Thomas Woolner: a Pre-Raphaelite Sculptor in Australia
Keywords:
Art, historyAbstract
This paper examines the nature of Thomas Woolner’s Australian oeuvre, its relationship to professed Pre-Raphaelite ideals and its role in achieving his brilliant career. Obscure and penniless, the only sculptor amongst the original Pre-Raphaelite Brothers was lured to Melbourne by the promise of gold in 1852. His real fortune was to meet on arrival the influential circle of Dr. Godfrey Howitt and the Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria, Charles La Trobe, who had connections with the London Pre-Raphaelites. When prospecting failed, Woolner sculpted portraits of La Trobe, the Howitts and their friends in low-relief profile medallions. Although he revived the genre in Melbourne “to get money with,” the unparalleled accuracy and realistic detail of these portraits, so striking to contemporaries, were based on his unswerving adherence to the Pre-Raphaelite principles of “excelling truthfulness” and “devotion to nature.”
La Trobe and the Howitts promoted Woolner, lending their portraits to the first official artist exhibitions in Melbourne in 1853 and in 1854. They introduced him to Sir Charles Nicholson, Speaker of the Legislative Council of NSW, when he moved to Sydney that year which resulted in portrait medallions of Council members at a pivotal moment of nation building. Income from commissions for bronze casts of his colonial portraits provided the “seeding capital” for launching Woolner’s career when he returned to London in 1854. Of his future Australian commissions, ironically, the gigantic Monument to Captain Cook, of 1878, for Hyde Park, Sydney, came closest to fulfilling the principles espoused by the first Pre-Raphaelites: a monumental, Ideal work of the highest category, history, articulated by sharply executed, realistic detail. I argue that the successful, lucrative career of Thomas Woolner, R.A., sometime Slade Professor of Sculpture, began the moment he met with appreciation and support in the cultured circle of Victoria’s first Lieutenant-Governor, Charles La Trobe, the Howitts and their friends in Melbourne in 1852.
References
Works Cited
Botham, Helen. La Trobe’s Jolimont: A Walk Round my Garden. Melbourne: C. J. La Trobe Society and Australian Garden History Society, 2006.
Clemente, Caroline. “The Private Face of Patronage: the Howitts, Artistic and Intellectual Philanthropists in early Melbourne Society.” Master of Arts Thesis. University of Melbourne, 2005.
——. “Thomas Woolner’s Portrait Medallion of C. J. La Trobe.” La Trobe Journal 80 Spring (2007): 52-64.
Cox, John Francis. “An Annotated Edition of Selected Letters of Thomas Woolner, Pre-Raphaelite Poet and Sculptor.” Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Arizona State University, May 1973.
Downer, Christine. “Artists’ Societies in Colonial Victoria, 1853-1881: The Search for Identity.” Master of Arts (Preliminary) Thesis, Department of Art History, Cinema, Classics and Archaeology. University of Melbourne, 1981-82.
Eastwood, Jill. “Summers, Charles.” Australian Dictionary of Biography. Vol. 6, Melbourne: Melbourne U P, 1976.
“Fine Arts.” Illustrated Sydney News 3 June 1854, p. 2.
Holman-Hunt, Diana. My Grandfather, His Wives and Loves. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1969.
Holman Hunt, William. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2 vols., London: Macmillan & Co., 1905.
Howitt, Alfred. Letter to Mary Howitt. 3 July 1854; letter to Anna Mary Howitt. 10 Aug. 1857. MS 9356. Papers of the Howitt Family. La Trobe Australian Manuscripts Collection. State Library of Victoria.
Howitt, Phebe. Letters to Edith Howitt. 6 May to 6 July 1855. MS 13848. Papers of the Howitt Family. La Trobe Australian Manuscripts Collection. State Library of Victoria.
Howitt, William. Manuscript autobiography. Not dated. MS 9356. Papers of the Howitt Family. La Trobe Australian Manuscripts Collection. State Library of Victoria.
La Trobe, Charles Joseph. “Letters from the Colony.” La Trobe Journal 71 (2003): 130-41.
Melbourne Exhibition 1854. Official Catalogue of the Melbourne Exhibition, 1854, in Connexion with the Paris Exhibition, 1855. Melbourne: F. Sinnett & Co.,1854
Melbourne Morning Herald. 13 July 1853, n.p. [fol.7 counting from the cover sheet].
Neale, Anne. “Woolner’s Australian Romance.” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 19 (Fall) 2010: 27-44.
Ormond, Leonée. “Thomas Woolner and the Image of Tennyson.” Read and Barnes 40-45.
Peers, Juliet. “Beyond Captain Cook: Thomas Woolner and Australia.” Read and Barnes 34-39.
Read, Benedict and Joanna Barnes, eds. Pre-Raphaelite Sculpture: Nature and Imagination in British Sculpture 1848-1914. London: The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, 1991.
Read, Benedict. “Thomas Woolner: PRB, RA.” Read and Barnes 21-33.
——. Victorian Sculpture. New Haven and London: Yale U P, 1983.
——. “Thomas Woolner’s Godley and the British Statue Overseas.” Stocker 78-86.
Stephens, F. G. “Thomas Woolner RA.” The Athenaeum No. 3390. London: October 15 1892.
Stocker, Mark, ed. Remembering Godley: A Portrait of Canterbury’s Founder. Christchurch: Hazard, 2001.
Victoria Fine Arts Society. Catalogue of the Victoria Fine Arts Society’s Exhibition Melbourne, August 20, 1853. Melbourne: 1853.
Woolner, Amy, ed. Thomas Woolner R.A., Sculptor and Poet: His Life in Letters. London: Chapman Hall, 1917.
Woolner, Thomas. “Diary of Thomas Woolner in Australia” 1852-53, 1854. MS 1926, Microfilm. La Trobe Australian Manuscripts Collection. State Library of Victoria. Referred to in footnotes as Woolner Diary.
——. Letter to W. B. Scott. 17 Dec. 1857. Cox 82-83.
——. Letter to Emily Tennyson. N.d. Sept. 1858. MS 12831. La Trobe Australian Manuscript Collection. State Library of Victoria.
