Public and Private Amateurs

Caroline Jordan, Picturesque Pursuits: Colonial Women Artists and the Amateur Tradition. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2005.

Reviewed by Catherine Speck

The terms ‘amateur’ and ‘professional have always been vexed ones for feminist researchers and Caroline Jordan’s wonderfully engaging Picturesque Pursuits adds fuel to the fire. Her focus is on Australian women whose amateur work is now in public collections, although the watercolours and drawings tend to be housed in libraries, historical societies and natural history museums rather than in art galleries.

The book’s starting point was a chance remark made to the author as a young curator at Bendigo Art Gallery in the mid - 1980s. She was asked to develop an exhibition around the theme of the goldrush and suggested women artists of the era, but was told she couldn’t possibly show the work of these artists because ‘there weren’t any!’ This puzzled Jordan who was then informed, ‘there were, but they were amateurs’ (p. 4). This tantalizing contradiction, which lies at the heart of this book, whetted the appetite of our curator who postponed the idea of the exhibition and, instead, spent the next part of her life exploring the evidence surrounding this dilemma.

Jordan takes her readers into the lives of Georgina McCrae, Louisa Anne Meredith, Mary Morton Allport, Fanny McLeay, Jane Currie, sisters Martha Berkeley and Teresa Walker, Elizabeth Gould, sisters Harriet and Helena Scott, and others who settled or were born in colonial Australia. In doing so, she unravels the myriad roles of amateur art in domestic and public life for these women.

Drawing has always been on the menu of a middle to upper - middle class young woman’s education in ‘accomplishments’, along with music, languages, taste in dress and so on, but the peripatetic ways in which young ladies leant how to draw is revealing. In today’s era where there is a school for everything, we ask ourselves: how did amateur women artists learn to draw at home? Some had private tutors, but they tended to have diverging teaching styles and tutors came and went; others turned to drawing manuals. Jordan takes us on a fascinating journey into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ prevailing beliefs about an ornamental education which deemed reading and music ‘risky’, since they inflamed the passions and led young women into decadent society. Medical texts and conduct manuals of the day advocated staying at home and engaging in ‘innocent occupations’ of drawing, botany and horticulture (16), although this involved some delicate side-stepping around a plant’s reproductive system! This cult of nature was thought to be well suited to women who had ‘delicate female nerves’.

Against this restrictive background in Britain, two determined women Georgina McCrae and Fanny McLeay learnt to draw prior to settling in Australia. Georgina had a series of tutors with radically differing approaches - John Glover taught her to paint a landscape by ‘carry[ing] away a remembrance of scene’, while John Varley taught her to copy his own work, another standard teaching approach then. Georgina also learnt how to paint miniature portraits in watercolour, without learning to draw the nude figure! Women faced prudish restrictions then before they gained entry in 1860 to the Royal Academy Art Schools. Watercolour too was a favoured medium for amateurs, being compact, portable and clean – in contrast to painting in oils. Fanny McLeay learnt how to draw flowers by copying. Drawing manuals even pointed out this didn’t require ‘anything so difficult as learning perspective, practice in anatomy or invention in composition’ (34). She too had a mixed series of tutors, but was fortunate her father was secretary of the Linnean Society and, as Jordan suggests, perhaps he could see ‘the benefit of having a skilful assistant to record his specimens’ (42). Fanny became a good artist, as her consummate later watercolour, Study of Australian, European and South African flowers, c. 1830 shows. Before leaving England she exhibited work in the amateur section at the Royal Academy. The detailed study of Georgina’s and Fanny’s ornamental education prompts a radical rethinking of amateur status with Jordan commenting that ‘their experiences show that being amateur was no bar to being able to wrest a first-class technical training out of the private system’ (50).

Life in Sydney, Hobart and Perth in the early years of settlement was challenging for these amateur women artists. Their record of life then is invaluable historically and Jordan meticulously shows the place of amateur art in these early days. Fanny and her family settled in Sydney in 1826 and she completed early and now important drawings of Indigenous Australians and convicts. Jane Currie arrived with her naval officer spouse in 1829 at Garden Island in the Swan River Colony, and she too documented her new country in a panorama – but with some accommodation of the facts. Apparently following contact with local Indigenous inhabitants there was conflict, but Jane Currie shows only harmony. Mary Morton Allport settled in Van Diemen’s Land in 1831. Jordan recounts how these women had to find time to draw because there were competing demands on their time like sewing, and they were presented with limited subject matter. Louisa Anna Meredith, who had settled in Tasmania, found her life as an amateur artist very difficult at first. Lady Franklin, the Governor’s wife looked to art as a way of civilising this colony.

Jordan aptly calls these women artists ‘public amateurs’. In the absence of photographs, women sent back ‘home’ drawings of the interiors of their new homes and furniture they had made up. Their art also circulated in their new environs around the immediate family circle and in the wider community, and it was held up for approval to visitors. In colonial culture, amateur art was a ‘profoundly social act’; it was the ‘social glue that women used to hold the extended family together and to keep the family integrated into the wider community’ (94). This amateur art differs greatly from its earlier manifestations in Britain. Women also taught their art skills to others and some even supplemented the family income this way. Amateur artists like Adelaide’s Mary Hindmarsh also painted key figures of the day and important public events like Feast given to natives by Governor Gawler, October 1838, Adelaide SA. This notion of public amateurs throws a new light on domestic art, which as Jordan observes, was inseparable from the wider public economy in the colonial era.

Other women artists are called ‘private professionals’. This is the most gut-wrenching section of the book. It focuses in part on two very accomplished botanical and natural history artists, Harriet and Helena Scott, who illustrated their entomologist father’s work for many years. They did so without payment, but in 1866 Harriet - whose father’s affairs had deteriorated - was forced to seek work for payment. Jordan carefully details the surreptitious ways in which she sought payment for scientific illustrations from her long time friend Ned Ramsay, curator at the Australian Museum. Aware of the social stigma and humiliation involved in accepting payment for her work, she wrote to him ‘above all … let nobody know you are paying me for doing them for you ... I should be sorry that anybody else should know and Papa would be mad’ (53). Other intriguing cases of private professionals include early Governors’ wives, Elizabeth Macquarie and Eliza Darling, who designed major public gardens and public buildings; and ‘family firms’ in which natural history illustrators like Elizabeth Gould were integral to the John Gould product. The distinguishing feature between an amateur and a professional is payment for work done but, as Jordan points out, accepting ‘regular and necessary’ payment which ‘might indicate professionalism’ was not necessarily ‘a sign of increased status’ (56). Finally, Jordan looks at artists like Louisa Meredith who imported the picturesque tradition into their amateur style in order to mask and even neutralise the harsh conditions in which they found themselves, where there was the killing of Indigenous Tasmanians, as well as indiscriminate clearing of land and culling of bird and animal life.

This amateur tradition was complex and multi-layered, and was deeply rooted in the conditions of its time. Jordan’s fine weaving of personal accounts balanced by a steady theoretical line of argument mirrors the private/public role of amateur art in colonial Australia. This is an important book for art historians, and for feminist historians and cultural scholars too. It is also beautifully designed, in keeping with its subject matter.

Dr Catherine Speck is Associate Professor and Reader in Art History at the University of Adelaide, coordinator of the Graduate Program in Art History run jointly by the University of Adelaide and the Art Gallery of South Australia, and author of the recently published book Painting Ghosts: Australian Women Artists in Wartime.