AUSTRALIAN SCHOOL.
Original oil painting of a group of Australian Aborigines.
Probably Sydney, 1849.

Oil on board, 140 x 190 mm.; in very good condition, framed.

A haunting mid-nineteenth-century painting of an Aboriginal man standing in front of a group of Aboriginal women. The group is evidently at camp under the shade of a rocky outcrop and trees to the far right, and there are lovely individual touches such as the brightly coloured head-scarves being worn by three of the women, the small fire at the far left, or the dog, perhaps a dingo, laying next to the woman at right.

Scenes of Aboriginal life in New South Wales had been a popular subject amongst local artists from the early days of settlement. By the mid-nineteenth century traditional Aboriginal life had all but vanished from the areas around Sydney and most depictions of Aborigines of this date show small clusters of local tribespeople standing on the edges of the emerging new European settlement. Artists often added these groups to their paintings to add a touch of the picturesque. What marks the present painting out is that the aboriginal group is not merely a compositional device, but the sole subject: indeed, two of the women studiously have their backs to the artist - and the viewer - suggesting that the scene is probably an authentic depiction of what the artist saw.

Attempts to encourage Aborigines to wear European clothing began with settlement, however it was not until Macquarie's governorship that more strident calls were made for Aborigines to be prevented from appearing naked in public. The women of this group have apparently abandoned their traditional dress, and are wrapped in British blankets: the markings "B.O. / 1849" and an arrow painted on the blanket of one figure on the right indicate that she wears a blanket which was originally convict issue; the "B.O." stands for "British Ordinance", and numbers probably indicate that the year of manufacture was 1849. From the work of a number of other artists, from Augustus Earle to George French Angas, Alexander Schramm, Charles Hill and William Strutt, we know that the adoption of blankets draped about the shoulders was a common mode of dress for the Aboriginal people, particularly the women, after colonisation.

The male figure, as is often seen in other works of the period, is more elaborately clad in cast-off clothing. He is wearing a long coat over a loosely buttoned shirt and what appears to be a straw hat. This somewhat pathetic figure is poignantly reminiscent of other images of aborigines in the colonial period, notably the famous series of silhouettes done by W.H. Fernyhough in 1836.

The identity of the artist of this work is a mystery. One possibility is that the artist may have been Captain Otway, whose work is known only by a signed painting from the 1840s, "'Charley' Spearing Kangaroos", in the Nan Kivell collection in the National Library of Australia. Certainly the format of the Nan Kivell painting is similar to this present work; it is oil on card of roughly the same scale, and it has been dated at around 1847.

Original images such as this, which form an important part of the documentary record of mid-nineteenth-century Australia, are mostly held institutionally and are rarely offered on the market.

Australian: $18,500 (Approx. US $16,678, Euro €12,833) Quote ref.

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