Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

such as AbbeyAltson's Flood sufferings 1891 (NGV) owe a dear debt to the tradition Earles demonstrates in Interior withfigures despite their rejection of his decorum. The nearest relation to Interior withfigures in its own time must surely be the watercolour by Melburnian Emma Minnie Boyd, Interior withfigures — The Grange 1875 (Dr Joseph Brown Collection), which not only shares its title but exhibits the same quiet pleasure in the reliable mundaneness of middle-class life. In each of these images life-giving sunlight animates the comfortable haven that is home to those who have a firm though unostentatious footing in nineteenth- century society. The resemblance between The three figures are disposed with an apparent inconsequence — they hardly seem fraught with purpose — and yet it is evident that 'something is going on'. The work's narrative taciturnity lends it the aura of the 'problem picture', a genre often considered characteristic ofVictorian painting, the rise of which has been attributed to artists' relinquishment of stories and themes from history and literature in favour of original incidents located in contemporary life.9 The problem picture became an expected item at the annual exhibitions and provided a feast of anecdote, scandal and entertainment for a huge and very mixed audience, especially in London, Emma Minnie Boyd 1858-1936 Interior with figures — The Grange 1875 Watercolour on paper 23.5x35.6cm Dr Joseph Brown, ao , obe this watercolour and Earles's painting — no doubt noticed by Dr Joseph Brown who bought them both7— is pressed home by the pictorial interest vested in the tacit connection of the man and the woman, though Boyd's later work The letter 1889 (Art Gallery of South Australia), with its single female figure, offers the audience a similar expression of the intimate, the prosaic and the reassuringly mild drama of a secure existence in a stable social world.8 Earles's painting has another dimension for the present-day viewer, however, deriving from the fact that his understated treatment sends the eye to the figures for more matter on which to feed, where it finds a curiously opaque drama. where Earles cut his professional teeth. Instances of this kind of pictorial puzzle dot the landscape of Victorian art, from Sir Edwin Landseer's Suspense at the 1834 Academy (Was the canine protagonist guilty of a heinous crime or about to save his mistress from one?), through James McNeill Whistler's Symphony in white no. 1: The white girl 1862 (Was the young woman fearfully anticipating her wedding night or reflecting regretfully upon it?), to Sir Frank Dicksee's The confession 1896, which had visitors to the Royal Academy offering to the correspondence columns of the daily papers the solution to the intense exchange taking place between an emotional young woman and a troubled older man. Though Earles's painting seems lukewarm if judged by Johnson's suggested criterion that 'the success of the problem picture depends on the artist's skill in selecting the precise climactic moment which will awaken the viewer to the full range of behavioural responses',10 Interior with figures nevertheless has an enigmatic, pregnant quality absent from pictures which one would, by contrast, happily term 'group portraits', such as the Art Gallery of South Australia's The artist and hisfamily c.1869 by Charles Hill. In such figure groups, meaning is governed by a directness and internal logic of pose, gesture and demeanour — the participants often look guilelessly out at the audience — of which the viewer makes a common-sense reading. By contrast, in the problem picture, figures are by definition involved in some portentous moment of drama or distress, suspense or surprise, usually in a prosaic setting which makes the present- day viewer's inability to 'read' the scene even more tantalising. A close companion in this vein to the present painting is Rebecca Solomon's The governess 1854, which may in the circumstances of its making and meaning provide some elucidation of the ambiguity experienced when viewing Interior with figures. Solomon appears to have invented her scene from modem life using the topicality of the 'governess' as a figure of the contemporary single woman's parlous socio-economic situation. The division of feeling is, however, ambiguous and in that respect Solomon's painting would have constituted a 'problem' for the public of the 1854 Academy. As in Earles's painting, the heterosexual pairing draws the eye, while almost at the same time the watchful second woman comes into focus. With a similar simplicity of setting — and with the garden view beyond the window functioning to the same degree as visual contrast and handy closure of the background space — Solomon's picture adds to its psychological and emotional intrigue with the fourth figure of a well-dressed little boy. Little critical comment was made on this painting, and its opacity may have been one explanation. Viewers might have expected a literary source, as Solomon 28 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965