Australia at the RA

To the Royal Academy for their latest show, Australia. What a joy it is – filled both with old friends and new acquaintances. And a real credit to its curators ‒ Ron Radford and Anne Gray from the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and Kathleen Soriano of the RA  in London.

The last major exhibition of Australian art in Britain took place at the Tate Gallery in 1962 ‒ over half a century ago. Although, as the catalogue shows, it had plenty of fine paintings, it was treated in a patronising fashion by the London art establishment, only “rather better than the more woeful prophets might have predicted,” according to The Times.

That kind of condescension has a long track-record. The critic RAM Stevenson (Robert Louis’s cousin) recalled the first substantial showing of Australian work in London in 1886, which included four paintings by Tom Roberts (including “Coming South”), as “still English, or, to speak more correctly, showed us fashions of painting that were founded upon the English trade picture… mechanical drawings and geological, botanical or topographical diagrams.”

By 1898, on the occasion of the second major Australian exhibition (at the Grafton Gallery), Stevenson was more enthusiastic: “The cleverest, the most brilliant, the highest toned work in the show is Mr Streeton’s square canvas, ‘Early Summer’.”*

The current exhibition, focused on landscape, is filled with major works, many of which have travelled around the world for the first time. Let’s see whether it unleashes a wave of patronising comment reminiscent of 1886. 

*Was this painting “Early Summer – Gorse in Bloom”, now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Australia in Adelaide?

Walkabout in St John’s Wood

Yesterday I went walkabout in the leafy inner-city suburb of St John’s Wood ‒ in search of the homes of artistic Aussies and New Zealanders who came to better themselves (or so they imagined) in fin-de-siècle London.

It’s an area that young Australasian artists, writers and musicians could probably only consider walking through nowadays, perhaps to a cricket match, property values having rocketed there during the twentieth century. Australasians have traditionally lived in close proximity in London in order to network with each other. In the mid-twentieth century, it was primarily in Earl’s Court (or “Kangaroo Valley” as it came to be known). More recently the suburbs of choice have been more diffusely spread across west London – from Neasden to Clapham ‒ the need perhaps substantially replaced now by Facebook.

Throughout the nineteenth century St John’s Wood attracted the artistic, notable inhabitants including the writers George Eliot and George du Maurier, fashionable artists Sir Edwin Landseer, Laurence Alma-Tadema and James Jacques Joseph Tissot, composers William Sterndale Bennett and William Wallace, with singers including Manuel Garcia II and his sister Maria Malibran. Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was a convenient place for mistresses and courtesans, including Mrs Fitzherbert, wife of the Prince Regent, and Jane Belmont, mistress of George IV.

The suburb had sufficient social and/or political clout by the end of the nineteenth century that the Great Central Railway was forced, at great expense, to tunnel its way south from the Finchley Road to its new London terminus, Marylebone Station, leaving the leafy charms of St John’s Wood untouched.  

Whose homes did I find?

Much the most exciting was the discovery that 87a Clifton Hill, where the Australian sculptor Bertram Mackennal (later Sir Bertram, he was the first Australian artist to be knighted) lived and worked with his family for ten years from 1894, is not on the road, but set back behind No 87 down an alleyway ‒ a real studio house. I rang the bell, but nobody was home, so I’ll have to go back another time to see if I can get a look around. Just three doors away was the studio of another important sculptor, Sir William Reid Dick. For some reason Reid Dick has a Blue Plaque, while Mackennal has none. In 1904 Mackennal moved a short distance to more salubrious accommodation in Marlborough Hill.

At 10 Hill Road lived Arthur Streeton and his new wife, the Canadian violinist Nora Clench, a house which “though ordinary-looking outside, is delightfully artistic inside,” according to the Sydney Morning Herald in 1910.

It seems that Durham House in Langford Place, the home of the great contralto Ada Crossley, has been demolished, but, judging by others in the street, it must have been a fine property, a magnet for visiting Australians.

A pair of brothers from Wellington, Arnold and Garnet Trowell (cellist and violinist respectively), lived with their parents at 52 Carlton Hill. While Arnold became a leading player in his generation, both brothers are best remembered now as beloved by another young New Zealander, Katherine Mansfield, who was to become perhaps the greatest writer of short stories in English in the twentieth century. Katherine became infatuated with Arnold first, then, when he did not reciprocate, with Garnet, with whom she became pregnant in 1908/09. She lived with the Garnets for a while in Carlton Hill.

On the edge of St John’s Wood at 11 Boundary Road, with what must have been fine country views to the north, lived the Australian portrait photographer, H Walter Barnett. He moved to set up in London (from Sydney) in 1898, where he quickly established himself as a leader in the field, Australia’s first world-class photographer.

Above: Arthur Streeton and Nora Clench with their dog Pat at 10 Hill Road, St John’s Wood, by H Walter Barnett, c.1909

Rediscovering Walter Barnett

I’ve been asked how I came to rediscover the photographer, Walter Barnett. This is what happened.

I was writing a little book* on some portraits of Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa painted by Count Nerli. It gradually became clear that only one, maybe two of them – there were over twenty in total – had been actually painted there in 1892. The rest had been painted later, a lot later, in a studio lent to Nerli in Knightsbridge, London, by Barnett.

Barnett had been approached by his friend, the Australian artist Arthur Streeton, on behalf of Nerli, who was finding it tough to break through in London.

Then it dawned on me that two pastels of Stevenson by Nerli (above) were based directly on a photograph of the writer (taken by Barnett in Sydney in 1893, the year after Nerli was in Samoa).

And a pencil drawing of the writer, now in the State Library in Sydney, carried the inscription: “Al mio caro amico H Walter Barnett, questo ricordo di Samoa Girolamo Pieri-Nerli offre.” (To my dear friend H Walter Barnett, Girolamo Pieri-Nerli offers this souvenir of Samoa.)

All of this was enough to encourage me to explore the life and work of Walter Barnett.

It turned out that the work was primarily to be found in four places – in the State Library in Sydney, in the Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and in the National Portrait Gallery also in London.

*Robert Louis Stevenson and Count Nerli in Samoa: The Story of a Portrait, Red Lion Press, 1997

Walter Barnett at 150

I missed Walter Barnett’s 150th birthday. He was born on 25 January 1862.

Walter who? H Walter Barnett. Australia’s first world-class portrait photographer. I was lucky enough to rediscover him and his fine work and thought Something Should Be Done about it. But what?

So on a trip to Sydney, I went to see my friend Leo Schofield, at that time director of the Sydney Festival. Leo knows everything worth knowing about the arts in Australia.

“What do you think of Walter Barnett’s work, Leo?” I asked as innocently as possible.

“Walter who?”

“You know, the Australian portrait photographer,” I replied.

“No. Don’t think I know of him,” said Leo.

Cue for me to lay out on Leo’s desk a dozen or so photocopies of Barnett portraits – the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, the great pianist Paderewski, Mark Twain, the “father” of Australia Sir Henry Parkes, artists Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder, Dame Nellie Melba, actress Sarah Bernhardt (above), sculptor Auguste Rodin and so on.

There was a pause.

“Will you curate an exhibition for the Festival?” asked Leo.

“Well yes. I’d be delighted to.”

That morning, Leo called Andrew Sayers, director of the recently-opened National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, and so Legends: The Art of Walter Barnett became an NPG project that ran in Sydney, Canberra and the Mornington Peninsula.

Overall it was visited by some 186,000 people.