Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

TWO VIEWS OF DOBELL W illiam Dobell The Cyp rio t Dobell and Modern Mannerism: Timothy Morrell Substance and Spirit: John Hook Facing page W illiam Dobell Australia 1899-1970 The Cypriot 1940 Oil on canvas 123.3x123.3cm Gift of the Godfrey Rivers Trust through Miss Daphne Mayo 1943 Queensland Art Gallery Below Dobell in his studio with Portrait o f an artist (Joshua Smith) in 1943. Photograph courtesy Betty Churcher Dobell and Modern Mannerism % / % J illiam Dobell's The Cypriot % / % / 1940, a portrait of his friend ▼ Aegus Gabrielides, is a strange and complex painting with an equally intriguing history. The Queensland Art Gallery's painting is the last of six known portraits of Gabrielides done by Dobell over a period of several years. In general Dobell is best known for lively and apparently spontaneous paintings, either small, rapid, sketch-like studies or larger bravura portraits. In The Cypriot, however, the outcome of so much preparatory study is not a finished portrait done with the well-rehearsed but brisk confidence of a first sketch; this is a painting in which every detail of the composition and nuance of the sitter's character is minutely considered. The gradual evolution of the image into the intense final portrait may reflect the changing circumstances of the relationship between the two men, as well as the developing aspirations of the artist to create a portrait of enduring psychological power. Dobell first painted Gabrielides in 1934. In this early version, the sitter meets the viewer's gaze in an open way, hands on his hips, giving the portrait a slightly cheeky air. This reasonably straightforward recording of the man's features was to culminate, six years later, in one of the most penetrating individual studies in Australian art. The strength of Dobell's best portraits lies in his determination to understand and, if necessary, to exaggerate details of the sitters' appearance which distinguish them as individuals. It was this aspect of his art which, in the celebrated court case over his Archibald prize-winning Portrait of an artist (Joshua Smith) (private collection) in 1943, caused him to be branded a caricaturist. The brooding image of The Cypriot, however, is anything but a caricature. It is a severe, hieratic portrait which reveals more directly than any of his other works how much Dobell gained from the observation of old master paintings. It marks an important transitional point in the development of his technique from the relative sharpness and clarity of the more thickly worked, coarse-grained London paintings of the 1930s, in which paint was applied almost directly from the tube, to the feathery surfaces that came to distinguish his later work in Australia. Dobell admitted that his art was generally rather at odds with twentieth-century Modernism. However, in The Cypriot it is possible to find, in embryo, the personal mannerisms of strong colour, the flurry of light brushstrokes and the bodily distortions (qualities he brought to his art from preparatory studies) with which Dobell would strive to make his work progressive. All the studies for The Cypriot were made in London, presumably from the sitter. Back in Sydney, away from Gabrielides, this image of the man in a chair, impressed on Dobell's memory from repeated depictions, could be manipulated according to his imagination. Dobell's progress towards the final portrait is particularly well recorded in the preliminary versions he brought home 158 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965