Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

wife Jeanne Morel) signifies virtue; the fallen roses surrounding the other figures relate to human frailty.1 However, as one of the bathers in the background also has a rose in her hair it seems unlikely that the flower served only as a metaphor of purity in the picture12 Other clues supporting the interpretation of the image as an early twentieth-century Madonna and Child include the mother's pious gaze, and the child, whose extended hands seek to grasp the butterflies. Butterflies served as a Christian metaphor for the ascent of the spirit in works such as Gustave Moreau's Oedipus and the Sphinx 1864. On a more prosaic level, the child's gesture probably refers to a sentimentalised notion of childhood innocence where the child and butterfly become symbolically associated. This idealisation of motherhood is obviously not coincidental. During the period, as Ruth Zubans suggests: The concept of motherhood as a desirable goal for all women had wide social currency ... in medical journals, political forums and general propaganda — to ensure population growth, healthy offspring and the perpetuation of the race. Motherhood was celebrated, idealised and encouraged ... Images of motherhood proliferated in the Salons and the Royal Academy.13 Bunny's awareness of the dictates of the market provides insight into the economic context behind the production of Bathers and similar works. Bathers was primarily a painting 'for sale' and it responded to dominant Salon and academy fashions and aesthetics.14As an expatriate artist, never belonging entirely to Australia or France, Bunny had to work that much harder to succeed. Bathers did not sell, which is why he exhibited it again in Melbourne and Sydney during the 1920s. (Nevertheless, the French government purchased ten of Bunny's other works during his career.) To Bunny's '... way of thinking, an artist's career, in the final reckoning, was demonstrated and indeed shaped by patronage [my italics]'.15 Bunny was not a French citizen, which did not help his cause, but he showed with the prestigious Galerie Georges Petit, thus increasing his range of contact with patrons.16As Mary Eagle has stated: Bunny rather consciously steered his career according to a sensitive reading of what were successful trends in Parisian a rt... Bunny had a practical monetary way of measuring success. As well as taking note of critics and fellow artists, he was guided by the market17 This position was confirmed by Bunny himself when in 1921 he bitterly confided to the painter Edith Fry that: ... he was now doing what he always wanted to do, and that his earlier work was a concession to the taste of the age, some of it being painted in the pathetic hope it would lead to portrait commissions.18 Later, he suggested to art critic Clive Turnbull that: All my life I have wanted to paint big decorative things. I hated the pompous academic style. I wanted to make it more human. But you can't do it without means of a commission.19 These financial pressures encouraged Bunny to teach art as well, which he did in Paris from 1904, and in 1909 he became associated with Jacques-Emile Blanche at the Atelier Blanche. Blanche had already created a niche for himself with subject matter similar to Bunny's which sold well to a wide range of affluent patrons. Bunny also never lost sight of the importance of his Australian connection. He presented his first solo show in Melbourne in 1911, and, after an unfavourable response to works that were exhibited in Australia in 1926, he travelled to Melbourne and organised a more extensive exhibition of his oeuvre (including Bathers) in the hope of bolstering his reputation and sales.20 Bathers was consequently exhibited in both Sydney and Melbourne in 1928, but without success. Indeed, the painting became something of a 'white elephant' for Bunny (his description), until it was sold after his death to the gentlemen of the Melbourne Club. Mark Pennings lectures in Art History at RMIT University, Melbourne. ART FOR THE BOURGEOIS DREAMERS OF PARIS 101