Portraiture

Unusually for an artist, Ada Whitingnee Cherry (1859 –1953) was a celebrated success in her lifetime.1In 1900, the first time she submitted a portrait miniature to the Royal Academy in London, it was hung ‘onthe line’ – a small work needs to be exhibited at eye level. Remarkable for a‘colonial’, a female, a first submission, and the first Tasmanian-born artist tobe exhibited at the RA! The same year, Ada exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Hibernian and the Paris Salon to considerable acclaim.

The Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth) visited Australia to open our new Commonwealth Parliament in Canberra in 1927. On their royal tour, the Duke and Duchess briefly stopped at Castlemaine station in April 1927, met by an enthusiastic crowd.

The first retrospective of ‘19th-century Australia’s best unknown artist’, Charles Rodius (1802–1860), bringing together 92 original watercolours, drawings and prints, will be shown at the State Library of NSW. While the host library holds the largest collection, other notable examples are held in the National Library of Australia, the British Museum and other public and private collections, many never shown before.

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794–1847) was early colonial Australia’s most sophisticated and glamourising portraitist. The current exhibition, Paradise Lost – Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) features 40 works by Wainewright together with contextual works by Blake, Fuseli, von Holst and a raft of Old Master prints known to have been in Wainewright’s collection.

Recently rediscovered information pertaining to the life of Australian painter and art teacher Rose Blakemore has enriched our understanding of four portrait miniatures in the Queensland Art Gallery’s collection.

John White was born at Drumaran, County Fermanagh in north-western Ireland about 1756 – not England as is sometimes claimed.1 He entered the Royal Navy as a surgeon’s mate in 1778 and rose to naval surgeon; in this capacity he was appointed to serve as surgeon on the transport Charlotte in the First Fleet, which left Portsmouth for New South Wales in 1787.

In 2012, the very substantial archive of the late Leslie Nicholl Walford AM (1927–2012) was acquired by the Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection. Walford was one of the most influential interior designers in Australia, especially in society circles in Sydney. He was widely known through his weekly newspaper columns for the Sun-Herald, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sunday Telegraph, running from 1967 to 1984.

The John Oxley Library at the State Library of Queensland has added a portrait of Lord Lamington, Queensland’s eighth governor, to its collection of historical works of art.