William Frater

William Frater first arrived in Australia in 1910. At his death in 1974, he was one of this country’s most significant painters in the Post-Impressionist style. However, until the publication of Dick Wittman’s fine monograph on him in 2000 (William Frater: A Life with Colour), Frater was, at least outside Victoria, not as well known by the general Australian public as he deserved to be.

Frater was a painter possessed of a complete technical training in pictorial art, acquired at the Glasgow School of Art under Greiffenhagen, with Anning Bell (in stained-glass work), in Paris and London and also (briefly) at the Victorian Artists’ Society Life Class in Melbourne. Although he was primarily a painter and colourist, he was a trained draughtsman and designer, and he developed his art to a high degree of mastery. He was a great exponent of painting in what has come to be termed the “apricot palette” of colours reminiscent of Paul Cezanne and he was, as well, the most significant representative practising in Australia of the school known and esteemed by connoisseurs as the “Scottish Colourists”. He adapted this approach and palette to the nature and quality of the light and colours of the Australian landscape, having as he said “abandoned Europe for ever”.

Frater’s life, and his work as a painter, present some puzzles. He was always at least mentioned[1]—and often noted and discussed as a seminal influence[2]—in major published surveys of the history and development of art in Australia, but until Wittman’s book appeared Frater’s work had not been given much detailed attention in print, apart from the usual exhibition catalogues and reviews. Honourable exceptions included major articles by Laurence Course in 1970[3], by Anne Gray in Art and Australia in 1981[4] and Wittman’s own article of 1990.[5] As well, there was Mary Eagle and Jan Minchin’s book on the George Bell School[6] and also June Helmer’s book on that School, The Art of Influence[7].

In part, the comparative neglect in detailed attention could have been due to Frater’s somewhat cantankerous nature and his personality, which although often forthright and even outspoken, could also become quite taciturn as the mood took him.[8] He gave an address or two in the 1920s, but he wrote very little about his art beyond a few short articles, preferring to let his works speak for themselves. Another possible reason for his not having received the full attention that was his due, is that as a “Post-Impressionist” he was at once too “modernist” for the traditionalists who favoured the usual work of the Australian Pastoral School, but at the same time not radical enough for the later avant-garde. He was associated with the ultimately abortive attempt by Robert Menzies and others in the late 1930s to establish a permanent Australian Academy of Art.

Wittman has traced Frater’s biography in greater detail than had hitherto been available. Frater was born at Ochiltree, Linlithgow, in Scotland in 1890. Orphaned early, he was cared for by relatives and after local schooling he was apprenticed in 1906 to Oscar Paterson’s stained-glass studio in Glasgow and attended the Glasgow School of Art, winning a scholarship there. A family disagreement about his accepting a further scholarship led him to travel out to Australia with his brother Tom, arriving in Melbourne in 1910. He quickly obtained a post as designer in the stained-glass department of Brooks Robinson, a leading firm in that field, at a time when glasswork, particularly in the art nouveau style, was very popular.

He befriended some young Melbourne artists, most of whom were students at the National Gallery School. These included W.B. McInnes, with whom Frater would travel back to Europe in 1911.[9] Frater applied for the National Gallery School, but was rejected. Joining the life classes at the Victorian Artists’ Society, he was ejected for “disruption”. Wittman notes that given his Glasgow School training, this was unusual, and it also presaged later battles with the “establishment”.[10]

On returning to Scotland in 1911, Frater resumed Glasgow School studies under Maurice Greiffenhagen and also Alphonse Legros. He also came under the influence of the “Scottish Colourists” notably Samuel Peploe and Francis Cadell.[11] Wittman says:

Frater’s stay in Glasgow came to an abrupt end one evening when he discovered his girlfriend emerging from the theatre with a young man resplendent in opera cloak and hat. Impulsively, he departed within the week, once more bound for Australia. The departure was emotional: “I turned round and looked at the Lomonds for the last time, and it was a wrench to leave them. You could see the Bens and there was snow on the laplands, the thatches … and the Bens were all white …” [12]

Back in Melbourne in 1914, he worked briefly on stained glass in partnership with one Dent, until returning to Brooks Robinson, and from there he went to W.B. Yencken & Co, where he remained until 1940, by which time the demand for stained glass had fallen off, as result of the Great Depression, the war, and changing fashions in architecture and building.[13] As well as works for private buildings, he designed many church windows, including for Scots Church in Melbourne. Frater’s work in stained glass has been examined by Jenny Zimmer in her book Stained Glass in Australia (1984).[14] Frater shone in this field, due to his extensive training at the Glasgow School and his natural abilities as a designer. His skill would later show itself strongly in the design and structure of his pictures.

Frater had met Winifred Dow during his earlier sojourn in Australia and they married in 1915. There were five children. The Fraters built a house in Alphington, which remained their home. In addition to his work in stained glass at Yenckens’, Frater entered with gusto into the hurly-burly of artistic life in Melbourne. During the 1920s and 1930s he became closely involved in the debate that ranged between the Academic or Traditionalist “art establishment” and the radical and modernist artists of the “Contemporary Art Group” around George Bell and Arnold Shore, with whose school Frater also became associated. It was in a sense, an early twentieth-century reprise of the Querelle des Anciens et Modernes, but in the Antipodes, at a remove, both in time and influences, from its sources in the revolutionary art movements then afoot in Europe. Unlike many of the younger generation of Australian artists around him, Frater was able to draw on his own experience from his studies in Europe and this, combined with his natural tendency to a cranky pugnacity, gave him a leading role in the debate over “modern art”. He was, for a time, associated with Max Meldrum’s pictorial approach.[15]

Of course, older artists such as McCubbin and Streeton had also travelled and worked in Europe; but Frater became something of a rallying point amongst his younger confreres because he had wider experience of the art world than they. Wittman has detailed very well Frater’s involvement in the “art wars” of the 1920s and 1930s.[16] Suffice it to say for present purposes, that Frater did two things: he emerged as someone sympathetic to a moderate modernism, but not committed to the radical avant-garde. He did not embrace pure Abstraction; he always remained a figurative artist, with a strong anchoring in traditional modes and methods, but with a basically ‘Post-Impressionist’ style and outlook. It was therefore not really to be wondered at that after some initial hesitation, Frater along with Arnold Shore, decided to accept nomination as an “Associate” of the Australian Academy of Art, whereas Bell had refused such nomination. Wittman notes that when Frater and Shore exhibited with other Academy artists, critics panned their works, favouring that of the traditionalist artists:

Art in Australia was particularly hostile, offering the opinion that Frater’s work was “not convincing and tend[ed] to reveal some outstanding weaknesses and blatant mannerisms of some modernist paintings”. Shore’s paintings were said to be rich and warm in colour but “somewhat tiresome”, “weak in drawing and unpleasant in colour”. It seemed that the two artists were being exploited as tokens of modernism.” [17]

By 1941, Frater had switched to exhibiting with the Contemporary Art Society founded by Bell and others. Frater’s The Red Hat (1937), a portrait of the artist Lina Bryans, was recognised as a significant work of Australian Post-Impressionism; it was acquired for the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.

Frater’s work moved into a new phase in the 1940s, particularly after he retired from stained-glass designing at Yenckens’. He became associated with a group of painters including Alan Sumner and Adrian Lawlor; they painted in near country areas such as Eltham. Frater formed a relationship with Lina Bryans and in 1940 went to live most of his time with Bryans and other artists at a former hotel building in Darebin. This caused his wife and family great tension and stress, but Frater later returned to his wife at Alphington.

His work from the 1940s onwards became progressively more assured and he developed his great facility in colour to a high pitch in rendering the Australian bush. His efforts in this direction did not please some critics, who were often ready to detect alleged “weakness”, or disliked any summary approach as being “oversimplified”[18]. However, some critics including Clive Turnbull and Alan McCulloch (after some doubts),[19] generally approved. From this period onwards, Frater developed his landscape style even further; and interspersed in or between landscape works were human figures, and often nude studies, with a great power and breadth of design. These showed once again Frater’s command of the essentials of design and underlying structure, derived from or relating to stained-glass work.

In the 1950s came a series of figures in landscape based on a visit to Central Australia, with the vivid colours of the interior, such as seen at Ayers Rock (Uluru) with groups of Aborigines which, like others of Frater’s figures, strongly remind one of Cezanne’s Bathers series. Laurie Thomas noted: “[at] Ayers Rock, he made oil sketches but spent most of his time getting his palette right—the pinks, the reds, the blacks, the blues, the lights—not just right, but dead right”.[20] Later in the 1950s came the first of a remarkable series in Frater’s Australian landscape works, namely the pictures he painted at Port Douglas, in the far north of Queensland. These combined the strength of deep colour seen in landscape and seascape works from the late 1940s such as Lorne (circa 1943), with a new “airiness” and opalescent rendition of the North Queensland coastal sea and vegetation. The blues and greens in these seascapes and certain other landscape works are luminous and inspired expanses of colour; some of them can remind one of passages in the late work of Frater’s Sydney contemporary, Lloyd Rees, or within Sam Fullbrook’s works. This phase of Frater’s mature and later style is perhaps best summed up in his Mount Bogong (1963) where the greys, pinks and greens that are so characteristic of Frater’s landscape art, are fused and built up into a monumental representation of the outline and structure of the mountain. If it reminds one of Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire it is no mere echo, as it so palpably depicts that particular peak in the Victorian Alps.

The 1960s and early 1970s saw Frater painting more figures, nudes, the occasional still life, portraits including some self-portraits, as well as landscapes in his now familiar style. Often, the bush landscapes might show an almost Expressionist streak in the angularity of the forms of curving tree-trunks, a motif that seems frequently to have appealed to Frater. In such pictures, the tree-trunks are often placed centre-canvas, as if consciously to depart from the traditional European conventions of landscape composition, but they are not thereby in any way “affected”. By some curious means, Frater in these pictures manages to show something that resonates with that “certain strangeness” which he once identified as a defining characteristic of “great art”, as well as capturing an element that is undoubtedly and authentically part of the Australian bush scene. These curving trees are certainly not Heysen-like, but they are very true to both the appearance and the essential structure of motifs found by Frater around areas such as Eltham and elsewhere in Victoria. 

Frater is primarily remembered for his skill as a colourist, but it is useful to consider first his work as a draughtsman. Drawing was obviously part of his comprehensive training and study at the Glasgow School of Art. He further developed his sense of design and his facility in that field, by his work in the special area of stained glass, where he learned much from Anning Bell. It was in his stained-glass work that his abilities as a colourist and designer coalesced to provide him with a livelihood for most of his working life up to 1940. Frater’s high standard of achievement in this field has been published by Jenny Zimmer in Stained Glass in Australia. Frater considered his stained-glass window work for the Scots Church in Melbourne as perhaps his best; but he also designed for other churches around Victoria.

Any viewing of a range of Frater’s paintings will quickly confirm the extent to which the strong sense of design which permeates his pictorial work also found ready expression in stained glass. And not only in the designing as such: there was also very evident in most of his mature painting, an obvious and inherent element of the juxtaposition of planes of colour, which is an echo of both his stained-glass work and of his Glasgow School training under Greiffenhagen and Legros. As well, there was the colouring itself, at once strong but subtle. Some think that Frater’s draughtsmanship was less good than his abilities as a painter and colourist: indeed, the allegation of “weak” drawing was a standard objection by the traditionalists to the work of “modernists” in the 1920s and 1930s. However, plenty of examples of Frater’s drawings survive, enough to demonstrate his ability as a draughtsman, not indeed of the fine and detailed lines, but of strong, broad and “decisive” drawing.

Frater’s drawing technique in that mode shows through in his figure works, both drawn and painted; and it is also seen in the best of his portraits. His broad handling of figures was by no means weak. Frater was in tune with the traditional grand manner, rather in the way Augustus John and George Lambert were. Frater perhaps would not have claimed it as such, but it was an outlook reflecting Goethe’s allgemeinheit—that “breadth and generality”, as Pater had put it in his essay on Winckelmann. Some of Frater’s mid-career interior portraits are perhaps a little studied or even laboured, but he could reach much greater heights, as he did with Memoria de Valencia (1934), The Red Hat (1937) and The Black Hat (another Lina Bryans portrait) and his Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (1935). The Red Hat is perhaps his best-known work and has been frequently illustrated in books on Australian art. Wittman notes that Frater himself considered it a very good picture, but that its fame obscured other paintings which he regarded as equally successful.[21]

Frater’s ability as a colourist was memorably celebrated by Laurie Thomas in his art column in the Australian in 1968.[22] Thomas referred to Frater’s orchestration of “greys, the greens, the lilac greys” to achieve (or to suggest) distance, space and air or “atmosphere” in his paintings. Frater was familiar with the Scottish Colourists active in his youth and when he was at the Glasgow School, and particularly Peploe and Cadell. The strong interest in these painters in recent years in the United Kingdom may yet presage a re-examination of and revival of interest in Frater’s work as a colourist and Post-Impressionist in Australia. As noted earlier, he was a fine exponent of the “apricot palette”. In his hands, there was a distinctive quality deriving from this and Frater’s manner of handling oils and the effects he obtained (usually on canvases or boards that he well prepared and grounded, in the time-honoured and traditional manner) which admirers of his work find especially appealing.

He was a very “painterly” artist, even when painting at his broadest. The colour and the spatial effects he achieves return the eye to his pictures. There is very often, in the best of his works, a facility which is very much more than mere competency. Many of Frater’s finest things are reminiscent of Augustus John (whom Frater admired) at his best. There is even, occasionally, a hint of the Expressionism of David Bomberg and echoes of the Colourism in Oskar Kokoschka’s late works.[23]

These qualities show out in a variety of picture types, or series, by Frater. In the Central Australian series there are strong ochre colours and dark shadows and the Cezannesque figures—depicted with a breadth of handling that shows an artist in the great European tradition of depiction of the human form within a landscape, in the broad and grand manner; typically his figures remind one of Cezanne’s Bathers pictures. Even so, it will not do to write him off as a Scots-Australian epigone of the modern master of Aix. Rather, it is in the common concern with underlying structure and volumes that Frater relates to Paul Cezanne; and thus even ultimately to Poussin, in the sense that Cezanne had explained.

Again, in Frater’s Port Douglas series we have lush and deeply colourful scenes painted with a palette of opalescent hues. Perhaps some of his finest works occur in this rather special series, which call to mind the adage, often recounted by the late Dr V.T. Vallis, that one can readily judge of a painter’s level of ability from the manner and level of success in their depictions, firstly of water and then especially of skies. Lastly, there is an early series of small works, depicting figures from classical mythology, including Diana the Huntress and Acteon. These are remarkable works, of vivid and high-toned colour; comparable with certain of Rupert Bunny’s smaller works on similar themes.

What then have the art historians and commentators thought of Frater? In 1945, Bernard Smith’s Place Taste & Tradition mentioned Frater briefly,[24] whilst in Smith’s fuller and later work Australian Painting 1788–1970[25] there was more detailed reference to Frater’s role in Post-Impressionism and the emergence of Modernist art in Melbourne. James Gleeson’s inclusion of Frater as the last artist discussed in his 1971 volume of Australian Painters— Impressionists 1881–1930 was nicely judged, on Frater’s main Post-Impressionist stance.

Laurence Course’s chapter on Frater in the 1970 book edited by Clem Christesen The Gallery on Eastern Hill was the beginning of detailed scholarly attention to Frater’s body of work and his influence upon pictorial art in Australia.[26] Anne Gray’s 1981 article “William Frater Reconsidered”[27] was a welcome fillip in the re-examination of Frater’s art and his influence. Barry Pearce included Frater in his 1983 survey A Century of Australian Landscape: Mood and Moment. Dick Wittman’s 1990 article “William Frater 1890–1974” in Paramanathan’s The Melbourne Modernists was a further development, in advance of his detailed and well-illustrated book.

Leaving aside the “old unhappy battles” of the 1930s, the balance of mature critical and scholarly appraisal of Frater’s work is perhaps best captured by Wittman in reporting the success of the Frater retrospective exhibition organised at the NGV in 1966 by Brian Finemore: “Saluting Frater as an artist of classical bent, Finemore pointed to the way in which ‘tradition and innovation join in his work’.”

Frater’s place in the history of Australian art is assured. He had a major influence on the development of figurative painting in Australia, through his work and its exhibition and also by way of his teaching. This latter came in two main bursts: firstly in the Frater–Shore and George Bell schools in the 1920s and 1930s; and later, Frater taught at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in the 1960s. He thus fostered the development of many Australian modernist or contemporary artists. He was associated with such artists as Isobel Tweddle and Alice Bale; and the influence of Frater as well as George Bell can be clearly seen in work (and particularly figure work), by artists like Enid Denton. He also fostered and encouraged Ian Fairweather when he (a fellow Scot) was in Melbourne and very much down on his luck. Frater immediately recognised the special quality of his painting. Frater ultimately became the distinguished President of the Victorian Artists’ Society from 1963 to 1973 and he was awarded the OBE in 1974. Frater noted to Laurie Thomas that these recognitions were ironic, in view of his being thrown out of the VAS life class in 1910. In this Frater shared the experience of Lloyd Rees, who became President of the New South Wales Society of Artists, having been rejected as rebel and outsider in the 1920s.

Frater’s work was much admired by some of the most discerning art collectors in Australia. I recall conversations with the late Justice John Lockhart of Sydney, a noted collector of Fairweathers and other works, who often remarked on Frater’s qualities and the fact he was under-rated. Frater’s works are so palpably appealing to the senses of colour and design, and his personal reticence or taciturnity were such, that one hesitates to seek for deeper themes or underlying concerns lying behind (and much less in) his works. However, he hinted at a wider outlook on life in his 1941 article “A Certain Strangeness”[28] and also in interviews he gave to Laurie Thomas.[29] He thought something terrible (and probably irreversible) happened to the world in about the year 1911—that being, perhaps not coincidentally, the same year of Mahler’s Das Lied Von Der Erde and Elgar’s Second Symphony, which might also be said to presage something of what was then to come. Yet Frater was by no means any escapist. In late 1914 he was painting at Walhalla in the Victorian mountains but came down to Melbourne and volunteered for military service, though he was rejected on medical grounds.[30]

His long years of working in stained-glass design and production, with the occasional sale of his pictures, provided for the upkeep of his family. He was a realistic man: a careful and “canny” Scot in many of his ways; but also blessed with a great lyrical ability as a colourist and painter. His work, once seen and observed, is almost immediately recognisable in its painterly manner, its subtle colour effects and its rendition of shades.

Some critics and collectors regard certain of Frater’s late works as weak or even repetitious, but he always retained an obvious skill in the art of painting and the craft of picture-making. It is true that not every work is masterful, but even his loosest works in oils and his most summary studio sketches in pencil have a strength and integrity all of their own which is immediately obvious to any informed and experienced viewer. In some ways, it was often held against him that he had his great facility with the brush and with colour; rather in the way Augustus John was criticised for “loose” or “weak” later works. Other artists have been most admired precisely for “loosening up” towards the end of their careers—as witness Turner and Lloyd Rees.

No practitioners of the fine arts consistently produce masterpieces. Even Richard Strauss sometimes cursed his own facility at “note-spinning” and declared: “I am a first-class second-rate composer!” Some later works by Frater do show a certain falling off of powers; even so, that is no reason to under-rate or downplay his overall body of works. Of course, there is a current (or various currents) of art criticism which abhors Post-Impressionism in any event; and thereby discounts Frater. It seems to me that Frater has, even now, not yet received his full due of recognition as a seminal force in twentieth-century Australian art. He was a highly accomplished artist, one dedicated to the art of figurative and landscape painting in the broadly “traditional” mould; and he was long the leading representative of an “Australian Colourism”.

William Frater is represented by works in most major public galleries. Some important pictures in these collections include: The Red Hat (1937, NGV) Mt Bogong (1963, NGV), Memoria de Valencia (1934, Castlemaine Gallery), Lorne (1943, NGV), Self-Portrait (1933, Geelong Gallery) and The Corroboree (1952–53, National Gallery of Australia). Dick Wittman’s book is indispensable; he has done the memory of Frater and the history of art in Australia an important service in bringing this artist back into due focus and attention.

Frater did not embrace pure Abstraction; he always remained a figurative artist, with a strong anchoring in traditional modes and methods, but with a basically “Post-Impressionist” style and outlook.