Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Photograph of Arthur Loureiro from Illustrated Sydney News, 1 August 1891. Photograph courtesy General Reference Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Portrait drawing of the artist Bertram Mackennal by Abbey Altson, 1894, from R. Jope-Slade, An Australian quartette', The Magazine ofArt, 1895, pp.389ff, La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne in both the Victorian Artists' Society catalogue and in a local newspaper. Perhaps Alderman Stewart saw the original composition in Loureiros studio when he was sitting for his portrait in 1887 (now in the collection of the Melbourne City Council) and found the sensuous motif of the allegorical maiden more to his taste than the bearded old-timer on her right. Interestingly, Loureiro kept this original version in his own collection. It was in his Melbourne studio sale in 1907 with the title The spirit o f the storm 3— which accurately reflects its Portuguese literary inspiration.4 Loureiro's revised oval composition is essentially a decorative allegory. In surviving reproductions, the young woman shown in clinging draperies is neither a goddess nor a symbol of the powers of good, but simply the 'spirit' or personification of the new moon on the cusp of which she sits. Loureiro made no reference to Portuguese poetry in the 1888 Victorian Artists' Society catalogue. Instead, he quoted a verse from the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley — which would certainly have been more familiar to Melbourne patrons: That orbèd maiden, with white fire laden Whom mortals call the Moon, Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor By the midnight breezes strewn. ('The Daemon of the World', Part I) The companion Spirit of the Southern Cross, 'among the five stars of which constellation a figure is appearing' was, of course, emblematic of Loureiro's adopted homeland, for the stars of the Southern Cross had been a popular visual symbol of the Australian continent since at least the 1850s, notably in both the Anti- Transportation League and Eureka flags. Loureiro's symbolist connections were authentic, if diluted by distance, by pragmatism and by his need to earn a living as a painter in Australia. His understanding of contemporary French art practice was evidently sound: he had studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1880 and exhibited at the annual Salon from 1880 to 1882. (In Melbourne he declined to speak English, even for his young pupils, because he was more confident in French.) In September 1881, in England, he married Marie Thérèse Huybers, Australian-born but of Belgian parentage, who was completing her education in Europe. One of her sisters was the Australian novelist 'Tasma'; another sister, Edith, reputedly had an affair in Paris with the symbolist writer Joris-Karl Huysmans before her marriage and later career as an art critic in Melbourne.5 Loureiro's earliest important paintings were mostly rustic themes — peasant children, rural workers, sheep — in the 'naturalist' manner of Jules Bastien-Lepage, whom he claimed to have met as a student in Paris (he called his elder daughter Fauvette after Bastien-Lepage's famous painting of a peasant child Pauvre Fauvette 1882).6In Australia, however, he broadened his repertoire and increasingly his subjects were more thoughtful, literary and allegorical. His first documented mural commission was for Wombaleno, a mansion in Toorak, where he painted a 'deep dado of blue green satin' in the drawing room with allegories of the four seasons: 'each of the larger panels containing an emblematical figure, surrounded by flowers or fruits appropriate to each ... '.7He took inspiration from the poetry of Adam Lindsay Gordon ( What's up old horse ...ï 1887), from Australian history ( The death o f Burke 1892, private collection) and, above all, from the unique landscape and vegetation of his adopted homeland. Loureiro's Spring 1890 was 'personified by a fair young girl clothed in diaphanous garments,... receiving homage from her attendant spirits ...', in a handcrafted frame also 'symbolical of Spring' and inlaid with sprays of wattle blossom. Ayear later, his Morning was 'a maiden in classic garb of green, singing amidst the misty eucalyptus forest of Gippsland'.8 Judging from contemporary reproductions of pictures at the Salon in Paris and the Royal Academy in London, this type of allegorical maiden became as common in Europe during the 1890s as country folk in the style of Bastien-Lepage had been in the 1880s. In Australia, however, they were an unusual species. Charles Conder exhibited BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965