Mervyn Napier Waller turned from painting seductive nudes to become a leading religious artist

Mystery surrounds the transformation of Mervyn Napier Waller from painter of seductive nudes to leading religious artist.

A detail of Mervyn Napier Waller’s Holy Wisdom stained glass window, at St Stephens Church, Sandy Bay, Tasmania.

A century ago, a man who was to become Australia’s most celebrated religious artist put the last brushstrokes to a watercolour called The Amazons, a picture that shows little more than busty young women, more than 30 of them. Two are on horseback, several hold spears, some wear winged helmets, and others carry quivers of arrows. Several appear to have clinging body armour.

In the 1920s the artist, Mervyn Napier Waller, made several ­such watercolours: Pharaoh’s Daughter is nude but for a close-fitting cap: she tilts her head provocatively, sways her body provocatively and flexes her left arm provocatively. In Caverns of the Sea, three muscular young men adore a naked young woman; The Wanderer features two topless girls who might be in their late teens; The Sleeping Faun, which out-Normans Lindsay, might be regarded as criminally erotic these days. The faun, a white-bearded old man from Roman mythology with horns of a goat, his legs and haunches hairy and ruminant-like, lies prone. Three nude nymphets tease him.

Waller never explained what drove him. His mind and its workings remain shrouded in mystery. He remains an enigma. Decades later and by scores of square metres, his mosaics and stained-glass windows for churches stamped him as Australia’s most prolific and public artist.

In Melbourne alone, the windows include The Crucifixion in St John’s church, Heidelberg, St Luke in St Stephen’s, Darebin, The Souls of the Righteous in Holy Trinity, Williamstown, The Triumphant Christ (in Geelong), and The Transfiguration in St Mark’s in Camberwell. There are many more.

Mural, by Stephen Downes.

If Australians have even heard of Waller, it’s usually only for his windows at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. There are 15 in the Hall of Memory. They depict unsmiling World War I service men and women in uniform. There is a gunner, a nurse, an airman, an artilleryman, and so on. In what Waller called a “monotone of blue and grey”, he wanted to portray a “serenity of ­effect with a dim cathedral light”. For me, the figures are frozen.

Born in 1893, he was a farm boy. His home was Penshurst, a tiny hamlet in western Victoria, and his parents no doubt expected him to stay on to plough the fields and fatten the lambs. Instead, he went to Melbourne’s National Gallery in his teens to learn to paint. Built like a country centre half-back, he never said why. Neither did his mother and father.

His drafting skills emerged immediately and after two years of Frederick McCubbin’s tuition he was exhibiting watercolours and drawings.

Then he enlisted for the Great War and was sent to France. By 1916 he had risen through the ranks, from private to gunner and finally bombardier. But at the Bullecourt battles in the spring of 1917 a mortar ripped through his right shoulder. Four surgical interventions in fewer weeks aimed to save his painting hand. They failed, and his arm was amputated to prevent his bleeding out. He was repatriated the following January.

Artist Mervyn Napier Waller's glass mosaic, I'll Put A Girdle Round About The Earth, on the facade of the Newspaper House building in Collins Street, Melbourne.

Back in Melbourne, you might expect Waller to wallow in self-pity, but in less than a year he had taught his left hand to do what his right used to, as he put it. A folio of brilliant war sketches was exhibited – and sold – in 1918-19 in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Hobart.

The only voice recording of this eminent Australian who died in 1972 runs for about 15 minutes. He says nothing in particular in a dour Sandy Stone-style monologue. After the war sketches, he says, he “diverted rather to imaginative work”.

Indeed so. Waller’s young naked women are among the most sensuous in Australian art. Relatively small pictures, their figures are exquisitely drafted and classically composed – for the eye’s uncritical pleasure, so to speak.

In his The Art of M. Napier Waller, Nicholas Draffin noted in 1978 that the watercolours that I call erotic – he didn’t – are privately owned, at least two by Waller’s second wife Lorna, who died in 1997. I have been unable to trace their whereabouts.

What made Napier Waller tick is one of Australian art’s biggest mysteries. I suspect that what moved him might have been fascinating. After the erotic watercolours he decided he needed to work on a bigger scale, he said, and he went to Britain and Italy to study mosaics, murals and stained glass-making.

But what really spurred him to paint titillating eroticism in the 1920s, a figurative mural across Keith Murdoch’s Newspaper House in Collins Street a decade later – nude males this time – and construct Christian windows of stained glass from the ’40s into the ’60s will almost certainly never be known.

Waller features in Stephen Downes’s next novel, Mural, published by Transit Lounge, out on September 1.