Pole). The last key room of the ing, triumphally titled ‘Genesis’. This took as the epic beginning exhibition follows gendered suit. I’m not sure what message this of Australian art the year 1885, marking Roberts’s return from gives young women with palettes – still dominating art school Europe (Place, Taste and Tradition, 1945). enrolments, as they did in the 1890s. It is surely not that hard to 2 ‘Hooray your boy with the palette has been awarded a silver bring these things into balance. medal,’ wrote Carrick. Bunny wrote from Paris: ‘It really stands

The exhibition’s finale, described by the curators as the ‘Aus- out to me as one of the best things there.’ (Hammond and tralian Narratives room’, displays Wurundjeri Head Man and Peers, p. 74). artist William Barak’s ceremonial watercolours against iconic works, including McCubbin’s epic The Pioneer (1904), Roberts’s She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism continues at the A Break Away! (1891) and Shearing the Rams (1890), and Stree- NGV until 22 August 2021. This review is supported by the ton’s Fire’s On (1891). It’s a risky (or insufficiently risky) post- Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. colonial strategy. From disjuncture, counter-narratives of foundational Australian cultural identity supposedly flow, or at least A. Frances Johnson’s fourth poetry collection, Save As, will be healthily jostle. Here, the intercultural dance is briefly elegant, published in 2021 by Puncher and Wattmann. A novel, Eugene’s but white scale overwhelms. I can’t help wondering why, given Falls (Arcadia 2007), retraces the painter Eugene von Guerard’s that the opening room is presented as ‘precursors’, ‘successors’ journeys across Taungurong country. She is Associate Professor might not have been displayed alongside settler and Indigenous of Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne and was the art of the period. This might have shaken things up in visually winner of the 2020 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.