Melbourne Modern Versus Sydney Picturesque?: Tales of Two Cities in Print 1891-1934

Colin Holden Melbourne Modern Versus Sydney Picturesque?: tales of two cities in print 1891-1934 IN 1910, JUST THREE YEARS before the completion of the Dome of the (then) Public Library of Victoria, a young Melbourne artist, Jessie Traill (1881-1967) published the first Australian cityscape in print in a style regarded at the time as consciously modern. Her aquatint and drypoint Melbourne from Richmond Paddocks unashamedly sought to capture the rhythm of the contemporary, commercially-driven city enveloped in a cloud of industrially-created smog. At the time this striking print appeared, the dominant influence among Melbourne’s artistic printmakers was the European etching revival, a nineteenth-century movement that consciously identified Rembrandt, Van Dyck and other old master etchers as models for both techniques and artistic values. Outstanding among the European revivalists who created cityscapes and architectural images were James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and French etcher Charles Meryon (1821-68), the former admired for views of London and Venice, the latter for his record of Paris. Few serious Melbourne printmakers deviated from norms encouraged by the etching revival and its best-known proponents. However, by 1934-5, when Melbourne and Victoria celebrated the centenary of European settlement, printmaking had experienced shifts encompassing both artistic styles and actual techniques. Artists working in woodblock and linocut often produced smaller-scale, more intimate images, many in colour, using cheaper materials than the etcher’s copper, an aspect influenced by the onset of the Great Depression. Others obtained a range of new effects through lithography, already widely used in commercial advertising. Their works were, in every sense, modern images of a modern city. At the same time, some artists continued to create works that reflected the ideals of the etching revival. Two works in the Library’s Picture Collection exemplify these opposite poles. Troedel and Cooper published a large colour lithographic poster designed by Percy Trompf as publicity for the Melbourne centenary celebrations. From the south side of river, John Batman looks – presumably in amazement – at a city skyline in which the Flinders Street Station dome and clock tower, St Paul’s Cathedral, the T and G building, the Forum theatre and the Manchester Unity building are all conspicuous. A modishly dressed woman and child stroll along the riverbank as a plane flies above. This and similar posters were produced as commercial works, and their creators were regarded at best as craftsmen, not artists.1 On the other hand, ‘Batman’s Landing’, an etching and aquatint by the young and emerging female artist Norma Bull (1906-80), likewise created as part of the Melbourne centenary celebrations, is almost painfully self-conscious in its intention as ‘high art’. 144 145 Melbourne Modern Versus Sydney Picturesque? John Shirlow, artist, The Great Dome, Melbourne Public Library. Etching on cream paper, 1924. H87.24/5. 145 The La Trobe Journal 146 147 Percy Trompf, artist, This will be the place for a village: Victoria and Melbourne Centenary Celebrations, 1934. Colour lithograph poster on white paper. H90.105/29. 147 Title The city is seen in a view looking straight up William Street as a train crosses the viaduct. Bull was determined to demonstrate her mastery of classical techniques. She worked scrupulously with her etching needle to capture the effect of the movement and reflections in the water in the foreground, highlighting the train and the stone wall on the river’s edge by using aquatint. This article examines some of the influences behind the many prints of Melbourne created between these two points in time. In particular, it examines contemporary perceptions of Melbourne in contrast with Sydney, both in the broader community and among artists themselves, and suggests that these perceptions explain the slightly different emphasis in the way each city was treated by its printmakers. II In Europe, the etching revival coincided with the Arts and Crafts Movement which rejected industrial and mass-produced products and despised the commercial. The consequence was a spate of works, the best often now unduly neglected, many others just competent but dull. Many British etchers turned for their subject matter to Italy, Spain, France and Germany, often to those areas least touched by industrialization – quiet provincial towns where tradition still held sway. Just before the Spanish civil war, Gertrude Bone wrote that the sense ‘that one is seeing the last of things’2 was the great attraction of Spain for her husband, Muirhead Bone, a major British etcher and a friend of Lionel Lindsay. He and other etchers were catching the pre-industrial world as it faded in front of their eyes. A powerful impetus in encouraging Australian printmakers to embrace the standards of the European etching revival was established late in 1891 when the National Gallery of Victoria acquired and exhibited the core of what would become, and continues to be, the nation’s most significant European print collection. As well as works by Meryon, Whistler and his brother-in-law Francis Seymour Haden, the Haden Collection included a number of old master works.3 Exposure to this collection was the catalyst for two etchers who became Melbourne’s leading proponents of the etching revival’s values, John Shirlow (1869-1935) and Victor Cobb (1876-1945). Lionel Lindsay (1874-1961), then a young artist seeking his way in Melbourne, would later become one of Sydney’s most influential printmakers, and a national spokesperson for conservative values in art: ‘I had been drawn to the Haden collection as by a magnet . .’, he recalled in 1924.4 These three artists along with others adopted the etching revival’s technical preferences. Most of their work was executed in etching or drypoint. They often used pure line work and were generally cautious in their use of plate tone – a film of ink left on the plate that would print as a tonal wash. They also experimented with aquatint. They imitated their European models in their subject-matter. Sometimes their prints directly referenced works by the European artists they so admired: a 1914 etching by Lionel Lindsay depicting a La Trobe Street Courtyard was modeled on Whistler’s ‘Lime- burner’ of 1859; Meryon’s ‘La Galerie Notre-Dame’ reappeared in 1926 as Victor Cobb’s 148 149 Melbourne Modern Versus Sydney Picturesque? Norma Bull, artist, Batman’s Landing 1935. Etching on cream paper. H86.40. 149 ‘Gothic Windows, Ruined Shrine, Ivanhoe’; and in a 1933 etching of the Sailor’s Rest in Hobart, John Shirlow recalled Meryon’s image of the Paris morgue. More broadly, just as Whistler had often eschewed the celebrated and familiar and sought out the byways and views known to Londoners or Venetians, these Australian etchers sought out hitherto- neglected subjects in their own cities – doorways and arches, laneways and courtyards, odd and battered shop fronts. Their mood was as nostalgic as that of Meryon’s etchings of Paris, produced at the time when as many buildings were threatened by Baron Hausmann’s urban planning and renovation of the city.5 Lindsay revealed his disappointment at the nature of Australian city development in occasional comments pencilled in the margins of some prints in the collection of his long-term adviser, dealer and friend in London, Harold Wright. He blamed naked commercialism for the destruction of much that was beautiful in Sydney.6 Elsewhere, he wrote that as early as the Federation era, the commercial values predominant in Australian culture had killed off the possibility of ‘a national platform’ founded on something more idealistic.7 To that extent, his prints of old Sydney were underpinned by a sense of cultural betrayal. In Sydney and Melbourne alike, many of the subjects chosen by these Australian etchers were destroyed by the march of modern commercial and industrial progress. In Sydney, the demolition of hundreds of buildings in the Rocks and Millers Point areas following an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1900 was an important stimulus to Lionel Lindsay.8 His appreciation for historic Sydney buildings had been boosted by his 1902 visit to southern Spain, where he was enchanted by a much older architecture. On the same trip, his presence in London coincided with an exhibition of Meryon’s etchings of old Paris. It reinforced what he already knew of the emotional power of such city views.9 Over almost three decades, starting in 1910, he published a steady stream of prints based on earlier drawings of colonial Sydney buildings and streetscapes. Catalogues of later exhibitions in 1921 and 1936 show how he regularly recycled earlier etchings while adding new images to this corpus. The titles of a handful of the earliest – ‘Old Hunter Street Book and Print Shop’, ‘Old Essex Street from George Street’, ‘Old Gloucester Street, The Rocks, Sydney’, ‘A Derelict, Old Kent Street, Sydney’, – all share a feature common to many in the longer series: their subjects are all ‘old’. Through such titles Lindsay verbalised the nostalgic mood of the images themselves. Lindsay was not the first etcher to be attracted by Sydney’s colonial architecture. Livingston Hopkins (1846-1927), who arrived from America in 1883, anticipated Lindsay by almost two decades. Hopkins’ ‘Old Sydney’ (1886) or Julian Ashton’s ‘Old House, Trinity Lane, Sydney’ also anticipated Lindsay’s appeal to nostalgia and stress on the ‘old’, and A. H. Fullwood (1863-1930) and Alfred Coffey (1869-1950) created other etchings of a similar kind.10 At the same time that Lindsay began to publish etchings in 1910, Sydney’s colonial architecture became the subject of illustrated books projecting similar images, sometimes reproducing etchings in lithographic form, or the drawings on which etchings were based. The most consistent illustrator of these images was Sydney Ure Smith (1887-1949).

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