William and Mabel Blamire Young collaborated in many of their artistic and other endeavours, yet she was overshadowed and her work has been largely unrecognised. Dr Andrew Montana investigates her contribution, especially to the Arts and Crafts Movement in Victoria, with the help of their descendants.
Born in Portugal and trained in Europe, Artur Loureiro (1853–1932) settled in Melbourne where he painted and taught art for a living between 1884 and 1904. Painting various subjects in a wide range of styles, he associated with all the leading Melbourne artists of the time – Streeton, Conder, McCubbin, Roberts and others. ANDREW MONTANA explores Loureiro’s life, subjects, styles, family, teaching, patrons and commissions, building up a picture of Loureiro through newspaper and literary references, and not least through analysing his artworks.
Objects and art shown at international exhibitions always attract a premium. Often, they really were ‘showpieces’, specially made to demonstrate the maker’s skills, ability and cutting-edge design. Three room suites of W. H. Rocke’s furniture displayed at the prestigious Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880 were illustrated in some of the contemporary newspapers, while half a dozen examples have been acquired by Melbourne museums, so their forms are already broadly familiar. Dr Andrew Montana discovered an 1880s photograph which shows a cabinet, originally from the 1880 Melbourne Exhibition, in a real domestic interior. He discusses this cabinet as well as other surviving examples of W.H. Rocke’s exhibition furniture.
Sydney stained glass artists Lyon Cottier & Co. carried out many commissions in public, private and religious buildings in their 50 years of activity from 1873 to 1924. Prominent architects chose their work for Sydney’s GPO, Government House and Parliament House. Religious services were an important and frequent part of 19th-century spiritual and social life. Dr Andrew Montana examines Lyon Cottier's decoration in city and country churches and the Great Synagogue.
At a heritage conference in Adelaide in 2015, Dr Donald Ellsmore attributed the superb interior decoration at Adelaide’s Ayers House and Gawler’s Para Para in South Australia to the Sydney decorating firm of Lyon, Cottier & Co. and their employee Charles Gow, purely on speculation. Till now, his opinion has gone unchallenged. By looking at the surviving artworks and researching contemporary journals, catalogues, directories and newspapers, Dr Andrew Montana refutes this attribution and restores William Joseph Williams and his workmen as the artists responsible. He shows that South Australia had its own pool of talented decorators and did not need to rely on importing skilled workmen from Sydney or Melbourne.
R.B. Smith made his model of the Strasburg Clock to celebrate the centenary of British settlement. It was hailed as a “scientific triumph of Australian workmanship”. At first, Smith exhibited it privately “like a fat woman in a country fair”1 until it found a home in Sydney’s Technological Museum. The clock has been there ever since, a popular and much-loved exhibit although the mechanism has been unreliable. Now, Andrew Montana turns our attention to identifying the subjects and painters of the portraits decorating Sydney’s Centennial Strasburg Clock.
