Inside Geelong Gallery as historic colonial art treasures go on show

Geelong Art Gallery houses colonial treasures and contemporary prints alongside the popular Archibald Prize, offering visitors a journey through Australian art history.

Frederick McCubbin’s A Bush Burial at Geelong Gallery.

The Geelong Art Gallery is showing the Archibald Prize at the moment, but one can’t hold that against it, because the notoriety of the show makes it a huge attraction at a regional gallery, and that means valuable ticket sales. And as we know from the financial woes of several of our big galleries at the moment, ticket sales do matter.

Fortunately there are other options for more discriminating audiences in Geelong. The first of these is a collection of some of the most important pictures from the permanent collection – displaced by the Archibald, which now occupies the main gallery space – exhibited under the title Views of Geelong and beyond. The display includes four important landscapes of the colonial period: Eugene von Guerard’s View of Geelong (1856) along with William Duke’s earlier and closer view of the growing city in Geelong from Mr Hiatt’s Barrabool Hills (1851), as well as a beautiful smaller landscape by Von Guerard and an expansive view by Abram Louis Buvelot.

Geelong was the main port for access to Ballarat during the gold rush that started in the year Duke painted his view, and it grew rapidly over the ensuing years. A series of hand-coloured engravings by ST Gill record its busy streets, full of prosperous men and women, in 1856 and 1857.

The paintings too include interesting figures. Aboriginal figures stand prominently in the foreground of Duke’s composition, outside the fence that marks the settled area; but before we leap to conclusions, there is also an Aboriginal camp within the fence. Von Guerard has an ox-drawn wagon of hopeful miners heading towards Ballarat, and a single figure on foot coming back in the opposite direction, presumably a dry allusion to the high failure rate for individual miners, even during a gold rush that enriched the new colony of Victoria.

On the opposite wall hangs one of the first works purchased for the new Geelong collection in 1900: Frederick McCubbin’s A Bush burial (1890). The subject of this picture, a young pioneer family burying a child, most likely their son, belongs to 19th-century genre; but McCubbin, who was an important member of the Heidelberg Group, brings a plein-air freshness to the landscape and an understated naturalism and emotional restraint to the figures that allows the sadness of the scene to speak for itself. It was McCubbin’s training in figure-drawing that also allowed him later to paint his triptych, The Pioneer (1904, NGV), a summation of important themes in Heidelberg painting.

A couple of images from or associated with this display are echoed in the other current exhibition at Geelong, another in a series I have reviewed here in the past, drawn from the extensive holdings of the Colin Holden collection of Australian and international prints. The present selection of works sets contemporary Australian works inspired by Renaissance or Baroque originals, or sometimes by paintings or sculptures, side by side, where possible, with their sources or with other similar pieces.

Two large etchings inspired by Albrecht Duerer’s famous Melencolia I (1514) open the exhibition and are particularly interesting and thoughtful examples of borrowing and reinterpretation. They are shown not with the original engraving, but an astonishingly close and faithful copy made just less than a century later by the Flemish Jan or Johannes Wierix (1602).

Eugene Von Guerard’s View of Geelong (1856) at Geelong Galler.

No engraving has ever been subjected to the same closeness of analysis as Melencolia I, which was discussed in detail by Erwin Panofsky in a scholarly study published in 1923, later incorporated into Panofsky, Klibansky and Saxl’s Saturn and melancholy (1964). This fundamental work of scholarship sets the engraving in the context of the humoral system of physiology and psychology, which goes back to classical Greece and continued to underpin medical thinking into the early modern period. In this theory the cosmos is composed of the four elements, air, fire, water and earth, which correspond, in the human microcosm, to the four humours of blood, yellow bile, phlegm and melancholy.

Serious imbalances of the humours led to disease, but a lesser preponderance of one or the other determined our temperament. That of artists and intellectuals tended to be melancholy, and governed by the planet Saturn, hence the title of Rudolf and Margot Wittkower’s Born under Saturn (1963). Duerer’s engraving thus illustrates an inherent condition of the artist but also of all men of genius, bent on understanding the nature of the world but frustrated by intellectual and philosophical conundrums.

The two modern prints, by Ray Arnold and Ian Westacott, were produced as part of a collaborative project in 2022 in which the two artists – one in Scotland and the other in Tasmania – made etchings of the 18 enigmatic objects in Duerer’s composition and sent them to each other. These two plates, however, represent the allegorical figure of melancholy without the objects. One has been etched on to the copper plate in the same orientation as the original, resulting in a reversed image; the other has been etched in reverse and thus ends up the correct orientation. The two images are technically very proficient, but because they are etchings rather than engraving, they are both more casual and sketchy in form and more individual in style.

A couple of the other early modern engravings are of great interest in themselves, and also remind us of the importance of inscriptions on prints. With modern etching, we expect the artist’s signature (always in pencil) and an edition number (like 5/30) or the note “artist’s proof”, which means an impression taken by the artist before the official editioning of the print. In older engravings, inscriptions will be incorporated in the plate, and may include the artist’s name or initials, and the date. In engravings that reproduce paintings, there will be two names: that of the painter with the abbreviation “inv.” (“invenit” in Latin, because “inventio” is the process of coming up with a composition) and that of the engraver with “sculp.” or “sculps.” (“sculpsit”, meaning “carved”).

But there can be more substantial inscriptions, including poems and dedications. Thus in Jan Saenredam’s engraving of the Temptation of man (1604), after Abraham Bloemaert, as well as “A. Bloemaert inv. / J. Saenredam sculp.”, there is a Latin text attributing the fall of man to insatiable appetite, the desire for what is forbidden and foolish credulity. The print itself is a very fine work, with a significant divergence, as the label points out, from Duerer’s earlier (1504) version of the same subject, for Adam is seated and in a much more passive role in relation to Eve.

At the same time, the picture includes prominent references to the new world opened up by the great age of exploration during the previous century, including a turkey on the right and pumpkins on the left. The discovery of so many lands and peoples previously unknown in Europe raised important theological questions: Why had Christ’s message of salvation not been spread among these populations? Were they therefore doomed to hell, or merely excluded from heaven, like the virtuous pagans who lived before Christ’s time? Had these peoples even been involved in the sin of Adam and Eve and the Fall of mankind? If not, were they free of Original Sin? The figure of Eve repeated in the background represents the prelude of temptation, but we can almost imagine it as hinting at multiple occasions of Original Sin.

Raymond Arnold, The winged personification of melancholy (2022).

Another impressive and far more dramatic engraving represents Judith beheading Holofernes (c. 1616) by Cornelius Galle after Rubens. Here the inscriptions include “Cornelius Galle sculp. et excud.” (“excudit” means published), but there is also a verse commenting on the scene, and then a dedication, both in Latin. The verse praises Judith in fulsome terms, for she had long been an exemplum of female virtue; the dedication is by Rubens to his friend Woverius, who was the secretary of neo-Stoic philosopher Justus Lipsius, and one of the portrait subjects, with Lipsius, Rubens himself and his brother Philip, in his Four Philosophers (1611-12). The artist adds that he offers this print in fulfilment of a promise made some time earlier at Verona.

The modern prints corresponding to these include one by Rew Hanks, We don’t have to (2002), which actually refers to Duerer’s Adam and Eve; here the artist has redrawn the figures on a much larger scale and in the more dramatic but much less subtle medium of linocut. Just as in the Bloemaert/Saenredam version, new geographical references have been introduced, in this case to Australia. Australian fauna such as a Tasmanian devil, a numbat and a Tasmanian tiger have been added, and Adam and Eve have been given, respectively, the features of Mike Archer, former head of the Australian Museum, and Queen Victoria.

The point of all these changes is to make the work into a critique of Archer’s suggestion that the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine might be brought back to life by cloning surviving examples of its DNA. The same or similar suggestions have been made in recent years about the mammoth and other extinct creatures. But this work, for all its technically impressive aspects, reveals the fundamental weakness of political art: topical references, such as the allusion to Archer’s cloning suggestion, soon become obscure when we have forgotten both the proposal and almost the man; the choice of Queen Victoria to match Archer seems gratuitous; and finally, it is not clear at all how the proposal to clone an extinct animal can be compared to the Fall of Man.

Another large-scale linocut by Sue Pickford is inspired not by a print but by Canova’s sculpture of Hercules hurling Lichas to his death when the latter has brought him the poisoned shirt of Nessus, unaware that he was bearing a deadly gift (2015-16); a second work by Pickford, which also has Hercules as its subject, is drawn from a painting by Guido Reni – Hercules vanquishing the Hydra of Lerna (1617-20) – and a print by Duerer, Hercules at the crossroads (1498), illustrating a philosophical parable told by the philosopher Prodicus of Cos. In Pickford’s composite image, Hercules is about to destroy the allegorical figures of pleasure from Duerer’s print.

Here too, the subtitle of the series, Feet of clay, implies that the artist feels some need to be critical of her subject. And unfortunately almost all the contemporary works are limited in their aesthetic resonance by the attempt to make some ultimately rather superficial point. One of the few that does not, and thus produces a more lasting and even haunting impression, is the last piece in the show, an etching and aquatint by Ruth Johnstone that recalls a famous French painting of the Renaissance, but without imposing any of the usual self-conscious layers of moral or political meanings that so quickly grow stale and even unintelligible. Poetic and imaginative meanings are far deeper and more durable.

Views of Geelong

Geelong Art Gallery to November 9

After-images

Geelong Art Gallery to November 9