Artist and Local Hero

Bill: The Life of William Dobell
by Scott Bevan
Simon & Schuster, 2014, 497 pages, $35

Scott Bevan’s admirably detailed and thoughtful new book on the life of Sir William Dobell OBE (1899–1970) offers us considerably more insight into Dobell’s life before, during and after the notorious court case over his 1944 Archibald Prize portrait of fellow painter Joshua Smith, than we have had before in the literature on this major artist. The book comes fifty years since James Gleeson’s very fine monograph William Dobell published in 1964 (coinciding with the major retrospective exhibition at the AGNSW) and nearly seventy years after Sydney Ure Smith’s The Art of William Dobell (1946). More recent works on Dobell include Brian Adams’s Portrait of an Artist (1983) and Elizabeth Donaldson’s William Dobell: An Artist’s Life (2010).

This new biography is built very much around Dobell’s connections with the people of, and his long residence in, Wangi Wangi in the Lake Macquarie area near Newcastle, New South Wales; but it is not limited to those aspects. Overall, this book gives us a fresh appreciation of Dobell’s personality, and his life among his family and his friends, including those friends he made among other Australians who were in London when he lived there between 1929 and 1938. It is a refreshing study, even if not without some blemishes that might easily have been avoided, but which may ultimately come down to issues of one’s personal opinion.

Bevan traces Dobell’s family roots in the Hunter, in Newcastle and at Wangi, his local schooling, his early work in architectural offices and his early art training at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School, where he came under the positive influence of that remarkable painter George Lambert. Dobell won the Society of Artists’ Travelling Scholarship in 1929, which took him to London where he had great stimulus from being able to view not only the many Old Master pictures in the National Gallery, but also such rewarding treasures as those to be seen in the Wallace Collection. He enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art and came under the tutelage of Professor Henry Tonks and Sir William Orpen RA, of whom Dobell wrote back to Julian Ashton, “he has been very decent to me & if he was not such a Jolly Irishman I should call him a Dinkum Aussie.”[1]

He travelled to the Netherlands including The Hague to see Van Goghs and Amsterdam where he visited the Rijksmuseum to see Rembrandt’s works. He also visited Belgium and spent some weeks in Bruges, savouring Renaissance works there as well as Flemish Primitives, and noted the Flemish Expressionism which was emerging in Belgian art at that time. In London, Dobell painted his famous portrait Mrs South Kensington (1937) and other major works including The Boy at the Basin (1932), The Milliner (1936) and The Duchess Disrobes (1936) as well as views of London, including the animals at the zoo in Regent’s Park. After his scholarship funds ran out, Dobell supported himself doing advertising posters including one for the “Orient Line to Australia”, a striking image which is still in some demand in reproduction today.

He also did the sketch for his Dead Landlord picture, completed in 1942, and took some minor acting work in the English film industry. He and other artists worked with Arthur Murch on a commission at Glasgow.

Thus, Bill Dobell had had a full decade of solid, traditional European art training and experience by the time he returned to Sydney in early 1939.

Bevan chronicles how Dobell settled in Kings Cross, which in those days which was a haven for artists and, with its cosmopolitanism, reflected something of his recent European experiences. During the Second World War, although Dobell’s name appeared on lists of proposed official war artists, his war work became that of a camouflage artist with the Civil Construction Corps, which took him back to his old family territory around Newcastle when he was stationed at the Rathmines RAAF base.

In the Corps he met fellow artist Joshua Smith, who would become the subject of Dobell’s controversial 1944 Archibald Prize portrait. The subsequent lawsuit by two disappointed competitor artists was to cause Dobell immense pain and anxiety and became a turning point in his life. Even though the court vindicated the AGNSW Trustees’ award to him, after this searing experience Dobell retreated to Wangi to recover his equanimity and restore himself in painting, away from the Sydney art scene in the tranquil, small fishing village he had known since his youth.

The story of the litigation has been often told. Bevan reminds us that in 1945, Zelman Cowen, then a law graduate, wrote an article on the case in the Australian Law Journal noting the Whistler–Ruskin case precedent in 1878. Cowen wrote:

Whistler, though subjected to ridicule and attack in his own day, has now achieved well merited recognition … The scorn poured upon the impressionists has now turned to praise. These facts should serve as warning to those who laugh to scorn contemporary art.[2]

Bevan also reminds us of facts less well remembered, such as that Dobell in early 1944 had been appointed a trustee of the AGNSW. In a perceptive essay for the catalogue of the 1964 retrospective, Hal Missingham, who knew Dobell and the details of the lawsuit very well, noted that the majority of trustees in favour of Dobell’s portrait in the Archibald Prize of 1944 included: Mrs (H.V.) Evatt, James McGregor, Sir Lionel Lindsay, Sydney Ure Smith and Professor E.G. Waterhouse.

The remainder of Bevan’s book is taken up with the story of how Dobell’s retreat to Wangi enabled him to rebuild his career and confidence, going on to paint such important works as his New Guinea series, his other major portraits of figures such as Margaret Olley (1948 Archibald Prize) and later, Helena Rubinstein, Dr E.G. McMahon, Sir Robert Menzies and President Ngo Dinh Diem (both for Time Magazine covers), as well as his depiction of the Sydney Opera House. It is also an opportunity for Bevan to explore Dobell as “Bill”, the local identity at Wangi during the 1950s and 1960s, and how he was admired, respected and even to an extent protected, by his fellow residents in those years when sightseer pests would drive up to his home at Wangi seeking a glance of the “Mad Artist”, as Dobell himself had noted.

This careful exploration of the more intimate and homely life of Dobell at Wangi is really the kernel of this book and its great value as social history. Bevan deals lightly and respectfully with the private life of Dobell and although there is some speculation about Dobell’s sexuality along the lines of what is now almost statutory in biographies, artistic and otherwise, Bevan does not labour this point. It is, after all, whilst relevant to an individual’s life, either not at all relevant to the artistic achievement (or at best, marginally relevant in some cases) and to the ultimate public recognition given a major artist such as Dobell. Not too much should be made of this: to take a more recent and outstanding example, Lucian Freud had high honours conferred upon him notwithstanding a private life that was unusually complicated, to say the least. He was earlier preceded in membership of the Order of Merit by the uber-bohemian Augustus John, and Freud has been succeeded in the Order of Merit by David Hockney. It is in this broader context that the honouring of a major artist should be viewed and beyond parochial limits.

Bevan also exposes some of the bitchiness with which Dobell was treated, even by fellow artists whom he had known from earlier days:

Edward McMahon the surgeon who had operated on Dobell [and of whom Dobell painted a fine Archibald Prize Portrait] wrote how his friend told him “with great satisfaction” that when he was called “Sir William” or “Sir Bill” in Wangi, “I know my leg is being pulled”. The surgeon added Bill’s “deep love of Wangi” stemmed from his “dislike of pretensions”. Yet Donald Friend, who had known Bill since their days in London, believed Dobell’s response to “pretension” could vary. At the time of Bill’s death, Friend wrote in his diary that the knighthood gave Dobell “a lot of pleasure and he liked to polish it up, as it were, with a few flourishes of indulgent self-importance”. “His anti-snobbery was elastic,” Friend sniped, “and allowed him a great fondness for Lords, State Governors and Governors-General, garden parties at Government House, and the social reassurance given by the spectacle of a pennanted Rolls Royce standing outside his bijou cottage at Lake Wangi.”

This is just the usual sort of snide view that betrays a complete misunderstanding of what figures like Dobell are about. He was an Australian from an ordinary, even humble, background who possessed artistic talent, obtained art training and went to London to refine his skills. Dobell was all of that, but he was an urbane and experienced man, even if also rather sensitive. He was under no illusions about the clear, if belated, public recognition which being knighted meant for him and for his work; and like Sir Neville Cardus, another poor boy made good, he would not dream of parleying with his Sovereign, much less to consider declining the honour. He knew how to behave with the great, as well as with the humbler. It is no more than that; the knightage is not, in and of itself, an aristocracy. Yet, such misconceptions still bedevil Australia’s socio-political history.

One other thing: there is, here and there in this book, a little of what is the lamentable tendency in Australian discourse, and particularly since the events of 1975, to “gib” (or jibe) at all things vice-regal. Hopefully, this tendency is now receding—and it is not that Bevan offends grossly in this regard. Rather, there is in the book a muted undertone of slighting disdain for formalities; which is quite acceptable in the context of an attempt to portray the artist as a man in his own home town or locality, as opposed to the renowned and knighted painter, feted as a celebrity by Australian and British art collectors and patrons and the wider general public. Lady Casey may well have caused havoc to the Canberra air traffic controllers when flying her own light plane from Melbourne (“Look out! Lady Casey’s on the way”) but was it really necessary for Bevan to characterise as “snobby” the way she called Dobell “Will” (after an older generation’s—that is, her own—forms) instead of “Bill”? We have had quite enough of this sort of thing—for example, Patrick White’s appalling caricature of the Queen and her Consort upon the occasion when he was invited to attend a luncheon on the Royal Yacht Britannia.[3] After all, both the Caseys and the Duke of Edinburgh (as Bevan notes) were prominent patrons and bought Dobell pictures for their own collections.

This book is a substantial work of biography and cultural history, running to some 497 pages including notes and acknowledgments. The publishers have provided it with a handsome cover and good layout and typography, as well as a generous set of colour plates of major works by Dobell and also some black-and-white photographs of “Bill” at Wangi. We are indebted not only to Bevan for providing his study of Dobell, but to all of the present and former Wangi residents who assisted Bevan with information and artefacts relating to their “Bill”. We have seen in the sad recent days at Macksville, for Phillip Hughes’s funeral, the close solidarity of an Australian country town for its own. It is of interest to note Bevan points out that “in a triumph of bureaucracy over geography, Wangi is not in [the Federal Electorate of] Dobell”[4] but that electorate is at least visible from atop a mountain ridge at Wangi. A small oversight: whilst Sydney Ure Smith’s 1946 book on Dobell is listed along with various other works, for some odd reason James Gleeson’s important 1964 monograph was omitted from the bibliography, but it is at least referred to in footnotes to the text.

Overall then this book can be, and indeed is, warmly recommended to anyone interested in Australian Art and in the social and cultural history of this country during the twentieth century. It provides an understanding of both Sir William Dobell, painter and Knight Bachelor, as well as of “Bill” Dobell, the much-loved and treasured local identity at Wangi, whose monuments are not only on the walls of Australian public galleries, in the Dobell Art Foundation and a Professorial Chair at the Australian National University, but also in the Dobell House and a memorial plaque placed by his drinking mates in the public bar at the Wangi Hotel. It is proof of the powerful significance, in our public life and the real estimation of the Australian people, of the diminutive of a name. They were quite different artists (and it must be said very different personalities) but it is rather as Lucian Freud OM, CH, was known as “Lu the Painter” to his humbler public bar friends in London. Freud also had some legal stoushes, but did not suffer quite as Dobell did due to the 1944 Archibald Court case. This is then a good read and Scott Bevan has made another valuable contribution to our Australian history, alongside his other acclaimed books such as Battle Lines: Australian Artists at War.