Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Kokoschka. The completed oil painting of The Irish youth 1938 (private collection) is the first work that defines Dobell's own maturing style of portraiture. A quizzical, ungainly boy, viewed slightly from above, seems rather unsure of how to fill the space around him. The colour notes in red, in this instance on the signature and the boy's tie, were to become Dobell's trademark. A dramatic change in The Cypriot's evolution came in 1937 and coincided with Eric Wilsons arrival in London. Wilson had won the New South Wales Society of Artists Travelling Scholarship and he came to London full of enthusiasm and energy. Wilson was a Seventh Day Adventist whose art and religion were virtually inseparable. The two men, almost diametrically opposed in every way except for their mutual passion for art, shared Dobell's attic in Pimlico for five months and became good friends. (Dobell gave Wilson an early study for The Cypriot.) Moreover, they seemed to spur each other to greater achievements. Dobell at this stage regarded himself as an academic painter following a long tradition; Wilson saw himself as a modernist who was on the road to incorporating Amédée Ozenfant's brand of Cubism. It was during this period that Dobell produced both a drawing and a painted study for The Cypriot in which the sitter takes on a formality and assurance derived from Italian Mannerist portraits. Bernard Meninsky, a teacher at the Westminster School, had advised Wilson to read Bernard Berenson's The Italian Painters of the Renaissance. It was surely a topic of discussion between the two artists and may well have influenced Dobell's change of approach to The Cypriot. In December 1938 Dobell left London to return to Australia. On the way he spent some time with Eric Wilson in Paris. They sketched together, visited a Cézanne exhibition, and Dobell rekindled the energy and resolve he needed to meet his own expectations. Upon his arrival in Sydney, the publisher Sydney Ure Smith promoted Dobell as the 'heir to Lambert', and the artist felt further compelled to produce his best work. Dobell bought a large stretcher of 48 inches (121cm) square, an unusual format. He gridded up the Study for 'Boy lounging' 1937 (The Art Gallery of New South Wales) and transferred the image to this canvas. It seemed a natural progression from The Irish youth — in Boy lounging another young man slouches in an armchair, his figure elongated then crumpled into the chair. However, the transition from his small- scale London works to a large format was not straightforward and Dobell seems to have experienced some difficulties adjusting to the increased scale and pace of the work. He was still poor, working with old brushes that had dried on the journey home. The abundance of brush hairs embedded in the painting's surface are testimony to this. Also, chemical analysis of the paint layers has shown that he was using a combination of oil-based house paints and artist's paints, a selection mediated by economics and the large area of canvas to cover, as well as by the scarcity of artist's oil paints owing to their requisition for use by official war artists. These aspects may have contributed to Dobell being unhappy with the finish of Boy lounging (he never went on to complete a final work). More importantly, the work was not the 'masterpiece' that he had aspired to produce upon his return. He decided to try again and to paint over it a new portrait of Gabrielides. In his Kings Cross studio in 1940, Dobell set to work on The Cypriot. He completed a detailed study of the left hand using the hand of Joshua Smith as a model. As the X-ray of The Cypriot shows, he rotated the Boy lounging canvas through 90 degrees and began painting the head of Gabrielides, slightly turned, in more profile than the 1937 studies. The X-ray also reveals more tentative brushwork as he attempted to fine-tune the pose and bearing of the sitter. Unhappy with this variation, Dobell at last achieved in his mind's eye the precise posture and attitude of The Cypriot. He abandoned the earlier working, rotated the canvas through 180 degrees and began to paint the final version of the head with great confidence. Dobell's friend, the Greek waiter, now assumes a posture of contained energy. 162 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965