Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

from London. They allow us to see the finished picture taking shape and offer a glimpse into the artist's private laboratory. The starting point is a classically stable triangular composition, with the sitter placed symmetrically and looking directly at the viewer with a rather matter-of-fact expression, seated in a tall, button-tufted Victorian armchair. The chair-back rises above his head beyond the picture-frame. The transformation of the subject from a familiar waiter to a glamorous courtier was achieved through fairly subtle modifications. The upholstered chair was evidently of the rococo-revival design, its back topped with a circular curve that made a halo shape around the head of its occupant. This is how it appears in the first, 1934, version. In the final portrait, the pyramidal composition is destabilised by emphasising the vigorous outward thrust of the man's bent elbows and repeating it in other details. The sitter seems taller, and he occupies the chair with greater authority. The shape of his hair is made to rhyme with the shape of the chair-back and the angles of his elbows. This exaggerated side-to-side lunge is charted like a seismographic movement by the pattern on his tie, and the jagged lines are combined with circles to create a frenetically unsettling design (although the gaudy, wide neckties of the 1940s make this detail plausible). The strong outward movement of drapery folds and stripes in the shirt is interrupted and made more complex by buckled armbands, making the garment slightly reminiscent of a Renaissance doublet. The hands, which were originally placed at the same level, are enlarged and positioned asymmetrically, so that the hand on the right is advanced forward, is larger and lower, and hangs above the bottom edge of the painting like a claw. Dobell increased the arch of the sitter's brows and deepened the shadows around his eyes. The fixed gaze and haughty pose seem rigidly frozen, yet the composition generates a force that pushes outward from the frame. The acanthus spirals, which spin like Catherine wheels on the ends of the chair's arms, are a dramatically amplified variation on the relatively demure neo-rococo tendrils copied from the actual chair in earlier versions. These whorls of paint, and the urgently scribbled lines running down the necktie, are abstracted from the real motif. Appropriately for the 'Greek' subject, the single greatest influence on this painting seems to have been the Renaissance artist El Greco, whose work provided a prototype for the highly charged variant on the classical formula of triangular portrait composition. The Cypriot is very similar to El Greco's glowering portrait of the head of the Spanish Inquisition, Portrait o f the Grand Inquisitor Don Fernando Nino de Guevara, painted in Toledo, Spain, in about 1600, a suitable subject for Dobell to use as a model for his darkly evocative character study. El Greco's Portrait o f Fray Hortensio Felix Paravicino c.1610 would have been another obvious stylistic source for The Cypriot. Of course, The Cypriot is also a picture of someone who seemed to Dobell to be interesting and perhaps attractive because of his foreignness. Gabrielides may have represented a kind of exoticism to Dobell. When he painted the final portrait back in Sydney, where Southern European faces were uncommon before postwar immigration, The Cypriot evoked a distant cosmopolitan world left behind in London, the world of great museums and old master paintings that had sustained the young artist. As well as the paintings and drawings that have approximately the same composition as The Cypriot, in 1936 Dobell painted a picture of Gabrielides known as The Sleeping Greek (The Art Gallery of New South Wales). In this painting of the man's head in extreme close-up with the brown upholstered chair as a background, Dobell captured him completely unaware, like a wild animal in repose. Dobell's fascination with this natural sensuality is a recurring aspect of the small, brilliant character studies he made of other London personalities. It is very possible that Dobell and Gabrielides were lovers. No other individual sat so often for Dobell, in the intimacy of his flat, over such a long period (at least four years). The closeness of their friendship is evident from the fact that Dobell was asked to be one of seven best men at the Greek Orthodox wedding of Gabrielides. In fact, Dobell went to the ceremony but did not participate, instead sitting at the back of the church, and knowingly or otherwise casting an inauspicious omen over the marriage by destroying the important numerical composition of the rites. Soon after this he returned to Australia. The exact nature of their relationship, and how Dobell regarded Gabrielides when finally he painted him from memory, can only be a matter for speculation. Much later, during an interview in the early 1960s, Dobell characterised his leading sitter as 'dignified', but also as a 'coward'. Despite being so well documented, The Cypriot remains an enigma. It is a completely uncharacteristic, even somewhat bizarre work. The sitter's ambiguous expression is ultimately indecipherable. This is, of course, one of the reasons why it is such a successful portrait. Timothy Morrell is Curator, Contemporary Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery. 160 BROUGHT TO LIG HT: Australian Art 1850-1965 Left William Dobell The Sleeping Greek 1936 Oil on canvas on hardboard 38x32.7cm Gift of the Society of Artists in memory of its president, Sydney Ure Smith 1950 The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Right Radiographic image of The Cypriot showing abandoned underpainting of Boy lounging William Dobell Study for 'Boy lounging' 1937 Gouache on cardboard 23x21.5 cm The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney