Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

AN AUSTRALIAN 'PROBLEM PICTURE' Chester Earles Interior w ith figures Pamela Gerrish Nunn Facing page and detail Chester Earles Australia 1821-1905 Interior with figures 1872 Oil on canvas on board 61X73.5cm Gift of Joseph Brown Gallery 1997 Queensland Art Gallery hester Earles, a British immigrant to Victoria in 1864, began his painting career in London and brought with him to the southern hemisphere an already formed professional habit which he seems to have adapted very little to his second career as an Australian artist. Arriving in his new homeland shortly before his forty- third birthday, with twenty years of exhibitions behind him, Earles plunged eagerly into the (comparatively shallow) waters of the Victorian art scene. His work was seen at the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition in 1866 and in 1869 at the Melbourne Public Library Exhibition and the Ballarat Mechanics Institute Exhibition. In most cases these were works he had brought with him from Britain. When, in 1870, the Victorian Academy of Arts was formed, Earless established position in his new environment was confirmed by his election as its treasurer. Thenceforth he was a regular and conspicuous exhibitor throughout Victoria.1 Earles's Interior with figures 1872 (Queensland Art Gallery) belongs to a type of Victorian set-piece which quietly celebrates the mainstream ideals of home, marriage and family. Though British and Australian flora can be seen outside the window, in all fundamental respects this is the kind of painting Earles could have exhibited with the Royal Academy or Society of British Artists in London. Like equally characteristic examples by artists exhibiting in Britain, such as Joseph Dyckman's Interior at Chestnuts 1867, Earless painting takes the everyday staples of Victorian bourgeois life and, with little embroidery or interpretation, presents them for the viewer's satisfaction and reassurance. At first sight, Earles's painting seems to accord with the advice allegedly given by early nineteenth-century Scottish painter Sir David Wilkie to William Mulready, 'Think of a subject of interest and with not too many figures in it',2and to illustrate E. D. H. Johnson's assertion with regard to subject paintings made for a largely middle-class audience, that 'the pictorial field was almost entirely confined to domestic scenes of kinds already popularized by earlier genre artists, but with sufficient changes in details to bring them up-to-date'.3Certainly, Earles's painting can be seen as either a more urbane descendant of the canvases of Wilkie himself or a diluted form of those produced by British contemporaries like Edward Bird, E. V Rippingille and Rolinda Sharpies. The laconic mood and minimal elaboration of Interior with figures represent a thinning out of the visual interest of those artists' often crowded scenes, but it occupies essentially the same territory. The modesty of this work contrasts with the showy, well-dressed versions of this kind of picture which the Anglo-French artist James Tissot made popular in British exhibitions of the same decade. Tissot's painting An interesting story 1878 (National Gallery ofVictoria) exemplifies his more sophisticated treatment of the conversation piece. Little of Earles's work in Britain is now known, but it can be assumed from critical mentions and exhibition titles that Interior with figures continues rather than extends the territory he had already covered in the land of his birth. This retention of his earlier habits was enough to give him an advantage in his new situation: 'It is to be deplored that an almost total absence of figure painting exists in Victoria', wrote the author of the catalogue of the Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition of 1875; 'Mr Chester Earles is the only artist in oils who may be said to paint figures'.4Ann Galbally has pointed out the dearth of figure paintings in the early life of the Victorian state collection, noting that the preference 'was overwhelmingly [for] landscape because here, it was felt, the "character" of Australia lay'.5It was not until the decade after Interior with figures was painted that what Galbally calls 'the Victorian penchant for subject painting'6gave rise to Australianised gerne painting such as Frederick McCubbiris Home again 1884 (NGV). This and later domestic scenes 26 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965