Art Collectors in Colonial Victoria 1854 - 1892

ART COLLECTORS IN COLONIAL VICTORIA 1854 - 1892 : AN ANALYSIS OF TASTE AND PATRONAGE. Gerard Vaughan B.A. Honours Thesis 1976 Volume I. TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME 1 Introduction i - v Chapter 1 The Loan Exhibitions before 1880 1- 8 Chapter 11 The Taste for Prints 9 - 11 Chapter 111 The Collectors 12-47 Chapter 1V Collectors and the International 48 - 51 Exhibitions - A Resume Chapter V The Interest in Foreign Art 52-62 Chapter V1 The Dealers 63 - 78 Conclusion 79 - 82 VOLUME 11 Footnotes - Introduction Chapter 1 1- 4 Chapter 11 5- 7 Chapter 111 8-24 Chapter 1V 25-26 Chapter V 27 - 30 Chapter Vi and conclusion 31-37 Appendix A Holdings of Major Art Collections 38-59 Appendix B Furniture and Sculpture 60-62 Appendix C List of Illustrations 63 - 66 Appendix D A Note on Picture Galleries 67 Appendix E Patrons of Melbourne Artists in 68 - 86 the 1880s VOLUME 111 Illustrations ART.COLLECTORS IN COLONIAL VICTORIA 1854-1892; an analysis of taste and patronage. INTRODUCTION My examination of the holdings of private art collections in Victoria before 1892 is confined to British and European art. It was to Britain that taste was oriented, and the emerging group of Australian painters made little impact upon those patrons and collectors recognized as being the cultural leaders of the community. It would have been difficult to incorporate my research on collectors of Australian art in an essay of this length. I have therefore confined myself to a number of general observations set out in Appendix E. These may be useful in better understanding a part of the background against which British and European art was collected. I have limited my discussion to the dates 1854 to 1892. The former date was chosen because it was in that year that private collectors first publicly exhibited pictures in their possession. I have chosen the latter date because by 1892 the recession had taken a firm hold, and it can be confidently said that the first period of wealth had passed. By 1892 art and its market had all but ceased to be a topic of discussion in the Melbourne journals. 11 I will concentrate on the 1880's; my Chapter on the period before 1880 is meant to be no more than a preface. The topic has been approached from two points of view. Chapters I to III concentrate on individual collectors, and attempt to establish, and then clarify, the various currents of taste which prevailed. My first concern was to identify the principal collectors, and then establish the extent of their holdings. The three broad groups that I have defined are discussed in Chapter III, and I have devoted Appendix A to summarizing this essential background information, while at the same time extending the number of collectors discussed. I will be searching both for evidence of motives for collecting, and for the way in which qualitative standards were established, though the results are generally disappointing. I have then approached the topic from an entirely different angle. I felt it important to take a broad approach and examine in more general terms the various influences which worked upon collectors. This has extended to the role of Melbourne's International Exhibitions, to the receptiveness of the community at large to foreign art and, perhaps most importantly, to the state 111 and role of the art market in Melbourne in the 1880's. In doing this I was compelled to leave out detailed discussion of a number of collectors whose pictures might seem to merit a more considered treatment. It would have been possible to devote the entire essay to the first process of identification, and of compilation of holdings. Considering the exploratory nature of the essay, I decided it would be more useful to sketch in a wider background which could then be used as a basis for further research. I will argue that in general Melbourne collectors in the 1880's, while becoming increasingly receptive to foreign art, clung tightly to a well- entrenched, traditional taste for landscape. I will be exploring the background to a fairly wide resistance to modern figurative art, especially "Olympian". Although the 1880's represented the period of Melbourne's greatest wealth collectors did not, in fact, reassess their attitudes to the notion of "high" art. will argue that from the market's point of view particularly the period was one of unfulfilled expectations. There have been limitations upon my ability to accurately assess the state and holdings of private Melbourne collections. Very few have remained intact - the crash of the 90's saw to that. For this reason I have iv had to rely almost exclusively on contemporary documents, and as my work progressed it became increasingly clear that the various catalogues and press reports were fraught with inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Thus, great care should be taken in accepting attributions. Contemporary scholarship in the field of Victorian art seems to be in a state of flux, and no clearly defined, commonly accepted critical terminology has yet emerged. In describing the various genres and types I have not imposed a strictly uniform system, but have preferred to use a variety of terms which might better help to describe the pictures, many of which I have been unable to illustrate. Because of the limits imposed on an essay like this I have decided not to include a discussion of the development of British aesthetic theory through the nineteenth century, of changing attitudes to landscape and such. I have used the word "taste" in its broadest sense. Ruskin, for example, early recognized the inherent "freedom" of the concept, and argued in Modern Painters 1 "that taste was an instinctive preferring, not a reasoned act of choice". In fact, the publication of Richard Payne Knight's treatise on taste in 1805 marked the final demise of the eighteenth century concept of taste as an intellectual perception governed by reason? v When the term was used by authors and journalists in Melbourne in the 1880's it was invariably conceived in this broad Ruskinian sense. The problems that I will be identifying and discussing relate principally to questions of motive, and r'oł the establishment of qualitative criteria. Chapter I. THE LOAN EXHIBITIONS BEFORE 1880. Little is known of the holdings of Melbourne art collections before the first important loan exhibition of 1869.1 There can be no doubt, however, that much of interest was brought to the colony by the first immigrants. Thomas Woolner2 was surprised to find that Governor Latrobe owned his "Red Riding Hood",3 although his letters offer no other information on local collections. By the early 1850's Melbourne had developed sufficiently to promote the establishment of a Fine Arts' Society, which held its first exhibition in the Mechanics' Institute in August 1853. The majority of exhibiting artists were portrait or flower painters.4 Several accomplished professional artists were by now working in Melbourne; E. Wake Cooks described in his reminiscences the joy of finding William Strutt's "Troopers: Mounted Police" in the window at Wilkie's music shop in 1852, to be followed by paintings of von Guerard and Chevalier. Although the market was small, they were able to make a living, their incomes supplemented by illustrative work in black and white. An exhibition was held in 1854, in which a fine arts section was included. 6This is, to my knowledge, the earliest instance in which private individuals contributed pictures for public display. It is surprising, therefore, that it has never been mentioned by authors writing on the period. In a remarkably prophetic way, these few paintings reflect accurately the principal characteristics and impulses of picture collecting in Victoria for the next thirty years. A number of (so-called) old masters, both Italian and Dutch, were loaned. There were five modern genre pieces by John Ballantyne, A.R.S.A.,8 and a picture of Warwick Castle by J. F. Hardy;9 finally, a German immigrant10 contributed an Italian peasant genre by Steinhauser. The old master pictures reflect a participation in an established English pattern of collecting, the inheritance of the "grand tour" taste of the eighteenth century. The Ballantynes indicate an ability to keep abreast of recent developments in England, while the Hardy is particularly significant in that it represents an. English middle-class interest in the "natural" school magnified to become the symbol of a sentimental reminiscence of home. A central theme of this essay will be the receptiveness of Victorian collectors to foreign art (particularly German), a function of the cosmopolitanism of Melbourne society from its earliest development. 11 The 1856 Victorian Exhibition of Art continued this pattern. While principally a commercial exhibition devoted to the works of colonial artists, a number of more-or-less contemporary pictures were loaned by 3 private individuals under the heading "Foreign Art", which included Bűtish.12 However, this rare manifestation of independence in defining schools of art was to be quickly submerged. It was to England that taste was oriented, as was every aspect of colonial life. As Melbourne emerged from a pioneering settlement into a major urban centre this tendency became more marked. If the advertisement inviting loans from private collections for the Geelong Mechanics' Institute Exhibition of 185713 particularly recommended the inclusion of views of colonial scenery, this was certainly not the sentiment expressed a decade later, in relation to another Geelong loan exhibition. The reviewer of the exhibition held in 1869, in remarking upon the quality of the English pictures shown (and particularly the prizes from the Art Union of London), added that this was "no slight praise in view of the natural eagerness of the denizens of a new country to encourage local performers and unduly exalt their merits".14 The 1857 Geelong exhibition15 was a pot pourri in every sense.

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