Flowers and Manliness

Flowers and Manliness: The flower paintings of George Lambert, Hans Heysen, and Ann Elias

Sydney College of the Arts

Abstract:

Hans Heysen’s, George Lambert’s, and Arthur Streeton’s paintings are celebrated for their part in building a healthy national identity, and in the process they contributed to the social construction of Australian masculinity. But they also painted flowers and practised the feminine ideals of delicate work in interior settings. This paper discusses the flower paintings of Lambert, Heysen, and Streeton and theorises the cultural dynamics of manliness and the floral using historical evidence from the period in which they painted flowers. It speculates on the emotional and intellectual satisfaction that each gained from practising this already-feminised branch of still life painting and questions whether their flower paintings were a symbolic retreat into interiority brought about by the melancholy of the era and the circumstances of their lives.

Paper:

Hans Heysen, George Lambert, and Arthur Streeton are celebrated for their part in building a healthy national identity for with paintings of heroic gum trees, athletic bush-workers, Anzac soldiers, and toiling animals. Through portraiture they characterised the men and women of the nation, and through history-painting they depicted events of historical importance to the concept of nationhood. In the process they contributed to the social construction of Australian masculinity. Lambert and Streeton heroised the Australian solider in paintings and sculptures commissioned during the First World War. Hans Heysen preferred not to paint human figures, but his celebration of the Australian bush is inextricably linked with a celebration of Australian masculinity, “for the bush would, it was thought, provide more manly boys than the city”.1 Through their artistic work, Heysen, Lambert and Streeton endorsed masculine ideals of robustness exemplified by the experience of the outdoorsman. But they were also flower painters and practised the feminine ideals of delicate work in interior settings. Their lived experience of manliness was therefore slightly at odds with the image of manliness they disseminated through their most respected paintings. 2

The following discussion, on the flower paintings of Heysen, Lambert and Streeton, theorises the cultural dynamics of manliness and the floral using historical evidence from the period in which they painted flowers. It speculates on the emotional and intellectual satisfaction that each gained from practising this already-feminised branch of still life painting, questioning whether their flower paintings were a symbolic retreat into interiority brought about by the melancholy of the era and the circumstances of their lives. All three had confronting experiences of the First World War, experienced the trauma of death and serious illness in their families, were acculturated by the social conventions of the era to repress libidinal desire, and felt either at odds or in conflict with modernity and . They painted flowers in the style of academic realism with a concern for the mimetic relationship of the image to Nature. When painted this way, the flower evokes home and old world values of beauty and elegance. It invites the

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projection of emotions such as grief and happiness, and it functions well to sublimate erotic desire for flesh.

Heysen worshipped flowers for their goodness and beauty. Streeton anthropomorphised flowers as an ideal form of feminine beauty. Lambert is more complicated. He painted floral still life as an end in itself but he stands apart from Heysen and Streeton because he understood the subversive power of the flower when brought to the image of masculinity. Lambert’s Self- Portrait with Gladioli (1922) is discussed in detail here because it transgresses the social image of the manly Australian body by its exaggerated pose, and by the inclusion of a vase of flamboyant gladioli.

The period under consideration is 1915 to 1930. This stretch of history embraces the period of greatest flower-painting activity for Heysen, Lambert and Streeton, who were acquaintances, as well as rivals. It also coincides with the rise of modernism in Australia in the nineteen-twenties, when women, especially Margaret Preston, became renowned for floral subjects, and when academicism in flower painting became intellectually estranged by the modern, and consequently isolated by modernist art history. The period under investigation concludes with the year of the death of George Lambert.

Flower painting is still an obscure realm of the artistic production of Heysen, Lambert and Streeton, despite eighty years of scholarship surrounding these men. The lack of discursive engagement confirms that men as well as women experienced prejudice to presuppositions about flowers, the most pervasive of which was that flowers are feminine and weak subjects. In the nineteen-twenties, liberated professional women who specialised in flower painting, felt imprisoned by essentialising claims about the nature of their sex and the flower’s femininity. This explains Margaret Preston’s curt remark: “I am a flower painter – and I am not a flower”.3 Conversely, professional men who painted flowers with a view to capturing their poetic beauty faced the possibility of compromising their masculinity by close connection to such quintessentially feminine objects.

A brief historical outline of the history of flower painting is needed to explain the relative status of men and women practising flower painting in Australia. Australian flower painting has its own history, but one that evolved in relation to British and European art. The floral branch of still life painting began in Europe in the seventeenth century and women were crucial to its development. Maria van Oosterwijk and Rachel Ruysch are two women who were innovators of the genre. However, the history of flower painting subsequently took many twists and turns so that while women in Europe were important for raising flower painting to a genre in its own right, it later became a speciality of men, not only in Holland in the seventeenth century but also in France in the nineteenth century, and most notably, in that century, with Manet, Monet and van Gogh. In Britain in the later nineteenth century, favourite flower painters included Henri Fantin-Latour. But many British women in the Victorian era were attracted to botanical art for the moral virtues of studying Nature, and a middle class dilettante culture encouraged the rise of the amateur woman artist who specialised in still lifes of flowers.4 By 1900, therefore, flower painting was connected with feminine moral virtues.

The legacy of British history is apparent in colonial Australia where at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was a regular practice for ‘lady amateurs’ to exhibit their flower paintings at art societies. Their work often met with a frosty reception from critics who brought gendered assumptions about the femininity of flowers, and views on the weakness of the subject of flowers and lady amateurs, to their reviews of exhibitions.5 It was noted at the 1897 exhibition of the Art Society of New South Wales “there are fortunately but few still lifes and flower

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paintings”.6 By 1900 in Australia, flowers were often not regarded as worthy of representation. The views of critics were steeped in eighteenth century academic theory and the ideas of British Royal Academician, Sir Joshua Reynolds, who assigned floral still lifes to the feminine world of copying, rather than the masculine realm of philosophy.7 Therefore, Hans Heysen, George Lambert and Arthur Streeton practised flower painting in an artistic climate where flower painting was irrevocably gendered as feminine, and where the objects themselves were poorly regarded.

In the context of Australia, flower painting was doubly gendered as feminine because the colonial population of Australia regarded art itself as a feminine practice. Albert Tucker said of the social image of the artist in Australia in the 1930s that “even to be categorized as an artist immediately put one in queer street: artists were people who try to avoid work”.8 Tucker was speaking about the mistrust that was shown to men seeking a life of creative independence, whose profession was viewed as an effeminate one, and who were persistently connected with the image of the aesthete in search of useless beauty.9 Spoken about an era poised between two world wars and the Depression, when the convention was to separate genders based on contrasting physical and behavioural characteristics of men and women, Tucker’s characterisation of the disapproval shown to men who chose art as their work also identifies the cultural anxieties directed towards homosexual men and the fear of indistinct gender difference in Australia. At that time it would have been difficult for a man in Australia to paint flowers, and spend what was already judged as ‘wasted’ time paying attention to the sensuality of blossoms, especially since men “were expected to repress those qualities which were associated with femininity”.10

This was the social background against which George Lambert painted his self-portrait in 1922. Lambert had only recently returned to live in Australia after many years in Britain, and like his Australian colleagues found the cultural climate unsupportive, and Australians generally suspicious of the life of the artist. Self-Portrait with Gladioli lampoons the Australian image of masculinity, and the vase of flowers plays a considerable role in contributing to the ironic representation of manliness projected by the image.

Lambert has presented himself as a successful gentleman-artist dressed in a velvet robe with an unlit pipe between his teeth, and standing next to a vase of brightly coloured gladioli whose phallic stems with vulval blossoms are placed suggestively near his body. Today we would describe Lambert’s image as ‘camp’ and the part played by the flowers in this reading is important because they bring ambiguity to his body image. Gladioli are sexually mutable because they are phallic in shape but feminine in their profuse decorativeness. Their close proximity to the figure of a man who looks like he might shimmy across the floor, contributes to the comical and ironic aspects of the painting. The feminine inflection of the painting and the camp stylisation of Lambert’s body, transgress the image of Australian masculinity as athletic and militaristic.11

Terry Smith has argued that while the Edwardian era is remembered for hegemonic heterosexuality, George Lambert’s self-portrait, which just post-dates the Edwardian era, is evidence that a more complex picture of masculinity and sexuality at that time must be considered.12 Martin Crotty’s study of Australian masculinity shows that the “extremely narrow masculinist codes of manliness appear to have eased” after the devastation of the First World War, and cites the work of Marilyn Lake to argue that “by the 1920s Australian culture had become much more feminised”.13 Nevertheless, the image that Lambert projects looks backward to the previous century when the aesthete used exteriority to signify taste and cultivation, but also decadence, in order to clash with mainstream society.14 Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Volume 10, 2, 2007/8 16 Flowers and Manliness

Figure 1 Self Portrait with gladioli (1922) by George Lambert (1873-1930), oil on canvas Collections: National Portrait Gallery , gift of John Schaeffer AO 2003

By 1922 Lambert felt disaffected with his treatment as an artist in Australia. He was only the second Australian to be elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in London, but in a letter dated 1923 he complained to Hans Heysen that “here in my own country I am made to feel somewhat of an alien”.15 When Lambert confided in Hans Heysen about feeling ostracised in

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Australia he was clearly unaware that even Heysen, who regarded Lambert as a great artist, once described him as a “poser”.16 In 1922, Australian masculinity was defined by the recent memory of the achievements of the Australian troops in the First World War, and a “poser” was excluded because the image was aristocratic rather than democratic, and therefore in conflict with a new national image of masculinity, albeit one, in retrospect, that was defined by racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes.17

It is clear from the structure, colour and form of Self-Portrait with Gladioli that Lambert wanted to project an image of himself that was different to the serious and sombre self-portraits of men in Australia in the 1920s. Perhaps because he already felt like an outsider, Lambert enjoyed pushing the boundaries of respectability, and in 1924 he was described as having “an intolerance for many of the conventional lies of civilisation”.18 In Self-Portrait with Gladioli he presents himself as a dandy, which suits his personality, because the dandy, like Lambert, was a social critic who rejected bourgeois values but acted out the appearance of an aristocrat. A keenness to look aristocratic explains Lambert’s choice to style his self-portrait on portrait-styles made famous by seventeenth century artists Velázquez and van Dyck, who specialised in royalty. In fact, Van Dyck makes an interesting comparison with Lambert because van Dyck also painted his self-portrait with a flower, in a work titled Self-Portrait with a Sunflower (1633).

The body semiotics in Lambert’s self-portrait supports Terry Smith’s assessment that, in relation to masculinity, “Lambert understood that all identities were performative”.19 In his self-assured stylisation, Lambert’s image brings to mind James Whistler, an artist who Lambert admired greatly and from whom, his friends noticed, he adopted the philosophy that “living is an art”.20 However, Whistler’s career achieved its greatest glory in the 1890s, at least twenty years before Lambert painted Self—Portrait with Gladioli. In other words, Lambert looks old-fashioned. He is dressed in velvet, a fabric that simulates the softness of flower petals, but by 1922 velvet, and floral imagery, were regarded as too ornamental, too ostentatious, and too feminine for the brave new masculine age of machines. “Those who go around in velvet jackets today are not artists, but clowns”, wrote Adolf Loos, in 1908, in his famous attack on the ‘crime’ of ornamentation, which was also an attack on feminine aesthetics.21

Self-Portrait with Gladioli shows that Lambert was not afraid to summon up his character through the signifier of the flower and this is confirmed by a comment he made a year earlier in a letter to his wife Amy, where he described himself in the context of his homeland Australia, as “a luxury, a hot house rarity…scoffed at for preciousness”.22 He clearly thought of himself as a rare flower, perhaps an orchid, subjected to a brutal social and artistic climate. He explained to Hans Heysen that he regretted the way Australians misinterpreted his appearance as “an outward and visible sign of a vulgar superiority”.23 But the excess of visual signs in his self-portrait reveals how conspicuous Lambert must have looked in interwar Australia: like a peacock in a foreign habitat, he would have been unable to camouflage himself in his surroundings. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the prevailing western heterosexist view was that men who made the floral too much part of their identity belonged to “the dubious masculine categories of the bachelor, the coxcomb, and the dandy”.24 And the proof was found in the notoriety of Oscar Wilde, and other men of the nineteenth century such as Aubrey Beardsley, and Joris Karl Huysmans, who were against ‘nature’ because they brought organic and floral imagery to their representations of men, at a time when the habitual tendency was to connect flowers with women and femininity.

The habit of connecting flowers and women evolved, in part, from Linneaus’s botanical taxonomy in the eighteenth century, which is a concoction of analogies between plants and the presumed feminine traits of weakness, sensitivity and chasteness.25 In the nineteenth century the Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Volume 10, 2, 2007/8 18 Flowers and Manliness

floral motif had become a signifier of homosexuality, and by the early twentieth century ‘pansy’ was a derogatory term for gay men.26 The term ‘pansy’ became entrenched in Australia, and during the Second World War, when artists were seconded to work as camoufleurs for the military, when they were harassed by regular soldiers who were not only homophobic about artists but also about the decorative aspects of camouflage, Frank Hinder wryly noted in his diary that perhaps he should change his title from “camoufleur” to “camopansy”.27

Self-Portrait with Gladioli is an aberration in for the way it appears to parody the idea of Australian masculinity and hegemonic heterosexuality. Lambert’s contemporaries were intrigued by the virtuosity of the painting, but felt ambivalent at the presentation of the body. After viewing Self-Portrait with Gladioli through a reproduction in Art in Australia magazine in 1923, Hans Heysen wrote to his friend and the country’s most prominent critic, Lionel Lindsay. Heysen and Lindsay corresponded frequently, often on the subject of George Lambert. Both men respected Lambert – they just did not like his flamboyance. Heysen’s letter shows he was concerned that there was “little or no connection between the uplifted arm & hand with the head”, and that Lambert “is carried away with his own dexterity of parts only”.28 Heysen was critical of the fragmented arrangement of Lambert’s body. He may also have recognised, in the exaggerated gesture of Lambert’s left hand, which is one of the painting’s key signifiers of dandy behaviour, a sign of transgressive masculinity.

Thomas A. King, who has written about ways in which bourgeois ideology attempted to control the gestured extravagances of the aristocratic body, explains that “wagging the hand was not only effeminate as a gesture, it indicated an inherent effeminacy of the subject”.29 Too much attraction to the hand and the wrist put the manly body in jeopardy, and the residue of this European prejudice survived well into the twentieth century in Australia, when the wearing of wrist-watches by men before World War 1 was “considered effeminate”.30 Moe Meyer describes camp gestures as displacing “bourgeois notions of the Self as unique, aiding, and continuous, while substituting instead a concept of the Self as performative, improvisational, discontinuous and processually constituted by repetitive and stylised acts”.31 In the fragmentation of form Heysen may well have seen the male body made ‘effeminate’, and if so, then the presence of the brightly coloured gladioli would have clinched this for him.

Heysen made no mention of the gladioli in his analysis of Self-Portrait with Gladioli. Yet the flowers are so awkwardly placed in the picture, and so lacking in integration with the whole, that they confirm Heysen’s argument that the parts of the painting have little or no connection. By 1924, not only had Heysen and Lionel Lindsay exchanged letters on the relative merits of Self- Portrait with Gladioli, but another acquaintance, George Pitt Rivers, had discussed it in a monograph on Lambert published by Art in Australia in 1924. But of the three, only Lionel Lindsay addressed the inclusion of the gladioli. Pitt Rivers preferred to consider the unlit pipe, which appears in other self-portraits by Lambert, and which is a common signifier of masculinity.32 Heysen was critical of the way the parts of the painting did not seem, to his eye, to fit together, but Lionel Lindsay noted that “the flowers in the corner attract the eye too insistently by their colour, the hands are over modelled – still a great revelation of George Lambert”.33

The gladioli, like a woman with makeup, attract the eye insistently. However, do the flowers, like makeup, attract the eye to hide something else? Since the daring nature of the painting is its suggestion of transgressive sexuality, it is unlikely that the artist is trying to camouflage the question of sexuality behind the flowers, unless the overt display of the gladioli is a ‘double bluff’, in which case Lambert is using irony to disguise the thing he most wants to hide. It has been argued here that Lambert intended his self-portrait to be socially provocative. It is also Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Volume 10, 2, 2006/7 19 Flowers and Manliness

possible to read the entire image, and the flamboyant gladioli, as a disguise of Lambert’s melancholic personality. He once confided in his wife Amy “thank goodness I manage to keep going without letting the whole world know [about those horrible periods of melancholy]”.34 After his experiences on the battlefields of Palestine and at Gallipoli, when Lambert was hospitalised, he became morbid and fearful, and left hospital a ‘broken man’.35 But Lambert’s melancholy was exacerbated by feeling an outsider in Australian society, and it seems important to connect this with his motivation to paint an image of manliness that satirises Australian male culture. The unlit pipe is ambiguous too, and also contributes to the satire, since it lacks fire or potency.

Figure 2 George W. Lambert, Tulips and wild hyacinths, (c 1920) oil on plywood, 60.7 x 52.0cm board; 72.7 x 63.7 x 4.4cm frame: Gift of Howard Hinton 1927: collection Art Gallery of NSW

Lambert painted many discrete still lifes of flowers, without any irony whatsoever. On the contrary, they often stimulate a meditation on the metaphysics of life and death, and in at least two instances his flower paintings were made in situations of stress. In 1916, when his son was very ill Lambert was determined “not to give way to melancholic brooding”.36 He picked a bunch of cottage flowers and painted them in detail to absorb his attention. When Lambert was an official war artist, sent first with the Australian Imperial Forces to Palestine, and later to Gallipoli where his mission was to prepare for large commemorative works of battles, Charles Bean, the official war historian, noticed that whenever it rained heavily Lambert stayed in his tent and painted flowers.37 One of the most affecting war paintings that Lambert completed is

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not a history-painting, but a flower painting titled Gallipoli Wild Flowers (1919). Under Lambert’s brush, the flowers turn their dark centres towards the viewer recalling John McCrae’s poem In Flanders Fields (1915) where the poppies turn their gaze on the poet to say ‘we are the dead’.

Anxiety, melancholy, and the psychology of the artist, are common to discussions of the lives of Heysen, Lambert and Streeton, and although there has been little critical engagement with their flower paintings, those writers who do engage like to implicate flower painting in trauma. Consequently the current literature makes a causal link between flower painting and illness, and flower painting and the aftermath of war. This is open to two possible interpretations: that flower painting is a sign of weakness, undertaken when there is a diminished control over practice. Secondly, that flower painting is empirically suited to healing and recuperation. Hans Heysen’s flower paintings have been interpreted as a symptom of ‘withdrawing’ and Humphrey McQueen describes a period of Heysen’s flower painting activity as “a retreat from the vast outdoors to safe interiors”.38 For men of Heysen’s era who were inculcated with the ideologies of landscape and nation and with the expectations of local and English critics, a ‘retreat’ into safe interiors would almost certainly have emasculated them. The safe interior was feminine space where women worked. Men worked outside at every opportunity.39 However, in the context of the specific life story of Hans Heysen, a life of war brutality and racial humiliation, death, illness, and eventually intellectual displacement by the advent of modernism, the flower paintings may very well be symptomatic of melancholy. Wolf Lepenies theorises melancholy as a type of impotence, and the “retreat into interiority, characterized by nostalgia for the past and apathy towards the present”.40

In 1921, Hans Heysen explained painting as “a matter of ‘life and death’”.41 He found a compelling metaphysical urgency in painting flowers before their decay set in. The symbolism of life and death in nature was not just an abstract meditation for Heysen. Between 1916 and 1925 his otherwise very successful and happy life was punctuated by moments of abject misery. During the First World War, his father was assaulted and other relatives, who were also German nationals, were interned at Liverpool. His daughter Nora Heysen described how, “some Australians did terrible things to Germans”.42 Hans Heysen described the war as a, “constant prey on one’s mind – no force of will will [sic] fade the colour of it from one’s mind”.43 In 1925, after years of languishing and recuperating from the same illness, his daughter Lilian died. In 1922 his wife had a ‘mental breakdown’ but she suffered relapses throughout her life. Many of Heysen’s flower paintings were painted for his wife, and it was the artist’s habit to write “to my wife” on the front of the image, as a permanent and visible reminder of the symbolism of the gift. Freud’s discourse on flowers began with the psycho-sexual implications of his patient’s dream about a gift of flowers, but as Derrida has shown, the act of giving is part of a circle of exchange that turns the gift into a debt to be returned. Every brush-stroke on Heysen’s canvases can therefore be interpreted not only as a mark of affection but also a longing for some reciprocity. Behind the labour of each painting for Sallie was an expectation of her return to health, beauty and happiness.44 This longing was also conveyed in Heysen’s letters to Lionel Lindsay, whenever he felt ‘black forebodings’ about his wife’s health.45

Still life painting always eliminates the human figure. Norman Bryson describes it as an “assault on the value and prestige of the human subject”.46 It is worth noting that in asking the question of what motivated these men to paint flowers, there is one answer that is idiosyncratic to Hans Heysen, and it involves his reluctance to render people. In 1921 Heysen claimed “I don’t want to paint human beings: they do not appeal to me in the way animals and Nature do”.47 Humphrey McQueen has suggested that the absence of the human figure in Margaret Preston’s painting was

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a consequence of their “threatening presence in the world around her” at the time of World War 1.48 The possibility that Heysen focused on flower painting after the War as a will to peace, even unconsciously, takes the interpretation of his work into the same realm of speculation as McQueen applies to Preston’s.

Melancholy, fracture and the dislocation inflicted by the war are also integral to the lives of Arthur Streeton, and George Lambert. After 1920, Arthur Streeton became fixated with flowers and produced over 150 flower paintings.49 Christopher Wray discusses how Streeton’s personality changed between 1914 and 1924, when he became “remote and reluctant to reveal his innermost self”.50 Streeton was sent as an official war artist to the Western Front in 1918 and “this was no ‘artist’s picnic’, [because] in France, he was often in the trenches, within 46 metres of the front line, chaos all around”.51 His letters at the end of the war were typically reserved and it was not until 1938, near the time of his own death, that he confessed to being very afraid of “oblivion”.52 Since the end of the war Streeton had suffered lumbago and insomnia, the latter a sign of the depression experienced by returned soldiers.53 With fellow Australians he witnessed the horror of the French trenches, the physical and psychological trauma it caused, and feelings of alienation that returning soldiers felt in their homeland and near their fellow citizens.54

Despite the philosophical seriousness of the subject of still life, a genre that is perfectly suited to morbid reflections on war, death, and earthly transience (because it is concerned with life that has been stilled), there was very little critical engagement with flower painting in Australia at the time of World War One. On the contrary, it had the reputation of being a frivolous and decorative study for amateurs. Hans Heysen explained the lack of critical engagement as “an underlying prejudice against all still life paintings”.55 Heysen did not elaborate on the prejudice, but its general nature has been deconstructed by Naomi Schor in her work on the aesthetic realm of the beautiful and the detail, and she has concluded it is a prejudice to ornamentality (and by association effeminacy), and to the everyday (and by association the domestic world of women).56

However, Heysen was fortunate to have an artist and art critic as a close friend and between them Lionel Lindsay and Hans Heysen created a critical context for still life in which they discussed each other’s work and the work of others, including Henri Fantin-Latour and George Lambert. Heysen criticised Lambert’s flowers for having “no movement”.57 But Lambert painted flowers differently from Heysen. In Lambert’s work each flower is separated and delineated in a manner that makes the whole composition relatively flattened compared to Heysen’s abundant extravagances. Tulips and Wild Hyacinths (c1920) exemplifies Lambert’s style, and indicates that sense of stiffness that Heysen disliked.

From 1915 Heysen revealed a penchant for academic paintings of flowers and fruit, displayed in extravagant detail, with the vibrancy of the fruit and flowers contrasted against a dark varnished background in the manner of the old masters. Old-world craftsmanship coupled with reverence for nature was Heysen’s philosophy. In 1921 Lindsay encouraged Heysen to paint more flowers and fruit.58 Lindsay was one of Heysen’s greatest admirers and it was his custom to offer Heysen informed views on his friend’s still life paintings. Heysen valued highly the exchanges with Lindsay on the subject of still life, which were usually supportive as well as flattering. However, despite his support for the virtuoso qualities of Heysen’s paintings, Lionel Lindsay seemed troubled by the feminine connotations of the still life genre.

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Figure 3 Hans Heysen, Flowers and fruit (zinnias), 1921, oil on canvas 70.0 x 82.7cm stretcher; 92.0 x 104.5 x 10.5cm frame: purchased 1921; collection: Art Gallery of NSW © C Heysen

He wrote to Hans Heysen to praise his flower and fruit paintings, comparing him to the French artist Henri Fantin-Latour. Heysen and Lindsay greatly respected Fantin-Latour’s ability to render the sensuality of flowers.59 But Lindsay observed greater masculinity in the work of Heysen and concluded that “I feel you have a greater robustness, a more masculine quality”.60 When written, Lindsay was preparing his ideas for a forthcoming essay on Hans Heysen’s flower paintings for Art in Australia. In this article, dated 1925, the issue of masculinity is again raised, but this time for the benefit of the reading public. Lindsay’s article attempted to establish Heysen’s difference to Fantin-Latour, by inferring Heysen’s masculinity in relation to Fantin- Latour’s femininity. He described Fantin-Latour as “not a nature lover, a painter of landscape like Heysen, but entirely an indoor artist”, whose “clairvoyance” was “almost feminine”.61 In 1926 Lindsay took the opportunity of yet another publication to emphasise the masculinity of Hans Heysen, and again in the context of a discussion about still life. In a 1926 issue of Art in Australia he addressed the potentially problematic question of “too much detail” in Heysen’s still lifes, excusing it as the fault of “masculine virtue, the Flemish instinct of generous giving”.62 But Lionel Lindsay’s emphasis on masculinity was typical of his era. The prolific use of the term by artists and critics in the early twentieth century has been explained by Caroline Ambrus as a way of protecting an already fragile male image in a culture that regarded men in the arts as effeminate.63

It is argued here that men in the arts who painted flowers were twice as likely to have their masculinity challenged as men who painted other subjects. The majority of professional male artists in Australia during the years 1915 to 1930 did not paint flowers. The bodily performance of flower painting may have been a deterrent. R.W. Connell’s study of masculinity addresses the separation between a physical sense of maleness and femaleness, and he provides both a history and a vocabulary for speaking about presuppositions of gender difference.64 In Connell’s interrogation of the male body as cultural object he discusses the constitution of masculinity

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through bodily performance that is, in turn, proof of sexual potency. The performance of painting flowers draws on physical actions that have become known in discourse as feminine ideals, namely the physical action of painting in small and delicate brushstrokes.

When floral still lifes are painted in an academic manner, they aim for mimesis, and require close-up and indoor work to achieve the level of detail required for the illusion of objects in space. For this reason they require a different bodily engagement to en plein air painting, and studio-painted landscapes, both of which tend to the general rather than the particular. The performance of mimetic flower painting requires control over the smallest observations, which means that wrist and finger movements are determined by the conceptual objective of achieving truth to nature. The careful control of paint is apparent in Heysen’s, Lambert’s and Streeton’s flower paintings, but is most obvious in Heysen’s where the brushwork is tight and smooth, and subordinate to the illusion of three-dimensions. However, there is a popular misconception that the physical act of depicting flowers, with the aim of truth to nature, is more suited to the feminine or feminised body, than the manly body. Antonia Ridge exploits this in her fictional biography about the eighteenth century Belgian flower painter Pierre-Joseph Redouté. In The Man Who Painted Roses the author imagines that people “must have been staggered to see his hands. People who had never seen Pierre-Joseph, poetically decided, on seeing his flower paintings, that he must have long, tapering fingers – ‘the fingers of a fairy’”.65 Following the chain of signification in Ridge’s text through “flower”, “tapering”, “fairy”, readers are steered to the conclusion that it is customary to regard a man who paints flowers as effeminate or homosexual.

The question of gender is of paramount importance to the subject of flower painting and so, too, is sexuality. Not only do the letters between Hans Heysen and Lionel Lindsay seek to establish the matter of unequivocal gender, they also reveal that painters of still life, as well as admirers of still life, invested considerable libidinal energy in the genre. Consequently while Lindsay’s correspondences with Hans Heysen frequently use masculinity as the highest form of praise for his still life paintings, there are times when the language is sexualised and eroticised. When Heysen painted flowers, he often included fruit. Fruit and flowers are mobile signifiers for both masculine and feminine sexes. Outside botany, the swollen form of ripe fruit, such as a grape, can be conceived as both an ovary encasing eggs, and a testicle containing seeds. When flowers and fruits are spoken about poetically, the tactility of flesh is often fetishised, and because flowers and fruit are sexually ambiguous, they can cause the one who is speaking to slip between hetero-erotic and homoerotic intonation.

In one correspondence, Lindsay responded to a painting of grapes by Heysen by constructing a testicular semiotic of grapes, seed, fertility, and the licentious festivities of Dionysus, noting “these fat globes of nectar are aburst with the sap of life; How wise the Greeks were to make the grape sacred to Life, Dionysus born of extasy and acclaimed by extasy”.66 Lindsay’s virile enthusiasm was matched by Heysen’s own admission that the prospect of painting a fresh bunch of grapes “made me so very excited that it was some time before I could get to work on them. The trouble is that each fresh subject I tackle is a matter of ‘life or death’ – at least they give me no rest until I feel my ‘paint is exhausted’”.67 His approach to flower painting was the same. He painted flowers as tributes to nature and beauty, but he projected a sense of hunger for the flowers, even though this was couched as moral pleasure taken in their beauty and goodness.68 He was obsessed with affirming their life and would paint from daylight to dark, declaring of one painting that “the excitement’ when starting it was intense – I did not know which to do first but knowing the ‘frailty of the flower’ I put my whole energies into that bunch”.69 There is anxiety behind his efforts to stave off the imminent death of the flowers, but a thrill at the idea of

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preserving life through the painting.70 Clearly there is also an intense and erotic relationship with the objects.

Flowers in paintings are rarely just flowers, just as flowers in dreams are also mutable. This observation became a vital part of Freud’s theories of the imagery of the unconscious. A patient dreamt she received a bouquet of flowers, and from this Freud wrote an explicit discourse on flowers and the unconscious. He interpreted the dream as a “struggle between libido and its repression”.71 He argued for a psychosexual interpretation of the dream: “it may perhaps be true in general that gifts of flowers between lovers have this unconscious meaning since sexual flower symbolism, which, indeed occurs very commonly in other connections, symbolizes the human organs of sex by blossoms, which are the sexual organs of plants”.72 The act of camouflaging desire behind representations of flowers is part of the secret history of botany as well as flower painting in the fine arts.73 A lily, for example, a traditional symbol of chastity and purity, has the potential not only to invite moral contemplation but also erotic daydreaming. The bisexual makeup of some flowers, and the ability of their form to look both phallic and vaginal, have attracted the attention of men as well as women, especially those wanting to conceal their erotic impulses behind the innocence of petals and blooms.

Figure 4 Arthur Streeton, Roses, (c 1929) oil on canvas, 61.3 x 51.0cm stretcher; 79.7 x 69.0 x 9.9cm frame; purchased 1930; Collection: Art Gallery of NSW

Libidinal excess belongs with the territory of still life since flowers “are not in fact useless ornamental objects but the sexual organs of plants, necessary for reproduction”.74 Arthur Streeton, like Hans Heysen and Lionel Lindsay, often wrote with libidinal excitement about flowers. His painting titled Roses (1926) is voluptuous because he has painted a poetic analogy between fleshy pink blossoms and fleshy female bodies. Flowers are shown in various stages of opening, and are suggestive of women in various stages of undress, and in various stages of

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development from the bud of youth to the mature woman whose beauty is destined to be shed like the petals of an aging rose. And Streeton’s descriptions of flowers often evoke the bodies of women. In 1934, writing about the cultivation of roses for the Argus, Streeton voyeuristically described “the exquisite beauty of a La France bud slowly unfolding its precious garments as you look at it”.75 The flower’s configuration with petals protecting an intimate centre is easily anthropomorphosised as a woman. His son Oliver is one of few people to speak about the eroticism of his father’s flower paintings, and encourages us to “see how his Canterbury Bells, those beautifully bell-like and subtly hued receptacles, wait expectantly for the bee. See how his roses display their unfolding petals with erotic suggestion”.76

Streeton was born into the Victorian era when the language of flowers was code for a language of emotions and desires that people found difficult to communicate directly to one another. Anne Grey has commented that Streeton “had difficulty in conveying deeper feelings about people”.77 When talking about the rewards of gardening and painting, Streeton described it as “the secret pleasure of doing it”.78 He spent a great deal of letter writing on the subject of women and wrote about how much he disliked modern women who in “their abbreviated dress lose all their charm”.79 A woman was more fascinating if she hid her body and kept it secret because it could then be discovered. His letters show he was highly attuned to the flower as sexual metaphor, and that well before 1911 when he began painting still lifes of flowers and fruit on a regular basis, flowers were objects into which he could sublimate erotic fantasies. Writing to in 1890 Streeton described seeing “sarsaparilla twisting her purple strength round everything; she is most amorous and sheds her colour like blue tears if you pluck her roughly”.80

Streeton’s keen interest in plucking flowers, and watching them open, conform to the era’s view of masculine normalcy as heterosexual. Like a woman, the flower is his feminine other, the object of his gaze, and the object of desire. The paintings themselves are heterosexually suggestive. Roses (1929) displays velvety petals against velvety cloth, a fetishisation of flesh not dissimilar to paintings of women reclining on exotic fabrics. But in the same decade that Streeton painted Roses, and other works loaded with sexual metaphor, Margaret Preston and the modernists were attracting attention for flower paintings which Preston explained as rational experiments with form. Preston described her approach to flowers in a cool and methodical voice: “When I’m painting flowers I’ll pull one of its kind to pieces. I will know exactly how it’s formed. When I’ve done this I draw from another one”.81 But for Streeton, flowers allowed him to enjoy a secret erotic life camouflaged behind the purity of the flower.82

In asking what motivated three of the most prominent men in the canon of Australian art to paint flowers, to spend what was already judged as wasted time paying attention to the sensuality of blossoms, in a climate that was hostile to flower painting, artists and homosexuals, in a period when codes of manliness were governed by brawny physicality, and when the emotional characteristics of ‘real’ men were far removed from the qualities of softness and passivity, the answers need to draw on the social history of the period, and to be assembled in conjunction with evidence from the personal histories of each individual artist. Flower painting is a physical and symbolic shift from a concern with distance (epitomised by landscape vistas), to a concern with intimacy (epitomised by close-ups). It can also be regarded as an orientation to the emotionally safe ‘feminine’ space of the home. George Lambert’s Self-Portrait with Gladioi is an aberration in Australian art and an extroverted deconstruction of assumptions about gender and sexuality. But, like Heysen and Streeton, he also painted flowers as discrete still lifes, and the physical act of painting flowers offered an engagement with the world that some might have thought of as effeminate, but in which these men found sensual and emotional satisfaction.

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Endotes

1 Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male: Middle-class Masculinity 1870-1920, Carlton South, Vic.; University Press, 2001, p.21 2 Non-hegemonic masculinities are discussed by Crotty, pp.6-8 3 Margaret Preston, ‘”I Am Not a Flower” – Mrs. Preston’s Art Gallery Portrait’, Sun (Sydney), 6 April 1930, cited in Elizabeth Butel, Margaret Preston: the art of constant rearrangement, Sydney, Penguin in Association with Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1985, p. 43 4 For a concise history of women and flower painting in Europe see Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race, New York, Secker & Warburg, 1979, pp.227-250 5 For a thorough discussion of the reception of amateurs and flower painters in Australia between 1915 and 1930, see Caroline Ambrus, Australian Women Artists First Fleet to 1945: History, Hearsay and Her Say, Woden, A.C.T; 1992, pp.95-100 6 Review of the Annual Exhibition of the Art Society of New South Wales, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 September 1897, p.5 7 Joshua Reynolds, ‘Discourse 3’, from Discourses on Art, Yale, Yale University Press, 1985, p.46 8 James Mollison and Nicholas Bonman, Albert Tucker, Sydney and Melbourne, Australian National Gallery and Macmillan,1982, p.23 9 For a discussion of masculinity in relation to the visual arts in Australian history, see Ambrus, pp.29-41 10 Ambrus, p.29 11 Martin Crotty explains athleticism and militarism as two stages in the construction of Australian masculinity. 12 Terry Smith, ‘’Three Ages of man: Masculine Sexuality in Australian Art’, in Paul Patton and Diane Austin-Broos (eds), Transformations in Australian Society, Sydney, The University of Sydney, 1997, p.11 13 Crotty, p.229 14 For a discussion of the manipulation of signifiers of exteriority and interiority in relation to Wilde’s version of the Dandy, see Moe Meyer, ‘Under the Sign of Wilde, an archaeology of posing’, in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, Moe Meyer (ed), London, Routledge, 1994 15 George Lambert letter to Hans Heysen, National Library of Australia, Canberra, ms 5073/1/1332 16 Hans Heysen letter to Lionel Lindsay, 18 December, 1921, Melbourne, State Library of Victoria, ms 9242/1961 17 Crotty, p.227 18 Pitt-Rivers, ‘A psychological study of the Artist and his Art’ in The Art of George W. Lambert, A.R.A, Sydney, Art in Australia, 1924, p.33 19 Terry Smith, p.11 20 George Pitt-Rivers, p.31 21 Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1908) in Ornament and Crime, selected essays, translated by Michael Mitchell, Riverside, Ariadne Press, 1988, p.175 22Anne Gray, Art and Artifice: George Lambert 1873-1930, an Art and Australia book, Roseville, Craftsman House, 1996, p.109 23 George Lambert letter to Lionel Lindsay, April 9, 1923, Canberra, National Library of Australia, ms5073/1/1332 24 Christopher Looby, ‘Flowers of manhood: race,sex and floriculture from Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Robert Mapplethorpe’, Criticism 37, 1 (Winter 1995), p.121 25 Discussed in Amy M. King, Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp.11-47 26 Christopher Looby, ‘Flowers of Manhood: race, sex and floriculture from Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Robert Mapplethorpe’, Criticism, Winter 1995, v37 no1 p.16. 27 Frank Hinder, War Diary, Canberra, Australian War Memorial, Personal Records, AWM PR 88/133, file 895/4/182 28 Hans Heysen letter to Lionel Lindsay, 17 March 1923, Melbourne, State Library of Victoria, ms 9242/1977

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29 Thomas A.King, Performing “Akimbo”: Queer pride and epistemological prejudice’, in Moe Meyer (ed) The Politics and Poetics of Camp, London and New York, Routledge, 1994, p.27 30 From the caption of a cartoon reproduced in Humphrey McQueen, Social Sketches of Australia 1888- 1975, Ringwood, Vic., Penguin Books, 1978, p.90 31, ‘Under the Sign of Wilde, an archaelology of posing’, in Moe Meyer (ed), The Politics and Poetics of Camp, , London, Routledge, 1994, p. 75 32 Pitt-Rivers, pp 39-40 33 Lionel Lindsay letter to Hans Heysen, February 1923, Canberra, National Library of Australia, ms 5073/1/1317 34 Gray, Art and Artifice, p.49 35 Gray, Art and Artifice, p.97 36 Gray, Art and Artifice, p.92 37 Gray, Art and Artifice, p.96 38 Humphrey McQueen, The Black Swan of Trespass, Sydney, Alternative Publishing,1979, p.117. 39 Michael Mangan, Staging Masculinities: history, gender, performance, Palgrave MacMillan, N.Y, 2003, p.167. 40 Esther Sánchez-Pardo, ‘Modernist Cultures of the Death Drive’, Cultures of the Death drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia, Durham and London, Duke University Press, p.194. 41 Hans Heysen, letter to Lionel Lindsay, 14 March 1921, in Julie Robinson, Hans Heysen: the creative journey, Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia, 1992, p.14. 42 Nora Heysen quoted in Scott Bevan, Battle Lines: Australian Artists at War, Sydney, Random House, 2004, p.95. 43 Hans Heysen letter to Elioth Gruner, 9 April 1918, Canberra, National Library of Australia, MS 5073/1/644. 44 Jacques Derrida, GivenTime: 1.Counterfeit Money, translated by Peggy Kamuf, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp.9-16 45 Hans Heysen letter to Lionel Lindsay, July 25, 1933, State Library of Victoria, RMS 9242/1972 46 Norman Bryson, ‘Chardin and the Text of Still Life’, Critical Inquiry 15, Winter 1989, p. 228 47 Freda Sternberg, ‘A Visit to Heysen’, The Home, volume 2., no.4, 1921, p.97 48 McQueen, p.163 49 Geoffrey Smith, Arthur Streeton 1867-1943, Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, p.176. 50 Christopher Wray, Arthur Streeton: painter of light, Milton, Jacaranda Wiley, 1993, p.155. 51 Anne Kern, Arthur Streeton: The Man and his Art, Sydney and Melbourne, Heidelberg Publishing, 1981, p.37. 52 Arthur Streeton letter to Lionel Lindsay, 11 June 1938, in Letters from Smike: the letters of Arthur Streeton 1890-1943, pp. 211-12. 53 Ann Galbally and Anne Gray, Galibally & Gray, Letters from Smike: the letters of Arthur Streeton 1890-1943, Oxford University Press Australia, p.199 54 K. Saunders, ‘Specimens of superb manhood: the lifesaver as national icon’, Journal of Australian Studies, March 1998 n.56 p.98. 55 Hans Heysen letter to Lionel Lindsay, September 1921, in Colin Thiele, Heysen of Hahndorf, Adelaide, Rigby publishers, reprint 1976, p.293 56 Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine, New York, Methuen,1987, p.4 57 Hans Heysen, letter to Lionel Lindsay, April 22, 1920, Melbourne, State Library of Victoria, ms9242/1945 58 Lionel Lindsay letter to Hans Heysen, October 18, 1921, Canberra, National Library of Australia, ms5073/1/1124 59 L Lindsay, letter to Hans Heysen, October 9, 1923, Canberra, National Library of Australia, MS 5073/1/1374. 60 L Lindsay, letter to Hans Heysen, October 9, 1923, Canberra, National Library of Australia, ms 5073/1/1374. 61 L Lindsay, ‘Heysen’s Flower Pieces’, Art in Australia, S. U. Smith and L. Gellert (eds), June 1925, unpaginated.

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62 Lionel Lindsay, ‘Heysen the Draughtsman’, Art in Australia, March 1926, series 3, no. 15, unpaginated. 63 Ambrus, p.31 64 Robert Connell, Masculinities, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1995, p.52 65 Antonia Ridge, The Man Who Painted Roses: the story of Pierre-Joseph Redouté, London, Faber and Faber, 1974, p.185 66 L Lindsay, letter to Hans Heysen, March 23, 1923, National Library of Australia, Canberra, ms 5073/1/1323 67 Hans Heysen, letter to Lionel Lindsay, 14 March 1921, in J. Robinson, Hans Heysen: the creative journey, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1992, p.14. 68 Colin Theile, Heysen of Hahndorf, letter to Lionel Lindsay, 18 Feb. 1923, p. 297 69 Letter to Lionel Lindsay, September 1921 in Colin Thiele, Heysen of Hahndorf, Adelaide, Rigby publishers, reprint 1976, p. 293 70 Hans Heysen, letter to Lionel Lindsay, 14 March 1921, in Julie Robinson, Hans Heysen: the creative journey, Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia, 1992, p.14. 71 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Dream Work’, in The Interpretation of Dreams, The Pelican Freud Library, volume 4, translated by James Strachey, Penguin Books, 1976, p.496 72 Freud, p.496 73 See Christopher Looby, ‘Flowers of manhood’ 74. Looby, p.124 75 Arthur Streeton, Roses – a delight for everyone’, The Argus, January 1934, in Arthur Streeton: The Passionate Gardener, curated by Geoffrey Smith and Oliver Streeton, Victoria, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, 2001, p. 20 76 Oliver Streeton, in Arthur Streeton: The Passionate Gardener, pp.19-20 77 Anne Gray, Letters from Smike: (preface to Chapter 14) 78 Streeton, Arthur, ‘On Gardening – a Reverie’, published in The Argus, January 1934, quoted in Arthur Streeton: The Passionate Gardener, p.19 79 Arthur Streeton, letter to , 10 December 1937, in Letters from Smike, p. 211 80 Arthur Streeton, letter to Tom Roberts, in Smike to Bulldog: letters from Sir Arthur Streeton to Tom Roberts, R.H. Croll (ed), Sydney, Ure Smith, 1946, p.16 81 Deborah Edwards with Rose Peel and Denise Mimmocchi, Margaret Preston, Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2005, p.156 82 Also discussed by Christopher Looby, ‘Flowers of manhood’, p.128.

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