A Study in Brown – Part Two

/ Garrulous Gwendoline

I mention several artworks in this post. To ensure I do not accidentally contravene the New South Wales Art Gallery’s or the State Library of New South Wales’s copyright, I will only provide a link to the painting/s, rather than upload an image. Readers can decide whether they would like to click through. I’ve also provided links to the artist’s biographies, which are too detailed to include in the body of this post. 

 

Using the description provided by my Aunty Myra and JA’s grandmother (see part one, here) JA and I began a search of the NSW Art Gallery online database, all 33,000 images. Given that we had neither the name of the artwork, nor the artist, this was a little like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack. Our search was further thrown off-track by grandmother’s belief that Lucy had been a model for several different painters,  all before her marriage (1919),  but not as a child. Lucy was 23 when she married, so, even though we knew we were looking for a “girl”, we were prepared to throw the net wide. 

Simultaneous to our search, JA emailed the art gallery. To her great credit, the librarian (of the Edmund & Joanna Capon Research Library section) did a thorough search using the name of Lucy Elizabeth Creft for the time period we had given. She advised she’d searched these sources without success:

  1. Art Gallery of New South Wales Collection Database
  2. Archibald Prize Database – this is an annual prize for portraiture which began in 1921. A 1944 entry by J. Vatamanoff was called “Lucy” but the gallery did not have an image. In any case, we were looking for an earlier painting.
  3. The Australian Art Database indexes of catalogues from commercial galleries and art societies.  The librarian found seven works with Lucy in the title,  but without images we were still perplexed.
  4. Royal Art Society of New South Wales exhibitors.
  5. Australian newspapers. The  Australian National Library has digitised hundreds of newspapers and these are freely accessible via Trove at trove.nla.gov.au.  Sadly there was no mention of a portrait of Lucy Creft. 

Interestingly though, the librarian did discover two newspaper reports of Lucy Creft winning a NSW Kennel Club prize in 1904 with her Kelpie bitch Gipsy Queen. It must have been an exciting moment for 8-year-old Lucy! This accorded with separate research I had already done. As far back as the 1860s, Lucy’s father, John Creft, had been instrumental in lobbying for show dogs to be included in agricultural exhibitions in Victoria, and by the time he moved to New South Wales he was not only exhibiting, breeding, and on the committee of dog societies such as the Kennel Club, but – in his profession as “Writing Master and Calligraphist” – was preparing the winners’ certificates. He was nearing fifty when Lucy was born, and died in 1907, just a few years after her triumph with Gipsy Queen. All of which at first appears irrelevant to our search, until you consider the economic pressure his death put on the family  . . . 

Back to the painting . . . 

By this time, JA and I had scoured the digital images on the NSW Art Gallery website. We’d discovered that it must have been a “thing” to do brown studies in the early twentieth century!  To a non-artistic, uneducated, pleb such as I, the works could be interpreted as dark, moody, mysterious, and obscured. Many years ago I did a hobby course in photography. I took a particularly fetching photo, using “available light”, of a hand pouring from a bottle of wine into a glass which was resting on a wooden table. It was dark and moody, and very evocative with its similarly dark background. All the viewer’s concentration is drawn to the central object, that part which is ever so slightly illuminated from an unknown light source. (I’ve found the negative but not the print). These paintings were in a similar style, evoking more the mood and colour of Rembrandt rather than the Impressionists.

  • One possibility was “Coquetry” (circa 1918) by Bernard Hall. It was the head and shoulders of a young woman wearing a huge floppy hat and looking over her shoulder, which was almost bare given her low cut dress. Here is the painting. We discarded this, partly because it was not a close enough match to our descriptions, but more so, because it was more “risqué” than our family stories. Wishful thinking perhaps, but we were clinging to the “wholesome” legacy we had been handed.
  • Another outside possibility was “Bella Donna” (1919) by Norman Carter. Here is the painting. However, apart from it being a long way from our description, after a bit more digging, we were able to identify this as a portrait of fellow artist Florence Aline Rodway.

We learned that Norman St Clair Carter (1875-1963), was a portrait-painter and stained-glass artist who is largely unrecognised in the Australian art scene of today. The NSW Art Gallery owns sixteen of his works. Half of those are portraits of men. Five are landscapes or group scenes. One is Bella Donna (above). Another is the Eldest Daughter, painted in 1932 – too late for us. 

And the sixteenth? Taaa-daaaah – “Study in Brown”, painted in 1908.

It was a very close match. Here we had two independent descriptions provided by my Aunty Myra (born 1914) and JA’s grandmother, born about ten years later. The two women were vaguely related and yet had never met – they didn’t even know of each other’s existence – but both had seen the portrait many times, provided eerily similar descriptions, and knew very well who the sitter was. Aunty Myra had passed, but JA’s grandmother was still alive. The fly in the ointment was she lived about eight hours drive away, was not terribly mobile, and had no access to the internet, even assuming her eyesight was good enough to see a thumbnail image. 

JA telephoned her grand mother. After that exchange, we were bothered about a slight quibble over the position of one hand.

Back we went to the librarian. “The painting had been known to the family as a study in brown,” JA wrote. “Could there be more than one painting by that name?”

Oh yes – there could! The librarian repeated the above process. This time she provided us a list of twenty-two artworks!!! . . . but no images. 

Back to the elimination rounds. They were painted too late, or painted in the wrong state, or exhibited in remote places, or, most tellingly, the NSW Art Gallery didn’t own them. 

Interestingly, one on the list was “Study in Brown” by Florence Alice Rodway (see above). It was painted in 1910, exhibited at the annual exhibition of the Society of Women Painters at 26 Hunter Street, Sydney, number 167 in the catalogue, priced at 31 guineas. But my efforts to locate this painting only came back to another done by Norman Carter, and now owned by the State Library of NSW. You can see it here.

JA and I finally settled on “Study in Brown“, by Norman Carter, painted 1908, as our portrait of interest.

Time to put our skates on, shake a leg, get down and dirty – however you want to phrase it – but it was time to get away from our computers and dig into the records that would prove our theory.

More of that in the next post.

Oh? What was that? You wanted an image of the painting?

So! Now you have an inkling of the impatience and frustration we were already feeling 🙂

Pazienza, my dear friends. Pazienza.

This stuff takes time and dogged perseverance.

41 thoughts on “A Study in Brown – Part Two”

  3. Pingback: “A Study in Brown – Part Three, The Reveal” | The Reluctant Retiree

  10. Ancestry searching can be a full time job—more if you let it take you down a rabbit hole! I’m currently searching for a grandmother who died at the age of 25, My daughter and I have spent months tracing her brief history. Good luck with this Gwen!

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    • Thank you. I have a nose for research, and the internet makes it so much easier than in the early days. BUT! I am usually loath to accept information on other Ancestry trees unless the owner has backed it with sources. I think there is a growing well of trees with incorrect ancestors.

      There are so many hints in births, death, marriage certificates that can also open up other places to research. I’m trying to write a second book at the moment that melds around the stories drawn from these various sources and their rabbit holes.

      Good luck with fleshing our your grandmother’s story.

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  13. Gosh, you are persistent I hope it has paid off – got my fingers crossed. A passing thought looking at the portraits in the links and the canonical art movements of this period. There was a lot of colour being used generally and in portraiture too, but doing a general search looking at Google images for Australian portraits they are very muted with an amazing number in browns. Is this a recognised style for Australian art in the first quarter of the 20th century?

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    • I’m glad you noticed the trend also. So it’s not just my imagination. I was wondering if it was the product of a school or group of teaching artists active at that time?

      I’ve passed your question on to the curator at the NSW Art Gallery with whom I’ve corresponded. She’s flat out with exhibitions, so I don’t expect an answer, but let’s see.

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      • I’ll be very interested in her answer. It could so easily be an Australian or even an Australian regional school all working in that style, but it could also be the influence of the physical environment or even social environments within which they were painting. That’s a viewpoint that goes in and out of fashion in the world of Art History!

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        • I do hope she has time to answer. However, I have been dipping in and out of newspapers of the time, and there does seem to have be some dispute between traditionalists and others. Perhaps there was an “established” way to represent portraits. I’m not convinced it was a physical environment influence, as the famous “great brown land” of Australia was well beyond the borders of their city studios. Perhaps the lighting in the studios was bad???? Interestingly, if you look at Carter’s landscapes, he distinctly “lightens up”. https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/?artist_id=carter-norman

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        • In the blog post I am writing now (part 4), I am cross-referencing to a piece written by a Karla Whitmore. She says “In the early phase of his career Carter was influenced by the ‘low toned’ movement espoused by Max Meldrum who also studied at the National Art School in Melbourne. Meldrum placed tone above proportion and composition and his theories were followed by his devoted students. Carter was less purist, noting ‘His principles are good when applied with intelligence but his followers seem to be nothing more than slavish imitators of Meldrum and each other’. (source: Carter, Notes for an Autobiography, p.13) Contemporary news reports of Carter’s work note the tendency to formality and clarity in his portraiture and emphasis on finding the character of the sitter.”

          She then goes on to write extensively about his stained glass work. You might find it very interesting whenever you have free time to read it all.

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          • Mmm always interested in stained glass work – will have a good look when the Christmas business is over.

            Regarding Meldrum and Carter it is interesting when a recognised artist/individual creates a ‘regional movement’ such as this which some folks call Tonal Impressionism. I think it was probably quite natural for Carter when painting portraits at this time, which were presumably commissioned, to retain the tonal browns, but restrain the impressionism and go for more clarity to produce a portrait in order to capture ‘the character’. People often forget the influence of patrons in the making of art even with recognised artists.

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          • My timing is bad, I know how busy you are right now! But you will enjoy her very detailed piece when you have the chance to read it.

            You are spot on with his quest to find the “character”. There is an audio interview taken late in his life where he repeats that several times.

            As far as I can tell, all his work was commissioned, privately, by organisations, or as paid illustrations for magazines, journals and newspaper short stories.

            The piece that doesn’t fit that modus operandi is “Study in Brown”. So, wishful thinking perhaps, but I keep coming back to the theory that it was done as part of his studio teachings, where it is recorded that he used live models.

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          • Well, I think that idea of the work resulting from a studio teaching session has much to recommend it. I am not well informed about 20th century studio practice, but couldn’t there also be the chance of more than one version of the session in existence. Perhaps a picture painted by a student which could potentially add more evidence for identification of the sitter. I am sure as with all these lesser known artists there’s much of their oeuvre surviving and documented, but also much associated work that has been lost along the way. Perhaps you need to put a call out to folk to search their attics for old oil portrait paintings or has that seam been exhausted? I see a long lost miniature of Charles Dickens has resurfaced after 175 years and was discovered surprisingly in South Africa.

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          • The possibility of extant student work had crossed my mind, but I just didn’t know where to start chasing that rabbit. There seems to be no list of his students, even though they had to have some merit to get through the interview process. As you’ll see from the final installment I have just posted, in the end we settled on JA’s grandmother’s word for it. We took her as a reliable eye-witness, (although the cynics could claim we influenced her into it)

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    • Agnes, I know you have stopped blogging so I’m not sure if you will see this comment. Just today 2nd Apr ’24 I have purchased a second Norman Carter, called Study of a Girl but it is another version of Study in Brown. Your hunch as in the below comments was close to the mark.

      Hope you are keeping well xx Gwen

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