Howard Hinton (art patron)
Howard Hinton, Australian art patron and benefactor, was born on November 10, 1867 at Croydon in south London, England, the third child of Mary Hinton and Thomas Alexander Hinton. A thwarted artist due to shortsightedness, he visited many of the great galleries of Europe in his youth. At age 24 he migrated to Australia and associated with leading artists of the Heidelberg School and the bohemian artists' camps around Sydney Harbour in the 1890s, he built a successful career in shipping and used his moderate wealth to support waves of Australian artists in the first half of the twentieth century. Through extensive donations to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Armidale Teachers' College he became one of the greatest benefactors in Australian art history. Hinton's early schooling was at Mr Hester's school, Mr Southee's school, before he attended Whitgift Grammar School, South Croydon, until fifth form in 1883, his passion for art developed at an early age. As a youth he took parentally-financed vacations with his brother to some of the great galleries of Europe.
He attended art classes at Continental schools, but acute near-sightedness frustrated any hope of becoming an artist himself. Howard's father, was a commission merchant, a broker trading for marginal returns. Howard was given early experience in this trade, to be the basis for his future career; as a young man Hinton was rather plump, short-sighted, wearing thick optical lenses, diffident in manner, hesitant in speech, he "only dropped his guard with his closest friends." Hinton sailed to Australia on board the Loch Torridon arriving in 1892 at the age of twenty four. Through the shipping line he gained employment with merchant agents A. McArthur Ltd. in Sydney. Employed in shipping, Hinton took the opportunity to combine travel, he journeyed through the Pacific in the 1890s on many vessels. On an 1898 trip he met and stayed with the New Zealand artist Charles Goldie before travelling on to Raratonga and Tahiti. In 1904, his firm gave him charge of a speculative venture to take an old steamer, the Macquarie, to the Far East carrying wheat and coke to Yokohama.
The further use or disposal of the vessel was Hinton's responsibility. Once in Japan he shrewdly took advantage of the Russo-Japanese War to charter the ship for transporting war materials, he continued trading in Asian waters for two years. Sixty-two pages of diary entries and four photographic albums give detailed record of these exotic years: trading and dining between ports in Japan, Hong Kong and Vietnam, he sold the Macquarie for more than double the firm's required price and returned to Sydney via Manila and German New Guinea in 1906. When his firm was reconstituted in 1908 as the McArthur Shipping & Agency Co. Ltd. Hinton remained with the company, thus spending his entire working life in Australia with the one business, rising to directorship in 1916 and enjoying moderate wealth. At the age of 61 in 1928 he retired and set out on an extended stay in England and Europe including visits to many art galleries and studios. Though he corresponded he did not return to Australia till 1931. After migrating to Australia in 1891 Hinton made friends with artists including Julian Ashton, Livingston Hopkins, Tom Roberts, Albert Henry Fullwood and Arthur Streeton.
He was a frequent visitor to and sometime inhabitant of several of the artists' camps set up on the foreshores of Sydney harbour, began buying paintings. His art purchasing was predominantly based in Sydney, on Sydney exhibitions and studios, he boarded with the Sabiel family at Glenmire in Stanley Street in nearby Balmoral for ten years, remained connected with the Sabiels in the ensuing years. Following his two years trading in Asia, he returned to Glenmire lived in other boarding houses on Sydney's north shore, at times taking the same address as the Sabiels. In 1919 Hinton and the Sabiels took rooms for a period in Hazelhurst, an upmarket boarding house in Murdoch Street Cremorne, in 1920 Hinton became a permanent boarder there, living the life of a bachelor in a serviced room till his death in 1948. Laundry, starched shirts and meals were provided with his board, he ate a traditional breakfast, dressed for a three-course dinner - sometimes with invited guests - and took lunch in town at the Millions Club in Rowe Street which still exists as the Sydney Club.
He wore spats and always carried a walking stick. He was quiet and self-effacing, but exceedingly generous, giving paintings to friends and presents to Hazelhurst staff, all of whom he remembered in his will. Besides diarising his travels, Hinton was an active correspondent and dabbled in occasional verse, both with humour and gentle wit, he was a loyalist. At the time of World War I he was twice refused enlistment in the AIF because of his poor eyesight. However, he "gave of his money during this war and in World War II when he divided his funds on the strict basis of a quarter for buying paintings from needy young artists and three quarters for the R. A. A. F. and A. I. F. Comfort Funds." He spoke of his charitable works but examples are known, from helping unemployed youths to buying beds for a youth hostel in Narrabeen, buying paintings from artists struggling in the Great Depression. From his Sydney base Hinton continued to support artists, for example assisting Elioth Gruner with overseas travel and assisting the widow and family of deceased young artist J J Hilder.
He visited artists' studios and was a familiar figure at galleries and showrooms. He used his wealth to acquire their work despite having little display
E. Phillips Fox
Emanuel Phillips Fox was an Australian impressionist painter. After studying at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne, Fox travelled to Paris to study in 1886, he remained in Europe until 1892, when he returned to Melbourne and led what is considered the second phase of the Heidelberg School, an impressionist art movement which had grown in the city during his absence. He spent over a decade in Europe in the early 20th century before settling in Melbourne, where he died. Emanuel Phillips Fox was born on 12 March 1865 to Alexander Fox and Rosetta Phillips at 12 Victoria Parade in Fitzroy, into a family of lawyers whose firm, DLA Phillips Fox, still exists, he studied art at the National Gallery School in Melbourne from 1878 until 1886 under G. F. Folingsby. In 1886, he travelled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, where he gained first prize in his year for design and École des Beaux-Arts, where his masters included William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Jean-Léon Gérôme, both among the most famous artists of the time.
While at Beaux Arts, he was awarded a first prize for painting. He was influenced by the fashionable school of en plein air Impressionism, he exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1890, returned to Melbourne in 1891. In October 1892, Fox opened the Melbourne School of Art with Tudor St George Tucker, where he taught European ideas and techniques, he had a considerable influence as a teacher on Australian art during this period. In his brief career with the Heidelberg School, Fox was noted for his figure compositions and subdued landscapes painted as nocturnes, utilising a low-key palette in which the colours, although limited in range, were related to each other "with the utmost delicacy and inventiveness," to quote Australian artist and art scholar James Gleeson; the emphasis on landscapes may have been at least a response to market demand – landscapes found more ready acceptance, Art Students, a figurative genre painting now recognised as one of his best, first exhibited at the Victorian Artists Society in 1895, remained unsold until 1943.
In 1901 he was given a commission under the Gilbee bequest to paint a historical picture of The Landing of Captain Cook for the Melbourne gallery. One of the conditions of the bequest was that the picture must be painted overseas and Fox accordingly left for London, he explained his decision to base himself in the European art world in a 1903 letter to Frederick McCubbin: "I am quite certain that the only way is to exhibit alongside the best of the work here, that one man shows, colonial or Australian exhibitions in London are of little good." Both the Royal Academy and the Salon were bastions of establishment art, remote from the modernism of Braque and the School of Paris, Fox's biographer, art historian Ruth Zubans, describes the Salon as celebrating elegance and femininity "...filtered through Impressionist experience and academic training". Fox enjoyed considerable success in Paris and London, becoming in 1894 the first Australian to be awarded a third-class gold medal at the Salon for Portrait of my Cousin.
On 9 May 1905 he married the artist Ethel Carrick in St Peter's Church, Ealing. They toured Italy and Spain in 1908 settled in Paris, where he was elected an associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, he returned to Melbourne on a visit in that year and held a successful one-man show at the Guildhall gallery. Two years he became a full member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, the first Australian artist to attain that honour, he was exhibiting at the Royal Academy. In 1912 he was elected a member of the International Society of Painters and in the same year spent some time painting in Spain and Algeria. In 1913 he returned to Australia. Edith Susan Gerard Anderson was one of the main models featured throughout this collection of works; the show was reported with enthusiasm in the local press, the Melbourne Argus writing: "With light and atmosphere always the ruling motive, there is revealed in his themes something of the infinite beauty discoverable in everyday things...". The writer might have had in mind this typical work titled The Arbour.
A final aspect of Fox's oeuvre worth noting are his official commissions. The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, the most important of these works, holds more than a hint of his teacher Gérôme. Fox died of cancer in a Fitzroy hospital on 8 October 1915, his wife survived him by 36 years. His nephew Leonard Phillips Fox was a prolific writer and pamphleteer for Communist and humanitarian causes; when compared with Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder, Fox shows more fascination with the "effects of dappled light" than to the "sunny vistas" one finds in the other two painters' Heidelberg paintings. He is described as an artist who "remained committed to a late nineteenth century aesthetic that paid homage to Impressionism while retaining the tonal values of academic realism." E. Phillips Fox Eagle, M: The oil paintings of E Phillips Fox in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997 ISBN 0-642-13086-8 Fox, Len, E. Phillips Fox and his family published by the author, 1985 ISBN 0-9589239-1-4 Serle, Percival.
"Fox, Emanuel Phillips". Dictionary of Australian Biography. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Zubans, R. E. Phillips Fox 1865–
Australian Town and Country Journal
Australian Town and Country Journal was a weekly English language broadsheet newspaper published in Sydney, New South Wales, from 1870 to 1919. The paper was founded by Samuel Bennett with his intention for it to be "valuable to everybody for its great amount of useful and reliable information"; the paper was known for its diversity in dealing with domestic and foreign news as well as featuring essays on literature and invention. The first issue of the Australian Town and Country Journal was published on 8 January 1870 and ran until 25 June 1919. After 2 June 1878, when Samuel Bennett died, publication of the paper was taken over by his sons and Christopher; the paper has been digitised as part of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program project of the National Library of Australia. List of newspapers in Australia List of newspapers in New South Wales Australian Town and Country Journal at Trove Press timeline: Select chronology of significant Australian press events to 2011 http://www.nla.gov.au/anplan/heritage/NewspaperChronology.html The birth of the newspaper in Australia http://australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/birth-of-the-newspaper Australian Newspaper History: A Bibliography http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/eserv/UQ:9521/anb_rk.pdf Australian Town and Country introduces'The Dawn' http://digitisethedawn.org/australian-town-and-country-introduces-dawn
Jules Bastien-Lepage
Jules Bastien-Lepage was a French painter associated with the beginning of naturalism, an artistic style that emerged from the phase of the Realist movement. Bastien-Lepage was born in the village of Damvillers and spent his childhood there. Bastien's father grew grapes in a vineyard to support the family, his grandfather lived in the village. Bastien took an early liking to drawing, his parents fostered his creativity by buying prints of paintings for him to copy. Jules Bastien-Lepage's first teacher was his father, himself an artist, his first formal training was at Verdun. Prompted by a love of art, he went to Paris in 1867, where he was admitted to the École des Beaux-arts, working under Cabanel, he was awarded first place for drawing, but spent most of his time working alone, only appearing in class. He completed three years at the école. In a letter to his parents, he complained that the life model was a man in the pose of a mediaeval lutanist. During the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, Bastien was wounded.
After the war, he returned home to recover from his wound. In 1873 he painted his grandfather in the garden, a work that would bring the artist his first success at the Paris Salon. After exhibiting works in the Salons of 1870 and 1872, which attracted no attention, in 1874 his Portrait of my Grandfather garnered critical acclaim and received a third-class medal, he showed Song of Spring, an academically oriented study of rural life, representing a peasant girl sitting on a knoll above a village, surrounded by wood nymphs. His initial success was confirmed in 1875 by the First Communion, a picture of a little girl minutely worked up in manner, compared to Hans Holbein, a Portrait of M. Hayern. In 1875, he took second place in the competition for the Prix de Rome with his Angels appearing to the Shepherds, exhibited again at the Exposition Universelle in 1878, his next attempt to win the Prix de Rome in 1876 with Priam at the Feet of Achilles was again unsuccessful, the painter determined to return to country life.
To the Salon of 1877 he sent a full-length Portrait of My Parents. The last picture, now in the Musée d'Orsay, was praised by critics and the public alike, it secured his status as one of the first painters in the Naturalist school. After the success of Haymaking, Bastien-Lepage was recognized in France as the leader of the emerging Naturalist school. By 1883, a critic could proclaim that "The whole world paints so much today like M. Bastien-Lepage that M. Bastien-Lepage seems to paint like the whole world." This fame brought him prominent commissions. His Portrait of Mlle Sarah Bernhardt, painted in a light key, won him the cross of the Legion of Honour. In 1879 he was commissioned to paint the Prince of Wales. In 1880 he exhibited a small portrait of M. Joan of Arc listening to the Voices. In 1881 he painted the Portrait of Albert Wolf, his last dated work is The Forge. Between 1880 and 1883 he traveled in Italy; the artist, long ailing, had tried in vain to re-establish his health in Algiers. He died in Paris in 1884.
His friend, Prince Bojidar Karageorgevitch, was with him at the end and wrote: At last he was unable to work anymore. At his grave's head his mother and brother planted an apple-tree. In March and April 1885, more than 200 of his pictures were exhibited at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1889 some of his best-known work was shown at the Paris Exposition Universelle. Among his more important works, may be mentioned the portrait of Mme J. Drouet; the Little Chimney-Sweep was never finished. A museum is devoted to him at Montmédy. A statue of Bastien-Lepage by Rodin was erected in Damvillers. An obituary by Prince Bojidar Karageorgevitch, appeared in the Magazine of Art in 1890; the influential English critic Roger Fry credited the wider public's acceptance of the Impressionists Claude Monet, to Bastien-Lepage. In his 1920 Essay in Æsthetics, Fry wrote: Monet is an artist whose chief claim to recognition lies in the fact of his astonishing power of faithfully reproducing certain aspects of nature, but his naive innocence and sincerity was taken by the public to be the most audacious humbug, it required the teaching of men like Bastien-Lepage, who cleverly compromised between the truth and an accepted convention of what things looked like, to bring the world around to admitting truths which a single walk in the country with purely unbiassed vision would have established beyond doubt.
Ukrainian-born painter Marie Bashkirtseff formed a close friendship with Bastien-Lepage. Artistically, she took her cue from the French painter's admiration for nature: "I say nothing of the fields because Bastien-Lepage reigns over them as a sovereign. Bastien", her best-known work in this naturalist vein is A Meeting, shown to wide acclaim at the Salon of 1884. By a curious coincidence she succumbed to chronic illness the same year as her mentor. 1883: Knight in the Order of Leopold. This article incorp
Bailed Up
Bailed Up is a 1895 painting by Australian artist Tom Roberts. The painting depicts a stage coach being held up by bushrangers in an isolated, forested section of a back road; the painting is part of the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. and has been described by the former Senior Curator as "the greatest Australian landscape painted". Roberts painted the work while staying at Newstead sheep station—near Inverell, New South Wales—owned by his friend Duncan Anderson, he had earlier painted The Golden Fleece, his second painting depicting sheep shearing, while at Newstead. The notorious bushranger Captain Thunderbolt had been active in the Inverell area more than twenty five years earlier and Roberts conceived an idea of painting a bushranging scene. Roberts found his location for the painting along the road between Newstead and Paradise, a neighbouring station; the location was remote, on a flat bend on an uphill stretch of the road, surrounded by "grass trees and a forest of tall gums."
At this spot Roberts, with assistance from the Anderson family, constructed a viewing platform in a tree growing on the slope below the road, thus setting himself up at road level. Roberts painted the Cobb and Co coach in Inverell and modelled the characters in the painting on people in Inverell and station hands at Newstead. Before starting on the main canvas Roberts "made tiny drawings and an oil sketch of how he wanted the scene to look." Once complete, Roberts exhibited Bailed Up in Melbourne. Critical reception to the work was mixed. Pearce considered. Regardless, for a thirty-year period the painting failed to find a buyer. Roberts reduced his asking price from £275 to 75 guineas in 1900 but still no buyer could be found. In 1927, Roberts reworked the painting and the extent of this rework has been difficult to ascertain. Using X-ray photography, art historians now think that Roberts simplified the work making it flatter and more abstract, in the modernist style that had come into vogue at that time.
The painting was sold for 500 guineas in 1928, purchased by a Sydney solicitor, J. W. Maund. Maund was a trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and he lent the painting to the gallery—selling it to them five years later. En route to an exhibition in Melbourne in 1956—part of the cultural program of the 1956 Summer Olympics— the painting fell off the back of a truck; the painting was damaged but restored. Tom Roberts' Bailed Up – National Film and Sound Archive McCarthy, Patrick H. Bailed Up: The story behind the painting. Watermark Press. ISBN 0-949284-72-6
Eadith Walker
Dame Eadith Campbell Walker, DBE was an Australian heiress and philanthropist. Eadith Campbell Walker was born at The Rocks, the only child of Scottish parents, Thomas Walker, a merchant, his wife Jane; the family moved to their home, Yaralla, an Italianate mansion on the Parramatta River in Concord West, an inner-western suburb of Sydney. Following the death of her mother, she was raised by Joanna Walker, she and her father carried out numerous charitable works in Australia. When the First World War came she took a special interest in returned soldiers suffering from tuberculosis, had 32 of them at "The Camp" in the grounds of Yaralla Estate from 1917 to 1920. From April 1917 to December 1922 she lent another home at Leura for the same purpose, paid the entire cost of maintenance, it was afterwards made a children's home. She built cottages for elderly men at Yaralla, provided an endowment fund for their upkeep, supported sporting clubs and religious and health institutions, after the First World War, returned soldiers.
She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for philanthropic and charitable services. Dame Eadith died on 8 October 1937, aged 76, she was cremated at the chapel in Rookwood, her ashes were buried in the family grave at St John's Ashfield. She left an estate of £265,000. After providing for many legacies to relations and employees, one-third of the residue of the estate went to the Returned Soldiers' and Sailors' Imperial League of Australia, the real estate to the Red Cross Society. After her death, two-thirds of the income from £300,000 of her father's estate was set aside for the upkeep of the Thomas Walker Hospital, built from 1891-93 with money provided by her father's will. Another £100,000 was used to turn Yaralla into the Dame Eadith Walker convalescent home for men, one-third of the income from another sum of £300,000 was set aside for its maintenance. Both Yaralla and the Thomas Walker Hospital are now listed on the Register of the National Estate.
J. MacCulloch,'Walker, Dame Eadith Campbell', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 12, Melbourne University Press, 1990, pp 356–57. Eadith Walker, The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in the Twentieth Century. Patricia Skehan. "Walker, Eadith". Dictionary of Sydney. Dictionary of Sydney Trust. Retrieved 9 October 2015
Shearing the Rams
Shearing the Rams is an 1890 painting by the Australian artist Tom Roberts. The painting depicts. Distinctly Australian in character, the painting is a celebration of pastoral life and work "strong, masculine labour", recognises the role that the wool industry played in the development of the country. One of the best-known and most-loved paintings in Australia, Shearing the Rams has been described as a "masterpiece of Australian impressionism" and "the great icon of Australian popular art history"; the painting is part of the National Gallery of Victoria's Australian art collection, held at the Ian Potter Centre in Federation Square, Melbourne. Roberts modelled his painting on a shearing shed at what is now called Killeneen, an outstation of the 24,000-hectare Brocklesby sheep station, near Corowa in the Riverina region of New South Wales; the property was owned by the Anderson family, distant relations to Roberts, who first visited the station in 1886 to attend a family wedding. Having decided on shearing as the subject for a painting, Roberts arrived at Brocklesby in the spring of 1888, making around 70 or 80 preliminary sketches of "the light, the atmosphere, the sheep, the men and the work" before returning to the station the following shearing season with his canvas.
Roberts' work was noted by the local press with reports of him "dressed in blue shirt and moleskins... giving the last finishing touches to a picture in oils about 5ft by 4ft."Art historians had thought Roberts completed most of the painting in his Melbourne studio, using the sketches drawn in his time at Brocklesby. In 2003 however, art critic and historian Paul Johnson wrote: "Tom Roberts spent two years, on the spot, painting Shearing the Rams". New evidence was brought to light in 2006 that suggested that Roberts painted much of the work en plein air at the shearing shed itself. In 2006, The National Gallery of Victoria conducted a scientific examination of paint left on a piece of timber salvaged from the now-destroyed shed, where it was thought that Roberts cleaned his brushes; the study confirmed that the paint, in a number of different shades matched the paint used in the painting. The senior curator of art at the NGV, Terence Lane, believes this is strong evidence that much of the work was done on location: "For me, that's evidence of a lot of time spent in that woolshed... all those paint marks and the selection of colours indicates he spent so much time en plein air".
In a seeming anachronism, the painting shows sheep being shorn with blade shears rather than the machine shears which started to enter Australian shearing sheds in the late 1880s. Art historian Terry Smith's suggestion that Roberts presented a deliberately historical vision of shearing has been questioned on account of there being no evidence that electric shears had been introduced to Brocklesby at the time of the painting's composition; the young man carrying the fleece on the left of the painting alludes to the figure of Esau in Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise at the Florence Baptistery. The model for the smiling tar-boy at the centre of the picture, the only figure to make eye contact with the viewer, was a girl, 9-year-old Susan Bourne, who lived until 1979, she assisted Roberts by kicking up dust in the shed to allow him to capture some of the atmosphere. An x-ray study of the painting in 2007, taken while the painting was being cleaned, unveiled Roberts' original sketch of the central shearer.
In that original sketch, the shearer was more upright. John Thallon, a Melbourne frame-maker, provided the frame for many of Roberts' paintings, including this one. Roberts was born in England in 1856 and migrated to Australia with his family in 1869, settling in Collingwood, a working-class suburb of Melbourne. A talented artist, Roberts attended classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School before returning to England in 1881 when he was selected to study at the Royal Academy of Arts. While touring Europe with Australian artist John Peter Russell, Roberts adopted the principles of impressionism and plein air painting and brought them back with him to Australia when he returned in 1885. With like-minded artists, he helped to form the "Heidelberg School" movement, a group of Melbourne-based impressionists who depicted rural life and the bush, with nationalist and regionalist overtones; the Australian colonies celebrated the centenary of European settlement in 1880s, for the first time, Australian-born Europeans outnumbered the immigrant population.
These and other factors fostered strong nationalistic feeling and intense discussion about Australian history and identity. Seeking to develop a national art, Roberts chose agricultural and pastoral subjects that would symbolise the embryonic nation, such as bushranging and shearing. In the 19th-century, wool was a major source of wealth for the colonies, by the 1870s, Australia had become the world's largest wool producer. Historian Geoffrey Blainey states that shearers of that era, like Jackie Howe, were seen as "folk heroes" with shearing tallies reported in local newspapers in a similar manner to sports scores. Shearers inspired popular bush ballads around this time, such as "Click Go the Shears" and the poems of Banjo Paterson. According to Paul Johnson, Shearing the Rams, like works by Heidelberg School member Arthur Streeton, illustrates the tribute paid by Australian artists to their country: " saw the country as a place where hard work and determination were making it the world's paradise".
The painting itself is described by Johnson as a celebration of "the industr
