Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

'the Beloved', describing how '[the] almost fleshily voluptuous blouse of the central figure offer[s] a disguised nude, tentatively opening her arms'.1According to Rodriguezs interpretation, this figure offers a focus for both the painter within the painting and the painter o f the painting. The figure has been identified as Violet Bowes-Kelly, who would have been about 17 or 18 when the work was painted, and who studied under Rupert Bunny at the National Gallery School in Melbourne with A. M. E. Bale. As the daughter of the founder of the Broken Hill Proprietary Company, she would have enjoyed the kind of privileges that permitted young women of this era to engage in intellectual and cultural pursuits.2 Alice Bale's own artistic, intellectual and musical pursuits were similarly fostered by parents who encouraged their only child to follow her interests. As Victoria Hammond and Juliet Peers have pointed out, Bale inherited 'a scientific approach to her art' from her father, and an 'aesthetic sensibility' from her mother, who was 'a collector of period furniture, objects and costumes'.3Indeed, the home environment proved to be so comfortable that Alice Bale remained living with her father until his death when she was aged sixty-four.4 Although she never left Victoria, her membership of the Australian Art Association enabled her to co-exhibit with the major artists of her day, and during her lifetime portraits by Bale were included in two overseas exhibitions: at the Royal Academy in London in 1933 and at the Paris Salon in 1939.5 Juliet Peers observes that Bale's commitment to looking after her father was used by her as a means of coming to terms with the disappointment she must have inevitably felt when Leisure moments failed to win the 1902 Travelling Scholarship competition run by the National Gallery of Victoria. According to Peers, Bale's phlegmatic response to her award of fourth place in the competition rationalised that overseas travel was 'impracticable' for an only daughter.6 Further evidence of Bale's resolute and doughty character is apparent in her active membership in a number of art societies (including the Victorian Artists' Society, where she served as journal editor, the Australian Art Association and the Melbourne Society of Women Painters) and in her vociferous support for issues close to her heart. Yet the energy and commitment she brought to her art, her writing and her involvement with the visual arts infrastructure of her day seem to have been motivated more by a grim determination than any passionate extravagance. By all accounts, A. M. E. Bale emerges as a strongly opinionated stoic who took both her gender and her privileged position unquestioningly, and then got on with the task of making art according to the traditional standards she judged as superior to the emerging challenges of Modernism. Juliet Peers uses first-hand reminiscences of Bale's character to shade in more fully the nuances suggested by some of the rather austere photographs available in accounts of the artist: 'To outsiders Alice appeared dour ... she did not smile very much and laid down the law. She was a bit dictatorial... She was all for academic art, never for modern art'.7 Janine Burke's book Australian Women Artists, 1840-1940 includes a photograph of A. M. E. Bale in her studio in 1925.8 In it we see a fuller figure of the artist depicted in Leisure moments wearing the same gathered smock and holding a huge, serious-looking palette in a pose that is redolent of the solemnity and authority of other, more commonly male, artist- portraits of the era. The artist's studio in this photograph displays the same kind of elegant furniture and chinoiserie that are arranged throughout the room in Leisure moments. Behind the artist's left shoulder is a painting that can be identified as Iceland poppies C.1925, one of Bale's popular still- life paintings, also in the Collection of the Queensland Art Gallery. Regardless of her self-assurance, her relative success and her economic independence, Alice Bale probably had more than a few reasons to appear dour. In spite of the obvious competence of her figure paintings and portraits, critics still, on the whole, refused to grant credence to her achievements in this genre, and instead relegated her to the primary role of a still- life painter. Janine Burke remarks on the 'disturbing' nature of an article in Art in Australia in 1924 which described the artist as 'a still-life painter by nature', adding that 'Successful figure painting seems, as yet, beyond her reach'.9 Figure compositions such as Leisure moments and others are obviously the work of an artist capable not only of the technical aspects of painting, but also of using the genre in a highly sophisticated way to suggest relationships, issues and psychological possibilities. Importantly, Bale's figurative work dared to seek insights into relationships between committed, intellectually engaged women, which was rarely attempted in Australian art at the time. There can be little doubt that Alice Bale's strong convictions and their convincing manifestation through her paintings were highly influential. Another article in Art in Australia, published in 1926, credited her with being 'at the forefront of the Meldrum school'even though she had independently and adventurously gone far beyond the example of Max Meldrum's teachings.10 Juliet Peers even suggests that although the subject matter of Leisure moments had proved to be somewhat contentious for the conservative standards of the 1902 Travelling Scholarship, the interest raised by the painting had paved the way for the first woman to be awarded the scholarship in 1908, when Constance Jenkins's winning entry, Friendly critics 1908 (National Gallery of Victoria), also depicted women at work in a studio. The subject matter of women artists was a relatively new one, but had been dealt with in a few significant works. Publicly exhibited paintings of women artists — at work in the studio, as portraits and self- portraits — had certainly increased dramatically in Britain in the last decades of the nineteenth century and such images were circulated in illustrated magazines, art periodicals and women's papers.1 Contemporary Australian depictions of women in an art studio include Art Students (The Art Gallery of New South Wales) BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965