Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

dedication of the house to his Irish-born wife. The commissioning of a distinguished Irish artist or workshop to produce the window emphasised its prominence as an important decorative feature. Although there are indications that the stained glass was produced to a tight deadline, there can be no doubt that it was created by a master craftsman.32It is also clear that the artist had never been to Australia and was dependent upon the availability of printed material for his sources. According to Beverley Sherry the depiction of a kangaroo hunt and a scene featuring a bullock-drawn plough are rare in Australian stained glass.33The artist had, however, many pictorial sources of kangaroos to base his drawing on, including that deriving from an engraving of a painting by English artist George Stubbs, Portrait o f the kongouro from New Holland c.1771-72. As Terence Lane has pointed out, this was to become the seminal model in the depiction of the kangaroo, in spite of the physical existence of kangaroos in '... English and Continental parks and zoos before 1800'.34 The kangaroo scene in the Sidney House stained glass window would also appear to be a composite of scenes from a contemporary publication All Round the World: An Illustrated Record o f Voyages, Travels and Adventures in All Parts of the Globe, which included descriptions of early settlement in Australia and accompanying illustrations after drawings by contemporary French artists.35Foremost amongst these borrowings is the stationary backward-looking kangaroo motif in Grass trees (reversed in the window scene to face right to left) and a kangaroo­ hunting scene. Interestingly, the artists' illustrations continued to be based on the textual conscription of the kangaroo as a paradoxical creature in a 'world upside down', difficult to draw and outside the Linnaean system of classification that had become popularised in the early nineteenth century.36 Other images in All Round the World ... provided a number of possible sources for the stained glass window. These include scenes of laconic horsemen in broad- Left Hunting kangaroos. Engraving from an original drawing by Karl Glradet In All Round the World: An Illustrated Record of Voyages, Travels and Adventures In All Parts of the Globe, vol.2, Collins, London, undated, p.337 Grass trees. Engraving from an original drawing by Karl Giradet in All Round the World ..., p.291 rimmed hats and dungarees rounding up herds of cattle, men working with oxen, and bush scenes depicting the flat plains, straggly eucalypts and bold escarpments of the Australian landscape. The important central section of the window, surrounding the area for the coat of arms, seems to have been drawn from an altogether different source, ft is the most generalised of these images and its theme of nature's abundance could possibly have been drawn from contemporary pattern books of heraldic motifs. While the semiotic significance of architectural form and decoration is all- encompassing, Sidney House projects discreet ideas about the family who built it and the wider social, cultural and economic milieu in which they were placed. The stained glass window feature was commissioned to celebrate the good fortune and interests of Thomas Finney following his migration to the colonies and marks the specific occasion of his marriage in 1882. The window formed part of a larger decorative scheme that distinguished Finney as a man of taste, progressive economic ideas and with interests in the contemporary life of the colony. Unfortunately, Thomas Finney's celebration of life in Australia was to be short-lived: Sidney Anne died the following year and Thomas subsequently divided his time between England and Australia. Rodney James has worked as an education officer at the Queensland Art Gallery and is now a curator and writer based on the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria. TASTE AND THE LATE-COLON 1AL BRISBANE RESIDENCE 4