Public Works: Agnes Goodsir

IN the 1920s and 30s, expatriate Australian artist Agnes Goodsir enjoyed stunning success in Paris.

Agnes Goodsir's Girl with Cigarette

IN the 1920s and 30s, expatriate Australian artist Agnes Goodsir enjoyed stunning success in Paris.

She established a reputation for her portraits of people such as Leo Tolstoy, Benito Mussolini and Bertrand Russell, and for still lifes and interiors that captured Parisian life.

She was held in such high esteem by the French that in 1926 she was invited to become a member of the Salon Nationale des Beaux-Arts, the second Australian woman to receive the honour.

But she received little recognition in her home country and, after she died in Paris in 1939, she was largely forgotten.

Incredibly, this started to change in the mid-90s when a relative of Goodsir's walked into Victoria's Bendigo Art Gallery and asked to speak to Karen Quinlan, now the gallery's director.

As a result of this meeting, Quinlan became fascinated with Goodsir's story and her art. Quinlan even travelled to Paris to do further research, visiting Goodsir's former apartment at 18 Rue de l'Odeon, in the heart of the Latin Quarter. On her return, Quinlan curated a show of Goodsir's work, In a Picture Land over the Sea, in 1997 at the Bendigo Art Gallery, which introduced the forgotten painter to a modern audience.

Goodsir, who was born in Portland, Victoria in 1864, studied art from 1898 to 1899 at the Bendigo School of Mines and, encouraged by her teacher, Arthur T. Woodward, left for Paris to continue her training. For the rest of her life she lived in Britain or Paris.

To cement Goodsir's connection with Bendigo, last year the gallery established the $30,000 Goodsir Scholarship, which gives an Australian artist the opportunity to travel and work overseas.

When I visit the Bendigo Art Gallery I'm shown one of Goodsir's paintings, Girl with Cigarette by the gallery's curator, Tansy Curtin. Painted in 1925, this is a portrait of Rachel Dunn, a divorced American who was Goodsir's long-term companion and model for several paintings. Dunn, whom Goodsir nicknamed "Cherry", wears a boldly patterned shawl over a pullover, with a cigarette in hand. Cherry typifies the 20s flapper, a confident and independent woman.

"I guess the really wonderful thing about this painting is the gaze of the sitter, the way she is just simply sitting there staring at you," Curtin says.

"It is interesting because it was the 1920s when the role of women is changing very dramatically. At the time it was quite unusual for women to be painted or photographed smoking.

"And it is Paris, the best place, where all the artists were at that period.

"There is also a wonderful sense of patterning that we get in this period. There is the wonderful Japanese fan and the paisley shawl alludes to the Orient, the strange and the unusual, which is what they were embracing in Paris."

It is thanks to Dunn that about 40 of Goodsir's paintings were returned to Australia following the artist's death. Dunn was concerned about the impending war and the future of the paintings. She wrote to Goodsir's family: "The whole centre of my life was Goodie and . . . I think [the pictures] should be in Australia . . . in time they must have a big place in Australian art."

Dunn sent several paintings to Goodsir's family and to Daryl Lindsay, a former director of the National Gallery of Victoria, so that he could distribute them among state and regional galleries. The location, however, of many paintings remains unknown.

"The foresight and the vision displayed by Rachel Dunn meant that Australia became a repository for the unsold and unowned paintings by the artist," Quinlan says. "The viewer is now in a position to ponder the lost and unknown whereabouts of the remaining paintings, the full extent of her oeuvre, somewhere in the seas between Australia, Britain and France."

Agnes Goodsir
Girl with Cigarette, 1925
Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria.
Bequest of Amy E. Bayne, 1945.
On display.