A Forgotten Talent Gwenyth Rankin uncovers the rich legacy of artist Esther Paterson
It has been argued that the mainstream art histories of 20th-century The artist in question, Esther Paterson, niece of renowned landscape painter John Ford Paterson, was born in Carlton, Victoria, in 1893. Her family background was almost guaranteed to foster creativity. Other than her uncle, who lived with the family, her father was a theatrical designer and entrepreneur and her mother an amateur actress and singer of considerable repute. Their neighbours and family friends included artists, actors and other theatre personalities, journalists, poets and publishers. Frederick and Annie McCubbin and family lived next door. On Sundays, Melbourne’s artistic fraternity congregated in the Patersons’ studio. Their combined pipes generated such a cloud that Paterson has recalled sitting with her mother in the church across the street, wondering if this could be the hellfire supposedly awaiting all non-churchgoers.
The Pictures Collection of the National Library holds several childhood photographs of the artist and her siblings. The theatrical bent of the family is unmistakable; artistic costuming and evocative settings distance these images from portraits of a more pedestrian conception. Significantly, a similar ambience distinguishes Paterson from her contemporaries in a photograph of the painting class at the National Gallery of Victoria. Her unbound hair and softly draped gown attest to the confidence that allowed her to defy Melbourne’s fashion conventions and embrace the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic she favoured. An inscrutably pensive portrait in profile from 1915 (also in the Pictures Collection) affirms the ongoing strength of this influence in her life and work. Paterson entered the Gallery school in 1907, its youngest student at only 13 years of age, and graduated at the head of the painting class in December 1912. In 1935, she recorded her memories of these years in an article entitled ‘Gallery Days’, published in the Star on 29 June (in the Library’s Newspaper Collection). Anecdotes about fellow students, teachers and models, sketching trips, fancy dress balls and other jollifications make entertaining reading, brought even more vividly to life by her own engaging black and white sketches. Notwithstanding her light-hearted tone, Paterson, who even made fun of her personal taste for ‘arty’ dress in this article, was a hard-working and ambitious student determined to use her artistic training as the basis for a lifelong career. She was actively directing her talents to this end while still at the school, illustrating for The Woman as early as 1908. Cartoons satirising the Australian ‘society’ girl bearing her signature appeared regularly in the Sydney Bulletin throughout 1912. Within a few years her illustrations and cartoons were finding acceptance from the editors of the Melbourne Punch, the Argus, the Lone Hand and several other journals and daily papers. By 1915 she had diversified further, boldly combining her more formal portraits with sketches, posters, caricatures and decorative design work in an exhibition held at Melbourne’s Besant Hall, favourably received by Melbourne’s critics.
In 1918, Paterson published her first book, a slim volume of sketches entitled Aussie Girls. The National Library holds this book, which showcases the artist’s ability to analyse and represent in images the social customs and values of Melbourne society. A corresponding ability to convey the flavour as well as the fine points of the fashions of this period is also evident. Her second book, “Me”: A Page From My Diary, published a year later, is just as perceptive and would probably appeal to today’s adolescent girl as much as it ever did to the teenagers of the flapper era. Not surprisingly, Paterson’s talents in this respect were quickly recognised by authors and publishers, leading to collaboration with writers such as Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce. She also undertook work as a freelance journalist, contributing illustrated articles to magazines such as Table Talk and Home, and producing full-page pictorial essays for Punch, the Weekly Times and a shorter-lived journal entitled Adam and Eve. She continued to paint, producing crisply convincing portraits and vibrant streetscapes that hinted at the encroaching influence of modernism, and found a ready market when exhibited. The breadth and diversity of her work underwrote an enviable record of achievement and financial success. Paradoxically, it may also have contributed to her neglect by art historians, who would have been more likely to regard her a serious artist had she restricted her efforts to canvas. The Paterson family papers, held in the Library’s Manuscript Collection, contain a treasure trove of memorabilia, charting her life and professional development from a more personal perspective. Many examples of her work—including Christmas cards designed for the Prime Minister’s official mailing list, cartoons, recruiting posters, sketches for theatrical programmes and advertisements—have been pasted into scrapbooks along with photographs and newspaper reviews of her work. Unfinished black and white and watercolour drawings, whole newspapers, magazine covers, catalogues from her many exhibitions, letters and family documents fill other folders, enabling a more comprehensive picture of this multifaceted woman and artist than would be otherwise possible. The closeness of the relationship between Paterson and her sister, Betty, is indicated throughout the collection. Paterson completed numerous portraits of her younger sibling, a talented musician who trained at the Marshall Hall Conservatorium and received most of her visual arts education at the hands of her gallery-educated sister. Her developing aptitude in this direction only became publicly known in the 920s when she followed her sister’s lead in working as a cartoonist for Punch. Within years, the renown of her portrait sketches of babies and young children had begun to attract commissions, including many from international celebrities. Somewhat ironically, the enduring appeal of these attractive but relatively simple studies was such that Betty is better known today than the sister who originally nurtured her talent. Another significant relationship able to be traced in the archive is the extraordinarily productive partnership enjoyed for over half a century by Esther Paterson and her husband, George Hermon Gill. Paterson met Gill, a British merchant seaman working with the Commonwealth Government Line of Steamers, in 1922. They married in 1923, embarking on a mutually supportive life journey that utterly confounded his family’s early concerns about the incompatibility of their respective backgrounds.
Gill, whose intelligence and sense of humour enliven a folder of personal letters to the wife he affectionately nicknamed Kitten, left the sea in 1929 to become a journalist. He was employed over time as a staff writer at the Melbourne Star, the Herald and the Argus, as well as freelancing for other publications. Following Paterson’s example, he cultivated a talent for drawing, creating the cartoon characters Walter and Hermon who kept Star and Argus readers amused for many years. He also wrote longer articles and books, illustrated of course by Paterson, and became official historian to the Australian Navy after World War II. Although the couple had no children their lives were very full, their days spent in constant interaction with friends and other family members. There is nothing in the archive to suggest that either would have preferred a different path. The overall impact of the Paterson family on In 1971, only a few weeks before her death, Paterson was interviewed by Hazel de Berg for the National Library’s Oral History Project. Her final anecdote is memorable. She tells of acting as a model for William McInnes’ 1926 Archibald Prize entry, Silk and Lace. After noting somewhat diffidently that the painting was so named because the sitter should really have been a person of note, she reveals that the finery in question was actually her wedding dress. This gown, she relates, had been sewn in haste only the night before her marriage. Her work, and her efforts to raise money for the family of a colleague who had died almost penniless, had kept her too busy to create anything more elaborate. Her pride in having collaborated in creating a portrait that not only took that year’s prize but was subsequently purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales is clearly enhanced, rather than diminished, by this circumstance. The spirit of Esther Paterson, and of many other women artists whose stories are only now beginning to be told, could not be more eloquently conveyed. GWENYTH RANKIN is a post-graduate student of Deakin University |
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