Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

had returned from the National Gallery School, Monday morning was Lahey's version of an academic set-piece, a demonstration of descriptive picture­ making to which she added essential hints of personal interpretation. The convention within which Lahey created Monday morning might best be described as an Australian derivative of European narrative painting — the interior genre picture with a touch of local flavour. Paintings such as Frederick McCubbin's Home again 1884 (National Gallery of Victoria) and David Daviess From a Distant Land 1889 (The Art Gallery of New South Wales), with their 'curious mixture of gentility and utility', had been a popular feature of Australian art from the 1880s.7 By the time Vida Lahey arrived at the National Gallery School these conventions had responded gradually to new input from various sources. Pictorial elements including colour, brushwork and texture were beginning to be freed from a strictly representational relationship to the world, though the 'ugly realism' of these so-called 'impressionist tendencies' was a cause of anxiety for some commentators.8 This is not to suggest that there was anything unorthodox about Monday morning. On the contrary, the painting strictly conformed to the compositional methods being taught in conservative academies everywhere. In particular, Lahey borrowed heavily from a mode which pictured women, some working, others at leisure, within the partitioned spaces of the home. There are hundreds of images in this tradition, showing wives and mothers, governesses and maids, running or helping to run middle-class households (though as Patricia Grassick has commented, in the best Australian versions, such as McCubbin's Shelling peas 1912, NGV, refinement was presented as an aspiration of the working- class home as well).9 The first version of Monday morning as it appeared in the Queensland Art Society's 24th annual exhibition catalogue, 1912, p.13 The women in these paintings peel vegetables, clear dust, write letters, or tend children, according to their station. Steady light from the world outside (the world of men) enters via a window or doorway to illuminate faces in partial or total eclipse. The message is clear — the interior of the house is intrinsically female territory; it is women rather than men whose job it is to guard the moral and physical purity of the home. Works such as Helen M. Hindley's Washing the dishes 1904 (exhibited that year at the Royal Academy as Domestic service ) demonstrate that the format adopted by Lahey — the carefully controlled placement of the protagonists, the virtuoso flourish of a still-life arrangement somewhere in the composition, the emphasis on a grey-brown palette with red and purple highlights — was commonplace throughout the genre. In Monday morning , the mandatory still-life element is cleverly downplayed by Lahey, and features a pile of grimy clothes instead of the usual elegant grouping. These antecedents of Monday morning are consistently noted in studies of the artist.10 However, the painting is more complex and intriguing than can be revealed by its art historical genealogy. Janine Burke was right in one sense — part of the interest in this work lies in the isolated status it now occupies within the larger body of Lahey's oeuvre, in its unavoidable comparison with all the bright and shining still life and flower studies that were to come. The self-containment within Monday morning, where the attention of the subjects is applied intensely to the task at hand (the routines of soaking, hand-scrubbing and boiling are laid out in actual sequence), provides us with an intimation of the artists own concentration, as she assembled the only truly large-scale easel painting she would successfully produce. Monday morning was first shown in the Queensland Art Society's 1912 exhibition, where public and critical responses to the picture were enthusiastic. The young 'Miss Lahey' had created an 'excellent', 'ambitious', 'masterful', and 'clever' painting and it was immediately donated to the Queensland National Art Gallery through an Art Society member, Mme Emily Coungeau!1Interestingly, an illustration of Monday morning in the QAS catalogue indicates that there may have been an earlier version of the work, perhaps destroyed in the fire in Lahey's studio in March 1912!2In some respects this published image is quite different, and if the reproduction is accurate, it is tantalisingly more experimental. In the 'lost' version, the interior of the washhouse is dramatically cramped, an effect achieved by severe cropping of the background model and restriction of the foreground space between viewer and setting. The result was a less resolved and far more casual 'snapshot'. In the final work, the central figures are described by a contemporary critic as 'two young women bending over washing tubs, one apparently contented with her lot, but the other filled with rebellion against fate'.13This writer deciphered Lahey's blocky refusal of frontality in Monday morning — the women turn away from the viewer — as a theatrical clue rather than a calculated attempt at naturalism. Nevertheless, the suggestion that at least one of the 'washer-women' is a malcontent indicates that the arduous all­ day task of tackling the family wash was regarded as something of a trial. This is confirmed by popular accounts in journals and housekeeping manuals — for instance, Anthony Hordern & Sons, 'Universal Providers', published an annual catalogue offering everything from 'washing caps' to tubs and wringers to ease what was described as 'the terror of washing day'.14 Later in life Vida Lahey claimed, a little grandly, that she had intended Monday morning to act as a historical record of domestic working life which would also make visible the seriousness and dignity of labour: 114 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965