Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

INTERNATIONAL CLASSICISTS IN THE AUSTRALIAN IMPRESSIONIST' ERA Arthur Loureiro and Bertram Mackennal Jane Clark Facing page and detail Arthur Loureiro Australia/Portugal/ France 1853-1932 Study for 'The spirit of the new moon1 1888 Oil on canvas 56x165cm Purchased 1995. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant with the assistance of Philip Bacon through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation. Celebrating the Queensland Art Gallery's Centenary 1895-1995 Right Engraved view of The crescent moon' by G. Loureiros [sic] from Illustrated Australian News, 22 December 1888, p.217, La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne % / % / hen Arthur Loureiro 1 / m / painted The spirit of w the new moon in Melbourne in 1888 and Bertram Mackennal, in London, modelled Truth in 1894, both were expatriate artists. Loureiro was Portuguese, a native of Oporto, and had trained and exhibited in Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, Paris and London before settling in Melbourne with his Australian-born wife. Mackennal, born in Melbourne, had received his early training at the National Gallery School at much the same time (1878-82) as Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin. He then travelled to London and enrolled briefly at the Royal Academy Schools, visited Rome and, by 1884, had established a studio in Paris — unquestionably the centre of the nineteenth-century western art world. After a return visit to Melbourne in 1888-91, he worked again in Paris and he settled in London in 1894. Both Mackennal and Loureiro were cosmopolitan in their aims and ambitions. Academically trained but open to new ideas, they were aware of major international trends and fashions in late nineteenth-century art, and they developed their own artistic styles and subject matter accordingly. Although they doubtless met in Melbourne through the Victorian Artists' Society and through mutual friends such as the Argus art critic and National Gallery trustee, James Smith, there is no evidence that they were closely acquainted. The shared theme of the female figure as poetic allegory or symbolic personification was part of an international language of painters and sculptors which, with increased communication through travel, photography and illustrated publications, was now spoken more widely than ever before. Arthur Loureiro was perhaps the first painter in Australia whose work embodied elements of French Symbolism. As an artistic movement, Symbolism was loosely organised and given written expression by poets rather than by artists: indeed it was not a pictorial style so much as an attitude. Thus it was the poet Jean Moréas who called on artists 'to clothe the idea in sensuous form'.1Among writers, the symbolist outlook was promulgated in numerous periodicals (mainly French and Belgian) during the 1880s and early 1890s; whilst among artists, the mural painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was widely recognised as representative of the symbolist attitude — even as far away as Australia. Loureiros Study for 'The spirit o f the new moon' 1888 (Queensland Art Gallery) was originally inspired by his reading of a Portuguese poem (as reported in the Melbourne newspaper Table Talk on 19 October 1888). Asecond and presumably much larger oval variant was commissioned by a former mayor of Melbourne, Alderman James Cooper Stewart, to be installed as a mural for his newly built ballroom and was exhibited, along with a companion work, The spirit o f the Southern Cross, at the Victorian Artists' Society in November 1888. The images were described at the time as 'thoroughly poetical in conception', 'symbolical... graceful and classical' — and illustrative of the artist's European origins and inspiration.2 Unfortunately, Loureiros two oval canvases are now lost — although the finished Spirit o f the new moon was illustrated 58 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965