Florence Fuller: Difference between revisions

Florence Fuller
Pen portrait of Florence Fuller, 1897
Born	1867 Port Elizabeth, South Africa
Died	1946 (aged 78–79) Gladesville, New South Wales
Education	National Gallery of Victoria Art School, Melbourne Académie Julian, Paris
Known for	Painting
Notable work	Inseparables (1900) Summer Breezes (1904) A Golden Hour (1905) Portrait of Deborah Vernon Hackett (c. 1908)

Florence Ada Fuller (1867 – 17 July 1946) was a South African-born Australian artist. Originally from Port Elizabeth, Fuller migrated to Melbourne with her family in 1883. There she trained with her uncle Robert Hawker Dowling and teacher Jane Sutherland, as well as taking classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School. Fuller became a professional artist in the late 1880s, and travelled to England and France to undertake further study in the 1890s; she also visited Africa to paint portraits of Cecil Rhodes. Her paintings were exhibited at the Paris Salon and London's Royal Academy.

In 1904, Fuller returned to Australia, living in Perth. She became active in the Theosophical Society, and painted some of her best-known works, including The Golden Hour, described by the National Gallery of Australia as a "masterpiece" when it acquired the work in 2013. In the years from 1908 Fuller travelled extensively, including periods living in India and England, before ultimately settling in Sydney, where she was the inaugural teacher of life drawing at the School of Fine and Applied Arts established in 1920 by the New South Wales Society of Women Painters. She died in 1946.

Highly regarded in her lifetime as a portrait and landscape painter, by 1914 she held the record for the number of public galleries that owned works by an Australian woman artist. She subsequently sank into obscurity, and is frequently omitted from reference works on Australian artists. Her paintings are held by the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and Australia's National Portrait Gallery.

Florence Fuller was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa in 1867, a daughter of Louisa^{[notes 1]} and John Hobson Fuller. The family migrated to Australia in 1883, where Florence worked as a governess while undertaking studies in art. She first took classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in the year of her arrival, then again for a further term of study in 1888. During this period she was also a student of her uncle, Robert Hawker Dowling, as well as of Jane Sutherland,^[2] who was regarded as "the leading female artist in the group of Melbourne painters who broke with the nineteenth-century tradition of studio art by sketching and painting directly from nature".^[3]

In 1886, Dowling returned to his native England. Giving up her work as a governess, Fuller moved to paint full time and had opened her own studio before she had turned 20. There, she completed a portrait of the Victorian Governor's wife, Lady Loch, which Dowling had commenced.^[2] Other early portraits followed: two pictures of homeless children, titled Weary and Desolate, in 1888; and Gently Reproachful circa 1889. Also in that latter year, she was awarded the Victorian Artists Society's prize for best portrait by an artist under 25.^[2]

In 1892, Fuller travelled to the Cape of Good Hope "to convalesce", though from what illness or injury, her biographer Joan Kerr does not say.^{[notes 2]} Two years later she travelled on to England and France, where she remained for a decade.^[2] In the 1890s, Australian artists studying abroad favoured Paris over London, and Fuller was no exception; other Australians studying in France around that time included Agnes Goodsir, Margaret Preston, James Quinn and Hugh Ramsay.^[5] Fuller studied at the Académie Julian,^[2] one of many art schools that had only recently opened their doors to women. The women students at Académie Julian experienced poor, overcrowded conditions, and contempt from the (mostly male) teachers.^[6] Despite this, Fuller appeared to develop her skills there, with contemporary critics favourably noting the influence of the French training.^[7][8]

During her time in Europe, Fuller had great success. After having a pastel portrait accepted for the Paris Salon in 1895, two of her paintings were shown there in 1896, followed by another, La Glaneuse, in 1897, in which year she also had a work accepted by the Royal Academy in London.^{[2][9][10][11]} There were exhibitions in many other locations: the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and Manchester Art Gallery in England, and the Victorian Artists Society and the New South Wales Society of Artists, as well as the Melbourne studio of Jane Sutherland.^[2] There was even a painting, Landscape, hung in the exhibition for the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Bendigo.^[12] Not all her time was spent in Europe however; in 1899 she travelled to South Africa to paint Cecil Rhodes,^[2] one source suggesting she ultimately prepared five portraits of the founder of Rhodesia.^[13] Another source reports that Fuller also travelled and made sketches in Wales, Ireland and Italy.^[14]

In November 1902, the Australian Federal International Exhibition was held. It was opened by the Governor of Victoria Sir George Clarke, who spoke of its goal to advance "the industrial progress of Australia". The event occupied the entire Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne, and was dominated by an exhibition of art, both Australian and international.^[15] Included in this extensive survey of painting were six works by Fuller.^[16]

Further recognition came with the hanging of one of Fuller's paintings, Summer Breezes, at the Royal Academy in 1904. Other Australian artists hung at the same time included Rupert Bunny, E. Phillips Fox, Albert Fullwood, George Lambert, and Arthur Streeton,^[17] but Fuller was the only female artist to be represented.^[18] A critic writing in The West Australian observed:

The work...is essentially Australian in almost every detail. Standing in a sunlit Australian paddock, a lithesome Australian blonde holds her summer hat on against the rude caresses of an Australian breeze—a subject simple but grand in its simplicity...Next to its suggestion of breezy sunshine and the incidental portrayal of willowy grace the picture is to be admired for its colour scheme...The details of the picture disclose untiring care.^[19]

By the time Summer Breezes was on display, Fuller had returned to Australia,^[20] not to her previous home in Melbourne but to Perth, Western Australia, where she joined her sister, singer Amy Fuller.^[21] Though only in her mid-thirties, Fuller's background made her "one of the most experienced artists in Western Australia at this time".^[22] For the next four years, she painted portraits including one of Western Australian politician James George Lee Steere, undertaken posthumously from photographs and recollections of those who had known him, and acquired by the gallery whose board he chaired.^[23] She also took on students, including French-Australian artist Kathleen O'Connor.^[2]

Fuller's paintings from this period included A Golden Hour, described by the National Gallery of Australia as "a masterpiece...giving us a gentle insight into the people, places and times that make up our history".^[21] The painting, an oil on canvas 109 cm (43 in) high and 135 cm (53 in) wide, portrays a man and women standing together in a rural setting in late afternoon, surrounded by grass, scattered gum trees and Xanthorrhoea. When the painting was put up for sale in 2012, the auction house catalogue stated that it had been owned by William Ride, former director of the Western Australian Museum. It reported:

The current owners assert that Professor Ride always understood the figures in the picture were Sir John Winthrop Hackett, (then owner of The West Australian newspaper, well known business man and philanthropist, whose gift allowed the construction of the impressive University of Western Australia buildings and St. George’s Residential College) and his new wife, Deborah Vernon Hackett".^{[24][notes 3]}

In addition to appearing as the small female figure in A Golden Hour, Deborah Vernon Hackett was also the subject of a portrait, painted around 1908, again during Fuller's time in Perth.^[21][25] The head of Australian art at the National Gallery of Australia, Anne Gray, observed of Fuller's approach to the newspaperman's wife, that:

Fuller portrayed her sitter sympathetically, capturing the young woman's grace and charm. But she also conveyed the complexity of the young Mrs Hackett's character through her soft, feminine, pale-blue dress counterpoised by the dramatic black hat and direct gaze.^[22]

Fuller painted other works for the Hacketts. In a 1937 piece reflecting on early twentieth century art in Western Australia, the reviewer recalled:

Dr. (later Sir Winthrop) Hackett was a great patron of Miss Fuller, and he was a constant visitor to her dignified studio, above his office in the old West Australian Chambers. The first portrait I saw Miss Fuller working on was of Mrs. E. Chase...The portrait was a commission from Dr. Hackett, and was destined to hang in his gallery. Miss Fuller painted Lady Hackett both before and after her marriage, and one particularly happy picture of her is as a young girl gathering wildflowers in the Darlington hills. Her portraits of the first Hackett babies were charming studies of childhood.^[26]

Biographer Joan Kerr speculated that it may have been Jane Sutherland who introduced Fuller to Theosophy, and this spiritual philosophy remained influential throughout Fuller's life. While in Perth, she was variously secretary, treasurer and librarian of the local branch of the Theosophical Society.^[2] In 1906 Fuller's portrait of feminist and theosophist, Annie Besant, was among the paintings exhibited at the West Australian Art Society's annual exhibition.^[27]

In 1907, Besant became the president of the Theosophical Society globally, and set to work with a major expansion of the organisation's headquarters at Adyar, in what was then Madras.^[28] When it was announced that Besant would undertake a speaking tour of Australia in 1908, she was expected to stay with Fuller while in Perth.^[29] Some months later in 1908,^{[notes 4]} Fuller left Western Australia and travelled to India, staying at Adyar, before going on to England in 1911.^{[notes 5]} Of her time in India, Fuller wrote:

I went in search not only of beauty, and light, and colour, and the picturesqueness in general, which delight the eye and emotions of all artists—but of something deeper—something less easily expressed. I spent two and a half years in a community that is quite unique—perhaps the most cosmopolitan settlement in the world—the headquarters of the Theosophical Society...Well, I painted there, of course, but my art was undergoing a change, and I felt that it could not satisfy me unless it became so much greater.^[33]

Sources describing Fuller's movements after her time in India are sometimes ambiguous. She arrived in England in June 1911 and was still there two years later.^[33] She continued to paint portraits, but found it difficult to realise the transformation in her art that she had conceptualised in India:

I have painted a great many portraits since I have been in England, and have been, I suppose, fairly successful—though I have done nothing in any way remarkable. The hidden inner life has not yet succeeded in expressing itself on canvas, and I can only write myself as one who aspires to a greater art, but who has not yet achieved.^[33]

Fuller subsequently travelled from London to India in 1914;^[13] in 1916 she was described as a "visitor" to Sydney, and a year later as a "visitor" to Brisbane, with both reports indicating that Fuller had spent a period painting in Java (at that time part of the Dutch East Indies), though when this occurred is not clear.^[34][35] She later returned again to Sydney, via Perth, from India in 1919.^[36][37] Certainly, at some point following these travels, Fuller settled permanently in Mosman in Sydney's northern suburbs, where she continued to paint, including miniatures.^[16] Her 1916 visit to Sydney had included an exhibition of a group of her miniatures, all of them portraits of theosophists including Besant and Henry Olcott, co-founder of the Theosophical Society.^[38]

In 1920, the Society of Women Painters in New South Wales established a School of Fine and Applied Arts, with Florence Fuller appointed as the inaugural teacher of life classes. At the exhibition held to mark the School's establishment, Fuller displayed a portrait of the organisation's founder, Mrs Hedley Parsons.^[39] When the Society held a show in 1926, a portrait by Fuller was one of those selected for favourable comment, but the general opinion of the Sydney Morning Herald reviewer was that "the exhibitors have let their style harden into a groove".^[40] Fuller's health eventually deteriorated owing to mental illness, and she died in Gladesville Mental Asylum (as it was then known) on 17 July 1946. She was buried at Rookwood Cemetery.^[2]

Gwenda Robb and Elaine Smith, in their Concise Dictionary of Australian Artists, considered Fuller's art to be created in "a free painterly style indebted to Impressionism".^[41] During the first decade of the twentieth century, reviews drew attention to her distinctively Australian style. When one of Fuller's works was included in an exhibition of colonial artists in London (including paintings from Canada and Australia), the Adelaide Advertiser's correspondent described Fuller's contribution as "most Australian in feeling".^[8] Reviewing her work hung in the Royal Academy in 1904, a Perth critic reported: "Of the 16 or 17 Australian artists exhibiting at the Academy, Miss Fuller was the only one who chose a typically Australian scene. Her picture shows a young girl in thin white, clinging, dress, standing on a bushy piece of country... As the London Observer says, the atmosphere that bathes the graceful figure of the girl is capitally managed with its note of subtropical heat".^[7] One reviewer thought very highly of her portraits, but was less convinced about Fuller's approach to the Australian light, writing:

She had less success with our landscapes than with her figure subjects. That was the result of her passion for toning her pictures for ultimate indoor hanging. Thereby she lost, or illuminated, the hard Australian, hard light and shade, and startling relative values. Observable too was the influence of the English school in her rendering of our foliage; never could she bring herself to see our trees as dim coloured as they usually are.^[26]

In 1914, it was reported that Fuller was represented in four public galleries—three in Australia and one in South Africa—a record for an Australian female painter at that time.^[13] Reviewing the Western Australian Art Society's exhibition in 1906, the critic for Perth's Western Mail considered Fuller's works to be the finest on show, and that "the occasion provides another triumph for Miss Fuller".^[42] Yet although she experienced considerable success during her early life, Fuller subsequently became almost invisible. No obituaries appeared in the newspapers in 1946. She is not mentioned at all in Janine Burke's Australian Women Artists 1840–1940, Max Germaine's Dictionary of Women Artists in Australia, or Caroline Ambrus's Australian Women Artists.^[43][44][45] Despite this, in 2013, Ann Gray described Fuller as "an important Australian woman artist and arguably Western Australia's most significant artist from the Federation period".^[21] Works by Fuller are held by the Art Gallery of South Australia,^[46] the Art Gallery of Western Australia,^[47][48] the National Gallery of Australia,^[21] the National Gallery of Victoria,^[49] and Australia's National Portrait Gallery.^[25]

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