down on berry’s bay: the twilight years of a.h. fullwood
TRANSCRIPT
DOWN ON BERRY’S BAY: THE TWILIGHT YEARS OF A.H. FULLWOOD
“Old artists never die, they just get the big brush-off.”
I have long been fascinated by what happens to artists as they drift into old age. I’m especially interested in those journeyman landscape artists of the late 19th century who, though successful early in their careers, never really made it big by the time they had reached middle age.
Such artists, no longer fashionable -‐ and not in the fortunate position of having a loyal and wealthy spouse, partner or patron -‐ can hardly simply continue to go on the road like the ageing rock stars of today who can now frequently extract considerable amounts of cash from nostalgic baby boomers at geriatric music venues.
If you are an ageing has-‐been landscape artist it’s no easy thing to put on a best selling exhibition of new works or even to knock up a few additional copies of your once popular paintings to raise some cash to tide you over in old age. Finding a dealer or gallery willing to take you on would be a tough call. And finding enough people who can still remember either your name or what your paintings once looked like might be even tougher.
But Albert Henry Fullwood had not always been a has-‐been.
In the 1880s and 1890s he was young, ambitious and exceedingly hard working. And don’t even start me going on about how prolific he was!
But prolificacy (like profligacy) does not necessarily amount to talent – and, facile as he could be when required, today (if he is known at all) Fullwood’s legacy probably rests almost solely on the countless landscapes he produced in various media – and which turn up regularly in the sales of Australian and London auction houses.
Fullwood’s current reputation is, to put it bluntly and in the old Australian vernacular with which he would have been familiar, “As crook as Rookwood.”
It is salutary, therefore, to pause and puzzle over a landscape work such as his Solitude, 1895.
Albert Henry Fullwood (1863-1930) Oil on canvas, 90 x 126 cm.
Such a work must surely have seemed pretty edgy back then and certainly very different from the more iconic Australian images he produced between 1885 and 1900.
A.H. Fullwood - Newbold Crossing Oil on panel, 43 x 26.5 cm
(Summer Art Auction, GFL Fine Art, Perth.)
Presumably, however, works like Solitude did not sell as readily as Fullwood might have hoped – and in 1890s Sydney, for an artist keen on making a splash (much as many probably would have had hated to have had to admit it) the only good painting was one that sells.
Even someone as successful in Australia as Eugene von Geurard (born 1811 and whose works can sometimes command millions of dollars today) ended up dying in poverty in Chelsea in 1901 -‐ a double victim of both of some of the spectacular Australian bank crashes of the 1890s and the simple, though personally disastrous, matter of falling almost completely out of painterly fashion towards the end of one’s life.
Indeed, the rise of the Heidelberg school in late 19th century Australia must have seemed something like the arrival of late 1970s punk rock to someone like von Guerard -‐ the indubitably talented but now financially hapless son of a court painter of miniatures at the court of Emperor Francis I of Austria no less.
Put simply, it is sometimes possible for a skilled artist to live too long – or, even worse, to live at a peculiarly disadvantageous time for someone who wants to make his or her living from a particular style of art.
Indeed, the prolonged economic depression of the 1890s saw the Australian art market go very close to near total collapse and so nearly all of the then emerging big names – Roberts, Streeton, Conder, Fullwood and, later, Syd Long and Will Dyson – made the decision to try their hands in London or Paris in what they guessed would then be a better market place.
"On the Thames," c. 1905 - Oil on canvas board, signed in monogram 'AF' lower right, 20 x 29 cm and A.H. FULLWOOD. 1863-1930 'Tudor Country House'. Oil on canvas on board.. Monogrammed
lower left. 48 x 73cm
After the move overseas, many only just survived financially.
Some, like both Fullwood and Streeton, only eventually permanently returning to Australia as late as 1920 -‐ having spent many years working furiously on any project that would bring in a quid and also sometimes hanging out at the Chelsea Arts Club, a place where a whole host of expatriates would occasionally burn gum leaves as a nostalgic reminder of their days painting en plein air in the various artists' camp back in sunny Australia.
Whether or not such a purification ritual actually helped to help clear the presumed miasma of the London fogs -‐ it nonetheless is likely to have brought back fond memories to Roberts, Conder, Streeton and Fullwood of their salad days at Curlew on the eastern shore of Little Sirius Cove at Mosman in Sydney.
It had been Girolamo Nerli and Julian Ashton who had helped so many young Australians to develop their love of practising their art in the open air. And those fortunate enough to do it around Sydney Harbour were enjoying an experience few would be likely to easily forget. For many of these artists the sunlit, glistening shores of one of the world’s finest harbours held a lasting attraction.
Published by Raphael Tuck & Sons– A ‘Wide Wide World Series’ Postcard c.1905
And, indeed, what sort of person would not have looked back fondly on days when they were young and happy and just starting to make their way in the art world while struggling with the challenges of making a living through art in the middle of a cold English winter?
Nonetheless, some other Australian artists’ (usually ones not associated with the Sydney artists camps) got lucky in either Old Blighty or on the continent and pursued careers which prospered -‐ Bunny, Lambert and Longstaff, for instance. Even the English born Conder (whose Australian period is probably the apogee of his painting career) while not quite making it as a ‘society artist’ nonetheless managed to marry a wealthy widow, thus ensuring financial security by a different means.
Others still, like the Aussie architect and artist – the still young William Hardy Wilson (taught by Syd Long no less) -‐ were independently wealthy and not only could enjoy the nostalgic soirées at the Chelsea Arts Club but were also sufficiently well-‐heeled to dabble in some lucrative and educative collecting in the fields of European antique furniture and the decorative arts. Still, all these very significant departures from the Australian art scene occasionally did have the positive spin-‐off of opening up some scant artistic opportunities for those who remained.
Fred Leist, for example, who (like Fullwood) began working as a black-‐and-‐white artist, but managed, after 1900, to score Fullwood’s old job as the Sydney representative for the Graphic magazine of London. Leist, however, unlike so many of the others, moved to Europe much later (in 1917) when he was appointed as an official war artist to serve with the Australian Imperial Force
alongside such expatriates as Longstaff, Roberts, Fullwood, James Quinn (who also painted a portrait of Fullwood now held by the AGNSW) and, of course, Will Dyson who – while in England in December 1916 -‐ had been commissioned by the Commonwealth as the first Australian war artist.
A.H. Fullwood - Sirius Cove (c.1892-1895)
Oil on cedar panel, 20 x 24.2 cm
It was to be an extended absence for Leist (he only returned to Australia in 1926 to take up a position as Head of Painting at East Sydney Technical College) and it was one that would appear to have had as significant an impact on Leist’s subsequent reputation as the even longer unbroken twenty years away from Australia appears to have had on Fullwood’s.
For, among such current turn of the twentieth century Australian art luminaries (Streeton and Roberts and Long) poor old A.H. Fullwood is, unlike his former painting mates, today often well-‐nigh forgotten – or mentioned only in the briefest of footnotes or in passing when listing a string of artists’ names.
Although Fullwood’s work – in various media – still turns up very regularly at contemporary auction house sales, today it commands nothing anywhere near the prices of his mates in the artists’ camps who had dubbed him “Uncle Remus” because of the pleasure both his art and his story-‐telling brought to them.
Yet, for the forty years of Australian art history between 1885 and 1925, Albert Henry Fullwood is not only arguably the most prolific ‘Australian’ artist (like Tom Robert and Conder, Fullwood was born in England) but Fullwood was by far the most widely published Australian art practitioner. Moreover, few other Australian artists can go near matching Fullwood in terms of the variety of art media which he mastered – etching, illustration, watercolour, charcoal, monotype and oil – or in the range of publications in which his art appeared.
And, although it is landscape art that clearly became his bread and butter, the young Fullwood was not simply the most prolific of the many artists then often working en plein air trying to capture something of the special light and character of Australia’s golden summers. Fullwood was both influencing and being influenced by his now more famous colleagues. It is even very possible that it was A.H. Fullwood who set Sydney Long on the path of his now celebrated interlude of ‘Australianised’ art noveau -‐ for Fullwood’s extraordinary “Girl with Galah” may well pre-‐date the Long’s ‘Spirit of The Plains’ by a full two years.
ALBERT HENRY FULLWOOD Girl with Galah gouache44.5 x 30.8 cm Executed circa 1895
And yet despite possessing a sometimes astounding breadth and facility, Fullwood is today most often relegated to the lesser status of “black and white artist” – a still somewhat surprisingly disparaging label in a country which has been regularly referred to as home to some of the finest black and white art produced in the world.
Paradoxically, it would seem to be the fact that the frequency which Fullwood’s work – published in the Sydney Mail, Illustrated Sydney News, Australian Town and Country Journal, the Picturesque Atlas of Australia and The Bulletin -‐ was seen by the Australian public between 1885 and 1900 which has somehow helped contribute to lower the regard in which his oeuvre is held by an art world which still so often privileges oil paintings above all else.
“Coogee”, Sydney Mail Supplement Cover, 1890 (image courtesy Gary Werskey)
And yet – even as early in his career as 1892 – Fullwood was producing and selling massive skilfully-‐handled oils such as “Illawarra as seen from Bulli Pass”.
A.H. FULLWOOD ‘Illawarra from Bulli Pass’, Wollongong City Gallery (1892)
Indeed, back then, so well-‐regarded was this large Fullwood oil that, surprisingly, the photographer Henry King even went to the trouble of producing a black and white glass plate negative version (now held by the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney). There are very few other Australian late 19th century paintings which received this rather odd – and seemingly pointless -‐ kind of honour. But it is testimony, I guess, to widespread esteem in which all of Fullwood’s art in all media was held at the time – along with Henry King’s astute early recognition that the topographical art of A.H Fullwood was ideally suited to mass reproduction in the form of postcards (although the skills to produce photographic postcards in colour would first emerge in Germany and take more than a decade before it became possible in Australia).
Henry King - Glass negative, full plate, "Illawarra" from the "Bulli Pass", from the Painting by A.H.
Fullwood', Powerhouse Museum Collection, Sydney NSW
Moreover, the esteem which Fullwood’s art was accruing amounted to a kind of organic ‘popularity’ which appears to derive from the simple fact that Fullwood was the artist whose work was most frequently seen by the mass Australian public which took to illustrated newspapers and periodicals like ducks to water.
Quite simply, black and white art appearing in such publication was the art that most Australians saw between 1880 and the outbreak of World War One.
Australian oil painting as such did not really enjoy anywhere near the same kind of mass audience as the black and white art found in newspapers – and the novelty value which accrued to the very few block-‐bluster oil painting exhibitions which toured Australia at the time is an odd kind of testimony to this fact. In 1906, for example, an exhibition of a famous single Pre-‐Raphaelite painting -‐ William Holman Hunt’s the Light of the World -‐ was seen by an estimated four million people in Australia and New Zealand!
The Light of the World (1853–54 by William Holman Hunt illustrating ‘Revelation 3:20’:
"Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me". According to Hunt: "I painted the
picture with what I thought, unworthy though I was, to be by Divine command, and not simply as a good Subject." The door in the painting has no handle, and can therefore be opened only
from the inside, representing "the obstinately shut mind". The original is now in a side room off the large chapel at Keble College, Oxford. Toward the end of his life, Hunt painted a life-size version, which was hung in St Paul's Cathedral, London, after a world tour where the
picture drew large crowds. Due to Hunt's increasing infirmity, he was assisted in the completion of this version by English painter Edward Robert Hughes.
Despite even Fullwood himself having at least one very brief and rather uncharacteristic Pre_Raphaelite moment in 1890, it is doubtful that even the great mass of his black and white work which had appeared in Australian newspapers and periodicals – making him by then easily the most widely published Australian artist ever – would have been seen by quite as many people as Hunt’s celebrated work. There can, of course, be no precise comparison made in this regard for Holman Hunt’s Light of the World would needed to have attracted many repeat visitors as the entire population of this Australia in 1906 has been estimated on census figures to have then been only 4,091,485 (excluding Aborigines) and New Zealand’s a mere 888,578 (excluding Maoris).
A.H. Fullwood Decoration, 1890 Oil on board, 70 x 90 cm
Nonetheless, the wider audience for Fullwood’s work continued to spread because his work was also being published in the London Graphic (something which in the hey-‐days of the cultural cringe could only lend prestige to his art) and was soon to be further enhanced by the more than 130 beautifully produced coloured postcards of Fullwood’s “Wide Wide World Series” published by Tucks in the very attractive and popular ‘oilette’ landscapes.
'THE BLUE MTS N.S.W. / WEEPING ROCK, WENTWORTH FALLS' by A.H. Fullwood; Ralph Tuck and Sons' 'Wide-Wide-World' series of Oilettes, No. 7355 and DUNEDIN N.Z. / PORT
CHALMERS.' by A.H. Fullwood; Raphael Tuck and Sons' 'Wide-Wide-World' series of Oilettes, No. 7352
Between the early 1880s and 1920 few artists anywhere in the world appeared to have either worked so hard, produced so much or travelled so far. England, Scotland, France, Holland -‐ along with tiny places all over Australia and New Zealand feature in his work, as do images of South Africa, the United States and Canada.
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But sketching and painting en plein air all over the world in remote and challenging landscapes (and this was particularly the case for the Australian and New Zealand scenes) -‐ is clearly a young man’s game. And Fullwood certainly played it to perfection.
In doing so, he also managed to document important elements of Australia’s social history. And, indeed, part of my own affection for Fullwood is the way he so spectacularly captured the region – the Illawarra coast of NSW – where I was born and have spent my entire life in a series of oils and watercolours, six of which were produced by Rapahael Tuck and Co as handsome ‘oilete’ postcards with accompanying occasionally inaccurate text.
Bulli Pass leads up to the mountains around the town of Kiama [sic]. The gorgeous tropical foliage, and the other natural beauties of the place, make this place on the finest sights in
Australia. The road winds its way around and up the great hills, finally landing the traveller at the plateau, from which some of the finest views in the world may be obtained.
Yet among the curiosities of Fullwood’s art is that, throughout his life, he managed to effectively document many things which are now but a memory. His image of the ‘Old Slave Market’ in Capetown is one of South Africa’s great historical art treasures and in Australia he managed to record vivid images of just how remarkable was the achievement of a postal service which operated over such an extraordinarily diverse country with such vast distances between often tiny inland population centres.
“Australia: Collecting the Mail”; “Australia: G.P.O. Sydney, NSW”; “Australia: A Bush Post Office”; “Postman (on skis) - Kiandra District NSW Australia”. All images: Raphael Tuck
Oilette, Wide-Wide- World Series - Australia Post and Telegraph; Artist signed A H Fullwood
Old slave market Capetown (1902) - oil on canvas on paperboard 24.1 x 34.3 cm board; purchased 1925AGNSW
The boy who began as a Birmingham jewellery apprentice certainly went places – but he also worked and worked, and continued working into old age.
That he often returned late in life to earlier themes (although often using different media) is beyond doubt. He may simply have run out of ideas or perhaps he saw the return to old subjects just as much as a way of continuing to refine his skills as of exhaustion of both energy and ideas – as is evidenced by the sensitivity to which he would return in 1925 to etching his earlier postal sketches and watercolours produced some 30 years earlier.
The country postman. 1925 intaglio etching, printed in black ink with plate-tone, from one plate plate-
mark 15.3 h x 22.6 w cm In such an image we get some sense of the development of Fullwood’s skills. By this time he been honing his prowess as an etcher for some 40 years and the masterful creation of mood here is still clearly evident but there is also, perhaps, a certain lack of dynamism – a sort of running out of steam. And who wouldn’t be exhausted after the life Fullwood had led – but it is nonetheless sad to imagine what seems a more palpable sense of painterly exhaustion in some of his very late images such as his 1929 watercolour of Manly.
Manly - Watercolour and bodycolour, signed 'A. Fullwood' and dated '29' lower left, 20.6 x 27 cm
It seems an unusual and uninspiring way to depict Manly – but then, when looked at closely, is probably not really all that different in tone and lassitude to one of the London views he churned out some 18 years before.
Trafalgar Square 1911 Watercolour, signed and dated 'A Fullwood 11' lower left, 35.5 x 63 cm
The carefree days of the single young man and aspiring artist on the make had long passed – and yet, after marrying in 1896, Fullwood very much needed to work to both live and support his family. Fullwood and his wife - Clyda Blanche Newman (1871-1918) who was the daughter of Sydney photographer John Hubert Newman (1836-1924) - had produced two children by 1900. The couple was thus more in need of money at the very time when art sales had collapsed all around them – hence the deemed necessity of the move to London. And yet through all the difficulties that would ensue (tragedies involving children and a mentally unstable wife confined to various asylums) and, despite working so hard yet never quite making the big time, “Uncle Remus” persisted.
Perhaps it was simply an escape from the difficulties of his family life, but somehow Fullwood still found time to not only to continue to use his gifts of friendship and storytelling but also to use his organisational skills. Prior to his marriage Fullwood had been a prime mover in forming the Sydney Art Society with Tom Roberts and, after his return to Australia 1920, becoming the founder of the Sydney Etchers Society – yet two more arrows in the rather full quiver of an artist whose diverse talents are today largely forgotten.
Very few so amazingly prolific workaday artists have also found the time to take as collaborative approach to the art worlds in which they moved as A.H. Fullwood.
And yet Fullwood was far mote than a mere workaholic artistic factotum and organisational drudge. He could be a pioneer among his now more famous contemporaries as well for it was Fullwood who, as Gary Werskey has noted, "was the first of his generation to venture into the commercial issue of fine art drawings."
The 'Black Horse', Richmond, NSW, 1894. Etching, signed, dated and titled in plate lower left
to right, signed in pencil in lower margin, 22.5 x 32cm.
As Josef Lebovic has pointed out, “The Black Horse Inn was a popular honeymoon spot in the late 19th century.” And Lebovic is probably right when he remarks that “Fullwood produced the etching in an attempt to capitalise on this market.” (Australian Art Collectors' List No.130, 2008)
And it was Fullwood who taught many young Australian artists to also become etchers. Indeed, the popularity and importance of the etching in early 20th century Australia might, in large part, be properly ascribed to Fullwood’s generosity and influence. He seems to have been the kind of bloke who was happy to share his artistic knowledge with just about anyone who was interested.
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By 1925, however, Fullwood seems to have possibly been well and truly over it all.
Yet he kept at it nonetheless – still producing etchings and watercolours and oils at home and sometimes sketching and painting with his mates down on the shores of Sydney harbour.
Fullwood was now in his late 60s and he was perhaps growing tired.
The “debonair cynicism the artist [Fullwood] loves to assume," – which the Illustrated Sydney News had remarked upon on as early as 1889 (Thursday 31 October edition) was, by now, probably somewhat less ‘assumed’ than it had been back then.
Just the effort of carting his painting material down to Berry’s Bay with his mates might even now have been a bit of stretch.
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But back in the 1880s Fullwood was the consummate intrepid artist trekking almost everywhere and producing vivid sketches of untrodden paths and peaks in sometimes merciless Australian conditions.
For example, for then doubt relaxed and comfortable readers of the expensive Picturesque Atlas of Australia, Fullwood trudged through the very un–English ‘Somerset’ landscape of far North Queensland and then on to “Thursday Island, tossed by waves, soused by clouds, scowled at by Malays” as the correspondent for the Illustrated Sydney News phrased it (November 28, 1899) in order to produce a few small sketches for both public consumption and the anticipated profits of his employers (profits which, sadly, never came).
Today the picturesque “Six Foot Track” (a 45km trail) stretches across the Blue Mountains from The Explorer's Marked Tree, near Katoomba, and winds through State Forests and National Parks following the route of the original 1884 Bridal track between Katoomba and Jenolan Caves.
“The descent is very steep, and to early explorers extremely difficult of access, but thanks to the wise provisions of some past Government, some of the
boulders have been blasted; chasms have been filled up, trees felled, large and beautiful ferns have succumbed to the woodman's axe, and a good path
formed right through this natural gem, and tourists can now enjoy the lovely scene without excessive labour. Windsor and Richmond Gazette (Saturday 16
March 1889 p. 3)
Yet the 20-year-old Albert Fullwood and three mates pioneered the difficult walk when it was still in its roughest state – and also managed to be cheerful enough about it to keep a diary and sketch some mocking caricatures of four extremely worn-out trekkers.
“After the Black Range
Dropping 4000ft, over large boulders, wet and covered with slippery moss – cataracts – decayed ferns, trees, &c &c which formed a kind of black mud, two feet, & in parts deeper in thickness. Occasionally one would make a slip and roll headlong into this x x x x x x by the time we got to tree number 20 we were in a terrible state of
exhaustion and filth. AHF Sydney Novr 16th 1884.”
Fullwood sketch with annotations: “AHF Sydney Novr 16th 1884.” – photo by Gary Werskey
All this travel and travail must have been tough (even for a young man) but the hard work paid off – in the early days at least - and the commissions started coming in to make life a little easier.
“He has exhibited in Birmingham, Bristol, and Manchester, but his chief work at home was done 'by commission’, that godsend to the struggling young artist, who suddenly finds himself able to live, thanks to the millionaire's
fashionable craze for a picture gallery. Six years ago Mr. Fullwood came out to this country, working during half that time for the Picturesque Atlas Company, and exhibiting yearly (with one exception) in the Art Society's collections. His paintings, with their evidence of hard work and genuine feeling, are popular favourites, and it is probably to the ' lessons of Mother Nature ' that we may
trace that sympathetic insight which… throws a poetic atmosphere around his landscapes. (OUR SYDNEY ARTISTS - Illustrated Sydney News, Thursday 28
November 1889 p. 26)
But it was now the late 1920s – and no longer what must have seemed those ‘Golden Summers’ back in the 1880s. Fullwood still liked to go painting down by the harbour with his mates, however - and they still seemed to like having “Uncle Remus” around them.
But sometimes, in the late 1920s Fullwood did not even feel like putting pencil or watercolour to paper or oil to canvas. He was there by the harbour with the friends of his old age - Percy Lindsay, Sydney Ure-Smith, Albert Rollins, Fred Leist, M.J. (Mathew James) MacNally and Harold Herbert – and that was probably enough.
Fullwood now seems to have preferred, when working at all, to do it at home – and he was still producing small but elegant etchings to almost the very last day of his life. But the sunshine and harbour was now for friendship as much as art – and, no doubt, also as a nostalgic wink to the days of his lost youth.
Fortunately, M.J MacNally - the watercolourist, art critic, book reviewer and writer with the Melbourne Age, the Sydney Daily Telegraph and, later the
Adelaide News and Mail, (and also Carnegie lecturer at the Adelaide National Gallery for some years, as well as sometime lecturer to the South Australian Education Departments) has skilfully and thoughtfully recorded the paradoxical delights of one of these last bright sunny days in the twilight of Fullwood’s career.
“One day several artists had an excursion to Berry's Bay, Sydney. They were Percy Lind say, Ure-Smith, Albert Rollins, Fred Leist, 'Remus' Fullwood. Harold Herbert, and another. It was amusing to see he procession from the Bay Road Station to the point where Berry Bay overlooks the harbor — an artillery pack train was nothing to it. The day was hot and humid, and tempers were frayed. Arguments started and continued the whole afternoon. Nothing was done, so
they wended their way back to the station. Thinking what an accomplished group like this could have done with this lovely subject, I wrote a fanciful
account of he trip, for the Daily Telegraph, Sydney, and dwelt on the beauty of the drawing of the old homestead, with the blue water behind it, that 'Remus' had intended doing, but didn't. It was a good skit, if I do say it myself, on an
absurd afternoon, and amused them immensely. Imagine my surprise a day or so later to receive a telegram from a man at Hamilton, near Newcastle, saying he would pay £50 for Fullwood's picture of the homestead 'for that was where
he had been born.' I raced to the Press Club, roused out 'Remus.' and fairly drove him to Berry's Bay to do the picture. When he heard there was £50
hanging to it he became enthusiastic, and did a really fine work. We had it framed and sent along, and in a couple of days came a grateful letter of thanks,
and the promised cheque. Poor 'Remus' died shortly afterwards, very suddenly, and it was a sad and sorry saint group that followed this great
lovable old Bohemian to Rookwood.” (The Adelaide Mail, 28 December, 1940)
Such were the mauvais quarts d'heure of the final days of A. H. Fullwood down on Berry’s Bay – those bad quarter hours, those uncomfortable though brief experiences of the twilight of Albert Henry Fullwood’s artistic life.
The trouble was that – despite early success of the 1880s and 1890s – those quarter hours had begun to stretch into long decades after the turn of the 20th century and the fickleness of both age and changing artistic fashions began to take their inevitable toll.
And just as in polite dinner party circles, the time between the arrival of the guests and the announcement of dinner is traditionally called the mauvais quart d’heure - the actual time between Fullwood’s celebrated artistic success soon after arrival in Australia and the long delayed confirmation of his enduring genius was a particularly unpleasant and inordinately prolonged fifteen minutes. As M. J. MacNally marvellously unfolds it, the final years of the life of the artist A. H. Fullwood were, as Oscar Wilde so aptly phrased it his play A Woman of No Importance, “simply a mauvais quart d'heure made up of exquisite moments” with his friends down by Berry’s Bay – the pity is that they did not stretch into hours.
The tragedy is that, despite his early successes, Fullwood is today regarded by the Australian art world as pretty much, to purloin Wilde’ s phrase for our own purposes, ‘An Artist of No Importance’.
The station boundary 1891 oil on canvas (61.6 x 92.0 cm) AGNSW purchased 1891
As Gary Werskey has noted “one casualty of Barry Pearce’s makeover of the AGNSW's show court was Albert Henry Fullwood’s The Station Boundary (1888). Purchased by the gallery in 1891, it had hung for many years in one of the ground floor galleries. But in 2009 it was removed for restoration according to Pearce, and has failed to resurface. Fullwood's removal from the AGNSW's display of the ‘Golden Age’ echoes his absence from [Bernard] Smith’s narrative and surveys.”
Perhaps that judgement is a touch extreme, for Fullwood’s achievements - garnered over a lifetime – are, as I have endeavoured to demonstrate, of quite some significance (pedestrian and repetitive though some of it undoubtedly is) in the history of Australian art.
In the age where the mass reproduction of art images is so easily and comfortably available to anyone with an internet connection, it might be time to look again at Fullwood in the light of the contemporary ramifications which
have been spun from Walter Benjamin’s notions aired in 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Benjamin then suggests that the art that was developed in Fullwood’s time necessarily “differs from that of the present and hence our understanding and treatment of it must be reconsidered in order to understand it in a modern context.” His discussion of the concept of authenticity, particularly in application to reproduction, applies quite particularly to the career of Fullwood.
The AGNSW's 1891 purchase of Fullwood’s The station boundary represented a most important early affirmation of his success – and, as an artist in need of money, Fullwood was no doubt keen to repeat that success throughout his life.
Yet exiled to England – and still in need of money – was the production of yet another postcard image for Raphael Tuck and Sons going to be the answer to the problems of both his life and his art? By returning to his sketchbook and rather mechanically repeating the scene (but without much of the imaginative mood which made his 1891 once so significant) simply a case of Fullwood overcooking the goose which had previously laid the golden egg for him?
Raphael Tuck and Sons Postcard – probably printed c.1905 (8.8 x 13.8 cm)
It is almost as if Fullwood has simply taken the same ringbarked frees from his earlier massive canvas, Illawarra from Bulli Pass, and inserted them at the margins in this much smaller scale work.
But the coloured postcard image appears both bastardised and de-sensitised to any one who has seen Fullwood’s 1891 work.
The wonderful oil, The Station Boundary 189, held by AGNSW tells the whole history of NSW after the Robertson’s Land Acts – and establishes with the gentlest of touches just how important it was to mark the boundary of a property for both the squatters and small free selectors who had now gained Torrens Title to what should have, under British law, still been the hereditary property in perpetuity of Australia’s first peoples.
The fence and the ringbarked trees are thus a powerful symbol of what has happened to the land – and the insignificance of the figures and the dead tree in the foreground of the oil becomes the subtle strength (rather than weakness) of Fullwood’s allegory.
Fullwood’s postcard image simply gets it all wrong. The boundary rider in this work dominates the foreground and is Lord of all he surveys. It’s an imperialistic portrayal of a land grabber and the terra nullius of the vista presented (peopled only by a flock of sheep rather than its rightful indigenous owners) possesses none of the fragility, sadness and loneliness of establishing a sheep run on a small clearing lease on a ghostly ringbarked clearing -lease in the Australian bush.
Fullwood has by 1905 migrated from an inspired melancholic portrayal of the reality of Australian land settlement in the late nineteenth century to a kind of formulaic painting that masks most of the truth of the Australian life he was so poetically endeavouring to capture more than decade earlier.
As Water Benjamin remarked “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Importantly, Benjamin’s seminal 1936 essay looks at the changes in society's values over time, "the manner in which human sense perception is organised” and tries to show that “the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well." Benjamin then goes on to describe shifts in taste and style in art history and also discusses the ritualisation of reproduction and the emancipation of "the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual."
There is much we can apply to the art and career of A.H. Fullwood here.
Today, sometimes, the value of a work of art is determined by its very scarcity. But if that art is too scarce (that is, if that artist produced very few works over a lifetime) it is difficult for a painter, potter, sculptor or photographer to become a genuinely marketable art celebrity as, for collectors and galleries, there can exist no real secondary art market from which to profit.
Part of the key to the enduring Australian celebrity of Norman Lindsay – spurred on no doubt by the cavalcade of nudes he set before a suitably
scandalised and titillated public – is that he was immensely prolific and skilled in so many art media. That a substantial market in limited edition Norman Lindsay prints has grown up around his original images has also helped ensure his works are so often still in the public gaze today.
The largely topographical art of A.H. Fullwood (who, in his pursuit, of cold hard cash managed to somehow avoid the fate of his friend and colleague Tom Roberts – the vast majority of whose surviving oeuvre is made of portraits), however, is unlikely to titillate many of the punters of relatively modest means beginning to dabble in the Australian art market.
Sid Nolan (1917-1992), like ‘Remus’ Fullwood, painted extremely fast - reputedly producing some 35,000 paintings over his lifetime. Again, like Fullwood, Nolan was an inveterate and extensive art-traveller, took numerous trips into the outback, and visited most of Europe, America, Africa, Antarctica and China. Like Fullwood, Nolan (at least from 1955 until his death) lived as much in England as he did in Australia.
Both artists hit their strides in their early twenties – and each artist’s most iconic works stem from that period when they were young and in need of money. The contemporary ‘outsider’ artist Frank Nowlan suggests that perhaps only 500 of this avalanche of works by Nolan is any good. That is an extremely low percentage average – but without knowing for sure whether Fullwood produced 35,000 images in his lifetime (though it is eminently possible that he did) Fullwood’s strike-rate in producing works which were any good may actually pip Nolan at the post.
Sidney Nolan found Sunday Reed as his patron (and lover) and Ned Kelly as his momentary muse. Fullwood was not quite so fortunate.
Indeed poor “Uncle Remus”, as Gary Werskey has often remarked to me in conversation, seems “never to have been able to win a trick.”
The Australian art market collapsed just as Fullwood hit his prime; his departure from Australia in 1900 caused him to be remembered as predominantly a black and white artist; and yet his earlier sojourn in Australia meant that the English art world saw him as a colonial – something which could never be good for someone wishing to paint society portraits and genteel landscapes for the English gentry. Later, Fullwood’s continued pursuit of small scale etching on his return to Australia also helped to position him in precisely the wrong sort of artistic medium at the time when the extraordinary emergence of Australia’s fabulous coterie of modernist women artists and print makers – Cossington Smith, Margaret Preston Adelaide Perry, Dorrit Black, Ethel Spowers, Eveline Syme and Thea Proctor – were all producing work that was making Fullwood’s kind of topographical art look rather tame and old-fashioned.
And although these women were serious printmakers completely alive to the possibilities of mechanical reproduction of their work, their prints appeared in relatively tiny editions – just as Fullwood’s own prints had begun to.
The change is a dramatic one – from Australia’s most widely published and mechanically reproduced artist to the humble etcher (cum almost ‘Sunday Painter’) down on Berry's Bay.
It is certainly a very big shift in artistic fortune – but as we move towards the decade before the centenary of A. H. Fullwood’s death, it might be just the right time to begin a critical re-evaluation of his pioneering role in the development of Australian art and the reasons for the near total critical eclipse of his reputation in the 80 odd years since his death.
Joseph Davis
Thirroul February 2014
Fullwood, A. H. (Albert Henry), 1863-1930; John, Swain, lithographer; Bird's-eye view of Sydney, 1888 [and the city and harbour he came to love]/ A. Hy.
Fullwood 1888 Museum of Sydney
VEGETABLE CREEK
“The above shantys are all built of bark and wood – with an occasional patch of corrugated iron to relieve the monotony.”
From Fullwood’s NLA Album sketches photographed by Gary Werskey - to whom, along with his partner Hillary, this little essay is dedicated.
APPENDIX
Some Images of Berry’s Bay by Various Australian Artists
.
Lionel LINDSAY Old house Berry's Bay. c.1909 ink; paper lithograph, printed in grey ink, from one stone
Impression: undesignated impression; only a few impressions printed printed image 16.8 h x 21.4 w cm Purchased 1981 NGA
Lionel LINDSAY
A Nook of Berry's Bay 1922. Mezzotint, signed, titled and numbered 33/45 in margin below, 15 x 15.6cm. In Mendelssohn listed as (#279,) "A Nook at Berry's Bay, Sydney (Old Foreshore, Berry's
Bay)."
These images (and some of the ones below) may well show “the old homestead, with the blue water behind it, that 'Remus' had intended doing, but didn't”- and which scene J. M. MacNally tells us Fullwood whipped up for a sort of commission 50 quid not long before he died?
Sadly, we will probably never know for sure.
1888 Balmain Regatta by Henry King. The Yacht 'Electra' and Sydney from Berry's Bay
(Powerhouse Museum Collection, Sydney)
Roy de Maistre - Syncromy, Berry's Bay 1919 oil on plywood 25.4 x 35.2 cm
“G.W.W.” - Berry's Bay, circa 1879 (Powerhouse Museum Collection, Sydney)
Robert H. Johnson (1890-1964) -‐ Berry's Bay Oil on canvas on board, 36.5 x 44 cm
Sydney Long (1871-1955) Across Berry's Bay to the Sobraon, 1939 Oil on canvas, signed and dated lower left: Sydney Long /
1939, 51 x 76 cm
Sydney Long (1871-1955)
The Harbour from Berry's Bay (1926) line etching, drypoint, printed in brown/black ink
on paper Edition 13/60: 12.1 x 35.1 cm plate mark; 21.3 x 44.1 cm sheet
THE END
References Primary Sources Australian Town and Country Journal
Illustrated Sydney News
Picturesque Atlas of Australia
The Bulletin
The Mail (Adelaide, South Australia)
Windsor and Richmond Gazette
Secondary Sources Benjamin, Walter (1936), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: transcribed by Andy Blunden 1998; proofed and corrected Feb. 2005. Accessed February 26, 2014 http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm Davis, Joseph A.H. “Fullwood’s Illawarra Art (The artist as historian), Illawarra Historical Society Bulletin, 1 December, 1996, pp. 105-112. Lebovic, Josef, Australian Art Collectors' List No.130, 2008, Josef Lebovic Gallery, Paddington, NSW Nowlan, Frank, “Remarks on the Art of Sidney Nolan, U3A Thirroul, February 25, 2014. Tomlinson, Richard et al., (eds.), Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Post-apartheid City. New York, London: Routledge, 2003.
Werskey, Gary, “The Image-makers of Australian Federation, or Sydney’s Forgotten Artist-illustrators: The art of A.H. Fullwood”, NSW History Week Illustrated Presentation, Wollongong City Library, September 2013. Werskey, Gary (Draft Paper), “Fullwood Project Working Paper # 3 - Bernard Smith’s Narrative of Australian Art History: A Critique” (February 2014 draft). Werskey, Gary, “Uncle Remus’s Big Day Out” (three volumes) all self published for his grandchildren, n.d. (c.2011-2014).