National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | The Edwardians

This portrait of Thomas Lister, 4th Baron Ribblesdale, came to epitomise the Edwardian aristocrat: a sportsman, soldier, courtier and landowner. Sargent portrayed him as being alert and upright, a man with a strong physical presence, immaculately dressed, but with an expression that suggests he may have been stubborn at times. While Sargent revealed everything about his subject, in another sense he gave nothing away — he presented Ribblesdale’s public face and not his private life.

The models for The Browning readers were the artist’s wife, Alice, and her sister, Grace, wife of the artist William Orpen. Rothenstein depicted the readers in a quietly lit domestic parlour, decorated in an artistic ‘oriental’ style. This work was influential on contemporary interior decoration. The simplicity of the decoration shown in this painting — the brass plate and the blue and white china and the glass vase with a branch of spring blossom — started a fashion for uncluttered interiors.

By the end of the Edwardian era designers had embraced fashion inspired by the Orient and stylish women wore harem pants, lampshade tunics and turbans in vibrant colours, with Eastern bejewelled slippers as accessories. In Le Manteau chinois Fergusson has used a flat, decorative style, emphasising basic shapes and bright colours, rather than tonality and modelling.

A study of a male nude in Julian’s atelier, Paris exemplifies works produced at the Académie Julian by many artists at this time. Typically, the subject is observed against the light, contre-jour, involving a close study of local colour. Munnings described his time at the Académie Julian in the first volume of his autobiography, An artist’s life(1950): Julian’s in the Rue du Dragon soon became a second home … All were friends. Some advanced students were painting the most wonderful studies. Large canvases surprised us with their truth, drawing and colour … Youth, enthusiasm and small expenses bore us along week by week.’

Throughout the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th, artists used mythological and allegorical themes as well as classical forms to elevate their subjects.

In An idyll Bunny conveyed the universal and ageless theme of love with two lovers asleep, watched over by Cupid. First exhibited as L’Age d’Or, the image conveys a dream of a golden time, of Olympian gods and goddesses, of Adam and Eve before the Fall and of eternal man and woman.

Melba wore this cloak for her role as Elsa, in Wagner’s opera Lohengrin. Following her first appearance as Elsa at the Metropolitan Opera Company, the critic for the New York Tribune remarked: ‘the magnificence of her wardrobe was without a parallel as far as the local stage is concerned’. (quoted in Gray, 2004) Melba always wore her own costumes, not those belonging to the theatre as had been the standard practice.

Of all Drummond’s views of London, In the Park is the largest and most impressive, with the silhouetted figures depicted as if arrested in time. In a review of the 1912 Camden Town Group exhibition, The Times’art critic suggested that the bright colours in Drummond’s work had been inspired by the 1910 exhibition, ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’.

‘For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself … All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself … Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.’

When Virginia Woolf wrote this of her character Mrs Ramsay in To the lighthouse (1927), Woolf could just as easily have been describing herself as she was painted by her sister in this work. Bell’s portrait captured a moment of quiet intimacy between the sisters, with Virginia knitting or sewing, quite unselfconsciously ‘being herself’.

In Old Irish couple Reynell expressed the quiet dignity of the couple she encountered on her travels in Ireland and suggested their resilience against all odds. In 1915 Reynell’s friend Rose McPherson (Margaret Preston) wrote about the poverty in Ireland: ‘It is almost inconceivable … A family of nine in the ordinary course of events, and the father never hopes to earn more than seven shillings a week, how they feed them I don’t know’. (quoted in Butler, 1987).

In Arabs bargaining Carrick’s interest is as much in describing this commonplace market scene as in constructing a painting of abstract elements and high-keyed and vibrant colours. For Carrick, the intense light and colourful costumes of the Arab people provided a rich visual spectacle that allowed her to experiment with ever more intense blocks of colour and pattern in her work.

Many artists travelled to Morocco to paint. They admired the beauty, the uniqueness of the dress, the brilliance of the light and the unaccustomed brilliance of colour that they found there.