Bertram mackennal was fascinated by the theatre and theatricals throughout his working life. Australia’s first world-class sculptor was born at Fitzroy, Melbourne in 1863, son of Scottish immigrant parents, his father John Simpson Mackennal becoming an established archtectural sculptor in Australia in the 1860s/70s, and Bertram’s first teacher in his studio.
In 1878 he started studies at the School of Design of the National Gallery of Victoria, where fellow students included another sculptor, Charles Douglas Richardson and artists Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Rupert Bunny, and in 1881-82 Mackennal, Richardson and Roberts left Melbourne for London.
Bertram Mackennal, 1924. Photo by Walter Stoneman.
National Portrait Gallery, London.
The Lyric Muse, 1888, by Bertram Mackennal
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
To London and Paris
There the three young men shared a studio and Bertram met several of Britain’s leading sculptors, including Hamo Thorneycroft and Alfred Gilbert, plus members of the emerging group of New Sculptors, including Harry Bates and George Frampton. Australian artists with whom Mackennal socialised in London (and later Paris) included Roberts, Bunny, John Longstaff, Arthur Streeton and ‘Anglo-Australians’ Phil May and Charles Conder.
In 1883 Mackennal studied at the British Museum and started at the Royal Academy schools. His first known work was of his friend and fellow sculptor, Charles Douglas Richardson. During the following five years he left London for Paris, where, probably in 1888, he met and worked in the studio of Auguste Rodin, introduced by the Australian impressionist John Peter Russell.
In 1884 he married Agnes Spooner and the following year their daughter Henrietta was born. In England in 1888 he produced the first of a long line of theatrically-related works, a delightful bronze head of Euterpe, The Lyric Muse. Appropriately she is the muse of poetry and music, joy and pleasure, and is often represented, crowned with flowers, holding an instrument, in this case a lyre.
Head of a Woman [Mary Anderson], 1888, by Bertram Mackennal
Private collection
Mary Anderson as Galatea in Pygmalion and Galatea, 1884. Photo by Henry Van der Weyde, London.
National Portrait Gallery, London
Also in 1888, Mackennal, twenty-five years old, sculpted busts of two great American actresses who were appearing in seasons in London. First came Mary Anderson (1859-1940), who played both Hermione and Perdita in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale for 166 nights at the Lyceum Theatre—by far the longest run of that play, before or since. She was a major celebrity. The Morning Post earlier described her appearance in glowing terms:
Miss Anderson’s beauty is of a Grecian type, with a head of classic contour, finely chiseled features, and a tall statuesque figure, whose Hellenic expression a graceful costume of antique design sets off to best advantage.
Mackennal’s portrait, executed twice,1 echoes this description, the head confidently modelled. Born at Sacramento, California, as a child Mary Anderson was inspired by Edwin Booth’s Richard III, and her first role was Juliet. She continued with Shakespeare in London, where she became a great favourite. At the time of the sitting for Mackennal, he was working as a designer for the Coalport china company in Shropshire, from where he would visit friends – and work—in London from time to time.
Marble bust of Genevieve Ward, attributed to American sculptor Joel Tanner Hart (1810-1877)
Royal Shakespeare Company collection
Genevieve Ward in Forget-Me-Not, c.1880
From Genevieve Ward: A biographical sketch, Osgood, Boston, 1882
The second great American actress to be sculpted by Mackennal in 1888 was Genevieve Ward (1832-1922), who followed Anderson at the Lyceum in a new play, The Loadstone, specially written for her but unappreciated by the London press.
Born in New York a generation before Anderson, Ward was educated in France and Italy and had career as an opera singer before marrying a Russian aristocrat, Count Guerbel, and switching her attentions to drama. She became famous in England as Lady Macbeth, Volumnia in Coriolanus and Queen Margaret in Richard III.
She toured Australia for Williamson, Garner and Musgrove in 1884-85, opening at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne in Merivale’s comedy Forget-Me-Not, followed by Sydney Grundy’s The Queen’s Favourite, later becoming a celebrated Lady Macbeth.
Finally retiring aged 82, Ward was the first actress to be created DBE. Genevieve Ward’s name appears on the list of Mackennal’s sculptures made by his grandson, Colin Kraay, but its whereabouts is currently unknown.
Return to Melbourne
In 1888, Mackennal and his family returned to Australia so that he could fulfill a commission to execute relief panels for the façade of the Victorian State Parliament.
The fact that Mackennal had made busts of such major theatrical stars as Anderson and Ward may well have given him the credibility to approach others in Melbourne. The sculptor quickly became part of the vibrant artistic and theatrical scene there. In her memoirs, Mackennal’s daughter Henrietta observed:
Life in Melbourne seemed very exciting and my parents met many interesting people. We were living in a colony of artists, writers and theatricals. They told me that there were excellent plays at the Princess Theatre.2
Mackennal rented a small flat and studio on Swanston Street in Melbourne and appears frequently in the letters of the artist Tom Roberts during this time. Arthur Streeton wrote later that while Mackennal was in Australia the sculptor had hosted Bohemian suppers on the last Friday of each month—a young English actress, Janet Achurch, among the guests, as well as Streeton, Conder and Felix Meyer.3
Plaster and terracotta relief of Janet Achurch, c.1890, by Bertram Mackennal
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Janet Achurch as Nora in A Doll’s House, 1890. Photo by Falk [Walter Barnett], Sydney.
State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
It was while living in Swanston Street that Bertram Mackennal created his portrait of Janet Achurch (1854-1916). She was a well-regarded young English actress from a theatrical family. Her first engagement had been with Genevieve Ward’s company in London and her range extended from the Fairy Queen in pantomime to Lady Macbeth. However, it was in the year prior to the creation of Mackennal’s portrait that Achurch became famous—with the opening of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in London in June 1889.
The actress’s naturalistic portrayal of the proto-feminist Nora created both shock and admiration. Before the opening, Achurch and her husband, the actor Charles Charrington, had signed a two-year contract with the Australian theatrical triumvirate of Williamson, Garner and Musgrove, and it was their future Australian salaries that the couple mortgaged in order to première A Doll’s House in London.
Charrington and Achurch toured Australia and New Zealand from September 1889 to August 1891, becoming closely involved with the artistic communities in both Melbourne and Sydney. Charles Conder met her in Melbourne and according to Table Talk was commissioned to paint her (now untraced, possibly unexecuted) portrait.4 The Sydney-based photographer Walter Barnett, another friend of Mackennal, took a number of portrait photographs of her. Arthur Streeton met and became friendly with the actress and her husband—Streeton gave her his painting of Coogee Bay in Sydney. He wrote to Tom Roberts:
... I go and dine at Charringtons, at Woollahra, very often. They are fine people. She is a very artistic woman & all Sydney is running after her now…She is the most earnest professional woman I have ever met.5
The reaction of the press in London to this controversial play had filtered quickly to the colonies and the couple and their play already had a contentious reputation when they arrived in Australia. It caused rowdy scenes at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne when it opened on 14 September 1889.6
There are three known versions of Mackennal’s portrayal of Janet Achurch.7 All are relief portraits. Notable are a number of formal similarities with his later portrait of Sarah Bernhardt. Like the Bernhardt, Mackennal depicted Achurch in profile facing left. The artist’s text and lettering style is similar, inscribed vertically in front of the actress’s face. While the Bernhardt work is executed in low relief, the Achurch portrait is formed and in high relief. There are also differences in the conception of the portraits. Achurch is presented simply as a woman wearing a toga-like garment. Mackennal’s depiction of Bernhardt is more sophisticated, for with her fashionable contemporary dress, symbolic figure and heavy-lidded eyes she is presented as a modern woman.
Mrs Brown Potter, 1901, by Australian artist Theodora Cowan (1868-1949)
Tatler (London), 15 October 1901
Mrs Brown Potter, 1890. Photo by Falk [Walter Barnett], Sydney.
Falk Album, Theatre Heritage Australia
During the same year (1890), Mackennal also made a portrait bust, untraced, of the American actress, Cora Brown Potter (1859-1936), who was also touring Australia for the ‘triumvirate’, with her leading man, Kyrle Bellew (1855-1911). Born in New Orleans to a wealthy family, Mary Cora Urquhart married the New Yorker James Brown Potter in 1877 when she was eighteen. Cora became a leading member of the New York social set, in demand at parties for her beauty and her talent for recitations. In London in the summer of 1886, Mrs Brown Potter met Bellew, an English actor who had previously been a prospector on the Australian goldfields. Leaving her husband, she began a career on the stage with Bellew, a long and successful partnership. Together they undertook extensive world tours and it was while they were in Australia in 1890 that Brown Potter and Bellew met Mackennal.
Although in their dramatic styles the two actresses were quite different—Achurch the modern naturalist, Brown Potter the melodramatic beauty—it is noticeable that in other ways Brown Potter and Achurch had unexpected similarities: their plays and performances were contentious, and both represented the independently-minded ‘New Woman’. Nellie Stewart, a prominent Australian actor-singer of this period, described Brown Potter in her autobiography, My Life’s Story:
Mrs Brown-Potter was very beautiful in her slender and somewhat sinister style, but I don’t suppose that anybody will seriously pretend that she was a great actress. ... Her voice, naturally husky… she worked to the point of stridency. She clothed her lithe body in such a way as to give an effect of snakiness. Long before the cinema, she was the first of the vampires.8
Table Talk applauded the new Mackennal work: ‘When Mrs Potter’s face is in repose the strength of purpose and determination show more strongly than when the features are softened by a smile, and Mr Mackennal has caught the more lasting expression admirably.’ The same publication later linked Mackennal’s portrait of the American actress to his next commission from a performing artist:
Mrs Brown-Potter’s arrival in Australia found him [Mackennal] an enthusiastic and discerning patron, and the beautiful actress gave him sittings for a bust, into which the young sculptor put some of his best work ... After a sojourn in Paris, where Madame Bernhardt was as good as her promise to stand by him, he settled in London, and was invited by Mrs Potter to act as a sort of caretaker-guest for her London home during her absence on her second Australian tour.9
Mackennal’s daughter Henrietta recalled this period when her father was a ‘caretaker-guest’:
We arrived in London in early 1894, to stay at the house of the actress Mrs Brown Potter, in Abbey Road, St John’s Wood. It was a strange house, and not really suitable for my father’s work, so from here we had to look for a larger place.10
It seems likely that this relationship served as a conduit for Mackennal, enabling him to meet and obtain commissions from members of high society and artistic circles when he arrived back in England.
Kyrle Bellew, 1890. Photo by Falk [Walter Barnett], Sydney.
Falk Album, Theatre Heritage Australia
Eugénie Legrand, c.1882. Photo by Albert Naegeli, New York.
Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC
In 1891, still in Australia, Kyrle Bellew’s former wife, the French actress Eugénie Legrand, commissioned an untraced bust from Mackennal. Legrand had been married to Bellew, ‘the handsomest man in Melbourne’, in 1874 very briefly—she left him after twelve hours of honeymoon—but long enough apparently to conceive a son. The wedding between the beautiful couple had been celebrated with great ‘éclat’, according to Table Talk. Her acting career in Australia was substantially over by 1891. The sculptor wrote to Legrand on 3 August from the Hotel Metropole in Sydney:
I expect to begin the work in Melbourne next Monday … I told Madame Bernhardt that you had commissioned me to execute your bust in marble and she was very pleased. Madame has been most kind to me giving me her drawing room as a studio and posing three hours at a time. I should like with your permission to exhibit your bust in the salon at the same time as I do the busts of Madame Bernhardt and Mrs. Potter.11
It is significant that in this letter Mackennal groups all three actresses together and quite clearly at this point intends to exhibit the three together at the Paris Salon.
Sarah Bernhardt in her studio with a self portrait bust, c.1878. Photo by Achille Mélandri, Paris.
National Portrait Gallery, London
Sarah Bernhardt, c.1892-93, by Bertram Mackennal
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
The French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) was a bigger star than Anderson, Ward, Achurch or Brown Potter. Like those women, Mackennal not only created portraits of the actress but also socialised with Bernhardt and her company. The sculptor attempted at least three representations—a statuette in role as Cleopatra, a relief and a bust, but only the relief was ever exhibited, the statuette and bust being untraced.12 It was the bust that was executed first, initially in Melbourne and finished up in Europe. It appears in a photograph of Mackennal’s studio in London c.1898. The surviving bronze relief, now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1894.
The ‘Divine Sarah’ was the most celebrated actor of her generation, inspiring the leading writers of her generation to write many of her finest plays. She was a global superstar who always performed in French. Her voice was ‘a golden bell’, her figure slim, her eyes dark. After her debut with the Comédie Francaise in 1862, she conquered London in 1879, New York in 1880, going on to open her own Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris in 1899.
Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra, 1891. Photo by Falk [Walter Barnett], Sydney.
Falk Album, Theatre Heritage Australia
Bertram Mackennal’s London studio, with his statue of Circe in the foreground and bust of Bernhardt behind
From The Sketch (London), 29 April 1896
She and her company undertook a major tour of Australia in 1891, brought by J.C. Williamson and presenting many of her most famous productions—La Dame aux Camélias, La Tosca, Adriana Lecouvreur, Fedora, Cleopatra and Jeanne d’Arc amongst them. And she gave the world premiere of Pauline Blanchard in Sydney. On a world tour, between May and August, she and her company performed in Honolulu, Samoa, Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, before returning via the USA through Auckland. In Australia, she would play six different roles on consecutive nights, always to packed houses.
When she first arrived in Sydney harbour, the photographer Walter Barnett and wife Ella boarded her ship prior to disembarkation, signing her up exclusively. Learned from his mother in Melbourne, Barnett spoke French. She sat for Barnett in Sydney and Melbourne and later in London—as she did for Bertram Mackennal. Without fluent French at this stage, it is unclear how Mackennal first met her. It may be that they were introduced by Eugénie Legrand.
However, having met, the first we hear of her relationship with him is that she wrote to the Argus objecting to the fact that Mackennal had only been awarded second place in a public competition organised by the National Gallery of Victoria for his sculpture, The Triumph of Truth.
Marie Tempest as Adele in An Artist’s Model, 1895. Photo by Window & Grove, London.
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Melba in her garden near Maidenhead with playwright/partner Haddon Chambers (left) and Bertram Mackennal (right). Photo by H. Gude.
Private collection
Back to London
While Mackennal returned to Europe at the urging of Mrs Brown Potter and Sarah Bernhardt, it was not until 1896 that he again produced a portrait of a performing artist. The untraced bust of Marie Tempest (1866-1942) was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1896, and in a review of this exhibition in The Times the critic commented: ‘Mr Bertram Mackennal’s Miss Marie Tempest is a really excellent work.’13
Tempest was born Mary Etherington in London and educated in Belgium before studying music in Paris, then vocal at the Royal College of Music in London. Making her stage debut in 1885, she quickly established herself as a star in musical comedy. A friend of Melba, married three times, she toured Australia and New Zealand in 1917 and 1920 taking with her thirteen productions of musical comedies now long forgotten, it seems. She was created DBE in 1937.
Marie Tempest and her first husband, Alfred Izard, lived close to the Mackennals in St John’s Wood. Henrietta Mackennal wrote about her visits to their home in her memoirs:
Marie Tempest, I remember also visited us at Marlborough Hill. She was to be the leading comedienne of the English stage … She went horse riding most mornings, and often stopped to visit us, tying her horse up to a lamppost right outside our gate … She was not very beautiful, but a fascinating person, and I remember she had the most beautiful hands. Father did a bust of her, and before it was cast, she gave him a packet of letters from her present lover [Cosmo Gordon-Lennox], whom she later married, she begged him to seal them inside the cast where her heart would be. He carried this out, and one wonders whether they are still there today.
Tempest’s biographer Hector Bolitho names Mackennal as a regular guest at her house during this time.14 It is possible that it was Melba that introduced Mackennal to Tempest. In June 1900, Mackennal told an Australian friend that, for a long time prior to executing her bust, Nellie Melba had been an enormous support to him.
Referring to his success in London, Mackennal said: ‘I owe it all to Melba. She introduced me to all the big people and I held up their walls for years.’15 One of the ‘big people’ that Mackennal probably was referring to would have been Tempest. Mackennal’s commissioned bust stood in her house alongside copies she owned of his Salome and his Circe.16
In early 1896 Tempest was the leading lady in a musical comedy intriguingly entitled An Artist’s Model and it was while enjoying this success that Tempest commissioned Mackennal to sculpt her.
Another portrait commission that Mackennal probably gained through his connection with Melba is that of Mimi Ronald, née Ettlinger (from Frankfurt-am-Main), the first wife of composer-pianist-conductor Landon Ronald (1873-1938).17 They married in 1897 and it is likely that Mackennal’s portrait, again lost, dates from around this time. Mimi died in 1932.
Nellie Melba had met Ronald in 1891, when he was a répétiteur at Covent Garden, becoming her accompanist for many years. We know very little about this portrait, recorded as a bust on Colin Kraay’s list.
Nellie Melba, 1899, by Bertram Mackennal
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Nellie Melba, 1902. Photo by Walter Barnett.
National Portrait Gallery, London
At the end of the century, Mackennal came to perhaps his most important works in this series, two busts of Nellie Melba (1861-1931), completed in 1899. Had they known each other growing up in Melbourne? As already noted, Melba was the conduit for several of Mackennal’s commissions, including those of Marie Tempest, Mimi Landon Ronald and Ada Crossley. Agnes Murphy, Melba’s secretary and biographer observed:
It had become an established tradition with her to take a house on the River Thames, generally in the vicinity of Marlow, during the summer months…and to this cool retreat she always hurried at the close of her engagements in London, even after the opera... During these terms of river residence Melba did her utmost to make the place attractive for her colleagues in art, and there she loved to entertain them.18
Mackennal was one of these ‘colleagues in art.’ His daughter recalled:
It was there in Marlborough Hill that I first met Dame Nellie Melba, the great mezzo-soprano [sic] who often visited my parents. One year she took a large house at Henley for the summer, where she entertained. At that time she was always saying that she would like to be buried in the cemetery of the little church of Stoke Poges… In the church she sat and played the organ singing ‘Ave Maria’ in her superb voice… At a later date father completed a bust of her which was for many years on the stairs of the Covent Garden Opera House in London.19
Interior of Melba’s house at 30, Great Cumberland Place, London. The Mackennal bust may be seen on the left. Photo by W & D Downey, London. State Library Vicrtoria, Melbourne.
Already recognised as the greatest opera singer of her era, in 1898 Melba had recently visited the composer Puccini at his home in Tuscany to study with him his most recent, so far unsuccessful opera, La bohème.20 She performed Mimì in Philadelphia, then at Covent Garden in 1899, the year of Mackennal’s portrait of her, and later that year the diva performed the role at the Metropolitan in New York. Effectively it was Melba who made it the world’s favourite opera.
Melba’s portraits by Mackennal are formal and stately, perhaps reflecting the persona that Melba, now aged 40 and at the height of her career, wished to portray. She had decided that one of the two versions would be bequeathed to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, her home town, the other to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden where she reigned supreme. These portraits had a memorial role and it is significant of her esteem for Mackennal that she chose him to execute them. In a letter to the trustees of the National Gallery in Melbourne, printed in The Argus, she focuses on her patronage of the sculptor:
Last year I commissioned Mr Bertram Mackennal, the Australian born sculptor, whose work over here has created so much interest in the last few years, to execute a marble bust of myself with a view to its presentation to the Public Library [sic] of Melbourne. I have now to inform you that the work is finished…and I beg that you, on behalf of the trustees of the Public Library of Melbourne, will accept it from a daughter of the city, as tribute of her unfailing remembrance and affection. The bust, with its pedestal (which in itself is a work of art) will be forwarded to you within the next two or three weeks. May I, in conclusion, express the hope that I am not wholly forgotten in our beloved country.21
The version given to Covent Garden still stands at the head of the Grand Staircase—Melba on the left and (until recently) her predecessor the great Adelina Patti on the right. Sadly, in 1970, when an Australian film crew needed to see it, it was dropped, causing the head to be severed from the neck. It has since been repaired.
Of the version in Melbourne, Patricia Fullerton has written (in the Mackennal exhibition catalogue of 2007):
Elevated above eye-level on her pedestal, she looks every bit a prima donna, her imperious gaze surveying an audience before her. With hair swept up, head held high and turned slightly aside, the formality of the composition is softened, giving emphasis to her handsome shoulders emerging from the swirling drapery. A large art-nouveau brooch, in the form of a winged angel with lyre, clasps the knotted drape and draws attention to her throat and chest, alluding to her famed vocal cords and powerful lungs.
Ada Crossley on her marriage to Francis Muecke, 1905. Photo by Walter Barnett.
National Portrait Gallery, London
The portrait bust of another Australian singer, the leading concert contralto Ada Crossley (1871-1929), is also only known of through the list compiled by Colin Kraay. Unfortunately, as with others, it is currently untraced. Henrietta Mackennal says that on occasion Ada Crossley was mistaken for Queen Mary – a clue if the bust is ever to be identified.
Born in 1871 in Gippsland, Victoria, Crossley studied singing in Melbourne, initially traveling the 200 kilometres to her weekly lessons with Fanny Simonsen. Moving to London in 1894, she took further lessons with Sir Charles Santley, then in Paris with the great teacher, Madame Marchesi, who later told an Australian journalist: ‘Miss Crossley has a splendid contralto voice, there is no doubt as to her success. She is very intelligent, a hard worker and I consider her one of my best pupils.’22
Successful from her London debut at the Queen’s Hall in 1895, Crossley was much admired by Melba. For religious reasons, she never appeared in opera. It is probable that she also knew Mackennal through the diva. Mackennal’s daughter Henrietta writes of her own close relationship with the singer:
I became very friendly with Ada Crossley, the famous Australian contralto. She married a nose and throat specialist, Francis Muecke, he was best man at my wedding, and they lived near us in London. ... Ada Crossley was a retiring type of person, not fond of public life or parties, in fact she even disliked going out alone, therefore she often asked me to go with her, sometimes to dine at the Carlton or the Savoy, then on to a first night or a concert.23
It seems likely that the Mackennal bust was executed around the time of Crossley’s marriage in London in 1905. Her wedding was attended by over 500, including many London-based Australians. Walter Barnett, another Australian in London, took the formal wedding photography of her.
Salome, 1895, by Bertram Mackennal
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Bertram Mackennal holding his sculpture Salome, c.1895. Photographer unknown.
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Mackennal’s Other Theatrical Sculpture
If made in 1905, the Mackennal bust of Crossley is the last of his sculptures of living performers. However, he also made clear his commitment to the performing arts in other ways.
In 1897, Mackennal created one of his best-known works, Salome. This subject had inspired artists throughout the nineteenth century but producing it at the moment he did cannot have been an accident. Oscar Wilde was in prison, in disgrace after being found guilty of ‘indecency and sodomy’, his one-act play Salome, written in French for Sarah Bernhardt, remaining unperformed (indeed banned) in Britain and mocked by the press.
The fact that this was a courageous, perhaps even foolhardy, moment in time for Mackennal to present this piece at the Royal Academy has been overlooked. It calls to mind another moment when censorship had struck, the exhibition of his Circe at the RA in 1891, its riotous base beskirted in case visitors to the show should be corrupted. Wilde’s play was first performed in Paris the year before Mackennal’s work but had to wait until 1905 to be given in England (and until 1933 in Australia).
Mackennal depicts the moment when Salome, naked having performed the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ for Herod, thirsting to kiss the mouth of John the Baptist, sword clasped demurely behind her back, now demands her gift from the king: ‘In a silver charger. ... the head of Iokanaan [John the Baptist].’24
It is significant that he chose to be photographed later in life with Salome. In this carefully constructed photograph, Mackennal is depicted in an artist’s smock, thoughtfully gazing at one of his most successful theatrical works. A more apt choice for a sculptor who continuously celebrated the world of the performing arts would be hard to imagine.
Circe, 1893, by Bertram Mackennal
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
The Dancer, 1904, by Bertram Mackennal
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
There is no evidence that Mackennal was a particular follower of dance, but in 1904 he created his only work in the field, one of his masterpieces, The Dancer.25 By the end of the nineteenth century, ballet had reached a low point, with little in the way of innovation. At the start of the new century, a new star burst on to the scene, the American Isadora Duncan, and it was she that revitalised the genre, working mainly in Paris and London, dancing barefoot and endeavoring to recapture the glories of dance in Ancient Greece.
Mackennal’s Dancer is based on Duncan’s style. The pose is known as ‘épaulement’. While the legs and hips turn to the left, the shoulders and head arch fleetingly in the opposite direction. Rodin’s La Méditation, developed through several versions by the great sculptor between 1881 and 1896, addresses the same artistic goals, albeit more radically, and Mackennal may well have seen one of these in Paris or London.
In 1906, Mackennal was commissioned to create a memorial to Robert Brough (1855-1906), a London-born actor who lived and worked in Australia for the last twenty years of his life. Born into a famous theatrical family, Brough worked initially for D’Oyly Carte’s company, legendary first performers of Gilbert and Sullivan. In 1885, Robert and his actress wife, Florence Trevelyan, traveled to Australia, imported by Williamson, Garner and Musgrove, where they toured comedies.
Over the years they premièred in Australia many of the important playwrights of the day—Pinero, J.M. Barrie and Oscar Wilde amongst them. Brough died of a heart attack mid-season in 1906, the greatest actor-manager Australia had known, according to Beaumont Smith.
Tragedy Enveloping Comedy, c.1906-09, by Bertram Mackennal
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne—on long-term loan to the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria
Robert Brough, c.1894. Photo by Falk [Walter Barnett], Sydney.
Falk Album, Theatre Heritage Australia
Mackennal was to use the Brough memorial’s theme, Tragedy Enveloping Comedy, again in 1911 for another man-of-the-theatre, W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911). He had also used this iconography in Bernhardt’s portrait exhibited in 1894. Gilbert was the writing half of the famous operetta team, Gilbert and Sullivan. His portrait of W.S. Gilbert was not modeled from life. Lady Gilbert commissioned this work as a memorial to her husband and the portrait was placed in All Saint’s, Gilbert’s parish church, near his home at Harrow Weald. It is unknown how Lady Gilbert knew of Mackennal, though both Mary Anderson and Marie Tempest knew Gilbert well and either may have suggested him.
Together Gilbert and Sullivan wrote the Savoy Operas, produced at D’Oyly Carte’s Savoy Theatre in London, their collaboration lasting twenty years. Successful throughout the English-speaking world, Gilbert’s great gift was in writing ingenious, pithy, satirical lyrics that set well to music. Gilbert also wrote straight plays, mostly comedies, before working with Sullivan—including Pygmalion and Galatea (1871), the story of a sculptor who wishes his statue into life as a beautiful young woman, one of Mary Anderson’s most successful roles, and Comedy and Tragedy (1884) written especially for Anderson.26
W.S. Gilbert Memorial, c.1912, by Bertram Mackennal, All Saint’s Church, Harrow Weald. Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Facebook.
Mackennal’s portrait of Gilbert consists of a large portrait in relief in the centre flanked by figures of Comedy and Tragedy. As will have been noted, a recurring theme in Mackennal’s body of sculpture is the iconography of Comedy and Tragedy—the motif appearing both as masks and in figurative form. While this theme was quite common at this time, the repetition throughout his oeuvre might be seen as a motif for Mackennal himself.
The final work of art with a performing arts theme that Mackennal produced was his Shakespeare Memorial, commissioned by Sydney newspaperman Henry Gullett in 1914 (for the bard’s tercentenary) to stand outside the Art Gallery of New South Wales. A major work from the latter part of Mackennal’s career, he perhaps intended it to be a summation of his devotion to theatre and literature. As we have seen, Mackennal had sculpted Shakespearian actors from the earliest days—Mary Anderson, Genevieve Ward, Janet Achurch and Sarah Bernhardt. Surmounted by a full-length figure of Shakespeare, an amalgam of various known portraits of the bard, Mackennal depicted five life-size characters around the base—Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Portia and Falstaff.
Plaster cast of the figure of Shakespeare for the Shakespeare Memorial, 1925, by Bertram Mackennal. Photographer unknown.
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Bertram Mackennal modelling a figure for his Shakespeare Memorial, c.1925. Photographer unknown.
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Shakespeare Memorial
City of Sydney Archives, Sydney
Shakespeare Memorial (detail) showing Falstaff
City of Sydney Archives, Sydney
Unfortunately, this important public memorial, ‘one of his finest works’ according to William Moore, now rests on the central reservation of the busy highway running from Macquarie Street to the Eastern and Southern suburbs of Sydney.27 A less appropriate place—its back to the majority of the stream of oncoming traffic—for the finale of a great Australian sculptor who embraced the depiction of the theatrical arts would be hard to imagine.
Note
An earlier version of this essay, severely edited, appeared in the catalogue for the major exhibition of Bertram Mackennal’s work at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2007
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Patricia Fullerton, Elisabeth Kumm, Tony Locantro, Meri Machin-Roberts (2007), Michael Magnusson, Sophie Wilson
Endnotes
1. In National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and terracotta in private collection, Geelong
2. H. Mackennal, The Story of a Royal Sculptor, unpublished and undated, compiled by P. Kraay (1990)
3. Argus (Melbourne), 13 October 1931
4. A. Galbally, Charles Conder: The Last Bohemian, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2002
5. Arthur Streeton to Tom Roberts, early October 1890, in A. Galbally & A. Gray (eds), Letters from Smike: The Letters of Arthur Streeton 1890-1943, Oxford University Press, Australia, 1989
6. K. Brisbane (ed), Entertaining Australia: The Performing Arts as Cultural History, Currency Press, Sydney, 1991
7. Mackennal’s portraits of Janet Achurch:
i. Bertram Mackennal, Janet Achurch, c.1890, plaster, cast shellac, water-based emulsion paint casting, 57.8 x 47.6 x 8.5cm. National Gallery of Victoria
ii. Bertram Mackennal, Janet Achurch, c.1890, plaster, National Gallery of Australia (I understand that the NGA version was a copy created by Joseph Brown in the 1970s)
iii. Bertram Mackennal, Janet Achurch, 1890 bronze cast, 58.3 x 48.2 x 9.0 cm, Monash University Collection
8. N. Stewart, My Life’s Story, John Sands, Sydney, 1925
9. Table Talk, 18 October 1890 and 3 January 1901
10. H. Mackennal, p.
11. Bertram Mackennal to Eugénie Legrand, 3 August 1891, Lucy Bellew Papers, National Library of Australia
12. Société des Artistes Français, Salon de 1894, Cat. 3335
13. The Times (London), 25 May 1896
14. H. Bolitho, Marie Tempest, Cobden-Sanderson, London, 1936
15. Herald (Melbourne), 13 October 1931
16. Bolitho, p.96
17. E. Cundell, Sir Landon Ronald, in The Dictionary of National Biography 1931-1940, Oxford University Press, London, 1949
18. A. Murphy, Melba: A Biography, Chatto & Windus, London, 1909
19. H. Mackennal, p.13
20. B. & F. Mackenzie, Singers of Australia: From Melba to Sutherland, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1967
21. Argus (Melbourne), 24 October 1899
22. Age (Melbourne), 22 December 1894, quoted in B. & F. Mackenzie
23. H. Mackennal, p.26
24. Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, Salome, translated from the French by Lord Alfred Douglas, originally published 1894, republished by Dover, New York, 1967
25. Bertram Mackennal, The Dancer, 1904, bronze, 168 x 71 x 69 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales
26. S. Dark and R. Grey, W.S. Gilbert: His Life and Letters, Methuen, London, 1923
27. W. Moore, The Story of Australian Art, vol. II, Angus & Robertson, 1934
Selected Bibliography
Mary Anderson, A Few Memories, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1895
Ann Blainey, I am Melba: A Biography, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2008
Hector Bolitho, Marie Tempest, Cobden-Sanderson, London, 1936
Katherine Brisbane (ed), Entertaining Australia: The Performing Arts as Cultural History, Currency Press, Sydney, 1991
Deborah Edwards (ed), Bertram Mackennal (catalogue), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007
Corille Fraser, Come to Dazzle: Sarah Bernhardt’s Australian Tour, Currency Press/National Library of Australia, Sydney, 1998
Noëlle Guibert (ed), Portrait(s) de Sarah Bernhardt (catalogue), Bibliothêque nationale de France, Paris, 2000
John Hetherington, Melba: A Biography, Faber, Melbourne, 1967
Eric Irvin, Dictionary of the Australian Theatre 1788–1914, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1985
Henrietta Mackennal, The Story of a Royal Sculptor, unpublished and undated memoir, compiled P. Kraay, 1990
Nellie Melba, Melodies and Memories, Thornton Butterworth, London, 1925
William R. Moran (ed), Nellie Melba: A Contemporary Review, Greenwood Press, Westport CT, 1985
Agnes G. Murphy, Melba: A Biography, Doubleday Page, New York, 1909
Roger Neill, Legends: The Art of Walter Barnett, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 2000
Carol Ockman & Kenneth E. Silver, Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama (catalogue), The Jewish Museum, New York, 2005
Hal Porter, Stars of Australian Stage and Screen, Rigby, Adelaide, 1965
Joanna Richardson, Sarah Bernhardt and her World, Putnam, New York, 1977
Viola Tait, A Family of Brothers, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1971
Pamela Vestey, Melba: A Family Memoir, Phoebe Publishing, Melbourne, 1996
Genevieve Ward & Richard Whiteing, Both Sides of the Curtain, Cassell, London, 1918
