Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

V I C T O R I A ' S C H I L D R E N : Innocents Abroad Nicholas Chevalier Weary: An episode at St Leonards Mary Laurenson % / % / hen Nicholas Chevalier % / submitted Weary: ▼ I An episode at St Leonards (Queensland Art Gallery) to the Royal Academy Exhibition in London in May 1878, he was just a few days short of his fiftieth birthday. Born on 28 May 1828 in St Petersburg to Swiss-born Louis Chevalier and his Russian wife, Tatiana, Chevalier grew up with his five siblings amongst the splendours of tsarist Russia. He received some training in art at the Musée Arlaud in Lausanne, but from 1848 to 1850 he trained as an architect in Munich, then worked for Ludwig Grüner, engraver and adviser in art to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, in London, between 1851 and 1852. Lor nearly two years in 1853-54, he travelled in Italy. At the end of 1854, however, family investments in the gold- rushes in Victoria seemed about to crash and Chevalier was sent to Australia to see what might be retrieved. Chevalier was then 26 and he spent his next thirteen years in Melbourne, employed as the first cartoonist for Melbourne Punch, which began in August 1855, and working as an illustrator for seven or eight of the often short-lived colonial newspapers. He explored and painted in the greater part of Victoria, and visited NewZealand on four occasions, these travels resulting in a substantial volume of work, ft was his meeting with Queen Victoria's second son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, that brought him back to England in 1870. In 1867 Prince Alfred was captain of HMS Galatea, which called at Melbourne at one stage of a worldwide goodwill tour. At Clontarf he was shot and injured by a Sinn Fein supporter; the tour was abandoned and he returned to England. When the prince had recovered and the tour was to be resumed, Chevalier was invited to join the Galatea as official artist. He sailed from Melbourne in March 1869, and over the next fourteen months visited New Zealand, many South Pacific islands, China, Japan, India and Ceylon. Chevalier left the Galatea at Colombo, meeting up with his wife there, and together they went on to London. Facing page Nicholas Chevalier Australia/England 1828-1902 Weary: An episode at St Leonards 1878 Oil on canvas 121x88cm Purchased 1989 from the estate of Lady Trout with a special allocation from the Queensland Government Queensland Art Gallery From 1871 the Duke of Edinburgh's influence secured for him the patronage of Queen Victoria and other members of the Royal Family, resulting in a number of important but exacting commissions.1 Also, each year during this period, Chevalier was submitting to the Royal Academy highly finished and detailed paintings of landscapes and exotic scenes inspired by his travels. To compound these professional pressures, he was already suffering recurrent bouts of rheumatic gout, which affected his right hand especially, and which were to become increasingly severe as time passed. It was against this background, and from his studio in Bayswater, that Chevalier prepared his canvas for Weary: An episode at St Leonards. 1849-50, and Augustus Egg, with his 1858 trilogy Past and Present, continued the tradition, as did, in their various ways, William Frith, and the Pre-Raphaelites, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Frederic, Lord Leighton. Chevalier's picture tells a story, but it is not a straightforward narrative, not an 'easy read'; it provides no ready answers to the question that the title raises: What episode? According to the Macquarie Dictionary, an 'episode' is 'an incident in the course of a series of events, in a person's life or experience; an incidental digression'. St Leonards, the setting for Chevalier's painting, is a seaside resort, an extension to the town of Hastings in south-east Sussex. It was built and developed in the early nineteenth century by James Burton to provide accommodation in the form of small hotels and boarding-houses for those who wished, or were advised, to take advantage of the restorative properties of the warm sun and bracing sea air of the region. A promenade runs for more than two kilometres along the sea front. What has happened here? To whom? The viewer is forced to search the painting for significant passages. This narrative painting is a most unusual departure in Chevalier's oeuvre, as landscapes form the greatest proportion of his subjects. The 'picture that tells a story' grew out of seventeenth-century genre painting with its vignettes of social situations, and was developed in England in the early nineteenth century by artists such as Sir David Wilkie and William Mulready; among others, John Millais, with his Christ in the house of His parents In Weary: An episode at St Leonards 1878, attention is centred on the form of a sleeping child propped in a corner of a wooden bench in a seaside shelter. The setting may be reasonably confirmed as St Leonards by the castle mins on the cliffs above the town of Hastings, and the steamer approaching (or leaving?) Hastings pier, completed some years earlier in 1872. The flower-girl is asleep; she is pale, her clothes are clean but well 30 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965