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• Auction House:
  Bonhams Australia
• Sale Name:
  Important Australian Art
• Sale Date:
  24 Aug 2021 ~ 6pm (AEST)
• Lot #:
  7
• Lot Description:
  Florence Ada Fuller
  (1867-1946)
  Mother and Child
  oil on canvas
  43.0 x 61.0cm (16 15/16 x 24in).
  signed lower right: 'FA Fuller'
• Provenance:
  Private collection, Sweden
• Notes:
  Mother and Child is one of Florence Fuller's most mysterious works. It coalesces two important strands of her practice, that as a painter of childhood genre scenes and as a portraitist to an array of influential patrons. It may also invoke a lesser understood aspect of her life as a mystic and spiritualist whose practice was increasingly dedicated to the service of the Theosophical Society, whose leaders she began to paint from around 1905. Women and children were a cherished subject for Florence Fuller. She visited the subject of childhood on many occasions in numerous her key works. Her gloriously sentimental genre painting of a destitute waif downcast in front of a hoarding at the Melbourne docks captured in the 1888 painting, Weary, now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and its tantalisingly lost companion Desolate, are among her most important works. Her portrait of a young girl reading by the fire, Inseparables, in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, of around 1900, reveals Fuller's interest in capturing the intimate, private worlds of her sitters. Fuller also painted children at play including a superb impressionist sketch of a young girl at the beach digging in the sand on a glary summer day in Sandpies, 1893, in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia. The mainstay of Fuller's practice was portraiture, and she painted an assortment of seemingly disparate sitters for her increasingly influential patrons. In 1885, she was commissioned by the Victorian pastoralist, philanthropist and life-long supporter of Indigenous self-determination, Ann Fraser Bon, to paint one of Australia's most remarkable nineteenth-century portraits, a likeness of Wurundjeri elder and artist, William Barak, in the collection of the State Library of Victoria. Yet, on return trips to South Africa, Fuller also painted the now highly controversial figure of Cecile Rhodes on no less than five occasions. Upon first glance, Mother and Child appears to be an intimate portrait of a mother with her young daughter of around three years old. What makes it so unusual is that the sitters are not posed in the typical late Victorian or Edwardian manner as the perfectly coiffed parent and child. In those portraits, the child is usually portrayed as a fashionably dressed doll amid flounces and ribbons. Instead, both mother and child share a fleeting moment as they lovingly kiss. Save for the mother's beautifully pleated pink collar and black puff sleeve, we do not see any of her fashionable finery and her daughter is naked, as though she has just jumped onto her mother's lap post-bath. It is perhaps Fuller's most Mary Cassatt-like depiction of an intimate moment shared between mother and daughter. A completely feminised space that preserves the sitters in a safe bubble tucked away from the outside world. For these reasons, this work cannot be a regular portrait commission and the artist must have known her subjects well; and was allowed into the private spaces of their lives. Could it be a portrait of Deborah Vernon Hackett with one of her four daughters? Fuller most certainly knew the Hacketts as her Perth studio was in the same building as the West Australian newspaper, which was owned by Deborah's husband, Sir John Winthrop Hackett. In around 1905, Fuller had painted what is believed to be an unusual portrait of the couple upon their engagement, A Golden Hour, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. She also painted a remarkable portrait of Deborah Vernon Hackett, now in the National Portrait Gallery, wearing a sky-blue dress trimmed with lace sitting in a simple wicker chair, arm draped over its rolled edge looking directly at the viewer from under her black hat. Fuller capturing her as both soft and stern, youthful yet worldly. Another interpretation of Mother and Child takes into account Fuller's life as a spiritualist. The angelic child, unconstrained by worldly clothes, her golden hair flowing loosely around her shoulders, looks up beyond the mother as though she has just appeared out of the indeterminate light force of the background beyond. The main work of the spiritualist was as a medium between the tangible world of the day-to-day and the spirit world and they were often engaged to commune with loved ones who had passed over. Could this angelic child figure be the spirit of a lost child evoked in this highly unusual, touching portrait? Fuller's painting technique was most suited to such a commission. It was uncanny how she was able to combine both the high finish of a traditional portrait with a decidedly impressionistic painting technique. In Mother and Child, the entire background is simply an allegory of light and dark painted to represent an ethereal space. While the sitters appear to be highly realistic, they are created through layers of loose brush strokes strategically placed to give the sense of solid form. Fuller uses a similar technique in Weary. Florence Fuller emigrated to Melbourne from South Africa as a child in the 1870s. She attended the National Gallery School in 1883 and 1888 and trained under her uncle the academic portraitist, Robert Dowling between 1884 – 1886. She ran her studio from her family's home in Malvern and exhibited at the Victorian Artists Society during which time she became one of the most noted portraitists in the colony of Victoria. Upon moving to Europe around 1894 she began to exhibit at the Paris Salon (five works), the Royal Academy in London (two works) and the Society of Lady Artists, London, (2 works). She returned to Perth in 1904. She exhibited no less than eight works at the 1907 First Australian Women's Work Exhibition and exhibited widely in both Perth and Victoria before following leading Spiritualist Annie Besant to Adyer in India in 1908. She lived her life between London, India and Australia. After her return in 1919 to Mosman in Sydney, she was eventually committed to Gladesville Mental Asylum in New South Wales in 1927 where she eventually died in 1946. Lara Nicholls
• Estimate:
  A$30,000 - 50,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.