Thomas Woolner: a Pre-Raphaelite Sculptor in Australia

Authors

  • Caroline Anne Clemente Independent scholar, Melbourne

Keywords:

Art, history

Abstract

 

This paper examines the nature of Thomas Woolner’s Australian oeuvre, its relationship to professed Pre-Raphaelite ideals and its role in achieving his brilliant career.  Obscure and penniless, the only sculptor amongst the original Pre-Raphaelite Brothers was lured to Melbourne by the promise of gold in 1852.  His real fortune was to meet on arrival the influential circle of Dr. Godfrey Howitt and the Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria, Charles La Trobe, who had connections with the London Pre-Raphaelites.   When prospecting failed, Woolner sculpted portraits of La Trobe, the Howitts and their friends in low-relief profile medallions.  Although he revived the genre in Melbourne “to get money with,” the unparalleled accuracy and realistic detail of these portraits, so striking to contemporaries, were based on his unswerving adherence to the Pre-Raphaelite principles of “excelling truthfulness” and “devotion to nature.”

La Trobe and the Howitts promoted Woolner, lending their portraits to the first official artist exhibitions in Melbourne in 1853 and in 1854.  They introduced him to Sir Charles Nicholson, Speaker of the Legislative Council of NSW, when he moved to Sydney that year which resulted in portrait medallions of Council members at a pivotal moment of nation building.   Income from commissions for bronze casts of his colonial portraits provided the “seeding capital” for launching Woolner’s career when he returned to London in 1854.  Of his future Australian commissions, ironically, the gigantic Monument to Captain Cook, of 1878, for Hyde Park, Sydney, came closest to fulfilling the principles espoused by the first Pre-Raphaelites:  a monumental, Ideal work of the highest category, history, articulated by sharply executed, realistic detail.  I argue that the successful, lucrative career of Thomas Woolner, R.A., sometime Slade Professor of Sculpture, began the moment he met with appreciation and support in the cultured circle of Victoria’s first Lieutenant-Governor, Charles La Trobe, the Howitts and their friends in Melbourne in 1852.

 

 

 

Author Biography

Caroline Anne Clemente, Independent scholar, Melbourne

Caroline Clemente is a Melbourne art historian and free-lance curator, having studied for her B.A. (Melb.), B.A. [Hons] (Lon.), and M.A. thesis (Melb., 2005).  A Courtauld Institute of Art degree and postgraduate studies in Florence, Italy were followed by a three-year tutorship in Fine Arts at Melbourne University and ten years as Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Victoria. She is author of Australian Watercolours in the National Gallery of Victoria, 1802-1926 (NGV, 1991) and the annotated “Catalogue of Plates” for Brenda Niall’s biography of Georgiana McCrae (Georgiana, MUP 1994). She won a State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship in 2007 to research Melbourne artists of the La Trobe era, and contributed to the SLV’s La Trobe Journal (2007), This Wondrous Land: Colonial Art on Paper (NGV, 2011), Eugene von Guerard: Nature Revealed (NGV, 2011) and  Auld Lang Syne: Images of Scottish Australia (Ballarat Art Gallery, 2014). As an SLV Honorary Fellow (2014), she focused on Thomas Woolner’s Australian period, subsequently presenting papers at the joint NGV/Melbourne University symposium Medieval Moderns—The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (2015) and Pre-Raphaelitism in Australia (Melbourne University, 2016).   With Barbara Kane, she is compiling a catalogue raisonné of Thomas Woolner’s Australian oeuvre for a forthcoming exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.

Caroline Clemente is a Melbourne art historian and free-lance curator, having studied for her B.A. (Melb.), B.A. [Hons] (Lon.), and M.A. thesis (Melb., 2005).  A Courtauld Institute of Art degree and postgraduate studies in Florence, Italy were followed by a three-year tutorship in Fine Arts at Melbourne University and ten years as Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Victoria. She is author of Australian Watercolours in the National Gallery of Victoria, 1802-1926 (NGV, 1991) and the annotated “Catalogue of Plates” for Brenda Niall’s biography of Georgiana McCrae (Georgiana, MUP 1994). She won a State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship in 2007 to research Melbourne artists of the La Trobe era, and contributed to the SLV’s La Trobe Journal (2007), This Wondrous Land: Colonial Art on Paper (NGV, 2011), Eugene von Guerard: Nature Revealed (NGV, 2011) and  Auld Lang Syne: Images of Scottish Australia (Ballarat Art Gallery, 2014). As an SLV Honorary Fellow (2014), she focused on Thomas Woolner’s Australian period, subsequently presenting papers at the joint NGV/Melbourne University symposium Medieval Moderns—The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (2015) and Pre-Raphaelitism in Australia (Melbourne University, 2016).   With Barbara Kane, she is compiling a catalogue raisonné of Thomas Woolner’s Australian oeuvre for a forthcoming exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.

References

Works Cited

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Published

2019-06-09

Issue

Section

PreRaphaelitism in Australasia Special Issue