Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

TASTE AND THE LATE-COLONIAL BRISBANE RESIDENCE Artist unknown Stained glass window Rodney James Facing page Artist unknown Ireland Stained glass window C.1882 Coloured and stained glass window in two panels 204x88cm Gift of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Brisbane 1988 Queensland Art Gallery Right Stained glass window, including original duck-shooting scene. Photograph from Australasian Post, 3 October 1957, p.21, courtesy National Library of Australia, Canberra It is therefore the most salubrious by nature, the most progressive by art and it must be added, the most fashionable by choice of domiciliation of the many interesting and beautiful suburbs that cluster around the city of Brisbane, the Metropolis of this great Colony of Queensland. J. B. Fewings, Memoirs of Toowong, 18901 I n 1959 the historic Sidney House in the Brisbane suburb of Toowong » was demolished to make way for the construction of television studios. Along with its picturesque setting and impressive facade, Sidney House was notable for its extensive interior decoration, which included a large stained glass window as a prominent feature. Commissioned by the original owner, Thomas Finney, thewindow was produced in Ireland in about 1882 and transported to Australia in that year to take pride of place in the central stairwell of the newly completed mansion, situated on the banks of the Brisbane river.2 Little is known about the details of the commission and even less about the Dublin artist(s) or firm who designed and manufactured the window. In spite of this lack of information and the fact that the windows are incomplete in their present form, the ambitious nature of the commission attests to the significance attached to architectural embellishment during a decade that witnessed the 'metamorphosis of Brisbane from frontier town to colonial city .. .'.3 In contemporary accounts, the stained glass window was considered sufficiently important to warrant attention in its own right.4However, the window is rarely mentioned in isolation; rather, it is discussed in terms of its spatial, functional and aesthetic relationship to the rest of the house and contents. The latter was in turn related to the nexus of setting and suburb. Written in the form of letters to his sister and cousin in 1890, J. B. Fewings's Memoirs o f Toowong offers an insightful reading of Sidney House in this regard, concluding that: '... the house and environments are indicative of comfort, spaciousness, coolness, salubrity, taste and affluence'.5 Terms such as stately, gracious, handsome and dignified were frequently used to describe Sidney House, as well as other noteworthy Brisbane residences built during the 1870s and 1880s. The use of such terms points to the convergence in late nineteenth-century Brisbane of notions of taste centred on architecture, decoration and decorum. Decorum is used in this sense as a descriptor for that convergence: the importance attached to building and decorating in a manner deemed appropriate to Brisbane and Queensland in the 1880s. The alignment of economic and cultural interests was of increasing significance in a colony aspiring to, and rapidly acquiring, a confident sense of its present disposition and its future direction. Born in 1837 at Tuam in Galway, Ireland, Thomas Finney, along with James Isles, arrived in Brisbane aboard the Flying Cloud in 1862. Formerly shopmates in the drapery business of Todd, Burns, and Co., Dublin, the two set up in partnership in Fortitude Valley and, according to an 1896 entry in Pugh's Almanac, '... from that period up to the present [Finney's] name and that of his firm have been inseparably 40 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965