The sensuality of women

Larry Schwartz

JANINE BURKE was sorting through a storeroom in a Queensland art gallery in the mid-1970s when she came upon a “a delicious, little pink, fleshy painting” of a woman in a scanty camisole. “I found so many works by women artists, long – forgotten and dusty, in the galleries,” says the art historian and author, who was then selecting works for her influential exhibition of art by Australian women. “They were never out on the wall.”

She was quickly impressed with the painting by the early 20th-century expatriate artist Agnes Goodsir. “No one had heard of her. She was totally and absolutely forgotten until I put her in that exhibition, and in the book that was published a bit later.”

Burke’s Australian Women Artists: One Hundred Years 1840 to 1940 created an opportunity to re-examine and reassess many an artist. Even so, Goodsir has remained largely unknown.

Although she grew up in Melbourne and was trained at the Bendigo School of Mines, Goodsir spent much of her life in Paris. Her remains lie in the same grave at Bagneux as her long-time companion and model, Rachel “Cherry” Dunn.

The second Australian woman (after Bessie Davidson) to be honored as a member of the Salon Nationale des Beaux Arts, in 1926, (other Australians included E. Phillips Fox and Rupert Bunny), Goodsir was possibly best known for her portraits, including those of A. B. “Banjo” Paterson, Count Leo L. Tolstoy and, some believe, Benito Mussolini, painted in the 1920s.

Karen Quinlan, curator of the Bendigo Art Gallery, which is holding the first Australian exhibition of Goodsir’s works since 1927, says she has been unable to trace the painting of Mussolini. Yet she has not ruled out its existence.

“I suspect there are many paintings (by Goodsir) in Europe,” she says. “But it’s unconfirmed. There were newspaper reports at the time that, on her way back from Australia, she did go via Rome and paint his portrait.”

A painter of landscapes, portraits and still-lifes, Goodir is remembered as a sensitive colorist, excelling in domestic scenes, many of them featuring her companion.

She was at the peak of her career when she returned to Australia, in 1927, exhibiting in Melbourne and Sydney on the second of just two visits home since leaving for Europe in 1900. “She came out to Australia for about nine months,” Quinlan says. “She got mixed reviews and there obviously wasn’t enough interest in her here. She basically took whatever works she could sell back to Paris and continued to paint portraits.” Goodsir was 63. It would be her last opportunity to make an impact here during her lifetime.

Burke notes that Goodsir missed out on “a fantastic era” for women in Australian painting, during which artists such as Grace Cossington Smith, Grace Crowley, Margaret Preston, Thea Proctor and Eveline Syme flourished.

“It was a great time to be an Australian woman artist,” she says. “But obviously not for Agnes Goodsir. For her, Australia was obviously anathema. She just couldn’t keep away from the place for long enough.”

She suggests several reasons why Goodsir might not have struck a chord here. She had lived outside the country for so long, was a private person who “wasn’t a great promoter of her work”, was not associated with Cubism, Fauvism, Dadaism or Surrealism – the great movements of modernism emerging in Paris at the time.

“There are personal and artistic reasons why her art hasn’t been appreciated, perhaps, the way (the work of) other women of the same generation has been – say Proctor or Preston who have had an enormous amount of success in the past 20 years.”

Humble and self-effacing, Goodsir had been slow to emerge. “She was a really late developer,” Burke says. “She was still a student when she was in her 30s. This is an interesting facet for a lot of women artists. They seem to take a long time. I’m sure there are a lot of social reasons, historical reasons.

“They took a long time to develop as human beings. And, if you take a long time to develop as a human being, you’re going to take a long time to develop as an artist. It didn’t seem to be until she was in her 40s and 50s that she had her own style. And I think that could probably be tied to her sexuality, as well. It seems that around the time that she developed her long, 30-year relationship with Dunn, who I presume was her lover . . . ” The sexual life of a lesbian in those years was very secretive. And maybe it took her a long time to come to terms with that sexuality . . .”

Did the family wonder if they were lovers? “As far as Agnes is concerned, we don’t know, and it’s hardly relevant now,” says the artist’s great-niece, Anne Sheppard.

BORN IN Portland in 1864, Agnes Noyes Goodsir was the fifth of 11 children of customs agent David James Cook Goodsir and his wife, Elizabeth. Agnes was just a year old when the family moved to Melbourne. She grew up in various suburbs, including Camberwell, South Yarra and Carlton. Two of her sisters died of scarlet fever within days of each other, in 1874. She was 18 when her mother died, after a miscarried.

Sheppard, who is in her mid-60s, lives in Sydney. She never met her great-aunt, but heard much about her as a child. Her paternal grandmother was Goodsir’s oldest sister. Goodsir preferred to be known as Agatha and was known in the family as “Aunt Gatha”.

While with the AIF, Sheppard’s father visited Goodsir in London, where she was based during World War I. About 1964, he gave his daughter an old box of press cuttings about the painter. She has retained a strong interest in her great-aunt.

Sheppard visited Bendigo a few years ago, mindful of the fact that her great-aunt had studied there in the late 1890s, and two of her paintings were on display at the gallery. It was she who alerted curator Karen Quinlan to other paintings owned by the family.

Goodsir’s maternal grandmother lived in Bendigo. Quinlan says her teacher in Bendigo, poet and artist Arthur T. Woodward, encouraged students to study at academies in Paris. Goodsir first returned to Australia in 1905 and met Pennsylvania-born Dunn while living in London during the war. By 1922, she had set up a studio apartment in the heart of Montparnasse, with Dunn, who divorced her husband to follow Goodsir to Paris.

Dunn was her model on several occasions. “I think I made Cherry look sadder than she is, don’t you?” she wrote on the back of one of the portraits.

Goodsir was 75 when she died in hospital on 11 August 1939. “I am so alone,” wrote Dunn, who died 11 years later. “She was my mother, my friend and, in the last years, when she was ill, so much like my child.”

Arrangements were made for 40 or so of her works to be sent to Daryl Lindsay, a former director of the National Gallery of Victoria, for distribution to galleries around Australia.

Quinlan says she and director Tony Ellwood were taken by two paintings by Goodsir – Girl with Cigarette and Girl on Couch when they came to the Bendigo Art Gallery in 1996. “We said in the early days – within a couple of months of starting here – that it would be great if we could find paintings of this calibre,” she says.

It was not until a visit by Sheppard that she realised it would be possible to hold an exhibition devoted to Goodsir. Works obtained from the family and other galleries include portraits, still-lifes and a series of watercolors called Bridges of Paris. She hopes it might help create a place for the painter in Australian cultural life.

Burke believes the Bendigo exhibition might help stimulate interest in the artist’s work. “It’s not going to rewrite the history book because she’s not a modernist painter. She’s not one of the radicals. She’s not one of the people who was changing our views about art.

“She was telling us something very intimate and very beautiful, I think, about the sensuality of women. That’s what she was doing for us.”

Agnes Goodsir’s works can be seen at the Bendigo Art Gallery until 7 June, the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery from 21 June to 2 August, and other regional galleries.