Apple fell close to tree lover

Given Nora Heysen’s talent and her parentage, her lack of significant work came as a disappointment.

Still life (1934) by Nora Heysen. Picture: Lou Klepac

In past centuries, it was not unusual for a female artist to be the pupil of her father. It was hard for a girl to be trained otherwise, for you could not send a daughter away to live in the house of a master, sharing quarters with his other apprentices. In most cases, too, it was thought inappropriate for women to draw from the nude, especially from a male model. This is why when Johann Zoffany painted a group portrait of the founding members of the Royal Academy set in the life class, the two female members (the academy was founded in 1768, the painting is 1771-72) had to be included as portrait sketches hanging on the wall.

In her father’s house, a girl could be trained in a safe environment and could even have access to the life model at his discretion. She also could benefit from his support and his network of patrons and clients and perhaps above all derive strength and purpose from paternal encouragement.

Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia were the most famous father-daughter pair in art history. In Australia, Hans Heysen and Nora Heysen are equally interesting, and this exhibition, which presents their work together for the first time, allows us to follow the initially connected but increasingly div­ergent trajectories of the two artists.

There was a tendency in the second half of the past century, with the triumph of modernism, to depreciate the work of Hans Heysen as inherently conservative or traditional. The extreme of this attitude could be seen in a recent book that purported to be a discussion of Australian art and why it mattered, but gave no serious consideration to Heysen.

But well before that, it had became habitual to consider several female artists of the interwar years as the most interesting of their time because they dealt with new urban themes and used a brighter, modernist palette.

Droving into the light (1914–21) by Hans Heysen.

A couple of these artists are indeed significant and appealing. One is Clarice Beckett, who was rediscovered relatively recently after a period of neglect. She was the most original pupil of Max Meldrum and, at her best, her work is full of a quietly intense and poetic sensibility; too often, though, the execution is slight and tentative.

The other is Grace Cossington-Smith, who produced some remarkable images of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in particular and much later in life, in her home in Wahroonga, some strangely introspective views of the outside world seen through doorways and in mirrors — nature as the world beyond the interior. But much of her other work, when seen in surveys, is surprisingly weak. She seems to lose herself in the complexity of nature rather than finding a way of articulating it. No doubt at a certain point we grew tired of the endless reproductions of Heysen’s paintings of majestic gum trees, and in Conversations with the Bride (1974-75) — at the height of the “death of painting” — Imants Tillers collaged elements from Marcel Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare (1915-23) on to reproductions of Heysen landscapes, setting up a deliberate conflict between these utterly disparate kinds of visual sign.

Self portrait (1932) by Heysen. Picture: Lou Klepac

But looking at Heysen’s work afresh, and at his achievement in a variety of media from drawing and printmaking to watercolour and oils, it is clear that he was by far the most able and gifted painter in Australia between the wars. If you think back to Sydney Moderns (2013), a comprehensive survey of the lively but rather lightweight cultural scene in Sydney in the same period, there was not one painter in that exhibition who could equal Heysen.

It is not just a matter of quality, though, but equally one of genre or style. The bright and colourful pictures of Sydney moderns are like jazz or jazz-pop while Heysen is classical. A lot of the light modernism produced in Sydney was expressly designed to decorate chic interiors; it was easy viewing, like easy listening. Heysen requires closer looking, which came to feel like too much effort for audiences trained to instant gratification.

Heysen was clearly something of a prodigy, and he was fortunate enough for his talent to be recognised by a group of Adelaide gentlemen who jointly contributed to a private study bursary that allowed him to travel and study in Europe for four years from 1899 to 1903. Some winners of such travelling bursaries make better use of them than others, but Heysen was exemplary, looking avidly and painting assiduously wherever he went, learning from Constable and Turner, the Venetians, Claude, Corot and the impressionists alike.

Early pictures from this period include a fresh and lively view of the Boulevard du Montparnasse from his room in Paris, oil sketches of Venice, and a landscape in Capri in a bright Mediterranean palette with Claudean shepherds in the right foreground.

Returning to Australia, he quickly made his mark, winning the Wynne Prize for landscape in 1904 for Mystic Morn, then earning the same prize again in 1909 for a watercolour, Summer. The first of these works is impressive but the second is a work of astonishing virtuosity: probably no painter in Australia has ever possessed such acute sensitivity to landscape and weather conditions, or the mastery of tone, hue and colour temperature with which to articulate the subtlest effects of nature. It is not at all surprising that one of his daughters reported that he could forecast weather changes from the subtly varying qualities of light on the horizon.

Nora Heysen’s Ruth (1933). Picture: © Lou Klepac

Heysen had a natural sense of composition too, as we see from several fine drawings and, interestingly, from a series of early monotypes. Because monotypes are painted on to copper or glass, then taken as a single impression, they convey the acute awareness that everything in a composition, near and distant elements, must all come together into a single flat pattern in the simultaneous impressing of the print.

If Heysen departs from what can broadly be called the classical tradition of landscape, as renewed by various masters of the 19th century, it is in deciding that the majestic eucalypts that he loved to paint could be represented mainly by their trunks, cutting off their crowns in most cases. He makes this seem plausible in his greatest compositions, such as Droving into the Light (1914-21) and The Three Gums (1915-20), but on the few occasions when he includes the whole tree, as in Approaching Storm with Bushfire Haze (1912), the composition is more satisfying.

Curiously, this lover of trees was also, later in his career, drawn to the bald and treeless Flinders Ranges, thus establishing the outback wilderness for the first time as a site symbolic of the Australian experience. He is able to make pictorial sense of these bleak hills, which might seem shapeless to a lesser artist, through his extraordinary grasp of light and hue, so we feel our eyes are being opened to something never seen before. His ink drawings from this period are notable too, especially for their clear intelligence and, even in his later years, a decisive aesthetic sense.

Nora Heysen, too, was clearly something of a prodigy, and growing up under her father’s guidance she received an initiation into the art of painting that no other Australian artist has enjoyed. The still-life of eggs she painted at 16 show that she could already do what most art school graduates cannot do today. Her later and more ambitious still-life compositions show her assimilating the study of Dutch still life and mastering relations of tone and colour. There is an impressive series of early portraits, for several of which a handsome but big-boned local peasant girl called Ronda modelled, though Nora called her Ruth in the title of one painting. Nora may have been attracted to and certainly seems to have been fascinated by her as a subject. But Ronda was evidently very conservative and apparently fled when Nora suggested she pose nude.

Later in London the suggestion of ambivalent sexuality arose again when she briefly shared a flat with a friend, Evie, whose beauty is only hinted at in the charming painting of Evie at breakfast but fully revealed in a remarkable drawing. Nora’s parents were uncomfortable with the arrangement, and Nora had to ask Evie to move out.

The period abroad, and away from her father’s influence, was ultimately not beneficial. People she came into contact with in London thought her style old-fashioned and encouraged her to paint more freely. Perhaps she could have evolved organically towards a greater fluency if she had persisted with her own rigorous style, but instead she succumbed to a bland and shopworn form of late impressionism, with no connection to the living modernism of her time. The irony is that the new realism of the late 1920s and the 30s — with Meredith Frampton, Christian Schad, Edward Hopper, Balthus and others — was much closer to her own early and supposedly conservative style.

The still life of corn cobs of 1938 makes a rather sad contrast with the masterful dish of quinces she had painted only a few years before. And somehow Nora never really recovered from this period. Her later still lifes of flowers mostly lack character, with a few charming exceptions such as a small floral piece in a Delft vase from c. 1946.

Her best work in later years was in portraiture, and in the documentary paintings and drawings she did as a war artist in New Guinea during World War II. One of her finest portraits is of Adrian Feint (1940), whose bookplates were discussed here a year ago, wearing blue overalls, pausing in the process of engraving a wood block and looking away into the distance with a dreamy and melancholy expression.

Equally memorable is the portrait of Robert Black, a young specialist in tropical medicine, who is also the subject of one of her best war studies, in which he is shown in his laboratory. She fell in love with Black, whose own marriage was faltering — there is a touching and erotic drawing of him lying naked in bed — and after the war the two lived together for 10 years until they finally were able to marry in 1953.

There is no escaping the fact Nora’s career was ultimately disappointing. Born in 1911, she was 34 when the war ended and should have been reaching maturity as a painter. With all her ability, why did she do so little of significance? Perhaps she had nothing much to say; perhaps, like other so-called realist artists, she was discouraged by the sterile fashion for abstraction. Or perhaps it was because she did not follow her father into landscape. One can see why, for it would have been hard to avoid being overwhelmed by his example; but at least nature is, as we see from his career, a source of inexhaustible renewal.

Hans and Nora Heysen National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, to July 28