Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

of our festivities',8Withers could have made equally valid claim to the 'artistic possession' of Heidelberg with his lease of Charterisville (a property below Eaglemont) where he painted and conducted art classes from 1890. Sidney Dickinson had linked the names of Streeton and Withers when he coined the term 'Heidelberg School' in 1891, and even after Withers had transferred the lease of Charterisville to Emanuel Phillips Fox and Tudor St George Tucker in 1894, he and his family remained resident in the region for some time. As well as living and painting at Charterisville, Withers also kept a city studio.9Presumably this was where he painted his Wet day c.1892. The womans the detached houses and the laneway running between them declare this to be not an urban scene but a suburban scene. Adna Weber, noting in 1899 how the Australian population was concentrated in the capital cities of each colony (especially in Sydney and Melbourne), claimed that 'Australia is therefore the representative of the new order of things, toward which the modern world is advancing';1 however, it is the relentless expansion of the suburbs that characterises the Australian city. Australian life is essentially suburban, just as in Withers's Wet day. On the other hand, Girolamo Nerli's Street scene on a rainy night c.1890 (NGV) is uncompromisingly urban in its dazzle of figure, in her androgynous coat and with her skirt hitched up from the wet roadway, is comfortably timeless: with her hat and hairstyle conveniently concealed by her umbrella, she could easily pass as a woman of the 1990s rather than someone painted a hundred years earlier. This picture impinges upon impressionist issues such as the portrayal of city life and the technique of representing wet reflective streets — but only fleetingly. Withers had studied in Paris for a fewmonths in 1887-88. Although his wife Fanny later claimed that 'Mauve and Manet and Monet were the idols' of his fellow students at the Académie Julian,10Withers was in many ways the 'most English' of the Heidelberg School artists. But in this little painting, at least, Withers is quintessentially Australian: city lights, and suggestively impressionist in its slick rendition of the wet streets. The source of Nerli's effervescent style is not known: he had trained in the late 1870s at the Academia di Belli Arti, Florence, a school focusing on academic figure drawing. There is no tangible evidence that Nerli had any direct link with French Impressionism (although his European embarkation point was Marseille), but his work has been compared with that of the Macchiaioli, a Florentine group of painters who specialised in plein air landscapes and scenes of modem life.12 Nerli's Beach scene, Black Rock c.1888 depicts a popular 'modern life' subject: leisure. The picture is one of a series of three similarly spontaneous sketches Left Tom Roberts 1856-1931 Slumbering sea, Mentone 1887 Oil on canvas 51x76.5cm Purchased with the assistance of a special grant from the Government of Victoria 1979 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Facing page Girolamo Nerli Italy/Australla/ New Zealand 1860-1926 Beach scene, Black Rock c.1888 Oil on card on thin cardboard 23.5X29cm Purchased 1979 Queensland Art Gallery he made at the same spot, presumably on the same day ( Beach Scene, Sandringham c.1888, AGNSW and The beach at Sandringham c.1888, NGA).13 Beach scene, Black Rock is the most energetic of the three, Nerli's brushstrokes economically yet effectively reproducing the force of the incoming waves of Port Phillip Bay. Confronted with all this natural energy, the woman with the parasol (seen strolling in The beach at Sandringham ) has collapsed in a lazy heap upon the sand. How languid her pose compared to the stiff-backed woman in Roberts's Slumbering sea, Mentone 1887 (NGV); how exhilarating Nerli's broken whitecaps compared to Roberts's oily bay! The appeal of quick but clever sketches was well demonstrated by the commercial success of the '9 by 5 Impression Exhibition' of 1889. Yet it was Nerli whom the critic De Fibra (James Green) later credited (blamed?) as the person responsible for encouraging Australian painters to substitute 'the mere sketch for finished work'.14The significant connection between Streeton's Sketch for ‘Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide', Withers's Wet day and Nerli's Beach scene, Black Rock is that, although all three are unequivocally sketches (in their rapid execution), they were intended as paintings in their own right and not just as preliminary stages for future museum pictures. Such sketches made quickly and straight from the subject could express an artistic intimacy that an overly refined work could not. Here, as was happening elsewhere in the western world, the sketch had overthrown the hegemony of academic painting. Dr Anita Callaway is a writer and lecturer on Australian art history. 74 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965