AUSTRALIAN SCHOOL Original oil painting of a group of Australian Aborigines. Probably Sydney, 1849
Oil on board, 140 x 190 mm.; in very good condition, framed.
A haunting mid-nineteenth-century painting of an Aboriginal man standing in front of a group of Aboriginal women.
Scenes of Aboriginal life in New South Wales had been a popular subject amongst local artists from the early days of settlement. By the mid-nineteenth century traditional Aboriginal life had all but vanished from the areas around Sydney and most depictions of Aborigines of this date show small clusters of local tribespeople standing on the edges of the emerging new European settlement - very much as outsiders looking in. Artists often added these groups to their paintings, not necessarily as some form of social commentary, but as a touch of the picturesque. The artist of this image did not adopt such a compositional device: the group is the sole subject of the work and two of the women turn their backs on the artist and viewer. It is reasonable to infer that the scene is probably an authentic depiction of what the artist saw.
The landscape in the painting has an ethereal aspect, with stylised foliage and topography. Whilst the female figures in their draperies seem to sit comfortably in this dream-like world, the incongruity of the strangely dressed male figure in the foreground is accentuated by his surrounds.
Attempts to encourage Aborigines to wear European clothing began with settlement; however it was not until Macarthur's governorship that more strident calls were made for Aborigines to be prevented from appearing naked in public. Well-intentioned settlers gave local tribespeople odd assortments of unwanted clothing, and consequently all but those in some official form of employ, such as the Native Police Corps, had little choice but to supplant their traditional dress with makeshift substitutes. The women of this group have entirely abandoned their traditional dress, and have adopted blankets in place of animal-skin cloaks. From the work of a number of other artists, from Augustus Earle to George French Angas, Alexander Schramm, Charles Hill and William Strutt, we know that the adoption of blankets draped about the shoulders was a common mode of dress for the Aboriginal people, particularly the women, after colonisation. The markings "B.O. / 1849" and an arrow painted on the blanket of the figure on the right indicate that she wears a blanket which was originally convict issue; the "B.O." stands for "British Ordinance", and numbers probably indicate that the year of manufacture was 1849. The male figure, as is often seen in other works of the period, is clad in cast-off clothing. He is wearing a long coat over a loosely buttoned shirt and what appears to be a straw hat. This somewhat pathetic figure is poignantly reminiscent of the images of Bungaree proudly wearing cast-off official clothing during the days of Phillip's governorship.
The identity of the artist of this work is a mystery. One possibility is that the artist is Captain Otway, whose work is known only by a signed painting from the 1840s, "'Charley' Spearing Kangaroos", in the Nan Kivell collection in the National Library of Australia. Certainly the format of the Nan Kivell painting is similar to this present work; it is oil on card of roughly the same scale, and it has been dated at around 1847. It is certainly not beyond the realms of possibility that this work is by Captain Otway, whose identity has never been fully established.
Original images such as this, which form an important part of the documentary record of mid-nineteenth-century Australia, are mostly held institutionally and are rarely offered on the market.
$A18500
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