Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

references. This kind of amalgam is typical of Bunny's generation of Anglo-French painters exhibiting in the Royal Academy and the Salon. The so-called 'Edwardian Luxe' of the picture resonates with a Whistlerian aesthetic, particularly in light of the references to Japonisme. The tea and coffee cups, fan, bowl and red lacquer dressing screen are all Japanese and the placement of the two women in front of the screen is reminiscent of Japanese prints, an element that Bunny also employed in his portraits of the Japanese actress Mme Sada Yacco during the same period.5 Additional references and layers of meaning can also be detected. For instance, the women are congregated around a Roman bath and display gestures that were probably appropriated from sources Bathers represents an updated format of this theme for an Edwardian rather than late-Victorian male audience. There is a perceptible shift of emphasis in the construction of feminine sensuality, which would then appear to reflect a commensurate shift in Salon and Academy fashion and taste.8The exotic orientalising or classicising tendencies of Alma-Tadema and Poynter remain, but only residually; instead, Bunny's fantasy of the voluptuous and the sensual is fundamentally situated in an Edwardian milieu. This is not to suggest that resonances and references pertaining to traditional depictions of the female nude are not in evidence. The placement of naked women near water was a well-worn convention in French painting during the nineteenth century, Left Rupert Bunny Endormies (Sleeping women) c.1904 Oil on canvas 131x200.5 cm Felton Bequest 1911 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Right Rupert Bunny Summer Time c.1907 Oil on canvas 248.9x298.5 cm The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney that Bunny had seen in Greek and Roman images, contemporary theatre and the rhetoric of gestures seen in official French painting.6 Similar bathing scenes had been popularised by late-Victorian artists such as Frederic, Lord Leighton, Edward Poynter and Lawrence Alma-Tadema in England during the 1880s. Their images of women in antique or oriental settings abstracted the female body from contemporary experience, thus allowing any overt sexual references to be toned down when posited in the glamour of the mythological, the religious, or the exotic.7In light of this convention, Bunny's vision of women is clearly a product of the masculine imagination. and this combination was often used as an allegory of abundance and the prime of life. This can be seen in paintings by J. A. D. Ingres, Eugène Delacroix and even Gustave Courbet. In Bathers, the subtle allusion to the harem remains — but it is not dominant. The contemporary dress and make-up of the women is identifiably European rather than 'oriental'. The manner in which Bunny treated the subject of leisured bathers had become an established convention at the Salon by the beginning of the twentieth century. This fashion was partially influenced by Edouard Vuillard's and Pierre Bonnard's images of women in the intimate interiors of the domestic milieu. One can argue that Bathers was meant to appeal to both a male and female audience. Bunny's idealisation of bourgeois women at leisure remains the dominant theme and reflects his desire to flatter women, thereby attracting increased interest from female spectators, patrons and buyers by providing them with an image with which to identify. Bunny translates dreamy elegance into a romantic vision, an image that would have appealed directly to middle-class Parisian women whose behaviour was strictly regulated by a patriarchal culture. These women had little freedom outside the domestic sphere and social contact was generally strictly controlled. These pressures isolated many women and young girls who could frequently escape by reading, and becoming absorbed in, romantic literature, poetry and the kinds of pictures that Bunny and his generation produced. With their pale skin and soft bodies the bathers are not labouring women. They are depicted at the prime of life and exist in a timeless, transcendent world, a world where women smoke cigarettes, and where '... the smoker adopts an aesthetic standpoint, outside the realm of utility or ethics, that kills the time of work or responsibility in order to bear witness to the time, to the music, of pure passing'.9 Before the First World War, middle-class women rarely smoked cigarettes in public, and anyone observed participating in such a ritual would have been socially ostracised. However, Bunny's artistic licence allowed him to depict bourgeois women smoking, and such images could provide a vicarious outlet for women who desired to escape social expectations and restraints by imagining the role they might play in this arcadian scenario.10 Beyond these considerations, the primary motif in Bathers is the celebration of motherhood. Indeed, the central grouping of mother and child is a direct allegory of the Madonna and Child. In this sense Bunny provides an apotheosis of the Edwardian bourgeois mother, who is offered as a spiritual model. It has been suggested that the roses in the picture reinforce the sense of the spiritual — the rose in the hair of the 'Madonna' (the model was Bunny's 100 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965