MOVING IN CREATIVE CIRCLES
by Joanna Gilmour
1st June 2008
from the National Portrait Gallery web site
Margaret Preston, c. 1930 Harold Cazneaux
Harold Cazneaux's portraits of influential Sydneysiders included Margaret Preston and Ethel Turner, both important figures in the development of ideas about Australian identity and culture.
Harold Cazneaux's portraits of influential Sydneysiders for the style-bibles of the day eschewed the romantic for the naturalistic.
In his forty-year career as a photographer, Harold Cazneaux created a rich catalog of Sydney’s mood and people. Cazneaux’s iconic cityscapes and street scenes have come to define the Sydney of his time and his many portraits offer a glimpse into the small social world which linked the city’s primary taste makers in the 1920s and 1930s.
Two such portraits by Cazneaux have recently been gifted to the National Portrait Gallery – one of artist Margaret Preston, c.1930, and the second of author Ethel Turner, photographed in 1928. Bestselling author Ethel Turner (1870-1958) was prominent in Sydney’s literary and social circles from the 1890s onwards, while Margaret Preston (1875-1963) enjoyed an enviable place in the Sydney art establishment and a reputation as one of the city’s foremost modernist artists. Both women can be considered important figures in the development of ideas about Australian identity and culture which emerged in the first half of the twentieth century.
Harold Cazneaux (1878-1953) arrived in Sydney in 1904 and worked for the commercial studio Freeman & Co. while with his own work established a strong profile in photographic circles for images of the city’s streets, people and daily life. He was a founding member in 1916 of the Sydney Camera Circle, a group which endorsed photography as an art form akin to painting, and which also promoted the development of a form of pictorial photography with a distinctly Australian character through use of local qualities of sunlight and shadow.
By 1920, Cazneaux had set up his own studio at his home at Roseville, and was engaged by influential publisher and artist Sydney Ure Smith as the official photographer for Smith’s stable of style-bible magazines which included The Home and Art in Australia. The work for Smith called for a diverse output, including numerous portraits of Sydney identities and their lifestyles. While he later admitted that photographs of Sydney socialites were his most disliked assignments, Cazneaux enjoyed photographing members of the creative circles he moved in. Artists like Norman Lindsay, Rayner Hoff, and Thea Proctor were photographed by Cazneaux, as were others within the cluster of arbiters of art and style who enjoyed Ure Smith’s regular patronage.
Margaret Preston moved to the harbourside suburb of Mosman in 1920 and throughout the next two decades created many of the exuberant works which remain among the most popular and recognizable in Australian art. Preston drew powerful inspiration from her extensive travels and the bushland around her home and became a vigorous campaigner for her vision of a modern Australian art that recognized Indigenous art traditions and the unique beauty of native flora and motifs. Preston was adept at promoting herself and her ideas, regularly contributing cover designs and illustrations for The Home and Art in Australia as well as articles for these and other publications. The 1920s and 30s were a prolific and diverse period of output for Preston. She experimented with techniques, working in painting, printmaking, craft and design, to create a modern visual language which melded Aboriginal form with modern art’s bright colors and bold structural qualities. Her woodblock prints and paintings of this era are celebrated for their Australian subjects, such as wildflowers, harbor scenes, and images of Sydney’s growth as a modern metropolis.
Similarly, Ethel Turner’s work is remembered for its celebration of unashamedly Australian themes. Turner came to Sydney with her family at the age of nine and was twenty-four when her first and best-known book, Seven Little Australians, was published in 1894. The novel was a blistering success, the first edition selling out within weeks and Turner’s publisher immediately contracting her to produce a sequel, The Family at Misrule, which appeared in 1895. While Seven Little Australians displayed traits typical of children’s fiction of the time – boarding schools, an autocratic father figure, scarlet fever, and the premature death of its rebellious heroine – it was distinct for its Sydney suburban setting and its representation of typical Australian childhood experiences. The rabidly nationalist Bulletin considered Turner among those writers whose work would come to form an Australian literary tradition – an association that caused unease with her English publisher, who sometimes feared her writing was too 'larrikin'. Like Preston, Turner achieved a prolific output: from 1896 until 1928, she produced an average of one book per year, contributed regularly to magazines, and wrote poetry, plays, a travel book and prose, much of her work retaining the local flavor that had made her first novel so popular.
By the 1920s, both women were ripe for profiling in the publications which were a primary vehicle for dispersing information about modern lifestyles and ideas, and it followed that Cazneaux would create the images that underlined their status within Sydney’s interconnected cultural community. Like many of his portraits, these images demonstrate Cazneaux’s move away from many of the conventions of portraiture of this era. He replaced the overly romanticized or clichéd studio settings with naturalistic poses, advertising his belief that the 'charm of successful portraiture' was best achieved through photographing in the ‘natural surroundings of your home and garden'. His portraits of Preston and Turner exemplify this approach as well as signifying the stimulation both subjects found in gardens and landscapes. In this, they display parallels with Cazneaux’s own love of the outdoors and the portraits he created – particularly of his children – in the garden of his home. Cazneaux’s portrait of Ethel Turner shows her posing in the window of her study at her Mosman home, 'Avenel', and was featured in an article about Turner published in Australian Home Beautiful in 1928. Cazneaux shared a connection with Turner through her daughter, Jean Curlewis, a writer who collaborated with Cazneaux on publications like Sydney Surfing, published by Art in Australia in 1929. The portrait of Preston is among a series of images made in the same sitting in her garden at Mosman in 1930. In 1936, Cazneaux photographed Preston in the garden of her subsequent Sydney home in Berowra, alongside the Banksia tree which she cited as an enduring source of inspiration. The accompanying article on 'Margaret Preston at Home' was published, also in Australian Home Beautiful, in February 1937. Both portraits can be seen as emblematic of the energetic and confident literary and artistic scene of Sydney in the 1920s and Harold Cazneaux’s role as the key documenter of its close-knit protagonists.
Ethel Turner
c.1928 Harold Cazneaux
ETHEL MARY TURNER
The following article is by BRENDA NIALL and was published in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1990
Ethel Mary Turner (1870-1958), author, was born on 24th January 1870 at Balby, Yorkshire, England, second child of Bennett George Burwell, commercial traveler, and his wife Sarah Jane, née Shaw (d.1923). Burwell died in Paris in Ethel's infancy; on 21st August 1872 in the register office, Yarmouth, Sarah Jane Shaw married Henry Turner, a widower with six sons; they were to have a daughter Jeannie Rose (b.1873). Ethel and her elder sister Lillian Wattnall Burwell (1867-1956) took their stepfather's name and were known by it throughout their professional careers. Turner, a factory manager, fell into financial difficulties and left only £200 when he died at Coventry in August 1878.
Next year Mrs Turner migrated with her daughters to Sydney. On 31st December 1880 she married Charles Cope, a clerk in the Department of Lands and brother of William Cope; their son Charles Rex completed the three-level family. Ethel Turner's autobiographical novel, Three Little Maids (1900), describes her mother's struggle to maintain her family in genteel poverty and presents the third marriage as a means of rescue.
Ethel and Lilian were educated at Sydney Girls' High School where they ran their own magazine, the Iris, in opposition to the Gazette, edited by Louise Mack. In January 1889, after Ethel left school, the sisters founded and co-edited a sixpenny monthly, the Parthenon, which lasted for three years until its printers, Gordon and Gotch, were sued for libel; the magazine sold about 1500 copies a month and made about £50 annually for its editors. Ethel contributed the 'Children's Page' and serial romances for adults: both she and Lilian planned to become novelists. In 1893 Ethel published a story in the Bulletin and was earning £100 a year as editor of the 'Children's Page' of the Illustrated Sydney News. The paper folded next year, but as 'Dame Durden' she edited the 'Children's Page' in the Australian Town and Country Journal until it ceased publication in 1919.
For diversion from a more ambitious work, she wrote her first children's book, Seven Little Australians. On the recommendation of William Steele, Melbourne representative of the English firm of Ward, Lock and Bowden, it was published in London in 1894. The first edition sold out in weeks and 'Ethel Sibyl Turner' (as she styled herself) was launched as a children's writer.
The Sydney suburban setting, the quiet comedy, the refusal to idealize family life and the insistence on the distinctive nature of Australian childhood experience set Seven Little Australians apart from its contemporaries. Although the novel shows the influence of Charlotte Yonge's The Daisy Chain (1856) and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), it reverses the literary conventions of these works. When its heroine, the rebellious Judy Woolcot, dies after a ring-barked tree falls on her, there is none of the customary religious consolation for a young life cut short. The irascible Captain Woolcot (a version of Turner's stepfather Charles Cope) never becomes a model father; the other Woolcots remain imperfect; and, while the family fortunes vary, they do not essentially change. The domestic realism is sustained in the second Woolcot novel, The Family at Misrule (1895).
Deploring the 'free and easy, somewhat rowdy associations due to [the Australian] atmosphere, climate, environment and the influence of The Bulletin', in 1895 Steele urged Ethel Turner to consolidate her reputation by spending some time in English literary circles. She refused to leave Sydney and delay her wedding to the young barrister HERBERT RAINE CURLEWIS (1869-1942), to whom she had been unofficially engaged for four years. They were married at St John's Anglican Church, Gordon, on 22nd April 1896.
Herbert was born on 22nd August 1869 at Bondi, eldest son of native-born parents Frederick Charles Curlewis, brickmaster, and his wife Georgina Sophia, née O'Brien. Educated at Newington College and the University of Sydney (B.A., 1890; LL.B., 1892), he was admitted to the Bar on 17th March 1893; practising mainly in common law, after an early struggle he prospered. Curlewis had some literary talent and, as a student, wrote Latin and Greek verses and some love poems dedicated to Ethel Turner. In The Mirror of Justice (1906), a layman's introduction to legal process, he emphasized the human interest of the courtroom as well as the intricacies of the law. He edited the Australasian Annual Digest of leading decisions in 1905-15 and lectured on the law of procedure, evidence and pleading at the university in 1911-17. Fluent in Italian and a member of the (Royal) Australian Historical Society, he was also attracted by anything mechanical. Appointed a judge of the Industrial Arbitration Court in 1917, he became District Court judge on 1 July 1928. He earned a reputation for severity, especially for his insistence that correct English should be spoken in the cases over which he presided. Curlewis retired in 1939.
The marriage was happy: each fostered the other's career. They rented a cottage at Mosman until their own house, Avenel, overlooking Middle Harbour, was completed in 1903. Their daughter was born in 1898 and their son in 1901. Ethel was prominent in Sydney's literary and social life, and enjoyed skating, tennis, golf and surfing. In 1910-11 the family traveled abroad. On their return, Ethel published Ports and Happy Havens (1911). Creating a garden absorbed a good deal of her time and her love of growing things is evident in her novel, The Ungardeners (1925).
Her writing showed a continuing tension between her enjoyment of popular and commercial success and her wish to break free from the restrictions of juvenile fiction. Ethel's publishers always insisted that her work should remain within the range of the sheltered young reader. Her use of Australian slang in The Little Larrikin (1896) brought a rebuke from Steele. When she published with Hodder and Stoughton in 1913, she found similar prohibitions.
During World War I Ethel Turner organized ambulance and first aid courses, campaigned for conscription and worked for patriotic causes. With Bertram Stevens, she edited The Australian Soldiers' Gift Book (1917). She also embarked on a temperance crusade in St. Tom and the Dragon (1918). A wartime trilogy—The Cub (1915), Captain Cub (1917) and Brigid and the Cub (1919)—is notable for its freedom from anti-German hysteria and for its sympathetic portrayal of a reluctant Anzac; the ideal of loyalty to Empire is combined with a strong sense of Australian nationalism.
A recurring theme in the Turner novels is that of the conflicting demands of the creative and the domestic life. Whatever restrictions Ethel may have felt as author, wife and mother, they did not diminish her productivity. Thirty-four volumes of fiction, three of verse, a travel book, plays, some miscellaneous verse and prose testify to her talent, and her discipline. Before World War I she had planned to start a children's newspaper; in 1920 she suggested the idea to the editor of the Sydney Sun; when it fell through, she edited (1921-31) 'Sunbeams', the children's page in the Sunday Sun. A member of the Sydney P.E.N. Club, in 1936 she joined C. H. Bertie, (Sir) Walter Murdoch, G. V. Portus and a dozen others who each contributed a chapter to Murder Pie. Ethel was an excellent manager of her financial and literary affairs; she gave time and money to various charities, and was a generous friend to less affluent writers, among them Henry Lawson with whom she shared the affliction of deafness.
Her daughter ETHEL JEAN SOPHIA (1898-1930) was born on 7th February 1898 at Mosman and educated at Sydney Church of England Girls' Grammar School. Jean published poems and stories as well as four novels: The Ship that Never Set Sail (1921), Drowning Maze (1922), Beach Beyond (1923) and The Dawn Man (1924). These appeared under the Ward Lock imprint, in identical format to the novels of Ethel and Lilian Turner. Her talent, however, was quite unlike that of her mother and aunt. Instead of domestic comedy and stories of love and marriage, Jean Curlewis wrote adventure stories with a strong sense of place. Yet, while they evoke the Sydney of sun and surf beaches, they are essentially novels of ideas. She was not at ease with the happy ending of most children's fiction: her characters accept compromise or defeat as the price of adulthood. When she married Percie Leonard Charlton, medical practitioner, on 23 October 1923 at St Luke's Anglican Church, Mosman, her health was already causing concern. After two years in Europe where Charlton did postgraduate work, she returned to Sydney looking 'fragile and sad'. Soon afterwards she was found to have tuberculosis. She died in Sydney on 28th March 1930, her promise as poet and novelist unfulfilled.
Her mother's last novel, Judy and Punch, was published in 1928. Although this book was prompted by Ward Lock's belief that another Woolcot novel was the best way to challenge the pre-eminence of Mary Grant Bruce's Billabong books, there may have been personal significance in the re-emergence of Judy at a time when Ethel faced her own daughter's death.
Survived by their son Adrian, Curlewis died at Avenel on 11th October 1942 and Ethel Turner died at Mosman on 8th April 1958; she was buried in the Anglican section of Northern Suburbs cemetery. Extracts from her diaries, kept since she had left school, were published in 1979 and 1982. Her portrait by Jerrold Nathan is held by the family.
Her elder sister LILIAN was born on 21st August 1867 at Lincoln, England. Her childhood, like that of Ethel, was disrupted by the deaths of her father and first stepfather, by financial insecurity, migration to Australia and by her mother's remarriage. Charles Cope, who was possessive—even obsessive—but generally indulgent towards Ethel, was strict and disagreeable with Lilian. Ethel, fair-haired and blue-eyed, was the prettier of the sisters, the more talented and, in spite of her fragile appearance, the more vital. Lilian's career, too, was eclipsed by her sister's early success. Though Lilian's first novel, The Lights of Sydney (1896), won first prize in an open competition organized by the London publisher Cassell and Co., it led nowhere. Accepting what she saw as a lesser aim, she turned to the 'flapper' novel: stories of love and ambition written for schoolgirls and young women. In a format identical to that of her sister's work ('as alike as tins of jam', Ethel remarked), Lilian Turner published twenty novels with Ward, Lock and Co. between 1902 and 1931. Most were competent, none was outstanding. Betty the Scribe (1906) deals with the clash between literary ambition and domestic responsibility; Paradise and the Perrys (1908) and Three New Chum Girls (1910) express her mildly feminist impulses, but suggest no future for the independent woman. While family life is shown to be drudgery, marriage seems the only realistic goal.
Lilian Turner's own life was marked by financial hardship and ill health. At the time of her marriage to Frederick Lindsay Thompson (d.1924), dentist, on 22nd February 1898 at St John's Anglican Church, Gordon, she was over 30, although (as Ethel had also done) she understated her age. Thompson was unemployed for long periods; Lilian had to keep writing to support her family, and had to accept financial help from her sister. Something of the Turner literary ability shone in her son Lindsay who published boys adventure and school stories. There was a strong bond of loyalty and affection between Ethel and Lilian, but to the best-selling author, the judge's wife, the woman of means, it was inevitable that Lilian should become 'Poor Lil'. When she died on 25th August 1956 at Turramurra, survived by her two sons, all her books were out of print, while her sister's Seven Little Australians had been translated into many languages, staged and filmed (1939). Its frequent re-printings and an Australian Broadcasting Commission television version in 1973 have confirmed its status as one of Australia's few unquestioned children's classics.
Portrait of Margaret Preston, c1924, by Harold Cazneaux
Collection: Preston archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Margaret Preston in Paris, c1905.
Source: National Gallery of Australia
Margaret Preston in her Adelaide studio, c1909.
Source: State Library of South Australia
Margaret Preston, aged 19, in 1894.
Source: National Gallery of Australia
MARGARET ROSE PRESTON
Born: 29th Apr 1875, Port Adelaide, South Australia
Died: 28th May 1963, Mosman, Sydney, New South Wales
The following article is by ISOBEL SEIVL and was published in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1988
Margaret Rose Preston (1875-1963), artist, elder daughter of David McPherson, marine engineer, and his wife Prudence Cleverdon (d.1903), née Lyle. By 1885 the family was living in Sydney where Rose about 1888 began training with Lister Lister. In Melbourne in 1893 she enrolled at the National Gallery's school of design under Frederick McCubbin.
Her father was admitted in February 1894 to Parkside Lunatic Asylum, Adelaide, where he died next year. In June 1894 she joined her sister and mother in Adelaide. She exhibited with the (Royal) South Australian Society of Arts (and continued to do so annually when in Adelaide). Returning to Melbourne in July 1896, she enrolled at the National Gallery's school of painting under Bernard Hall and with a painting, 'Still Life', won a year's free tuition. Returning to Adelaide, in 1898 she studied at the School of Design, Painting and Technical Arts under Harry Gill. She leased a studio next year and began teaching full time and painting at week-ends, chiefly still-life subjects.
Inheriting her mother's money in 1903, she moved to a new studio where one of her students was Bessie Davidson. 'Eggs' (1903), painted in an academic illusionist style, reveals her skill. After the selection committee of the Society of Arts rejected what she believed to be her 'best still life', she left Adelaide on 2nd July 1904, bound for Europe with Davidson. In Munich they viewed an exhibition of the German Secessionists. Shocked by her first view of the European avant garde, Rose MacPherson took lessons at the Munich Government Art School for Women. She then went to Paris where she saw the work of Cézanne, Matisse, Kandinsky and Rouault. Still conservative, Rose was thrilled to have one of her traditional oils accepted by the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français. With renewed self-confidence she studied Japanese and Chinese art at the Musée Guimet, learning 'slowly that there is more than one vision in art'.
On her return to Adelaide in 1907 she leased a studio with Bessie Davidson and they held a combined exhibition in March. 'Onions' (1905) was purchased by the National Gallery of South Australia. Gladys Reynell and Stella Bowen joined her classes in 1908. She also taught at the Collegiate School of St Peter and Presbyterian Ladies' College. A citizens' committee in 1911 commissioned her to paint a posthumous portrait of Catherine Spence for the gallery.
In 1912 Rose and her now intimate friend Gladys Reynell arrived in London to see the Second Post Impressionist Exhibition, organized by Roger Fry, in which Matisse and Picasso were well represented. They lived in Paris and Brittany in 1913-14 before moving to London on the outbreak of war; Rose now admired Gauguin's color. She exhibited her first woodcuts with the Society of Women Artists, studied pottery at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and became familiar with the designs of Fry and the Bloomsbury group. Her paintings, 'November on the Balcony' and 'Still-Life Sunshine Indoors' were exhibited at the New Salon, Paris, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. She also studied under the Scot A.E.H. Miller, and exhibited with the New English Art Club; 'Anemones' (1916) marks her final rejection of academic realism and the emergence of her new style based on color theory.
From August 1918 MacPherson and Reynell taught shell-shocked soldiers ceramics, basket making and printmaking at Seale Hayne Neurological Hospital, Devon. The task required great ingenuity because traditional materials were unavailable. Next year Rose was invited to exhibit at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburg, United States of America. On the voyage home she met her future husband, William George Preston (1881-1978), a gunner returning after serving with the Australian Imperial Force. She and Reynell held a joint exhibition in Adelaide in September 1919 and made some of the first pottery at Reynella. There Margaret (as she was henceforth known) married Preston on 31st December.
They settled at Mosman, Sydney. Preston became a director of Anthony Hordern and Sons Ltd, Tooheys Ltd and other companies, and belonged to the Union Club. Margaret's financial security enabled her to travel and to experiment with new styles and techniques. Her travels included visits to New Caledonia and the New Hebrides (1923), South East Asian countries and China (1924-26), North Queensland (1927) and Ceylon, Africa and India (1956-58). In the 1930s the Prestons also lived at Berowra where Margaret kept two exuberant terriers and enjoyed pottering in her garden, left half in its native state, and filling her cupboards with home-made bottled fruit and jam. Fiery and volatile in temperament, she once threw a plate of cakes at Thea Proctor. Leon Gellert later recalled, however, that never 'was a domestic alliance so felicitous … Bill seemed to regard it as a national duty to keep his beloved Margaret happy and artistically productive'.
At first Margaret had exhibited with the Royal Art Society of New South Wales. 'Summer' (1915), showing Post-Impressionist influence, was bought by the National Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1920. She soon joined the less hidebound Society of Artists, where she was supported by Sydney Ure Smith. The Contemporary Group from 1926 gave her the opportunity to show her 'modernist' style. She was now familiar with Leger and Purism and with Cubism. 'Implement Blue' (1927) shows a Japanese influence fused with a technique of lighting used by contemporary photographers.
Increasingly adept at promoting her art and ideas, Margaret Preston contributed twenty-seven articles to Ure Smith's journals, Art in Australia and the Home, as well as writing for other publications. In December 1927 she published her autobiographical essay, 'From Eggs to Electrolux', in Art in Australia. Between the wars she had a substantial part in articulating new attitudes towards art and in creating a receptive climate for changing aesthetic taste in Sydney.
For her first major printmaking exhibition she teamed with Thea Proctor in 1925; and in 1929, 1936 and 1953 held three major one-woman shows. The first woman to be commissioned by the trustees of the Art Gallery to paint a 'Self Portrait' (1930), she chose a style which conveys some of the direct challenge she communicated in her writing. Three of Ure Smith's publications were exclusively devoted to her work. In 1937 she won a silver medal at the Exposition Internationale, Paris.
Paradoxically, when her style was most international, Margaret proposed a 'national' art for Australia based on Aboriginal art. Although she was primarily a still-life artist for most of her career, in the 1940s she concentrated on landscapes in oils: in 'Aboriginal Landscape' (1941) and 'Flying Over Shoalhaven River' (1942) she reduced her palette to earth colors and surrounded simplified forms with black lines, based on her study of Aboriginal art. Still experimenting, in the 1950s she made a series of gouache stencils based on religious subjects: 'Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden' (1950) shows black figures in an Australian setting.
Survived by her husband, Margaret Preston died at Mosman on 28th May 1963 and was cremated with Anglican rites. Never an imitator, Preston needed different forms of expression. She experimented constantly in a variety of media, but her ability to present something fresh in her dynamic designs with her unerring sense of color allowed her to break traditional barriers. Her originality and powerful expression is evident in her printmaking, especially her hand-colored woodcuts. Her monotypes such as 'Hawkesbury River' (1946) demonstrate her acute observation of Australian landscape and flora.