Australian artists

Glover, John (1767 - 1849)

GLOVER, JOHN (1767-1849), landscape painter, was born on 18 February 1767 at Houghton on the Hill, near Leicester, England, the youngest son of William Glover, farmer, and his wife Ann. As a lad Glover worked in the fields near Ingersby, drew birds and became a lover of nature. A talent for calligraphy led to his appointment as writing master at the Free School, Appleby, about 1787. Here he started painting in oil and in water-colour. He married a woman nine years his senior and began to visit London to take drawing and painting lessons from William Payne and possibly John 'Warwick' Smith. In 1794 he moved to Lichfield, set up as a drawing master and made many sketching tours of picturesque districts. Between 1795 and 1804 he exhibited views in Cumberland, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Wales and Scotland at the Royal Academy.
The academy displayed water-colours poorly and in November 1804 Glover became a foundation member of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours. Its first exhibition so stimulated water-colour painting and collecting that Glover was able to settle with his family in London. Here he taught painting profitably and travelled assiduously in search of picturesque scenery. In 1807 he was president of the Water Colour Society. But his interest in oil painting grew; and when the society split in 1812 on the question of including oils in its exhibitions Glover became a member of the reconstructed Society of Painters in Oils and Water-Colours. He had begun to exhibit large oil paintings at the British Institution in 1810 and continued until 1827.
After Napoleon's abdication Glover visited Paris and exhibited a large painting in the Salon of 1814 which appears to have attracted the interest of Louis XVIII. But peace was attended by an economic slump which checked the demand for water-colours. About 1817 Glover left London and lived in the Lake District, near Ullswater, for two years; in 1818 he visited Italy. On 24 April 1820, however, he was able to open his own permanent exhibition at 16 Old Bond Street, where he also exhibited the work of his son William and his pupil Edward Price. Having resigned from the Society of Painters in Oils and Water-Colours in 1817 in the hope possibly of election to the Royal Academy, Glover in 1823 became a foundation member of the Society of British Artists, exhibiting with it until 1830 and remaining a member until his death.
Three of Glover's sons, James (and his wife), William and Henry, sailed for Van Diemen's Land in the Prince Regent and arrived in Hobart Town on 11 July 1829. Two married daughters, Mary Bowles and Emma Lord, remained in England. Before leaving England William had purchased eighty acres (32 ha) from the surveyor-general, for which he gave drawings to the value of £300. On arrival the three sons were granted a total of 1780 acres (720 ha) for their capital of £1600. On 1 April 1831 Glover arrived in Hobart accompanied by his wife and son John Richardson, in the Thomas Lawrie. By August he was established in a town house and had bought Ring Farm, eighteen miles (29 km) away. When applying for a land grant he stated that he had already bought two improved farms in the parish of Drummond, and had brought £7000 and English shrubs and song-birds to the colony; he expected to make £1000 a year from his paintings, in part, presumably, from sales in London. In May he was granted 2560 acres (1036 ha) which he hoped to locate on the River Jordan, but in 1832 he was allocated a grant at Mills Plains on the northern slope of Ben Lomond, and built his house on the Nile River, calling his property Patterdale, after a Westmorland village where he had once lived. Here he painted and with his family developed the property which eventually comprised more than 7000 acres (2833 ha) . By 1835 he was able to send sixty-eight pictures 'descriptive of the Scenery and Customs of Van Diemen's Land' for exhibition in London. In 1847 he exhibited in a collection assembled by the Launceston Mechanics' Institute, but in his last years devoted himself largely to religious literature and painted little. He died at Patterdale on 9 December 1849, survived by his sons and many grandchildren. His widow, Sarah, died at Patterdale on 19 November 1853, aged 95. In 1845 John Skinner Prout drew his portrait, later engraved and published by Basil Long.
Glover was highly prolific in water-colour but later turned increasingly to oil painting. Influenced by his teacher William Payne, he early perfected a technique of painting in grey tints with little colour, using a split brush for foliage, seeking subtle effects of light, mist and atmosphere. In Tasmania this interest in atmospheric effects continued but he also sought assiduously to depict qualities of the landscape. In the catalogue of his 1835 exhibition he noted: 'there is a remarkable peculiarity in the Trees of this Country; however numerous they rarely prevent you tracing through them the whole distant country'. But his strong links with the eighteenth century lingered. He wished to become known as the 'English Claude' and echoes of Claude, Gaspard Poussin and Salvator Rosa persist even in his Tasmanian work.
Select Bibliography
A. Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts, vol 3 (Lond, 1905); B. Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific 1768-1850 (Oxford, 1960); B. S. Long, ‘John Glover’, Walker's Quarterly, 15 (1924); P. R. Eldershaw, ‘John Glover’, Papers and Proceedings (Tasmanian Historical Research Association), vol 12, no 1, Oct 1964, pp 37-39; S. Passioura, John Glover (M.A. thesis, University of Melbourne, in preparation); correspondence file under J. Glover (Archives Office of Tasmania); manuscript catalogue under J. Glover (State Library of New South Wales). More on the resources
Author: Bernard Smith
Print Publication Details: Bernard Smith, 'Glover, John (1767 - 1849)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 1, Melbourne University Press, 1966, pp 455-456.











Roberts, Thomas William (Tom) (1856 - 1931)

ROBERTS, THOMAS WILLIAM (1856-1931), artist, was born on 9 March 1856 at Dorchester, Dorset, England, elder son of Richard Roberts, journalist, and his wife Matilda Agnes Cela, née Evans. Tom was educated at Dorchester Grammar School. After her husband's death Matilda and her three children migrated in 1869 to Melbourne where they lived at Collingwood. The first years were difficult for a poor family and Tom helped his mother to sew satchels after work. He soon became interested in art and studied at the Collingwood and Carlton artisans' schools of design in 1873; at the latter Louis Buvelot and Eugen von Guerard awarded him a prize for a landscape. In 1874 he joined the National Gallery School where he attended Thomas Clark's classes in design. Though the school listed his occupation as photographer, his responsibilities at Stewart's, photographers in Bourke Street, were confined to arranging backdrops and studio sets and sometimes posing the sitters for portraits.
Roberts was one of the first painters to recognize the special character of the Australian landscape; Studley Park, Kew, was close to where he lived (in Johnston Street) and he introduced his friend Fred McCubbin to the native flora there. Encouraged by Clark and his other teachers, Roberts resolved to gain further experience in London, and the Victorian Academy of Arts helped by providing him with a bursary. Already ambitious to paint subject pictures, he had attended anatomy classes at the University of Melbourne. Roberts was the first major Australian painter to be selected to study at the Royal Academy of Arts which he attended from 1881 to 1884, benefiting especially from tuition in anatomy and perspective. To help make ends meet he contributed illustrations to the Graphic.
In London he was especially influenced by a variety of regional groups who eventually formed the nucleus of the New English Arts Club in 1886; these artists from centres such as Newlyn and Glasgow rejected the strictly historicizing Academy style. Other strong influences were Whistler and the popular plein air painters such as Bastien Lepage and his British followers. Roberts toured Spain in 1883 with the future Labor politician Dr William Maloney and fellow artist John Peter Russell. Although he spent only a few weeks in Spain it was a joyous and formative experience which encouraged his naturalistic bent. Two Spanish painters he met in Granada, Lorreano Barrau and Ramon Casas, emphasized certain popular notions of Impressionism and plein air principles. In 1884 Roberts continued his pursuit of momentary effects in small studies of the seascape and several figure studies painted during a holiday at Venice—small exercises in a Whistlerian mode.
He returned to Melbourne in 1885 at precisely the right moment to instigate a new school of painting based on plein air practice which, in Australia as elsewhere, was allied to notions of nationalism and regionalism. Roberts's Melbourne colleagues immediately benefited from his experience; Arthur Streeton, for one, later claimed that 'Bulldog's' example was crucial. His sense of mission and enthusiasm were important in a period when painters and writers were seeking local self-definition. His dedication put him in the forefront of the group of painters which became known as the Heidelberg school.
The first camp was set up at Box Hill in 1886 at Housten's Paddock, scene of 'The Artists' Camp' and 'A Summer Morning Tiff'. 'We went to the bush', said Roberts, 'and, as was always our ambition, tried to get it down as truly as we could'. Early in 1887, painting at the seaside outer suburbs, Beaumaris and Mentone, Roberts first met Streeton and recorded the long hot summer in key pictures such as 'Mentone' and 'The Sunny South'. Charles Conder joined them from Sydney in 1888. In 1889 they established a hilltop camp at Eaglemont with sweeping views of the Yarra valley.
In August that year Roberts, Streeton and Conder arranged their 9 x 5 (inches) Exhibition of Impressions (with a few contributions also by four others including McCubbin) which further defined the Heidelberg movement in the public mind. The 182 small panels, of which Roberts contributed 62, were all painted on cigar-box lids and uniformly framed in flat wide lengths of kauri wood. Roberts had brought home a few 9 x 5 impressions painted in London; the first item in the catalogue was one of his Thames-side studies. The staging of the exhibition mirrored the artists' desire to display their artistic practice in an Aesthetic and Bohemian framework. The decorations of Liberty silks and the red silk background on which they were hung, as well as the elegant flower arrangements, were consonant with Roberts's practice at his studio in Grosvenor Chambers, at the fashionable 'Paris' end of Collins Street. At social and artistic soirées there, patrons could see his latest work in a setting decked out with chinoiserie, bric-a-brac, drapes, and with the addition of musical performances which were an important part of the mise en scène. Streeton claimed that Roberts was the first to bring bunches of gum tips into town.
The catalogue of the Impressions Exhibition had quoted Gérôme: 'When you draw, form is the important thing; but in painting the first thing to look for is the general impression of colour'. It continued: 'An effect is only momentary … Two half hours are never alike'. The Ruskinite James Smith condemned four-fifths of the exhibits as 'a pain to the eye'. When Roberts showed 'Shearing the Rams' in 1890, Smith found the painting too naturalistic: 'art should be of all times, not of one time, of all places, not of one place'. Roberts countered: 'by making art the perfect expression of one time and one place, it becomes for all time and of all places'.
Roberts and his colleagues had a few discriminating supporters and patrons, but the public was unimpressed and the National Gallery gave no encouragement. In 1891, with Melbourne falling into deep economic depression, Roberts followed Streeton to Sydney where the National Art Gallery of New South Wales had a positive policy of acquiring Australian pictures. In October Roberts established a camp at Sirius Cove, Mosman Bay, where Streeton and A. H. Fullwood joined him.
As part of his urge to develop a national art, since 1889 Roberts had been investigating the possibilities of painting historical subject-pictures, describing the experience of 'strong masculine labour'. Drawing on the basic tenets of naturalism, he developed an aim to record historical processes, especially agricultural and pastoral methods which were fast disappearing. For three years in a row he visited Brocklesby station in the Riverina where he painted 'Shearing the Rams', which came to be considered the definitive image of an emerging national identity. In the earlier 1890s he travelled widely from Sydney in search of subject-matter—riding long distances, living hard—notably to the property of his friend Duncan Anderson near Inverell. The paintings 'Shearing at Newstead: The Golden Fleece' (1894) and 'Bailed up' (1895-1927) were major consequences.
Roberts was a reader: his love for the English romantic poets is reflected in the titles of some of his paintings. In particular he read the works of his Dorset elder Thomas Hardy with whom he had had a childhood association. Far from the Madding Crowd was a favourite book and he had an early ambition to illustrate Hardy's novels. The influence can be traced directly: in Hardy's use of the word 'impression' and in his poetic, melancholic twilight scenes; his depiction of shearers at work; his contrasts of city and country, of a vanishing way of life, and his artist's assumption of the task of historical recorder; and in his interest in a regional, provincial culture. Later, in England, Roberts returned several times to Dorset.
In Sydney Roberts fell naturally into close touch with J. F. Archibald of the Bulletin whom he had met on board ship in 1885, 'Breaker Morant', 'Banjo' Paterson and many other writers and journalists at his Pitt Street studio. He was a member of the Dawn to Dusk Club. His democratic, nationalist tendencies were reinforced. In this period Roberts attempted every area of representation; his portraits of literary, artistic and political figures are as important as his landscape and subject pictures. More than half his paintings between 1885 and 1900 were portraits, a means of earning a living that he much preferred to teaching (to which he succumbed from 1896). He would much rather have painted more historical subjects, but they were time-consuming, expensive in materials and difficult to sell. Some of his portraits are 'official' and impersonal; those of friends and intimates more often demonstrate his talent and intelligence, and many of women and girls show great flair. The number of distinguished public figures he painted, however, such as Sir Henry Parkes, Major General Hutton, Alfred Hill and Marshall-Hall, led him eventually to develop an interest in a historical portrait-record of Australian types: in 1900 he exhibited a series of twenty-three informal panel-portraits, much influenced by Whistler. And, mainly on his trip north in 1892 to Queensland and the Torres Strait Islands, he painted Aborigines as individuals rather than types.
Through his close friend S. W. Pring, Roberts met again a former art-student Elizabeth (Lillie) Williamson and married her on 30 April 1896 at St Hilary's Church, East Kew, Melbourne. They settled at Balmain, Sydney, and had one son Caleb, born in 1898.
Roberts was a born leader and mentor to younger painters. Russell had been distraught when Roberts left for home in 1885. Conder affectionately addressed him as 'friend, philosopher and guide'. It is not known to what extent Roberts took the lead in 1886 in forming the Australian Artists' Association as a body of professional painters in opposition to the Victorian Academy of Arts, and in forming the Victorian Artists' Association in 1888, but he was a committee-member of both bodies. He was also secretary of the literature and art section at the 1889 Melbourne meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. Then in Sydney he was founding chairman (1895-97) of the Society of Artists. He was the one artist articulate and bold enough to duel, vigorously and stylishly, with James Smith and others in the Argus. He worked assiduously to promote the status of the artist and of art as a profession, demanding respect rather than patronage. Largely through his eminent portrait-sitters, he gained an entrée to Sydney society where he felt he was representing his profession and gaining recognition for it. There was more than a touch of flamboyance, however, in his top hat and red satin-lined cloak and, remembering his rise from poverty and hardship, he was no doubt well satisfied by his social prominence. But, as J. S. MacDonald later said, 'he convinced by his arguments, he convinced by his painting … he convinced by his presence'.
At the close of the century Roberts had decided to leave Australia because of the bad economic conditions and lack of patronage—'there seemed so little in front of us'. However, when in 1901 he was invited to attend the opening of the Commonwealth Parliament in Melbourne, he was commissioned to paint the official picture. His 'Minute Book' reflects his excitement. Roberts was to paint 250 figures for which he was offered more than one thousand guineas and expenses. The work took two and a half years but it gave him financial security. In 1903 he embarked for England to complete the 'Big Picture' (1570 sq. feet, 518 cm x 305 cm). He had 'longed and longed' to return to England, but he did not receive the patronage he expected despite his contacts with Royalty while painting the picture, and, uncertain of the direction his art should follow, he entered a 'black period' for several years. Although Roberts had considered the commission to be the peak of his career, the need to represent accurately so many figures and the importance he placed on the task sapped his energy and weakened his eyesight.
Portraits were again his bread and butter; one was 'hung on the line' at the Royal Academy in 1910, but he barely made ends meet during sixteen years in London. Lillie Roberts became well known for her handsome carved frames. Tom corresponded with Prime Minister Alfred Deakin with whom, as a sitter, he had immediately struck up a warm friendship—Deakin was 'ever ready for five minutes' chaff'—and in 1910 he unavailingly offered his services in establishing a national portrait gallery. In 1913 Roberts held an exhibition of alpine landscapes, but his confidence had been lacking and his hopes disappointed. He had organized an Australian artist group based on the Chelsea Arts Club and was often nostalgic for the 'Sunny South'.
During World War I, understating his age (59), he enlisted in 1915 with several other Australian artists as an orderly, undertaking menial tasks, at the 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth; he became corporal, then sergeant, in charge of the dental department, and remembered the hospital with great affection. He returned to Australia in December 1919, stayed for a year and held exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney whose success encouraged him to return finally early in 1923.
Roberts and his wife settled at Kallista in the Dandenongs in a small cottage they named Talisman. He was particularly fond of the countryside there and returned to painting small formal landscapes in a low-key tonal Impressionism which he had rediscovered in a small panel painted in 1914 at Lake Como. Lillie Roberts died in 1928 and on 27 August he married her childhood friend Jean Irving Boyes at Illawarra, Tasmania. His last work 'Ring a Ring a Roses' was a nostalgic reprise of a landscape painted at Cremorne, Sydney, in the early 1890s. He died at Talisman on 14 September 1931 and was cremated. His wife and son by his first marriage survived him.
Roberts was a slim 5 ft 10 ins (178 cm), brown-eyed, brown-bearded, prematurely balding; he retained his English accent. He was direct, definite and straightforward in manner, loved an argument and relating anecdotes, in his younger days was often the life of a party. (Sir) Frederic Eggleston, a friend of the 1920s, recalled: 'He was a great talker, full of fun and whims and wisdom, but he was no egotist … He would not permit the silent listener. Every moment brought the call for active comradeship, participation in the passing of life and the enjoyment of beauty. He could not have lived without this active interchange of affection and friendship'.
In the first third of the century his reputation, such as it was, slumped. The contrast with Sir Arthur Streeton is striking; Roberts was offered no honour. In his earlier Melbourne days he had been outspoken and suffered many 'nasty knocks' from critics and art-officialdom. The trustees of the National Gallery did not purchase one of his works until 1920—a portrait painted in London. R. H. Croll's Tom Roberts: Father of Australian Landscape Painting (1935), which included many reminiscences by associates, began his return to fame. In more recent years it has been recognized that Roberts was at least as distinguished a painter as Streeton, in the wider sense a much more significant figure, and heroic in his claims for art and as a patriot.
His readiness to absorb major current influences and his energy in disseminating them made him one of the prime movers in the development of a national movement in painting. A portrait of him by Conder is in a private collection and a self-portrait is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Select Bibliography
V. Spate, Tom Roberts (Melb, 1972); H. Topliss, Tom Roberts, 1856-1931: A Catalogue Raisonne (Melb, 1985), and for bibliography; Tom Roberts papers (State Library of New South Wales). More on the resources
Author: Helen Topliss
Print Publication Details: Helen Topliss, 'Roberts, Thomas William (Tom) (1856 - 1931)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 11, Melbourne University Press, 1988, pp 409-412.


















Streeton, Sir Arthur Ernest (1867 - 1943)

STREETON, Sir ARTHUR ERNEST (1867-1943), artist, was born on 8 April 1867 at Duneed, Victoria, fourth of five children of Charles Henry Streeton, schoolteacher, and his wife Mary, née Johnson, whom Charles had met on his voyage from England in 1854 and married in 1857 on his appointment to Queenscliff. The family moved to Melbourne in 1874 when Charles joined the administrative staff of the Education Department. They settled at Richmond and Arthur attended the Punt Road State School until 1880 when he became a junior clerk in the office of Rolfe & Co., importers, of Bourke Street.
As a child Arthur liked to draw and sketch in water-colour. He enrolled in night classes at the National Gallery of Victoria School of Design in 1882-87 and in 1886 his skill at sketching led to his being apprenticed as a lithographer to Charles Troedel & Co., of Collins Street. Streeton's first independently published black-and-white work, 'His First Snake', appeared in the Australasian Sketcher of 24 January 1889. He had no formal instruction in painting; his earliest extant oils date from 1884 and at this stage he was largely self-taught; he used such manuals as William Morris Hunt's Talks About Art (1877) which urged the emulation of plein air French painters Jean Millet and Camille Corot. Inspired by his reading, Streeton wrote to the compiler of Hunt's book for photographs of Corot's work.
In the summer of 1886 Streeton met Tom Roberts at Mentone. Seeing his work 'full of light and air', Roberts asked him to join a painting group which included Frederick McCubbin and Louis Abrahams. In their company Streeton continued to work on the problems of light and heat and space and distance which had already absorbed him. With the sale of 'Settler's Camp' and 'Pastoral', both exhibited with the Victorian Artists' Society in 1888, he was able to paint full time: for the next two years he worked at Box Hill and Heidelberg with his artist friends who now included Charles Conder, and also in the city where he did portraits and studies of the Yarra River and its bridges. A camp established at an old house at Eaglemont, overlooking the Yarra valley near Heidelberg, became the focus of their artistic fellowship. Streeton and Conder supplemented their income by giving painting lessons to young women; at weekends artists and students visited to paint and picnic beneath the pines.
On 17 August 1889 the Heidelberg painters opened their 9 x 5 (inches) Exhibition of Impressions at Buxton's Art Gallery, Melbourne. The exhibition was a statement of rebellion by young artists, influenced by international trends, against the prevailing academic tradition of Victorian painting. The 182 exhibits included forty by Streeton. Mostly painted on cedar cigar-box lids and hung among silks, they were Impressionist in the direct manner of painting and the study of momentary effects, while retaining the plein-airist tonal use of colour. The catalogue stated: 'An effect is only momentary: so an impressionist tries to find his place … So in these works, it has been the object of the artists to render faithfully, and thus obtain first records of effects widely differing, and often of very fleeting character'. The exhibition won popular success, but provoked critical scorn, expressed most virulently by the influential Argus critic James Smith. Streeton, Roberts and Conder responded in a letter to the Argus, asserting: 'Any form of nature which moves us strongly by its beauty, whether strong or vague in its drawing, defined or undefinite in its light, rare or ordinary in its colour, is worthy of our best efforts'.
The camp broke up in January 1890; three months later Conder left Australia for Paris, taking with him Streeton's 'Golden Summer' (1889) which was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1891, and hung on the line and awarded an honorable mention at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français, Paris, in 1892. Streeton, whose 'Still Glides the Stream and Shall for Ever Glide' (1890) had been acquired by the National Art Gallery of New South Wales, moved to Sydney. Julian Ashton saw him then as 'a slim, debonair young man … with a little gold pointed beard and fair complexion', who, when he was not painting, 'was quoting Keats and Shelley'. Streeton lived at 'Curlew Camp', Little Sirius Cove, Mosman, with Roberts and other impecunious artists, and painted a variety of harbour views, Coogee beach scenes, art-nouveau-inspired nudes and in 1893 two urban masterpieces, 'Circular Quay' and 'The Railway Station'. With Roberts he opened a teaching studio in Pitt Street.
In 1891 Streeton wrote to Roberts of his yearning to 'try something entirely new': 'to translate some of the great hidden poetry' of the immense, elemental outback. He travelled inland in New South Wales and painted directly in front of his subject, striving to capture—as he told Roberts—the 'great, gold plains', the 'hot, trying winds' and the 'slow, immense summer'. The paintings of this period, including 'Fire's On' (1891), are heroic landscapes which successfully balance bravura technique with real inspiration and feeling. His Hawkesbury River series (1896) is remarkable for the rendering of light, heat and distance. On the recommendation of John Mather the National Gallery of Victoria bought one, 'The Purple Noon's Transparent Might', shown at Streeton's first one-man Melbourne exhibition in December 1896.
After this success Streeton sailed for England, spending five months painting in Cairo en route. The early years in London were hard; he had few friends and felt none of the intuitive affinity with the English landscape that had inspired his Australian paintings. Homesick and nostalgic for his youth, he seems also to have suffered a time of artistic confusion. There was little interest in his work and little success at the major exhibiting venues, the Royal Academy and the New English Art Club. In 1906-07 he spent a year in Australia and had considerable acclaim with sales of his English and recent Australian work. G. W. Marshall-Hall and (Sir) Walter Baldwin Spencer were early patrons who became friends.
Returning to London, Streeton married Esther Leonora Clench, a Canadian violinist, on 11 January 1908 in the Marylebone register office. Apart from a visit home in 1913-14, he spent the years before World War I based in London whence he sent works for exhibition in Australia. During this period Streeton's art began to win recognition in England, France and at the international exhibitions held in the United States of America. His wife's extensive social contacts helped with commissions and Streeton's formerly rather reclusive personality had to respond to de rigueur 'country-house' weekends.
On 24 April 1915 Streeton enlisted as a private in the Australian Army Medical Corps and was posted to Wandsworth where he worked as an orderly for the next two years. Commissioned honorary lieutenant and appointed official war artist in 1918, he spent two periods in France documenting the Western Front for the Commonwealth government. In contrast to the Middle East paintings of George Lambert, Streeton concentrated on the landscape of war; his paintings show the desolation of the terrain, but none of the tragedy or drama of human suffering. As throughout his career, landscape views rather than figure-painting remained the core of his art. In July 1919 at the Alpine Club, London, he showed a series of war paintings entitled 'With Australians on the Somme'. His best water-colours recall his early work in their immediacy and delicate portrayal of light.
After the war Streeton and his family visited Australia. In 1922 they returned to London, via St Mary's, Ontario, Canada, where Nora Streeton's mother lived. Streeton's paintings of Canada were exhibited at the Montross Gallery, New York, in January 1923, but they aroused little interest in spite of a warm press reception. That year he returned to Victoria where he bought a home at Toorak and built a cottage at Olinda in the Dandenong Ranges. He made painting trips to many Australian sites and in 1928 was awarded the Wynne prize for landscape for 'Afternoon Light: the Goulburn Valley'.
In his later years Streeton became a national institution. He continued to paint sunny, pastoral landscapes, but many were mannered, fluent and facile, and devoid of the inspiration of his radical early work. Leading critics, particularly J. S. MacDonald and Lionel Lindsay, extolled his art which—with that of Roberts and McCubbin—was to some extent appropriated by the art establishment in the cause of a conservative, isolationist nationalism. Most responded to the optimism of Streeton's romantic blue and gold vision of a pastoral Australia. William Blamire Young was one of the few to contrast unfavourably Streeton's later canvases with the small 'gem-like' pictures of his early years. Reviewing a retrospective exhibition in 1933, he wrote that 'in many cases the poet has been over-powered by the technician'. As art critic for the Argus from 1929, Streeton himself became a tastemaker; although an early supporter of Hans Heysen and Norman Lindsay, he was not receptive to modern art. He frequently wrote in the press on art, the environment and public affairs. At the same time he embellished and consolidated the Streeton legend, writing his interpretation of the history of Australian painting, organizing his own numerous exhibitions and producing the Arthur Streeton Catalogue (1935). In 1937 he was knighted.
After his wife's death in 1938, Streeton retired to Olinda and devoted much of his time to his garden. He died there on 1 September 1943, having been received into the Catholic faith during his last long illness, and was buried in Ferntree Gully cemetery. His son survived him.
Widely read in English literature and poetry, Streeton was a Romantic. His love of music formed a great bond with his wife. Artistically he always preferred the tonal landscapes of the French plein air movement of the 1870s and late-Victorian Romantic landscapists like Alfred East. In the twentieth century he showed little interest in avant-garde art, believing to the end in the values of sound drawing and tonally orchestrated colour. He was of medium height and slightly built. Roberts's portrait, 'Smike Streeton, age 24' (1891), shows a fine-featured profile, wide, expressive, dark eyes, brown hair, a gold-tinged moustache and beard, and an eager, boyish expression. It is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, as is a self-portrait, presented in 1924.
Select Bibliography
Smike to Bulldog—Letters from Sir Arthur Streeton to Tom Roberts, R. H. Croll ed (Syd, 1946); B. Smith, Australian Painting 1788-1960 (Melb, 1962); A. Galbally, Arthur Streeton (Melb, 1979); G. Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come (Melb, 1973); Art in Australia, no 2, 1915, no 16, 1926; Meanjin Quarterly, 10, no 2, 1951; Streeton papers (Australian War Memorial); Roberts papers (State Library of New South Wales). More on the resources
Author: Ann E. Galbally
Print Publication Details: Ann E. Galbally, 'Streeton, Sir Arthur Ernest (1867 - 1943)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 12, Melbourne University Press, 1990, pp 119-121.












de Maistre, LeRoy Leveson Laurent Joseph (Roy) (1894 - 1968)

DE MAISTRE, LeROY LEVESON LAURENT JOSEPH (1894-1968), painter, was born LeRoi Levistan de Mestre on 27 March 1894 at Maryvale, Bowral, New South Wales, son of Etienne Livingstone de Mestre, gentleman, and his wife Clara Eliza, née Rowe, and grandson of Prosper de Mestre. From 1898 the family lived at Mount Valdemar, Sutton Forest, where he was educated by tutors and governesses. In 1913 Roi went to Sydney to study the violin and viola at the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music, and painting at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales, under Norman Carter and Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo, who encouraged interest in Post-Impressionism. He also studied at Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School.
In 1916, as Roi Livingstone de Mestre, he tried to enlist in the Australian Imperial Force; he was accepted for home service, as his chest measurement was not up to standard. Discharged in 1917 with general debility, he became interested in the treatment of shell-shock patients by putting them in rooms painted in soothing colour combinations. In November 1916, as Roi de Mestre, he had first exhibited. That year's paintings were Impressionist interiors and landscapes, impasted and concerned with the effects of light. With the Conservatorium director's son, Adrien Verbrugghen, he theorized about the relationship between painting, music and colour.
Influenced by recent American books, de Mestre and Roland Wakelin in August 1919 shared an exhibition of vivid flat-pattern landscape paintings: titles like 'Synchromy in Orange Red' were used, and interior decoration schemes by de Mestre showed a room in 'Blue Green Major' leading into another in 'Yellow Green Minor'. This 'colour-music' exhibition became part of Australia's art-folklore as 'pictures you could whistle'. Later in 1919 they painted, but did not publicly exhibit, some of Australia's first abstract paintings. After 1919 de Mestre virtually abandoned colour-music and abstraction, though in London in 1934 he reworked some ideas. Instead his paintings of 1921-22 are experiments in Max Meldrum's opposite theory of impersonal, unemotional tonalism.
In 1923 de Mestre was awarded a travelling scholarship by the Society of Artists, Sydney. He spent three years abroad, first in London, then in France in Paris and St Jean de Luz. On returning to Sydney he held one-man shows in 1926 and 1928; contributed to annual exhibitions including the new Contemporary Group formed in 1926 by George Lambert and Thea Proctor; conducted classes in modern art in his studio in Burdekin House, Macquarie Street; and in 1929 organized the Burdekin House Exhibition of interior design, mostly antiques—but de Mestre designed one of six sensational modern rooms. From his family's position in society he helped to make modern art fashionable in Sydney in the late 1920s, even in Government House circles, but his paintings became tame exercises in Fauvism and Post-Impressionism.
In March 1930 he left Australia permanently. Henceforth he called himself Roy de Maistre, believing the modern spelling suited a modern painter. By the 1950s he had added the name Laurent, mistakenly believing in his own royal blood via Madame de St Laurent, mistress of Edward, Duke of Kent, Queen Victoria's father; eventually he also added the name Joseph, in acknowledgment of a connexion with the philosopher, Joseph de Maistre, and changed the spelling of Levistan to Leveson.
From 1930 de Maistre is best considered a British artist. He held one-man shows at the Beaux-Arts Gallery, London, (1930), in the studio of his colleague Francis Bacon later that year; at Bernheim Jeune, Paris, (1932), Mayor Gallery, London, (1934) and at Calmann Gallery, London, (1938). His work was illustrated in several editions of Herbert Read's influential book Art Now. In 1934 he conducted a painting school with Martin Block. From 1936 his home and studio was at 13 Eccleston Street, Westminster. Patrick White, who for ten years rented a flat upstairs, collected his paintings, dedicated his first novel to de Maistre and acknowledged his influence on his writing.
De Maistre's paintings from the 1930s onwards are generally Cubist in style. Academic society portraits occur at all times. Occasionally biomorphic, Surrealist forms occur in 1930s paintings, and ambiguous content; so do variations on other masters, Mantegna, Piero, Courbet, or on newspaper photographs of royalty. Religious subjects begin later with his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Systematic variations on his own compositions became numerous. His webs of angled Cubist interlace and pattern are perfect forms for his obsessive ideas about the web of ancestry, family, friendship.
While working for the British Red Cross Society in 1938-43 de Maistre scarcely painted, but thenceforth he was an establishment artist. In 1962 he was appointed C.B.E. He exhibited with the Royal Academy of Arts from 1951 and was represented in Arts Council of Great Britain exhibitions; his work was bought for the Tate Gallery and other art museums, and was frequently discussed in the writings of Sir John Rothenstein. His modern religious pictures were sought for public collections and exhibitions; he painted a series of Stations of the Cross for Westminster Cathedral and two triptychs for St Aidan's Church, East Acton. Besides religion his late painting often dwelt on interior intimacies of his studio home and its artfully cluttered bric-à-brac. These included his finest works.
De Maistre died at his Eccleston Street home on 1 March 1968 and was cremated after a service at the Brompton Oratory. In 1974 Patrick White gave all his paintings by de Maistre to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which in 1976 exhibited its complete holding of his works.
Select Bibliography
J. K. M. Rothenstein, Modern English Painters (Lond, 1956); Roy de Maistre: A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings from 1917-1960 held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, May-June 1960, (Lond, 1960); M. Gillen, The Prince and his Lady (Lond, 1970); Roy de Maistre, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales (Syd, 1976); Roy de Maistre papers (Art Gallery of New South Wales Library). More on the resources
Author: Daniel Thomas
Print Publication Details: Daniel Thomas, 'de Maistre, LeRoy Leveson Laurent Joseph (Roy) (1894 - 1968)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 8, Melbourne University Press, 1981, pp 277-278.













Meldrum, Duncan Max (1875 - 1955)

MELDRUM, DUNCAN MAX (1875-1955), artist, was born on 3 December 1875 in Edinburgh, son of Edward David Meldrum, chemist, and his wife Christine, née Macglashan. He was educated at George Heriot's Hospital, Edinburgh, and arrived in Melbourne in 1889 with his father (who had taken a post with Felton, Grimwade & Co., wholesale druggists), his mother, two brothers and one sister.
After working briefly as a clerk in a wool store Meldrum enrolled in 1892 at the National Gallery School under Bernard Hall. In 1895-96 he sometimes assisted George Coates at his painting and life classes, was one of the artists in the Prehistoric Order of Cannibals club, and contributed cartoons to the socialist weekly the Champion. In 1899 he won the National Gallery travelling scholarship. To augment his travel funds he unsuccessfully requested the patronage of the trustees of the gallery for an art union which he proposed to conduct with his scholarship picture as the prize.
Proceeding to Paris in 1900 Meldrum began to work under L. J. R. Collin and Gustave Courtois at the Académie Colarossi. In March 1901 he was studying under Jean Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian as well as at Colarossi's, but he soon withdrew from both ateliers. In June he was living with a maternal uncle in Edinburgh and thence in December he shipped a nude study, painted in Scotland, to the Melbourne gallery trustees. He had already begun that year to copy works in the Louvre and on his return to Paris in 1902 copied a portrait by Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese's Flight from Sodom. Later that year he began to work on the original painting required by the terms of his scholarship. In Paris Meldrum met Charles Nitsch, a painter from Pacé near Rennes, who introduced Meldrum to his family; about 1907 he married Nitsch's sister Jeanne Eugenie, a singer of the Opéra Comique, Paris. From Rennes Meldrum exhibited 'La Leçon' at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français in 1904, and from Paris 'Le contre-fa' in 1905. In 1907-08 he painted murals on commission, in the Chateau de Pacé. He exhibited 'Au Chateau de Pacé' and 'Un Paysan de Pacé' in 1908 at the Société des Artistes Français, and in 1911 'L'homme qui rit'. He was elected an associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.
Returning to Melbourne with his family in 1912, Meldrum lived with his parents in East Melbourne, then at St Kilda. In 1915 he took a studio at 527 Collins Street, for a time sharing it with Harley Griffiths, senior, and opened an art school there. Among his students were Clarice Beckett, Colin Colahan, Auguste Cornels, John Farmer, Polly Hurry, Justus Jorgensen, Percy Leason and Arnold Shore, and he influenced considerably the work of his friend Alexander Colquhoun, whose son Archibald was also a Meldrum student at that time. In 1916-17 he was elected president of the Victorian Artists' Society.
In 1919 Max Meldrum His Art and Views, edited by Colahan, was published, including a long essay by Meldrum entitled 'The invariable truths of depictive art' developed from a lecture in 1917. In it he argued that painting was a pure science, the science of optical analysis or photometry by means of which the artist, in carefully perceiving and analysing tone and tonal relationships, could produce an exact appearance of the thing seen. Tone was the most important component of the art of painting, next came proportion, 'the superficial area occupied by one tone', and then colour, the least important component. The decadence of civilization was revealed through art by the declining interest in tonal analysis and the increased contemporary interest in colour. The theory, despite its severe constraints on proportion and colour, proved highly influential among his students and a Meldrum school of painting, impressed by the theory and methods of its master, developed in Melbourne. From the late 1930s his ideas were promulgated in Sydney by Hayward Veal, and in the United States of America by Leason at the Staten Island Institute of Art and Science.
Meldrum's school became the principal alternative in Victoria to the National Gallery's. Between 1916 and 1923 he held his classes in the city, then moved them to a large room in his home in Kooyong Road, Elsternwick. In April 1926 he sailed for France where he lived for some years, making a six-month tour of the U.S.A. in 1928 to lecture on his theory and methods of painting. Returning to Melbourne in 1931 he took a house at Armadale for six months, then moved to Olinda until 1933. In 1936 he bought a house in Belmont Avenue, Kew, and next year opened a new school in Collins Street. During the 1930s his students included John Farmer, Ron Crawford, Peter Glass, Hayward Veal and Ida Meldrum. He was a trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria in 1937-50, his strong opposition to the acquisition of modernist work bringing him into confrontation with Sir Keith Murdoch. Meldrum won the Archibald prize for portrait painting in 1939 and again in 1940. In 1950 The Science of Appearances as Formulated and Taught by Max Meldrum, a substantial account of his theory and methods edited by Russell Foreman, one of his students, was published in Sydney. He died at Kew on 6 June 1955 and was cremated. His wife (d.1966) and two daughters survived him.
Meldrum was probably the only Australian artist to develop a fully formulated theory of painting and to practise and teach it. Small in stature, generous to a degree, he was also argumentative and occasionally waspish. Lionel Lindsay, intolerant of his fanatical dedication to his theory, dubbed Meldrum 'the mad Mullah' and Norman Lindsay depicted him as the dogmatic McQuibble in his novel A Curate in Bohemia. A pacifist during World War I, he gave influential support to Egon Kisch on his arrival in Australia in 1934 and actively defended civil liberties over the years.
Meldrum became a foundation member of the Australian Art Association, in 1912. He held exhibitions of his work in Melbourne at the Athenaeum Hall (1913 and 1922) and Gallery (1931), at Georges Gallery (1945), and in Sydney at David Jones gallery (1937) and Farmer's Blaxland Gallery (1941). He also exhibited with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, London. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held in the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Queensland National Art Gallery in 1954. The National Gallery of Victoria also held an exhibition of his work in 1961. He was awarded the medal of the Society of Artists, Sydney, for services to Australian art. There is a self-portrait in the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Select Bibliography
J. J. M. Thompson, On Lips of Living Men (Melb, 1962); D. Meeson Coates, George Coates, His Art and His Life (Lond, 1937); C. B. Christesen (ed), The Gallery on Eastern Hill (Melb, 1970); E. Hanks (compiler), Australian Art and Artists to 1950 (Melb, 1982); Triad (Sydney), 10, no 6 (Apr 1925); Meanjin Quarterly, 26, no 2 (June 1967); Argus (Melbourne), 2 Sept 1912, 23 July 1913; Punch (Melbourne), 18 June 1925; Sydney Morning Herald, 1, 3 Nov 1937, 20 Jan 1940, 22 Jan, 14 Nov 1941, 11 Mar 1950, 10 July 1954; Age (Melbourne), 7 June 1955, 22 Aug 1959; Sunday Mirror (Sydney), 23 Sept 1962; J. McGrath, The Australian Art Association, 1912-1933 (B. Soc. Sci. special study, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, 1974); Australian art and artists files (State Library of Victoria); unpublished letter, Meldrum to Leason, 23 July 1928 (Leason papers, State Library of Victoria); biography cuttings and artists files (National Library of Australia); Salon exhibition catalogues, Paris, 1903-06, 1908, 1911 (held by Société des Artistes Français, Paris); private information. More on the resources
Author: Joyce McGrath, Bernard Smith
Print Publication Details: Joyce McGrath, Bernard Smith, 'Meldrum, Duncan Max (1875 - 1955)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 10, Melbourne University Press, 1986, pp 480-482.









Preston, Margaret Rose (1875 - 1963)

PRESTON, MARGARET ROSE (1875-1963), artist, was born on 29 April 1875 at Port Adelaide, elder daughter of David McPherson, marine engineer, and his wife Prudence Cleverdon (d.1903), née Lyle. By 1885 the family was living in Sydney where Rose about 1888 began training with Lister Lister. In Melbourne in 1893 she enrolled at the National Gallery's school of design under Frederick McCubbin.
Her father was admitted in February 1894 to Parkside Lunatic Asylum, Adelaide, where he died next year. In June 1894 she joined her sister and mother in Adelaide. She exhibited with the (Royal) South Australian Society of Arts (and continued to do so annually when in Adelaide). Returning to Melbourne in July 1896, she enrolled at the National Gallery's school of painting under Bernard Hall and with a painting, 'Still Life', won a year's free tuition. Returning to Adelaide, in 1898 she studied at the School of Design, Painting and Technical Arts under Harry Gill. She leased a studio next year and began teaching full time and painting at week-ends, chiefly still-life subjects.
Inheriting her mother's money in 1903, she moved to a new studio where one of her students was Bessie Davidson. 'Eggs' (1903), painted in an academic illusionist style, reveals her skill. After the selection committee of the Society of Arts rejected what she believed to be her 'best still life', she left Adelaide on 2 July 1904, bound for Europe with Davidson. In Munich they viewed an exhibition of the German Secessionists. Shocked by her first view of the European avant garde, Rose MacPherson took lessons at the Munich Government Art School for Women. She then went to Paris where she saw the work of Cézanne, Matisse, Kandinsky and Rouault. Still conservative, Rose was thrilled to have one of her traditional oils accepted by the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français. With renewed self-confidence she studied Japanese and Chinese art at the Musée Guimet, learning 'slowly that there is more than one vision in art'.
On her return to Adelaide in 1907 she leased a studio with Bessie Davidson and they held a combined exhibition in March. 'Onions' (1905) was purchased by the National Gallery of South Australia. Gladys Reynell and Stella Bowen joined her classes in 1908. She also taught at the Collegiate School of St Peter and Presbyterian Ladies' College. A citizens' committee in 1911 commissioned her to paint a posthumous portrait of Catherine Spence for the gallery.
In 1912 Rose and her now intimate friend Gladys Reynell arrived in London to see the Second Post Impressionist Exhibition, organized by Roger Fry, in which Matisse and Picasso were well represented. They lived in Paris and Brittany in 1913-14 before moving to London on the outbreak of war; Rose now admired Gauguin's colour. She exhibited her first woodcuts with the Society of Women Artists, studied pottery at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and became familiar with the designs of Fry and the Bloomsbury group. Her paintings, 'November on the Balcony' and 'Still-Life Sunshine Indoors' were exhibited at the New Salon, Paris, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. She also studied under the Scot A. E. H. Miller, and exhibited with the New English Art Club; 'Anemones' (1916) marks her final rejection of academic realism and the emergence of her new style based on colour theory.
From August 1918 MacPherson and Reynell taught shell-shocked soldiers ceramics, basketmaking and printmaking at Seale Hayne Neurological Hospital, Devon. The task required great ingenuity because traditional materials were unavailable. Next year Rose was invited to exhibit at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburg, United States of America. On the voyage home she met her future husband, William George Preston (1881-1978), a gunner returning after serving with the Australian Imperial Force. She and Reynell held a joint exhibition in Adelaide in September 1919 and made some of the first pottery at Reynella. There Margaret (as she was henceforth known) married Preston on 31 December.
They settled at Mosman, Sydney. Preston became a director of Anthony Hordern & Sons Ltd, Tooheys Ltd and other companies, and belonged to the Union Club. Margaret's financial security enabled her to travel and to experiment with new styles and techniques. Her travels included visits to New Caledonia and the New Hebrides (1923), South East Asian countries and China (1924-26), North Queensland (1927) and Ceylon, Africa and India (1956-58). In the 1930s the Prestons also lived at Berowra where Margaret kept two exuberant terriers and enjoyed pottering in her garden, left half in its native state, and filling her cupboards with home-made bottled fruit and jam. Fiery and volatile in temperament, she once threw a plate of cakes at Thea Proctor. Leon Gellert later recalled, however, that never 'was a domestic alliance so felicitous … Bill seemed to regard it as a national duty to keep his beloved Margaret happy and artistically productive'.
At first Margaret had exhibited with the Royal Art Society of New South Wales. 'Summer' (1915), showing Post-Impressionist influence, was bought by the National Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1920. She soon joined the less hidebound Society of Artists, where she was supported by Sydney Ure Smith. The Contemporary Group from 1926 gave her the opportunity to show her 'modernist' style. She was now familiar with Leger and Purism and with Cubism. 'Implement Blue' (1927) shows a Japanese influence fused with a technique of lighting used by contemporary photographers.
Increasingly adept at promoting her art and ideas, Margaret Preston contributed twenty-seven articles to Ure Smith's journals, Art in Australia and the Home, as well as writing for other publications. In December 1927 she published her autobiographical essay, 'From Eggs to Electrolux', in Art in Australia. Between the wars she had a substantial part in articulating new attitudes towards art and in creating a receptive climate for changing aesthetic taste in Sydney.
For her first major printmaking exhibition she teamed with Thea Proctor in 1925; and in 1929, 1936 and 1953 held three major one-woman shows. The first woman to be commissioned by the trustees of the Art Gallery to paint a 'Self Portrait' (1930), she chose a style which conveys some of the direct challenge she communicated in her writing. Three of Ure Smith's publications were exclusively devoted to her work. In 1937 she won a silver medal at the Exposition Internationale, Paris.
Paradoxically, when her style was most international, Margaret proposed a 'national' art for Australia based on Aboriginal art. Although she was primarily a still-life artist for most of her career, in the 1940s she concentrated on landscapes in oils: in 'Aboriginal Landscape' (1941) and 'Flying Over Shoalhaven River' (1942) she reduced her palette to earth colours and surrounded simplified forms with black lines, based on her study of Aboriginal art. Still experimenting, in the 1950s she made a series of gouache stencils based on religious subjects: 'Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden' (1950) shows black figures in an Australian setting.
Survived by her husband, Margaret Preston died at Mosman on 28 May 1963 and was cremated with Anglican rites. Never an imitator, Preston needed different forms of expression. She experimented constantly in a variety of media, but her ability to present something fresh in her dynamic designs with her unerring sense of colour allowed her to break traditional barriers. Her originality and powerful expression is evident in her printmaking, especially her hand-coloured woodcuts. Her monotypes such as 'Hawkesbury River' (1946) demonstrate her acute observation of Australian landscape and flora.
Select Bibliography
H. McQueen, The Black Swan of Trespass (Syd, 1979); J. Burke (ed), Australian Women Artists (Melb, 1980); I. North et al, The Art of Margaret Preston (Adel, 1980); E. Butel, Margaret Preston (Melb, 1986); Art Network, 2, Spring 1980, p 14; I. Seivl, Margaret Preston (M.A. thesis, University of Sydney, 1986). More on the resources
Author: Isobel Seivl
Print Publication Details: Isobel Seivl, 'Preston, Margaret Rose (1875 - 1963)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 11, Melbourne University Press, 1988, pp 283-285.















Boyd, Arthur Merric (1862 - 1940)

BOYD, ARTHUR MERRIC (1862-1940), artist, was the father of WILLIAM MERRIC (1888-1959), potter, and THEODORE PENLEIGH (1890-1923), artist.
Arthur Merric was born on 19 March 1862 at Opoho, New Zealand, son of Captain John Theodore Thomas Boyd, formerly of County Mayo, Ireland, and his wife Lucy Charlotte, daughter of Dr Robert Martin of Heidelberg, Victoria. The Boyds came to Melbourne in the mid 1870s and on 14 January 1886 Arthur married Emma Minnie à Beckett, artist; they settled at Brighton. In 1890 they left for England to live at the à Beckett seat, Penleigh House, near Westbury, Wiltshire. They both exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1891 after which they moved briefly to Paris. On their return to Melbourne in 1894 they lived at Sandringham. In 1898 their works were included in the Exhibition of Australian Art in London at the Grafton Galleries. The family travelled overseas from time to time, and spent summers in Tasmania where the scenery inspired some of Boyd's best work; he exhibited regularly with the Victorian Artists' Society.
At some time Boyd had studied to become an engineer but he did not practise. He was an artist of charm and ability, who painted best in water-colour, without reaching the heights of his contemporaries in the Heidelberg school. While he was friendly with Frederick McCubbin and E. Phillips Fox, he did not associate much with other artists. According to his son Martin (1893-1972), the novelist, he was, if a little remote, just and generous, with a tolerant and enlightened way of bringing up children.
His wife Emma Minnie (1858-1936) was born on 23 November 1858 at Collingwood, second daughter of William Arthur à Beckett and his wife Emma, née Mills. Many critics believe her work to be superior to her husband's. She, too, painted landscapes in Tasmania and many seascapes, but she had a particular talent for genre. At their farm at Yarra Glen she painted the four seasons in a frieze around the dining-room. She was lively, handsome, cultivated and compassionate. Restless, she had something of the religious mystic in her make-up. After her death at Sandringham on 13 September 1936, her husband lived at Rosebud where he was joined by his grandson Arthur, to whom he gave painting lessons. Boyd died at Murrumbeena on 30 July 1940, survived by two sons and a daughter.
His son William Merric, known as Merric, was born on 24 June 1888 at St Kilda, and attended Haileybury College and Dookie Agricultural College. Unsuccessful as a farmer at Yarra Glen, at one time he considered entering the Church of England ministry; he was the model for 'a difficult young man' in Martin Boyd's novel under that title. However, in 1908 at Archibald McNair's Burnley Pottery, he successfully threw his first pot. His parents helped to provide a workshop for him at Murrumbeena and pottery kilns were established there in 1911 (destroyed by fire in 1926).
Merric studied at the Melbourne National Gallery School under L. Bernard Hall and McCubbin. He held his first exhibition of stoneware in Melbourne in 1912 and a second exhibition soon afterwards, and was employed by Hans Fyansch of the Australian Porcelain Works, Yarraville. On 12 October 1915 he married Doris Lucy Eleanor Bloomfield Gough, a fellow student and potter. In May 1917 he joined the Australian Flying Corps but was discharged later in England. Before his return to Australia in September 1919 he undertook training in pottery technique at Wedgwood's, Stoke-on-Trent.
Merric produced his best works in the 1920s and 1930s. These were mostly pieces for domestic use, often decorated by Doris, and some pottery sculptures. He believed that 'the first impulse of the maker of hand-pottery is to obtain pleasure in making and decorating an article, and making that pleasure intelligible … the use of our own fauna and flora is of the first importance'. In spite of his aversion to creating art that would sell well, he worked hard to provide for his growing family. In the 1930s he was employed at the Australian Porcelain Co. Pty Ltd, Yarraville, in the manufacture of Cruffel art porcelain; he earned £4 a week. Doris worked there also on a half-time basis.
In his later years Merric became something of a recluse. He had adopted his wife's faith in Christian Science and from the 1930s read little beyond its teachings and the Bible. Subject to epileptic fits, he died at Murrumbeena on 9 September 1959. Doris died on 13 June 1960. They were survived by their five children, all noted artists: Lucy, Arthur, Guy, David and Mary. Merric had considerable influence on younger artists. 682 of his drawings were collected and published by Christopher Tadgell as Merric Boyd Drawings (London, 1975). His portrait by his son-in-law John Perceval is one of several.
Theodore Penleigh was born on 15 August 1890 at Penleigh House, Wiltshire, and was educated at Haileybury College and The Hutchins School, Hobart. He studied at the Melbourne National Gallery School (1905-09) and in his final year exhibited at the Victorian Artists' Society. He arrived in London in 1911 and his 'Springtime' was soon hung at the Royal Academy. He occupied studios at Chelsea, Amersham and St Ives, but for a time made Paris his headquarters. There his studio adjoined that of Phillips Fox who brought him into contact with the French modern school and through whom he met Edith Susan Gerard Anderson; they were married in Paris on 15 October 1912.
After touring France and Italy, the couple returned to Melbourne. In 1913 Boyd held an exhibition and won second prize in the Federal capital site competition; he also won the Wynne Prize for landscape in 1914. In October he exhibited at the Athenaeum Hall paintings of Venice, Paris, Sydney, Tasmania and Victoria, including some of Warrandyte, where he had built The Robins, a charming attic house set in bushland.
In 1915 Boyd joined the Australian Imperial Force, becoming a sergeant in the Electrical and Mechanical Mining Company, but was badly gassed at Ypres and invalided to England. In 1918 in London he published Salvage, for which he wrote a racy text illustrated with twenty vigorous black and white ink-sketches of army scenes. Later that year he returned to Melbourne and in November held an exhibition at the Victorian Artists' Society's gallery. Although he suffered from the effects of gas, he held one-man shows in 1920, 1921 and 1922; his work, both water-colours and oils, sold quickly. In September 1922 he visited England to choose a collection of contemporary European art for a government-sponsored exhibition to Australia.
On 28 November 1923 Penleigh Boyd was killed instantly when the car he was driving to Sydney overturned near Warragul; he was buried in Brighton cemetery. Next March, Decoration Co. auctioned most of his remaining work, including some of his finest paintings, without reserve.
In his short career Penleigh Boyd was recognized as one of Australia's finest landscape painters, with a strong sense of colour controlled by smooth and subtle tones. 'Wattle Blossoms', hung at the Royal Academy in 1923, was much admired. He loved colour, having been influenced early by study of Turner and the example of McCubbin.
His wife Edith Susan (1880-1961), was born on 16 February 1880 in Brisbane, daughter of John Gerard Anderson, head of the Department of Public Instruction, and his wife Edith Sarah, née Wood. She studied at the Slade School, London, and in Paris with Phillips Fox. After her marriage she continued to paint and excelled in drawing. In later years she wrote several dramas, staged by repertory companies, and radio plays for the Australian Broadcasting Commission in which she took part. She died at East Burwood on 31 March 1961, survived by her two sons, of whom Robin Gerard Penleigh (1919-1971) was a distinguished architect and writer. She may be recognized as the beautiful red-haired woman in several of Phillips Fox's paintings; three of his portraits of her are held by the family.
Select Bibliography
T. P. Boyd, The Landscapes of Penleigh Boyd (Melb, 1920); K. Hood, Pottery (Melb, 1961); Bernard Smith, Australian Painting 1788-1960 (Melb, 1962); J. Reed, Australian Landscape Painting (Melb, 1965); M. Boyd, Day of My Delight (Melb, 1965); Modern Art News (Melbourne), 1 (1959), no 2; Pottery in Australia, 14 (1975), no 2; Home, 1 Dec 1921; Australian Women's Weekly (Sydney), 26 Apr 1972; Herald (Melbourne), 30 Oct 1920, 9 Sept 1959; Times (London); 29 Nov 1923; Age (Melbourne), 4 Feb 1933, 10 Sept 1959, 3 Apr 1961, 1 Feb 1975; P. Nase, Martin Boyd's Langton Novels: An Interpretative Essay (M.A. thesis, Australian National University, 1969); M. Boyd, Boyd-à Beckett Family Tree and Associated Papers (State Library of Victoria); Doulton Insulators Australia Pty Ltd Archives (Yarraville, Victoria); private information. More on the resources
Author: Marjorie J. Tipping
Print Publication Details: Marjorie J. Tipping, 'Boyd, Arthur Merric (1862 - 1940)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 7, Melbourne University Press, 1979, pp 371-373.

















Drysdale, Sir George Russell (1912 - 1981)

DRYSDALE, Sir GEORGE RUSSELL (1912-1981), artist, was born on 7 February 1912 at Bognor Regis, Sussex, England, son of George Russell Drysdale, a gentleman of private means and Scottish ancestry, and his wife Isobel, née Gates, who was English. George Russell Drysdale was his grandfather. Having relinquished a commission with the Black Watch, his father returned in 1919 to Pioneer, the family’s sugar farm on the Burdekin River in northern Queensland. The family moved to Melbourne in 1923 and `Tas’, as he was known, went to Geelong Church of England Grammar School. When his father acquired Boxwood Park in the Riverina district in 1926, Tas was introduced to the inland plains that had been memorialised by novels of Tom Collins [Jospeh Furphy] and Marcus Clarke, by the work of the nineteenth-century Aboriginal artist Tommy McCrae, and by Tom Roberts’s paintings `Shearing the Rams’ and `The Breakaway’.
A detached retina was discovered in Drysdale’s left eye in 1929. In his final year at Geelong Grammar, possibly as a form of therapy, he had five sessions a week in drawing, including perspective, three-dimensional form, the art of memory, and design in plant forms. Eye exercises introduced Drysdale to art and perhaps determined his career; moreover, his great images—remarkable for their depth of space—were to be produced by one who had effective vision in one eye only.
During the spring of 1930, with a school friend, `Bunny’ Reed, Drysdale oversaw the shearing and farm work at Boxwood Park in his father’s absence, then worked for some months at Pioneer with his uncle Cluny Drysdale. After accompanying Cluny to Britain on family business in 1931, he returned to Boxwood Park. Plans to be a farmer receded in 1932 when he was recovering in a Melbourne hospital from an eye operation. Julian Smith, his surgeon and a gifted photographer, showed Drysdale’s drawings to (Sir) Daryl Lindsay, who suggested that he take lessons from George Bell. During the first few months that Drysdale attended his classes, Bell advised him against mere illustration and unreflective imitation, advocating the study of `form’ in modern art. The reproductions he showed to Drysdale had no meaning for the young man, who made an appointment to see (Sir) Keith Murdoch: the press baron squashed his aspirations to be an illustrator. Travelling in Europe in 1932-34, Drysdale took note of works of modern art and began to change his mind about its appeal.
In 1934, while working at Boxwood Park, Drysdale did some painting, including an oil of the foothills east of Albury similar in style to landscapes of the region painted concurrently by Bell and Rupert Bunny; and he courted Elizabeth (Bon) Stephen of Albury. She was knowledgeable about modern art, having travelled through Europe in 1930 with Lucy Swanton, who was to become Drysdale’s art dealer in Melbourne and later at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney. On 8 February 1935 Drysdale and Bon married in a civil ceremony in Melbourne.
After undergoing surgery on his eye that year, Drysdale re-enrolled at the Bell-Shore school, Melbourne. Bell’s teaching was towards the intellectual marriage of form and idea. In May 1937 Peter Purves Smith arrived and for seven months shared Drysdale’s working space, spurring him on in friendly rivalry. The period was decisive for both young artists. Following Tas’s first solo exhibition in April 1938, the Drysdales went to London, where he took some lessons at Iain Macnab’s Grosvenor School of Modern Art. For a time Drysdale shared Purves Smith’s studio in Paris, and bought day tickets for life drawing at the Grande Chaumière; his paintings over the next two years paid luscious homage to the School of Paris. With war threatening, the Drysdales retreated to London in October, and in April 1939 sailed for home.
In Melbourne Drysdale shared Bell’s home studio and was unwillingly drawn into acrimonious politics within the Contemporary Art Society. To his dismay he was not accepted for military service because of his eye. Doubly frustrated, he retreated with his family to Albury in mid-1940 and offered to manage Boxwood Park: its new owner, Bunny Reed, was absent on military service. Having supervised the shearing, he admitted the gesture was `ridiculous … one of the stock and station agents could do it far better’, and moved to Sydney.
According to his biographer Lou Klepac, `Drysdale felt that it was only when he got to Sydney that he really began to paint’. In his country themes, from 1941, Drysdale produced significant art. The major paintings of the next forty years commenced with `The Crow Trap’, `Man Reading a Paper’ and `Man Feeding His Dogs’ (1941). The back-country theme evolved through `Home Town’ (1943), `The Drover’s Wife’ (1945), `Sofala’ (1947), for which he won the Wynne prize, `The Cricketers’ (1948), the group portraits of Cape York Aborigines in the early 1950s, `Native Dogger at Mount Olga’ and `Basketball at Broome’ in 1958. His characteristic image throughout was the figure-in-landscape. In 1959 figures and background melded together suggestively in paintings such as `Snake Bay at Night’. The culminating work, `Man in a Landscape’ (1963), was the image of an Indigenous Australian who, as Drysdale explained to the owner, Queen Elizabeth II, was trying to hold on to his land. Unlike his contemporaries (Sir) Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, Drysdale did not incorporate literary subjects and characters from external sources into the Australian scene but sought to represent people in their places. His memorable achievement was to suggest that certain types of country Australians (from 1950 the types tended to be Aboriginal) represented a foundation for national identity.
Drysdale joined the board of Pioneer Sugar Mills (Pty) Ltd in 1947; he established strong ties with Pioneer, calling it his `spiritual home’. Through painting he expressed something of his, his father’s and grandfather’s love of the land, while retaining a wider choice than was available to those whose lives were tied to it. His art reflected the British-Australian experience, representing Australia to British as well as to Australian audiences; thus he resolved the so-called `provincial’ dilemma of whether to look for meaning within Australia or outside.
The repertoire of Australian types that he developed was at a level of myth too well understood by Australians to engender a sense that they were his personal creation. At inception his successful figures already had the stamp of myth. In sequence, exaggerated renditions of life on a country farm followed tall-story sessions with Purves Smith; images of wartime’s dislocated domesticity (cocooned soldiers sleeping uncomfortably at Albury railway station) followed his recognition of the symbolism in Henry Moore’s drawings of Londoners in underground shelters; drought and erosion subjects followed a trip to western New South Wales with the journalist Keith Newman of the Sydney Morning Herald; images of deserted mining towns were stimulated by George Farwell’s evocation of ghost towns; and a six-month journey through the north of Australia with his son, Timothy, led to totemic beings that melded human and animal. Characteristically, Drysdale remained in touch with his subjects, his mode being the daydream and the doodle by which key characters took on a life of their own. Thus the drover’s wife `Big Edna’, for example, had several incarnations in Drysdale’s art. By 1950, his practice when planning an exhibition was to use a few completed paintings to `seed’ the titles of other works, which he would then produce.
Drysdale’s career was international although, unlike other major Australian artists of his generation, Nolan and Boyd for example, he did not choose to live abroad. He was a regular exhibitor in London (at the Leicester Galleries in 1950, 1958, 1965, 1972), where he attracted critics and buyers. Like other internationally successful artists of his generation, he did not have to depend largely on public patronage. In 1941 the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acquired `Monday Morning’ (1938) from the Art of Australia 1788-1941 exhibition then touring the United States of America, and the Tate Gallery, London, bought `War Memorial’ (1950) from Drysdale’s first London exhibition, but many of his major works were sold privately, with Sir Kenneth Clark, Captain Neil McEacharn, Kym Bonython and Edgar Kaufmann among notable collectors. Between 1942 and 1962 he had nine exhibitions at the Macquarie Galleries, Sydney. The first of many monographs about him appeared in 1951, written by (Sir) Joseph Burke, who held the Herald chair of fine art at the University of Melbourne. In 1960 a retrospective of Drysdale’s work was organised by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The creativity of his colour photographs was recognised when Jennie Boddington organised a posthumous exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Tragedy entered Drysdale’s life in the early 1960s with the suicide of his son, Timothy, in July 1962 and of Bon in November 1963. On 20 June 1964 at Holy Trinity Church of England, Millers Point, Sydney, he married Maisie Joyce Purves Smith, a librarian and the widow of his friend. They lived at Bouddi Farm, near Gosford, from 1966. A member of the board of trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (1962-76) and of the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board (1963-76), he was knighted in 1969 and appointed AC in 1980. Three months after a major exhibition of drawings at Joseph Brown’s gallery, Melbourne, Sir Russell died of cancer on 29 June 1981 at Westmead and was cremated. He was survived by his wife and the daughter of his first marriage.
Select Bibliography
G. Dutton, Russell Drysdale (1964); M. Eagle and J. Minchin, The George Bell School (1981); L. Klepac, The Life and Work of Russell Drysdale (1983); J. Boddington, Drysdale Photographer (1987); G. Smith, Russell Drysdale 1912-81 (1997); Drysdale papers (State Library of New South Wales).
Author: Mary Eagle
Print Publication Details: Mary Eagle, 'Drysdale, Sir George Russell (1912 - 1981)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 17, Melbourne University Press, ????, pp 336-338.