Exhibition showcases portraiture's golden age

Napier Waller's Christian Waller with Baldur, Undine and Siren at Fairy Hills 1932 is part of the touring exhibition.

After being on the road for the best part of two years, the National Gallery of Australia's touring exhibition, Australian Portraits 1880-1960, has finally arrived in Canberra.

Portraiture in Australia has an image problem.

While it has been a mainstay money spinner for generations of artists, few artists regarded their portraits as their finest moment as artists. Many busied themselves with what Thomas Gainsborough called "the cursed face business" simply to make ends meet.

Dr Anna Gray, the curator of this exhibition and the author of the book-length catalogue which is also the first major history of portraiture in Australia, argues for a "golden age" of portraiture from the late Victorian period through the Edwardian period. To put it more broadly, between the 1880s and the 1920s when portraits were being produced in great numbers and of high calibre.

It was a time when photography had successfully eroded the market for exact mimetic likenesses and portrait painters had to assert their role as artists who provided interpretations, rather than as flattering "image takers". Portraits became self-consciously "aesthetic objects" as well as status symbols and the rollcall of Australia's most prominent painters became synonymous with a rollcall of Australia's most prominent portraitists.

This exhibition consists of 54 portraits by 34 artists, all drawn from the National Gallery of Australia collection, with most of the names well known to any student of Australian art. They include Tom Roberts, Hugh Ramsay, George W. Lambert, Frederick McCubbin, Grace Cossington Smith, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, Russell Drysdale, Ian Fairweather and John Brack. Possibly because it is a touring show with conservation issues to be considered, photography and printmaking, two very rich areas for Australian portraiture, are not included in this exhibition. Sculpture would also be difficult and expensive in a touring show.

Bernard Hall, Tom Roberts and Robert Dowling all made a reasonable living by painting portraits. Of the three, Roberts was the most distinguished artist and painted the most memorable portraits, including his An Australian native, 1888. However it was the next generation who painted portraits which were outstanding as paintings and where the subject matter generally paled into relative insignificance. Hugh Ramsay, the short-lived genius in Australian art, with a simple and informal portrait, such as Miss Nellie Patterson, challenges in quality John Singer Sargent, one of the leading portrait painters of Europe. Lambert and McCubbin were some of the most successful portraitists of this time, while the expats, E. Phillips Fox and Rupert Bunny, were some of the most accomplished. Fox's The green parasol, 1912, is one of the show-stoppers in the exhibition. The exhibition is exceptionally strong in the area of the Australian Edwardians and this forms the major highlight of the show.

The early modernist portraiture languished, with Margaret Preston, Grace Crowley and the juvenile painting by Grace Cossington Smith, being some of the brighter sparks in a fairly dull sea. It was with the second generation of modernists, in the 1940s and the 1950s, that a number of memorable portraits appeared. Pity that there is no major William Dobell portrait in the exhibition, The red lady, 1938 in the gallery's collection would have added bite to the Sydney selection and support the piece by Russell Drysdale. There is a superb Ian Fairweather, but it could be seen as problematic as a portrait, despite its title Portrait of the artist, 1962.

The Melbourne contingent of modernists, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval and Albert Tucker, are all represented by significant and at times iconic pieces.

John Brack's schoolgirl series serves as the chronological bookend for the show.

This is a great show which re-examines the tradition of portrait painting in Australia at a time when Australian art itself was establishing a new identity.