Love, absence, loss in National Portrait Gallery’s Australian Love Stories

Trying to forget the past; unhappy marriage; comfortable alone? If you look close enough you’ll find clues about the sitter.

An evening at Yarra Cottage, Port Stephens 1857 by Maria Brownrigg. Picture: National Portrait Gallery

Australian Love Stories
National Portrait Gallery, until August 1

It is no surprise to find an exhibition about love in a portrait gallery, since both the art of drawing and the practice of sculpture, according to an ancient legend, arose from love. Pliny relates the story in his Natural History: a young Corinthian maiden whose lover was about to go away on a journey traced the shadow of his profile on the wall. Her father, a potter known as Butades or Dibutades, then modelled a relief likeness in clay and fired it; this portrait was said to have been preserved in the shrine of the nymphs at Corinth until the destruction of the city by the Romans in 146 BC.

As this story reminds us, however, it is not only love but absence and loss that motivate portraiture. Portraits are produced as monuments to preserve the memory of the living after they have departed; sometimes portraits are even painted posthumously, although the result is seldom satisfactory. But equally portraits can appeal to the longing to see the features of those who, while still alive, are far away: travelling, at war or living in another land.

This longing is well-attested in early modern literature, from the time when portraiture was once again flourishing after its recovery in the Renaissance, and when it became possible to carry around miniature portraits in lockets. There are some fine examples of miniature portraits in this exhibition, particularly those of Captain John Lort Stokes and his wife (c. 1841) and of Mortimer Lewis and his wife (c. 1828). Lewis, as Colonial Architect, designed many important buildings in Sydney, including the Supreme Court at Taylors Square, the first example of severe Doric style in Australia, and the handsome original facade of the Australian Museum.

Mr Mortimer Lewis c. 1828 by an unknown artist and Mrs Elizabeth Lewis c. 1830 by an unknown artist. Image: National Portrait Gallery

The demand for portraits of absent friends and family, as I have mentioned before, naturally grew in the age of colonial expansion, when so many families were separated by vast distances and when departing settlers might never see parents or siblings again. As it happened this growth in demand coincided with the invention of photography, and the small format of early photographic images made them the direct heir to the miniature portrait.

By the middle of the century, and especially after the invention of the negative allowed one photograph to be made into multiple prints, the new format of the carte-de-visite became immensely popular as a portable miniature portrait. Examples here include pictures of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, whose adoption of the new medium helped to make it so fashionable.

Also from the mid-19th century are three group portraits of families, all on a small scale so that the individual heads are no bigger than those in a traditional miniature. One of these, The MacKenzie Family (1846), shows the family in their home, Adlington Hall, in Lancashire, some years before Mrs Mackenzie, after the death of her husband, emigrated to Australia with her children.

The peculiarity of this picture is that all the figures are silhouettes, cut out of black paper and stuck on a painted background. The profile, as we see in Renaissance medals, is the easiest kind of likeness to capture, but it results in a strangely stilted composition in which all the members of the family have to sit in pairs facing each other.

The other two group portraits make a telling contrast. George and Jemima Billet and family (c. 1852) is the picture of a now prosperous couple whose parents had been convicts. The painting is executed in a slightly naïve style with large heads and eyes, but most striking is the way the figures are set against a complete blank background, as though literally erasing a past that they would rather forget.

An Evening at Yarra Cottage, Port Stephens (1857), by Maria Caroline Brownrigg, shows her own respectable as well as prosperous family enjoying an evening together. Unlike the Billets, the Brownriggs are depicted in an interior full of details that speak of a relaxed but cultured environment: the son sits at the piano, which he has just been playing. The walls are hung with landscape paintings (perhaps by Maria?) and a bookcase is full of volumes. One of the daughters is doing needlework, but another is reading a book and a third is writing in her journal.

Most of the remaining pictures in the exhibition are focused on couples, but one that stands alone from the mid-19th century is the portrait of Lola Montez, famous as a Spanish dancer and courtesan but in reality an Irish girl who became the mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, apparently helping to turn his people against their formerly popular king. She later spent some time in America and then Australia where she performed her famous and revealing Spanish Spider Dance to the delight of audiences on the gold fields.

Another, but more accomplished actress, Julia Matthews, appears in a studio portrait that is tellingly not matched with the little portrait head of Robert O’Hara Burke. She was a precociously talented 16-year-old when Burke first met her, and around 20 in this portrait.

She rejected him, but he still made her the beneficiary of his will. She subsequently married her theatre manager who treated her poorly; according to the Dictionary of Australian Biography, “the only value that Mumford placed on his wife was as ‘a machine for grinding out golden sovereigns for him to waste in drink and debauchery’.”

The exhibition contains many pictures that will be recognised by and appeal to the general public, but the most interesting ones tend to be of artists and their models. There is, for example, Tom Roberts’s portrait of his wife Lily, painted in London some 14 years after their marriage in 1896; she was a skilled frame-maker, and made the frame for this picture. It is an affectionate painting, but not an evocation of young love, and the sense of distance is exacerbated by the fact that the self-portrait with which it is hung was painted another 14 years later, in 1924.

More complicated is the relationship of Rupert Bunny and his French model and wife Jeanne Morel. Once again, his portrait of Jeanne is dated to around 1902, while his self-portrait is from around the time she died in 1933; in contrast to the dashing red-chalk drawing in the AGNSW of a handsome young man with a dashing moustache (c. 1895), here we see a tired, ageing and perhaps bereaved man, around the time he finally left the cosmopolitan world of Paris to return to Melbourne.

Portrait of the artist's wife c. 1902 by Rupert Bunny. Picture: National Gallery of Victoria

The relationship itself remains mysterious: the beautiful Jeanne is ubiquitous, often as a sumptuous nude, in the compositions Bunny painted in his heyday and exhibited successfully in Paris, and yet there seems to be evidence of homosexual affairs in his youth; how happy he and Jeanne were together after they eventually married has been the subject of speculation which can never be resolved.

The romantic affairs of Bunny’s contemporary and fellow cosmopolitan George Lambert and his family are even more difficult to understand with any certainty, although things became much clearer with the NGA’s monographic exhibition on the artist in 2007. He had two sons with his wife Amy: Maurice who grew up to be a sculptor, and Constant, who was a composer and conductor and in turn father of Kit Lambert, manager of the rock group The Who (the family is the subject of Andrew Motion’s The Lamberts, 1986).

But at the same time Lambert seems to have had a passionate though perhaps platonic relationship with the beautiful and elegant Thea Proctor, of whom he made several remarkable portraits.

She was evidently very close to him, too, but was quite likely a lesbian, which may explain why nothing came of the suggestion of marriage to the elegant and eligible William Alison Russell, here in Lambert’s portrait. But most remarkable is the way that both Amy and Thea – as well as the two boys – are combined in some of Lambert’s most substantial works, as though symbolising the two ideals of love that he was trying to bring into balance in his own life; one maternal and sustaining, the other exciting and inspiring.

One surprising pleasure of this exhibition is to discover the relatively youthful self-portrait of another contemporary, Agnes Goodsir at the age of 36 in 1900, the year she first arrived in Paris. I had not previously seen this picture, which is in a private collection and does not seem to be online; the only portrait of the artist available on the web seems to be a rather dour photograph taken 20 years later. She was one of a number of Australian female artists living in Europe in the Edwardian period, most of whom were lesbians. Like Bunny, she was successful in France, but practically unknown in Australia and forgotten after her death in Paris in 1939. Several striking portraits of her model and companion Cherry survived, however, and they led eventually to her rediscovery.

Self portrait 1900 by Agnes Goodsir. Picture: National Portrait Gallery

For emotional complication and moral confusion, it would be hard to go past the collection of photographs by Albert Tucker of life at Heide, the house of his patrons John and Sunday Reed. There is a tender picture of his wife Joy Hester sleeping with their little son Sweeney, another of Joy smiling as Sidney Nolan holds up the little boy, another of John and Sunday holding Sweeney – and Sidney and Joy walking along the beach, and finally a memorable one of Tucker himself in the mirror with Joy.

But the reality behind these pictures was far darker than anything else in this exhibition: John and Sunday were childless – she had undergone a hysterectomy after contracting gonorrhea from a lover; Sidney was having an affair with Sunday, which he would later break off cruelly only to marry John’s sister who looked uncannily like him; Joy would abandon Tucker and her son – probably not by Tucker but another lover – and run away with another man; Sweeney would be adopted by John and Sunday and raised by them but would later commit suicide with a drug overdose in 1979, at the age of 34.

Far more balanced was the relationship between Patrick White and Manoly Lascaris, the young Greek he had met in Alexandria during the war, as revealed in a brilliantly composed photography by Max Dupain.

Patrick White and Manoly Lascaris 1987 by Max Dupain. Picture: National Portrait Gallery

At first sight, the picture is not one of warmth or intimacy, let alone passion.

The author sits on the right, as though absorbed in thought; Manoly sits in the foreground and on the left, looking to the right, holding one of their pugs under his right arm. There is no eye contact, and each may seem to some extent alone; and yet the solitude is only apparent, shared with another in a bond of implicit trust and harmonious co-existence.