Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

the allegorical Victorian idyll and The hot wind in 1889; Arthur Streeton's Oblivion c.1892-95 (private collection) and Tom Roberts's Adagio c.1893-99 (The Art Gallery of New South Wales) date from the 1890s. Charles Douglas Richardson was perhaps the only other local painter to move consistently in this direction. Bertram Mackennal, in Truth 1894 (QAG) and a number of related works, comes even closer to Symbolism as the distillation of an idea expressed in form, with no suggestion of narrative. He had arrived in London late in 1882, just as a group of younger artists, most importantly Alfred Gilbert, were transforming British sculpture: rejecting conventional academic classicism with its cold white marble and sympy sentiment in favour of what critics soon dubbed 'The New Sculpture'.9 Mackennal met Gilbert and other protagonists of the movement, whose work was characterised by French influence, variety of scale and medium (often domestic scale and often bronze) and naturalistic treatment of symbolic subjects. Through fellow expatriate painter, lohn Peter Russell, he met Auguste Rodin in Paris; also the American symbolist painter Elihu Vedder in Rome. 'Gilbert is wonderful', he declared; and Rodin 'the most marvellous modeller in the world and the greatest searcher after truth. He was the first man whose work made me understand that art is not Nature, but something grander and superimposed on nature'.10This confluence of early impressions would remain a potent influence on Mackennal's art for the remainder of his career. Photograph of plaster statue Circe by Bertram Mackennal in Sir Isadore Spielman's Souvenir of the Fine Art Section, Franco British Exhibition, 1908 (British Art Committee, London) 1980, (1305) opp. p.251. State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Working back in Melbourne for three years from 1888, Mackennal became bitterly disillusioned about his native land and its limited prospects for artists. 'I wish that I had been born English or American', he lamented on one occasion.1 He had returned to fulfil a commission for two panels on the facade of Parliament House in Melbourne and, as well, in 1890 entered a competition for a monumental sculpture to be placed outside the Public Library and National Gallery. In the event, his maquette, entitled The triumph o f Truth, received only a 'consolation' prize on the grounds that the trustees and the government could not actually afford to commission the work — despite an uproar in the press and protests from local artists, patrons and even the 'Divine' Madame Sarah Bernhardt, actress and sculptor, then on tour in Melbourne. Mackennal left Australia in March 1891 with financial assistance from 'a group of Melbourne gentlemen', 'a cartload of letters of introduction to eminent men in Europe' from Sarah Bernhardt, and the promise of accommodation — 'the run of her house in St John's Wood, in London' — from the actress Mrs Brown Potter.12 His first taste of the international spotlight came in 1893 when he received an honourable mention at the Paris Salon for his over-life-size statue of Circe. Then, in London the following year, the Royal Academy's conservative selectors were apparently so scandalised by the depiction of Circe's intoxicated victims — a frieze of entwined naked figures cavorting around the sculpted base — that they ordered a swathing of red baize to cover the entire pedestal from an all-the-more-curious public. As described by one contemporary reviewer, the mythological sorceress, with her serpent-filled tresses, 'stands erect, almost rigid in the pride of the consciousness of the irresistible supremacy of her nudity'.13Critics recognised the influence of recent French sculpture in general and of Rodin in particular. Meanwhile in Melbourne, Lindsay Bernard Hall, as Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, wrote that, judging from photographs and advice received, this was 'a genuine work of genius — very remarkable and impressive — (without doubt I should say Young Australia's chef d'ouvre [szc])'. Mackennal's reputation was made at last and his statuette of Truth was created as a gesture of thanks to the Melbourne sponsors who had helped to make this success possible. 'I shall never forget what I owe to these men', he wrote to Dr Felix Meyer. Although much smaller than Circe, the pose is a conscious echo of that powerful form, and the subject matter is surely a deliberate reference to the unjust treatment the sculptor had received INTERNATIONAL CLASSICISTS IN THE 'AUSTRALIAN IMPRESSIONIST' ERA 61