Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

however distant or fictional, and to consider it on its own terms. Above, left to right Daphne Mayo Portrait of R. Godfrey Rivers c.1925-27 Bronze 44x30.5x25cm Gift of Mrs Selina Rivers 1929 Queensland Art Gallery Daphne Mayo Self portrait 1952 Oil on paper 33.2x25.8cm Gift of Miss Veronica Russell 1992 Queensland Art Gallery Photograph of Vida Lahey, c.1903. Courtesy Lahey family archive Lloyd Rees Self portrait c.1920 Pencil on paper 19.8x18cm Gift of Alan and Jan Rees through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 1998 Right Hugh Ramsay Australia 1877-1906 Jessie with the dog 1904 Oil on canvas 174.5 X 95.6cm Gift of Mrs M.T. Tompson through Colonel W.H.J.G. Tompson 1943 Queensland Art Gallery It is equally revealing that Care had been shown previously in the Paris Salon of 1893, where it was accorded the honour of being hung on the line', the place reserved for the most worthy entries. It seems that young, uncertain Brisbane, like other Australian colonies, needed the endorsement of metropolitan pedigrees for its art. This deference to European success and to the academic tradition persisted in the Gallery in subsequent decades. At its very best this conservative leaning was a triumph: the great group of paintings by expatriates Rupert Bunny, Hugh Ramsay, Emanuel Phillips Fox and George Lambert, which today hang together with all the glamour of a typical Salon, were mostly purchased before the 1960s. Their work testified to the acceptance of Australians in European artistic circles, and it supported at home — in different ways — the traditional values associated with figurative painting. On the other hand the Gallery's major holdings of work by the Australian 'impressionist' John Peter Russell, friend and colleague of Monet and long-time resident in France, came into the Collection only in the last two decades. Though Russell was a contemporary and compatriot of Bunny, Lambert and the others, his art was far too radical for Brisbane in the early part of the twentieth century. Artists continued to be the principal campaigners for the Queensland Art Gallery in later decades. Through their support and advice, and astute purchases made by Daphne Mayo, Vida Lahey and Lloyd Rees (in their capacity as official advisers), the Gallery was able to acquire such important mid-century works as William Dobell's The Cypriot 1940 and Margaret Preston's Aboriginal still life, also 1940. These magnificent paintings were purchased directly from the artists around the time of their making, and attest to close knowledge by Brisbane artists of the achievements of their Australian colleagues. These two choices are fascinating: both artists, radically different in style and affiliation, were nevertheless totally of their moment. If Margaret Preston was the doyenne of an older generation of Australian modernists, William Dobell was acknowledged as the leading young modernist in a more realist vein: in fact they exhibited together in an important exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1942.2 If these acquisitions were inspired choices by artists, other emphases in the Collection responded to established social taste. In the early decades of the Gallery's life watercolour painting was a very popular artistic medium, practised widely by skilled amateurs as a leisure pursuit and within some professional artists' oeuvre given the same status as oil painting. Accordingly, the Gallery holds beautiful watercolours by Bessie Gibson, Sydney Long, J. J. Hilder, Hans Heysen and many others; it is also fortunate in its fine group of works by Albert Namatjira and other Arrernte artists, which first entered the 14 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965