Australiana, Vol 44 no 1, February 2022

I trust all members had an enjoyable festive season with the family and friends they were fortunate enough to be able to see. As I have stated all too often, COVID never ceases to amaze with the number of twists and turns it continues to deliver. Who would have ever thought that, with the vaccination levels most states are at, this pandemic would rear its ugly head in the manner it has with the Omicron variant? By the time you read this there will probably be another. It was most pleasing that NSW, VIC, TAS and SA state branches were able to hold well-attended and well-received functions prior to Christmas. From a personal perspective it was wonderful to reunite with so many members and view such quality items of Australiana ranging from colonial fine art to classic pre-1840 colonial furniture and various decorative arts at Craiglea, the Edwards family home at Woodbridge, 40 minutes south of Hobart. State Chairs Robert Stevens, Robert Hannan and Peter Lane report that similar sentiments were expressed at their events.

Peter Walker Fine Art established our annual Writing Award in 1999 to encourage writing for Australiana. At that time Australiana was a 32-page magazine, stapled, with three to five articles and a few black-and-white illustrations per issue. Twenty-two years on, the award has achieved its objectives. The Australiana Society now boasts a 60-page magazine, perfect bound, usually with a minimum of six articles per issue, all lavishly illustrated in colour. The articles are diverse in subject, length and authorship.

Making Good: Convict artisans in exile is a new National Trust (NSW) exhibition at Old Government House, Parramatta NSW from 5 March till 27 November, charting the lives of convicts and their impact on the colony.

English painter John Glover once owned two Italian landscapes by the French painter known as Claude Lorrain. Claude's work prompted artists and tourists to view landscape in terms of art, so they would often look at 'Picturesque' scenery reflected in a tinted convex mirror known as a ‘Claude glass’, simulating the golden hue of old varnish. Glover used such a tool and owned two paintings by Claude, which influenced the way he painted; they are now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Glynnis Stevenson looks at the two Claude paintings that Glover owned in England, comparing the Claudes with several copies of them Glover executed in England and later in Tasmania.

Artists in early Australia were usually trained in Britain and Europe in the Classical tradition going back to ancient Greece and Rome. David Hansen explores the possibility that, in the composition of his paintings created in Van Diemen’s Land, Benjamin Duterrau was influenced by Renaissance and Classical models he had seen in London.

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, workshop and guild traditions were based on the principle of emulation, with apprentices learning by copying the works of their masters. In painting, the practice was gradually regularised and systematised in the curricula of emergent national academies of art, beginning at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, and in Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s program at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris.

Objects and art shown at international exhibitions always attract a premium. Often, they really were ‘showpieces’, specially made to demonstrate the maker’s skills, ability and cutting-edge design. Three room suites of W. H. Rocke’s furniture displayed at the prestigious Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880 were illustrated in some of the contemporary newspapers, while half a dozen examples have been acquired by Melbourne museums, so their forms are already broadly familiar. Dr Andrew Montana discovered an 1880s photograph which shows a cabinet, originally from the 1880 Melbourne Exhibition, in a real domestic interior. He discusses this cabinet as well as other surviving examples of W.H. Rocke’s exhibition furniture.

In the aftermath of World War II, many commercial potteries were established in Australia to satisfy the market disrupted by hostilities, particularly for Japanese and European imports. While some of these new commercial potteries were established by immigrants from war-ravaged Europe, Henning Alfred Rathjen (1903–1968) was one of the Australian-born artists who established a new pottery studio to cater for local demand and post-war innovations in art pottery. Rathjen established his eponymous pottery studio in Melbourne in 1948, producing quality slip-cast wares over the next 20 years. His production moved away from standard 1940s designs, with applied flowers or incised designs and textured surfaces, as he gradually developed unusual shapes, different glazes and contrasting, flamboyantly coloured glazes. He sold his pottery studio in 1968, just before his unexpected death a few months later.

A small watercolour painting reveals remarkable similarities between the 1919 pandemic and that of our times.

Lesley Garrett, a long-standing family friend, fondly recalls Trevor Kennedy's life and passion for collecting, amassing the most important collection of Australian decorative arts ever assembled... Anne Schofield, the source of much of the spectacular jewellery acquired for his collection, has her own distinct memories of Trevor Kennedy as a collector... John Hawkins adds an anecdote, praises private collectors for their passion and foresight, and takes a swipe at those who neither appreciate the importance nor fund the collection, preservation and presentation of artefacts that help define us as Australians.

JOURNAL REVIEW BY DR ROSS JOHNSTON, Queensland History Journal, vol. 24, no. 11, November 2021, (Journal of The Royal Historical Society of Queensland); BOOK REVIEW BY DR LINDA YOUNG, Fringe, Frog & Tassel: The Arts of the Trimmings-Maker in Interior Decoration. By Annabel Westman; BOOK REVIEW BY DR DAVID BEDFORD, Ashley Hay, Gum. The story of eucalypts and their champions; BOOK REVIEW BY JOHN WADE, Alexis Bergantz, French Connection. Australia’s cosmopolitan ambitions.