Conversation pieces

I am standing in the painting storeroom in the lower levels of the National Portrait Gallery’s vaults, surrounded by steel-framed racks filled with works from the collection. I slowly pull out one of the racks, seeing faces in gold frames emerge from the darkness. Walking a few rows down, I pull another rack. A conversation begins – portraits addressing each other across the room.

Hugh Ramsay’s portrait of fellow Australian artist Ambrose Patterson was painted in Ramsay’s Parisian studio sometime in the summer of 1901–02. After his studies at the National Gallery School in Melbourne, Ramsay had sailed to Europe on the same ship as artist George Lambert in 1899. For 15 months he worked from his cold, grimy studio in Montparnesse, gaining some critical success while depending on the Lamberts for an occasional hot meal. In Ramsay’s painting, Patterson is captured in profile, with his left arm extended in a strong horizontal that drops elegantly at the wrist over the back of a leather upholstered armchair. The portrait, gifted to Patterson in friendship, was damaged while stored in Belgium and subsequently cut down leaving only the top half of the figure. The Art Gallery of New South Wales holds a 1903 self portrait by Patterson that shows our portrait in full, hanging on Patterson’s studio wall.

I look across the storeroom to Sir William Dargie’s portrait of celebrated Western Arrernte/Aranda/Arrarnta artist Albert Namatjira wearing a red handkerchief tied at his neck. Seated on a rock, Namatjira is similarly painted in profile, looking out across the blazing colours and ancient rock formations of his Country; landscapes he famously rendered in watercolour at the German Lutheran Mission in Ntaria/Hermannsburg. His distinctive style, though often reductively perceived as consistent with a traditional Western landscape aesthetic, was rooted in deep ancestral connection and knowledge of the lands spanning his father’s Country around the MacDonnell Ranges and his mother’s Country in the region of Palm Valley in Central Australia. While Ambrose Patterson holds paintbrushes – the tools of his trade – in his hand, Namatjira tilts a watercolour sketch up towards the viewer. There is a gentle hum of connection between these two portraits: a starting point.

I am selecting works for a salon hang that will go up in the Marilyn Darling Gallery, the first space visitors enter when they come to the National Portrait Gallery. Drawn from the rich holdings of our collection, this arrangement of paintings references the lavish 18th- and 19th-century European salons where paintings were dramatically hung floor-to-ceiling – a style that originated at the annual Paris Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in the 1670s. Ramsay was among a number of Antipodean artists who made their way to Paris to study at the turn of the century. While in 1901 he had a portrait accepted by what came to be considered the ‘Old Salon’ of the Societé des Artistes Française, the following year four of his paintings hung ‘on the line’ (at eye level) at the more progressive ‘New Salon’ of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts – an incredible achievement for a relatively unknown 24-year-old from Australia. The crowded, often haphazard arrangement of work in these salon exhibitions was hierarchical, with paintings hung in close proximity and set high and low depending on the significance of the artist. This history is ever present, even as the intentions of a hang orchestrated by an institutional curator in 2024 are vastly different; aware of the problematic inheritances of Western art history and seeking to make sense of the varied connections between paintings. Sometimes this connection pivots on a biographical arc – a moment in time, a shared relationship, passion, belief. Sometimes it is just a colour: red.

With a brilliant note of crimson, Adelaide Perry accentuated the lips of her former student, artist and educator Rachel Roxburgh. Having exhibited at the 1922 Old Salon while undertaking studies at the Royal Academy in London, Perry had returned to Sydney in 1925 where she opened her own art school and became a founding member of the Australian Academy of Art. Known for her modernist landscapes and prints, Perry also painted portraits of her female friends. I am drawn to Roxburgh’s soft cream blouse with mother of pearl buttons and delicate floral motif, set against the strong verticals of a striped wallpaper. Her gaze is steady, yet not quite looking at us.

In selecting these works, I am thinking about the way a portrait might speak to its companion. In a salon hang, this conversation is complicated by the fact that works sit side by side, but also above and below. Stella Bowen’s self portrait, painted around 1934 when the artist was 41, is one of engaging self-reflection. Hanging above the Perry in my layout, the two portraits share an intensity – projecting undemonstrative confidence. Bowen’s palette is soft and light, finding the earthy and muted tones she had loved when she travelled to Italy in 1923 and encountered the work of 14th-century Italian artists such as Giotto. We can see her ongoing fascination with his technique in the thin layering of pigment. Her green blouse is so briefly articulated; the overall form, collar and loose ties drawn in with the lightest dry brush over pencil lines. The hand of the artist is evident on the painting’s surface: Bowen used a sketchy, painterly style with fine scratches adding texture and dimension to the work.

Another artist’s hand offers a decorative flourish held aloft. In his 1922 self portrait, George Lambert stands beside a cut-crystal vase arranged with glorious plumes of gladioli, wearing a dandyish corduroy cuffed smoking jacket. It was painted in Sydney following Lambert’s return from London, in the year he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy. A letter Lambert wrote to his wife Amy in November 1921 reveals the artist playing up to the perceived image of him as foppish aesthete: ‘I am a luxury, a hot house rarity … Scoffed at for preciousness. Despised for resembling a chippendale chair in a country where timber is cheap.’ And yet, Lambert was a working artist, and his hands, strong and indelicate, are those of a craftsman. In a 1922 Sydney Mail article, the author noted Lambert would rather be told by a critic that he had ‘“done his job well”, as one might address a bricklayer’. I am thinking of the lovely Ramsay portrait of Patterson again, and the way a hand is so revealing of the subject.

I add these portraits to the list of 48 paintings that will fill the walls of the gallery. Spanning the 1850s to the present day, they celebrate the achievements of activists, doctors and company directors, musicians, writers, a former Governor-General and a Queen. While we often find the subject of a painted portrait positioned in the centre of the composition – set in isolation, our attention focused on the individual – in this crowd of faces, solitary moments are brought together. Through a furtive glance, a held stare, a gesture extended or repeated, the sitters connect with us and each other across time and space.