Ned Kelly, Sidney Nolan: Australian heroes

Ned Kelly, Australia’s most famous bushranger, was part of a Irish- Catholic-Australian family who lived in the North East of Victoria. The entire extended family was constantly in trouble with the police and courts, usually over low level crimes like cattle-duffing. Most people then (and since) believed the police were more corrupt than the criminals.

(top) Old Melbourne Gaol

(centre) Ned Kelly, day before he was hanged 1880.

(bottom) Kelly home, Glenrowan

That changed in 1878 when the Kelly Gang’s low level crimes changed to bank robberies, hostage taking, derailing trains and killing of policemen sent to capture them. In response to these killings the Victorian parliament did two things. Firstly it passed the Felons' Ap­prehension Act which outlawed the gang and invited any­one to shoot them. There was no need for an arrest and trial. Sec­ondly they posted a £8000 reward in Feb 1879 for the capture of the gang!

Since the Kelly Gang’s rampage of 1878-80, Ned Kelly has been de­scribed by many, especially the police and courts, as a crim­inal, thief and killer. For fewer people, he was seen as an oppressed, impoverished family man who railed against colonial authority and colonial injustice.

Ned Kelly, 1946
by Sidney Nolan

In the arts, we find the same div­ide. Anderson Brown's Literary Blog responded to Peter Car­ey’s novel: “The Irish identity of Kelly and his family, and the economic and le­g­al injust­ices to which poor transported Irish were subjected by the col­onial authorities, are among the real subjects of the book. Ned is a stub­born enough force of nature to hold our symp­athy without hero­ics”. Stephanie Trigg at humanities researcher was working on Ned Kelly’s associations with Robin Hood. She felt the pres­erv­ation of Kelly’s last boot spoke volumes about the iconic status of Kelly, and the myst­ique and veneration in which he is held. It looked very much like a saint's relic. Bartlett’s Blog suggests that the Kelly saga was a story which showed how one injustice can breed another, and how systemic oppression often begets violent responses. According to Bartlett, this is a lesson we still seem not to have learned 130 years later.

Over the decades the change in community perceptions about Ned Kelly has been slow but constant. Now I am suggesting that Sidney Nolan’s most famous art work, a series of stylised descriptions of Ned Kelly in the Australian Outback 1946-7, played a very important role in the change. I am not inter­ested in issues of connoisseurship here; just in Nolan’s iconography.

Nolan’s Ned Kelly series followed the main sequence of the Kelly story. However Nolan did not intend the series to be an authentic history of these events. Rather the series became the setting for the artist’s thinking about family, loyalty, injustice and betrayal. Because the tragic Depression and WW2 had just finished, Nolan had a challenge. He wanted to create and de­fine episodes in Australian nationalism, to retell the story of a hero. I would not have chosen Ned Kelly as a national hero, but Nolan’s Kelly became a man who resisted tyranny and pursued freedom at any cost.

Death of Constable Scanlon, 1946
by Sidney Nolan

The iconography was simple and powerful. In Ned Kelly 1946, the sim­ple geometry of Kelly’s armour suited modern art. Nolan just placed a pair of eyes into Kelly’s helmet which added life to its austere shape. The Death of Constable Scanlon 1946, now in the National Gal­lery Canberra, showed a somersaulting police trooper, a startled horse and a tent. The Trial 1947 depicting Ned Kelly in the court room, surr­ounded by the judge, police and jury.

Nolan clearly wanted to give his audience an insight into Australian history. His series created an artificially simplistic picture but either fostered or created the view that Ned Kelly, in his abstracted armour, was an Australian icon.

Above all, he considered that it was ‘a story arising out of the bush and ending in the bush’ eg matthewham discussed the complete fusion of Kelly with his horse, something I had not thought of myself. Remember that the Kelly story did not belong in Australian cities. Instead it was a way for Nolan to paint the Australian landscape with new eyes, with the story creating a special awareness of NE Victoria’s landscape.

Nolan himself acknowledged that his depiction of Kelly, with a black, square and impenetrable mask was difficult. But for some reason, he supposed to do with the nature of the century or with modern art, it worked out well. Nolan realised this was a story he could put into the landscape by investing the human psyche in a very simple shape.

The Trial, 1947
by Sidney Nolan

Heide in Melbourne was where Nolan painted the first canvasses in his Ned Kelly series. Eventually, in 1977, the series was given to the National Gallery of Australia. Heide Museum of Modern Art also has examples of Nolan's work.

House for an Art Lover by Charles Rennie Mackintosh

One Charles Rennie Mackintosh building is particularly amazing, but not because it was designed 108 years ago and later rescued and renovated. Rather because it was designed 108 years ago and only built very recently.

In 1901 Charles and Margaret entered a competition in a German de­s­ign magazine to design a House for an Art Lover that had to be in a 'thoroughly modern style'. Their entry was disqu­al­if­ied on the grounds of late submission, yet it was awarded a sp­ec­ial prize by the jury: for "the pronounced personal quality, the novel and austere form and the uniform configuration of interior and exter­ior." The drawings were published in the magazine Deutsche Kunst while the full portfolio was published under the title Meister der Innenkunst. Then the designs submitted to the competition were exhibited at the International Exposition in Turin.

Mackintosh’s designs for the House remained just that: plans on pap­er. Decades later, in 1988, someone in Glasgow had the idea of con­structing the Art Lover’s House, of bringing Mackintosh’s plans to fruition.

White house with low relief decoration

As envisaged on the original documents, The House for an Art Lover is large and rect­ang­ular. The external walls are painted white and the main facades are decorated with a few Art Nouveau low relief sculptures, created in sandstone.

Hall and stairs

The front door leads into the grand but rather dark double-height hall. The visitor can look from the main hall into the dining room, a room with very high dark panels that follow the style of the darkish hall. The black table with the black high-backed chairs stand in the centre of the dining room, and dominate the space. Clover Signs Blog asked “have you ever wondered what inspired, or possessed Charles Rennie Mackintosh?” This is a question I have asked myself often. Two rooms are so dark and masculine.

Dining room

On the other hand, there is a very light and feminine space: the music room. The sun streams into the music room, beaming on the light colours of the walls and the decorative elements. Note in particular how luscious the piano, chairs, light fittings and murals look. I don’t know anything about Japanese design, but I am relying here on Daithai C Apparently CRM liked the fact that Japanese arts furniture and design focused on the quality of the space, which was meant to evoke a calming and organic feeling to the interior. I hope that is so because the Music Room is spacious, light filled and calming. Not PC rightly said that Glasgow has never looked so sunlit, or so alive.

Music room

The Art Lover’s House at Bellahouston Park was opened in late summer 1990. The built house and gardens are now an essential element in the Mackin­t­osh heritage trail.

Victorian Spiritualism: Arthur & George

Arthur & George, a novel by Julian Barnes

In late-Victorian Britain, I read the interwoven tale of two very different young men: George, the son of a Midlands vicar and Arthur, growing up in well-mannered Ed­inburgh. George, determined to make his life’s work in Law, accidentally became involved in a series of nasty and cruel tricks played by local lads. Arthur studied medicine and made his mother happy, while eventually finding out that medicine wasn’t what he really wanted to do.

I am passionate about Barnes books, although in this book I found the two concur­rent-but-not-intersecting stories frustrating. It took a very long time before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dealt with his wife’s illness and his would-be lover, and was available to move to the very heart of the job in hand. Finally the unrelated lives started to dovetail. George’s family - caring, moral, passive, foreign, fatalistic and in the end inept - could do nothing to save their beloved son and brot­her. Only the author of the world’s most famous detective could save Innocent George.


By the time I had finished the book, I still had no idea if the story was totally fictional, a fictionalised version of a real court case or a well researched, unsensationalised version that really did mes­merise Britain at the end of the C19th. Only when I read the Baby Got Books blog and the dylanwolf reviews did it become clear that the events referred to the infamous Great Wryley Outrages.

Since the story was a fict­ionalised version of actual events, all the more credit to Barnes for handling the big issues of the day: coloured migration, life in the Church of England, increasing role of women in society and British system of justice. Even with these big issues, a summary of the book looks pathetic: Sir Arthur Conan Doy­le, inventor of Sherlock Holmes, lived in Undershaw in Surrey. Doyle met and assisted George Edalji, a small town lawyer in Staffordshire convicted of a crime he didn't commit. End of story. Spiritualism was almost an afterthought in the book, not tackled until the protagonist died.

We need to note that while mediums and magicians might have been fascinating to ordinary families, a surprisingly large number of Victorian scientists and literary figures also became enmeshed in the spiritualism controversy. On the side of the sp­ir­itualists were famous names like Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and George Eliot; Charles Darwin remained a sceptic.

Victorian Spiritualism struck me as somewhat unlikely concept, giv­en the Victorians passion for science, , progress, classification and rat­ion­alism. But The Haunted History Blog suggested that the two were not really incompatible in the Victorian mind. Like many other scien­t­ists in the Victorian era, Spiritualism proved to be an att­ractive opport­un­ity for a particular intellectual (Alfred Russel Wallace) to ex­pl­ore his scientific inquiries. His theory on evolution included the notion that the higher facul­ties of man need more than just Nat­ural Selection for develop­ment. A divine presence was behind Natural Selection, so Spiritualism was where an intellectual could search for answers.

Andrew Lycett, in the The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, agreed. The central paradox of Arthur's life was that this trained doctor and inventor of the super-rational Sherlock Holmes fell completely in thrall to spiritualism. Séances, spirit photos and other weird phen­omena that Holmes would dismiss as mumbo-jumbo proved an endless fascination. Conan Doyle regarded spirit­ual­ism as "a natural exten­s­ion of science." Both Conan Doyle and Holmes personified the Vict­or­ian ethos that sent forth reason to make sense of a confusing and newly godless world.

By the way, the film Dean Spanley (2008) covered the same territory with the same elegance.

****

Since this post was written in March 2009, David Edgar has adapted the novel Arthur & George for the stage. First shown at the Birmingham Rep and then to the Nottingham Playhouse, the strange but true story was apparently much easier to tell on paper than it was to produce for theatre-going audiences. A review in Country Life (31st March 2010) said "the stage adaptation is an awkward mix of detective story, psychodrama and comic pastiche, with a dash of courtroom drama thrown in." Just so!

The Migration Experience in Art: James Tissot

The 2006 Exiles and Emigrants Exhibition in Melbourne was set up to tell the emot­ional stories of the greatest Diaspora in Western history; it was the first time art and objects produced in Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) were used to tell the story of the unprecedented exodus of c15 mill­ion people from Britain. The exhib­ition traced the reasons that drove people from their homeland, their long and diff­ic­u­lt voy­ages, and their struggle to settle in the harsh and often unforgiving Australian climate. The feelings of fear, pain and displacement at leaving one's homeland for a country so foreign and far away were re­v­ealed in these paintings, the National Museum dir­ect­or said.

So why am I interested in a non-British, non-Australian artist who concentrated on society portraits?

Tissot, Goodbye on the Mersey, early 1870s

James Tissot (1836-1902) was born in Nantes. He was raised in a French seaport city and throughout his career, he impressed with his painting of ships, rigging, ports and water. He studied art at Beaux-Arts in Paris and following the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Tissot chose to move to London. There he paint­ed highly finished, beautiful paint­ings of London society.

Many bloggers have turned their attention to Tissot. Scholars and Rogues blog in ArtSunday: love among the ruffles noted that until his lover’s death by suicide in 1882, Tissot was a society painter exiled from high society, who worked for and sold to the successful merchants, bank­ers and brokers of London. “Paint­ings of vulgar middle-class boating parties, port­raits of overdressed ironmongers’ daughters and their pomaded swains in brand-new suits”, sniffed Ruskin.

Still Tissot worked, in constant demand, and in doing so created a marvellously detailed record of a very specific time and place, a can­vas history of dress, manners and values. As Cris, Artist in Oregon noted Tissot’s parents had run a clothing business in his youth and he was something of a dandy himself.

Hollister Hovey found fine portraits of men by Tissot. Not male partners and staff, helping women in their activities, but men as the sole focus of portraitly attention.

Tissot, The Emigrants, c1875

Lines and Colour blog noted that Tissot was also an accomplished etcher, having learned much from Whistler.

Mardecortesbaja was particularly on-topic for me for since the blog focused on Tissot’s attraction to the Port of Lon­d­on and the river Thames. Tissot loved the Thames, its ships and bustle. It may have taken him back to his youth. The blog’s example, Two Friends, was especially dynamic, with its small boat moving forward into a space in front of the picture plane as the taller ships lead our eye backward into the space of the painting, rein­forcing the sense of movement. His paintings with the river as the back­ground have an evocative atmosphere. I agree that a viewer could almost smell the smoke, and hear the shouts of the dockers and watermen.

In my pursuit of emigration art, Tissot’s dockside pictures were an important part of his desire to paint a unique­ly British subject: the Victor­ian problem of emigration. And, it should be noted, all the emigration paintings were created during Tissot’s 11 years in Britain.

They pointed to the sad rest­less­ness of the people waiting on the docks with steamer trunks in By Water/Waiting at the Dockside 1881 and to the tearful waves of those left behind on Goodbye on the Mersey. The central theme of this painting was the leave-taking of a loved son and fiance.

Tissot, Waiting at Dockside, 1881

View the woman climb­ing aboard the ship in The Emigrants c1875. The image showed a woman carrying a small child and a bundle on her left arm, standing on the deck of a ship looking down. There were men in front and behind her but the woman seemed to hover, perhaps because her husband had gone on ahead of her to ? Australia. While she and her child were emig­rating to find a better life, the voyage itself was both dangerous and lonely. Tissot maximised the dramatic backdrop of masts, ropes and flags.

As difficult to find as these images are, the theme of emigration and the conditions that forced people to seek a life overseas fascinated Tissot. Clearly he was interest in the drama of severing ties with one’s native land. In The Two Friends c1881, a man stretch­ed to shake hands with a soldier who leaned out from the rigging of a steamer that was about to pull away from the dock. Other figures engaged in leave taking remained along the edges.


Tissot, The Two Friends (etching)

I value Patricia Tryon Macdonald (ed)'s work Exiles and Emigrants: Epic Journeys to Australia in the Victorian Era, the well written, well produced  catalogue of the exhibition held in Melbourne (from late 2005) and then in Canberra (in 2006). Other recommendations, which I have not read myself, include Eric Richards' Britannia's Children (2004) and David Fitzpatrick's Oceans of Consolation (1994), and Jordana Pomeroy et al., Journeying Women: Victorian Women Artists Travel, Lund Humphries, 2006.