National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | The Edwardians

Steer painted many nudes in which his figures are set in a domestic environment. In Seated nude:The black hat he depicted his model sitting at ease among her discarded clothes, still wearing her hat. Her incomplete state of undress emphasises her nakedness. Steer never exhibited this work because his friends suggested that it was improper to paint a nude wearing a hat.

Florence, Lady Phillips (1863–1940) was the daughter of a South African land surveyor. In 1885, she met and married Lionel Phillips, who had become wealthy in the 1880s by mining diamonds. They lived in England from 1898 to 1906, during which time Lady Phillips developed a keen interest in art and bought contemporary works — by William Orpen, William Rothenstein, Walter Sickert and Philip Wilson Steer, as well as by Pissarro, Monet and Sisley. In 1919, her daughter Edith married the artist William Nicholson.

Valerie Susan Langdon — the subject of this work — caused a scandal in 1878 when she married in secret Henry Meux, the heir to a brewery fortune. Valerie said she was an actress before her marriage, but many suggested she had worked under another name at a dance hall frequented by prostitutes. In a bid to gain his wife a place in polite Victorian society, Henry bought Lady Meux the diamonds that Whistler portrayed her wearing in this painting. However, neither the jewels nor her Egyptian antiquities collection could gain her the position that she desired.

Nellie Melba was the professional name of Helen Porter Mitchell (1861–1931). The Australian soprano was born in Melbourne, the city from which she took her name. She sang at Covent Garden, London, from 1888 to 1926, and at intervals with the Metropolitan Opera Company, New York. Famous for her lyric and coloratura roles, Sarah Bernhardt described her voice as being ‘pure crystal’ and Percy Grainger claimed that her voice always made him ‘mindsee Australia’s landscapes’. When Bunny painted this portrait, Melba was at the pinnacle of her success and beginning her artistic partnership with the tenor, Enrico Caruso.

Lambert presented Lotty in command of the room, comfortably looking out at the viewer. The lady, dressed for outdoors in hat and gloves, is tenuously seated in this room; her body silhouetted against the door suggests her imminent escape. It was rare for a lady to venture into a kitchen, and in portraying Lotty and the lady together Lambert challenged traditional Edwardian social roles and behaviours.

La Belle chauffeuse is a portrait of the playwright Sylvia Bristowe. Nicholson loved style and often included costume in his paintings. In depicting Sylivia Bristowe in a motoring outfit he made a statement about her being a modern woman, adopting the latest modes of transport as well as being wealthy enough to own a car.

In Important people Lambert presented a group of ordinary people at a time when the subjects of group portraits were often people with wealth or status in society. He mocked the assumption that importance is a matter of money or property. He created an allegorical image representing a range of human qualities that he regarded as important: motherhood, physical prowess, business acumen, and new life and energy.

Peter Pan is a small-scale version of George Frampton’s sculpture unveiled in Kensington Gardens in 1912. Edwardian society was enchanted by JM Barrie’s story of Peter Pan. The subject reflects a contemporary fascination with paganism and a belief in the power of nature and natural forces.

In The fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy Sargent portrayed the artist Jane de Glehn sketching the scene in front of her, watched by her artist husband Wilfrid. Jane described sitting for the picture in a letter to her sister on 6 October 1907: ‘Sargent is doing a most amusing and killingly funny picture in oils of me perched on a balustrade painting. It is the very ‘spit’ of me. He has stuck Wilfrid in looking at my sketch with rather a contemptuous expression … I am all in white with a white painting blouse and a pale blue veil around my hat. I look rather like a pierrot, but have rather a worried expression as every painter should have who isn’t a perfect fool, says Sargent. Wilfrid is in short sleeves, very idle and good for nothing’. (quoted in Kilmurray and Ormond, 1988)

Nevinson witnessed the heavy casualties and widespread devastation of the first battles of the First World War. At the front, he made notes and sketches which he later worked up into drawings, paintings and drypoints. In Returning to the trenches he captured, through angular lines and abstract blocks of colour, the movement of an army on the march. He portrayed the column of men marching as if they were robots, caught up in a destiny over which they had no control.