A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
indicates, too, how colonization was not only the physical subjugation of the landscape, but its intellectual and imaginative occupation as well.51
The 1820s was a transitional decade for NSW, in which its sense of self-identity and belief crystallized into certainty that the colony would soon be a free and independent member of the British Empire. The emphasis on curious natural history dissipated. By the end of the 1820s, the portrait painter Richard Read Junior, who arrived in 1819 and at first advertised landscapes, natural history drawings and Indigenous portraits, had limited his oeuvre virtually exclusively to European portraiture.
The most interesting colonial artist of this period, Augustus Earle, arrived in Sydney in late 1825. An English-trained and well-traveled flâneur of peripheral cultures, Earle’s insightful observations of the peoples and places he encountered on his travels suggest his deep curiosity in people and their lives, which manifested itself in boldly designed and composed watercolors. Earle’s enjoyment in the documentation of everyday life, from bushranging to views of towns and landscapes always prominently inhabited by people, was a marked break with the conventional formality of depictions of the colony up until that time.
In the three years Earle spent in Sydney his portraits were commissioned by the colonial elite. Subjects included Governor Thomas Brisbane and the leading colonial official Captain John Piper and his wife (Piper argued for his own family’s social pre-eminence by commissioning his portraits at the same size as the Governor’s). Earle opened Sydney’s first gallery, taught art and published the first pictorial lithographs in Australia. While his formal oil portraits lack character, his watercolors were sensitive and finely observed. His portrait, for example, of Desmond (National Library of Australia), an Awabakal or Worimi man, is perhaps one of the finest early nineteenth century colonial portraits, deeply imbued with life and insight.
Few other colonial artists tackled the subject of convicts quite as directly as Earle in his lithograph A Government Jail Gang N.S. Wales, published in London in 1830. The lithograph was in part inspired by ubiquitous illustrations of street portraits of the urban poor and their unusual occupations.52 The exaggerated criminal physiognomy of Earle’s convicts locates them squarely within contemporary representations of the English underclass.
Earle’s records of Aboriginal life could be either richly and sympathetically observed, like his exceptional portrait of Desmond, or tough, as with Natives of N.S. Wales as Seen on the Streets of Sydney, also published in London. In text describing this plate Earle attributes the circumstances of Aboriginal people to “the Whites locating so much [of their] land [which] has destroyed their hunting grounds and means of subsistence.”53 Earle well may have intended a dig at colonists by setting this view of Aboriginal dissolution outside a European pub, but most of his audience would have read the image in the context of English street literature and robust graphic art, which dissolved the issues of urban poverty into grotesque or picturesque subject matter.
Earle, always quick to capitalize on commercial opportunities, issued a single lithograph (based on an oil painting now in the National Library of Australia) of Bungaree in August 1826, the first portrait lithograph published in Australia. Bungaree was the best known indigenous person in Sydney – indeed more portraits were made of him than any other individual in the first half of the nineteenth century – who was considered both an entertaining novelty and, unsettlingly for Europeans, a leader of his people and a skilled negotiator with colonists. Again Earle positions Bungaree in the familiar visage of an urban underclass: his extravagant gesture and ragged clothes corresponds to those of popular press images of London beggars. Yet Earle does not ridicule Bungaree. His perceptive observation of Bungaree’s face retrieves his humanity.
Colonists read Earle’s presence in the colony as evidence of its emerging cultural maturity. “The fine arts,” said the Sydney Gazette, “may seem a misnomer for foul arts, when applied to this Colony. … Forty years is a period in which Britons can work wonders. The Muses and Graces are not inimical to our Southern Climes…”54 Earle in many ways marked a transition in colonial art, from illustrations of the exotic to expressions of urban society like any town in England.
The capacity to commission a work of art expanded significantly in the 1830s as artists and artisans arrived in the colony, keen to exploit the new markets emerging as a result of the rapid growth of its population. These markets were now looking, too, for the sorts of popular imagery found in any English town: images of celebrities or murderers, disasters, new buildings or major sporting events. John Gardiner Austin, a entrepreneurial lithographer and publisher, brought presses and capital to Sydney when he emigrated to Sydney in 1834: he quickly commissioned local artists, like Charles Rodius and Robert Russell, to publish with him. Conrad Martens, a landscape artist, arrived in 1835, William Nicholas arrived in 1836, as did lithographer and profile artist, William Fernyhough. Maurice Felton, a talented portrait painter, arrived in Sydney in 1839, and found an immediate market for his work. Watercolor landscape painter John Skinner Prout brought his family to Sydney in 1840. Increasingly, too, artists whose training was entirely colonial began producing work. Samuel Elyard, Frederick Garling, Edwin Winstanely and Thomas Balcombe, for example, all arrived in Australia as boys and must have learned their craft in the colony.
But the money was not in landscape painting, the indicator by which the success of colonial art is now often judged: in May 1847 John Rae attributed some of John Skinner Prout’s financial difficulties to his being a landscape painter:
William Nicholas [a watercolor portrait painter] has more work than he can possibly manage . He is making at the rate of from £500 to £600 a year … Our vanity too favours the portrait painter. We willingly pay for our likeness when we would not think of laying out money for a beautiful landscape.55
Rae’s sentiments were echoed in Heads of the People, a locally-published illustrated magazine (1847–1848) which modeled itself on an earlier English magazine of the same name, known for its humorous portraits of all classes of society – in the Sydney version watercolor portrait painter William Nicholas contributed lithographic pen sketches of Sydney identities, from the Governor to publicans, artists, teachers and civil servants. Heads of the People claimed that with local patrons “self predominates in the orders given for portraits, ships, and ‘my horse’, and ‘my house’ . . vanity pays for these at a reasonable rate.”56
Local artists addressed local needs. Fine art could be sourced from local auction houses which imported paintings into the colony, along with reproductive engravings of modern British artists: indeed these were the kinds of images that graced the walls of most middle-class homes in Sydney, rather than locally created art. The catalogues to the Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts exhibitions of 1847 and 1849 reveal substantial collections of putative old masters, the majority of whose attributions were sceptically appraised by contemporary reviewers. Nonetheless the moral virtue of art continued to be asserted by colonists, who argued that these exhibitions showed:
that notwithstanding their distance from the centre of refinement, and science, and art … the sons of Britain still carry with them the tastes and the habits of their fathers, preserve their paintings like household gods … and it will show our friends in the other hemisphere, more than our largest amount of exports and imports, that our city has advanced with a giant’s strides to the proud position with she holds as the Queen of the Southern Seas – the metropolis of a new world.57
Yet it was to landscape painting that the greatest importance and moral value were ascribed. The Australian, for instance, was delighted to note in July 1835 that Conrad Martens had recently arrived in Sydney and that his abilities were “first rate. He is wandering, we are informed, in search of the picturesque.”58 Martens was a gentleman artist who found a ready market amongst the colonial elite for his sophisticated images: as Elizabeth Ellis notes, his client base was largely comprised of landowners, senior government officials and merchants, while his subjects were concentrated on mountain wildernesses, Sydney Harbour, houses within landscapes and views from his South Pacific voyages.59
The success of Martens, before the recession of the early 1840s bankrupted many of his