Incised with WOUREDDY/ AN/ ABORIGINAL CHIEF/ OF V. D. L/ B. LAW. SCULP./ HOBART TOWN (on reverse); incised with TRUCANINNY/ WIFE OF WOURADDY/ B. LAW. SCULP./ HOBART TOWN/ A.D. 1836. (on reverse) Patinated plaster
Art and natural history exhibition, Argyle Rooms, Hobart, 7 August - 18 September 1837 Launceston Mechanics' Institute Exhibition, Mechanics' Institute, Launceston, April 1860, cat. 188 (lent by Henry Dowling) (another cast) The International Exhibition of 1862, South Kensington, 1 May - 1 November 1862, cats. 550 and 649 (lent by J. A. Youl) (another cast) Intercolonial Exhibition, Melbourne, 1866, cat. 719 (lent by Henry Dowling) (another cast) Tasmanian vision: the art of nineteenth century Tasmania: paintings, drawings and sculpture from European exploration and settlement to 1900, Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, Hobart, 1 January - 21 February 1988; Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston, 16 March - 1 May 1988, cat. 76L Woureddy & 77L Tuganini (another pair) Creating Australia: 200 years of art 1788-1988, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 17 May - 17 July 1988; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 12 August - 25 September 1988; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 21 October - 27 November 1988; Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, Hobart, 21 December 1988 - 5 February 1989; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1 March - 30 April 1989; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 23 May - 16 July 1989 (another pair) Viewing the Invisible: An installation by Fred Wilson, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 7 October - 6 December 1998 (another pair) Presence and absence: portrait sculpture in Australia, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 22 August - 16 November 2003, cats. 45 and 46 (another pair) On loan to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (1983) On loan to National Portrait Gallery, Canberra (2009)
Literature
Catalogue of works of art, exhibited in the Launceston Mechanics' institute Building, on the occasion of its opening, April 9, 1860, Launceston: Charles Wilson, 1860, p. 10 (another pair) Country Life (U.K.): 21 August 1980 (illus., another pair); 1 January 1981 Critic (Hobart), 4 April 1924 Hobart Town Courier: 27 March 1835 ; 3 April 1835 ; 11 September 1835; 7 October 1836; 18 August 1837 Illustrated Melbourne Post, 24 January 1867, p. XXX (ill.) Intercolonial Exhibition 1866 : official catalogue (2nd ed.), Melbourne : The Commissioners, 1866 p. 84 Intercolonial Exhibition 1866, official catalogue and related papers, MS12392, box 3194/5, State library of Victoria Iris (Sheffield, U.K.), 11 December 1838 'Tasmanian art "on loan" to Australia', Mercury, 25 March 1981 Morning Star, 7 July 1835 Ross's Hobart Town Almanack and Van Diemen's Land Annual for 1836 True Colonist, 14 October 1836 Voyage au Pôle Sud et dans l'Océanie: sur les corvettes l'Astrolabe et la Zelée, executée ... pendant les années 1837-1838-1839-1840, sous le commandement de M.J. Dumont D'Urville, publié par ordonnance de sa Majesté sous la direction supérieure de M. Jaquinot, Paris: Gide, 1841-1855, vol. Anthropologie (Atlas), illus. plate 23 (lithograph by Leveillé after photographs by Bisson) Christopher Allen, Art in Australia: from colonization to postmodernism, London: Thames and Hudson, 1997, p. 36, illus. p. 35 (Truganini, another cast) Christopher Allen, 'Put in their place', Australian, 20 December 2008 James Backhouse, Journal No. 13, 23 August 1837, p. 30 Tim Bonyhady, 'Aboriginal celebrities', in Daniel Thomas (ed.), Creating Australia: 200 years of art 1788-1988, Adelaide: International Cultural corporation of Australia/Art Gallery Board of South Australia, 1988, pp. 92-93, illus. p. 93 (another pair) Tim Bonyhady, 'The politics of colonial sculpture', Art and Australia, vol. 28 no. 1, Spring 1990, p. 103, illus. (Truganini, another cast Barbara Campbell, Trukanini [sic] in extenso: sculpture, performance, installation Studio, Master of Visual Arts thesis, University of Sydney, 1998 Deborah Edwards, Presence and absence: portrait sculpture in Australia, Canberra: National Portrait Gallery, pp. 24-29, 82, illus. pp. 26,27 (another pair) Penelope Edmonds, '"We think that this subject of the native races should be thoroughly gone into at the forthcoming exhibition": the 1866-67 Intercolonial Exhibition', in Kate Darian-Smith, Richard Gillespie, Caroline Jordan and Elizabeth Willis (eds), Seize the day: exhibitions, Australia and the world, Monash university Press, 2008, pp. 04.11 (illus.), 04.14 Margaret Glover, 'Benjamin Law 1807-90', Art Bulletin of Tasmania, 1985, pp. 34-39, illus. p. 34 (Truganini), p. 37 (Woureddy, another cast) Jane, Lady Franklin, Diary, March 1837, Archives Office of Tasmania (NS279) Terry Ingram, 'Cravat stirs "mutiny" at London art sale', Financial Review, 8 November 1979, illus. (Truganini, another cast) Hendrik & Julianna Kolenberg, Tasmanian vision: the art of nineteenth century Tasmania: paintings, drawings and sculpture from European exploration and settlement to 1900, Hobart: Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, pp. 69 (illus. Truganini, another cast), 70, 103 T.J. Lempriere, Diary, 25 May 1837, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, (MLMSS A577) John Lhotsky, 'Australia, in its historical evolution', The Art Union, July 1839, pp. 99-100 Mary Mackay, 'Early Tasmanian sculptures. A reassessment', Bowyang, no. 5, April-May 1981, pp. 6-12, illus. cover (Woureddy, another cast), p. 8 (Truganini, another cast) John McDonald, Art of Australia (Vol. 1: Exploration to Federation), Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2008, p. 82, illus. p. 83 (another pair) John McPhee, Australian art in the collection of the Australian National Gallery, Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1988, p. 8 (illus., another pair) James Mollison & Laura Murray (eds), Australian National Gallery: an introduction, Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1982, p. 205, illus. p. 204 (Truganini, another cast) William Moore, The story of Australian art (2 vols.), Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1934, vol. II, p. 73 Paul Paffen & Margaret Glover, 'The Hannah and Benjamin Law letters', Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings, vol. 45 no. 3, September 1998, pp. 164-85 Andrew Sayers, Australian art, London: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 29, 43, 66-67 Ken Scarlett, Australian Sculptors, Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1980, p. 365, illus. (Truganini, another cast) Stephen Scheding, The National Picture, Sydney: Vintage, 2002, p. 113 Bernard Smith, The spectre of Truganini, Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1980, cover illus (Truganini, another cast) Graeme Sturgeon, The development of Australian sculpture, 1788-1975, London: Thames & Hudson, 1978, pp. 18-19, illus. p. 18 (other casts) Donald Williams, In our own image: the story of Australian art (3rd ed.), Sydney: McGraw-Hill, 1995, p. 30, illus. (Truganini, another cast)
Provenance
Judah Solomon, Hobart Town; thence by descent through the Solomon and Benjamin families Private collection, New South Wales
Notes
Executed in 1835 (Woureddy) and 1836 (Trucaninny) PROPERTY OF VARIOUS VENDORS TOGETHER WITH
two cedar pedestals, Australia, early 19th century, each a circular tray top with moulded rim above a turned column on circular ring foot and square base
Both approximately 103.5cm high including attached blocks, tops 32.5cm and 29cm diameter respectively
In the Hobart Town Courier of 7 October 1836, amongst advertisements for J.W. Davis's stock of flutes, guitars, bird organs, musical snuff boxes and pianos, for the stallions 'Duncan Gray' and 'Tom Thumb' being offered at stud and for numerous parcels of Vandiemonian real estate, there appeared a small announcement:
TRUCANINNY B. Law begs to inform the subscribers to his busts of the Aborigines of this Colony, that he has now completed his model of the female, Trucaninny, and has several duplicates ready for delivery, either in Bronze or colour. No. 76, Murray street. Likenesses moddled and busts executed in marble, bass-relief, etc.
Truganini was the second of two portrait busts of the Nuenonne (Bruny Island) Aborigines Woureddy and Truganini. Both sitters were well-known in the colony as members of George Augustus Robinson's 'Friendly Mission' to conciliate the few remaining 'wild' natives of the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes. Probably initially commissioned by Robinson himself, they were the work of Benjamin Law, a fellow Wesleyan, recent immigrant and settler Australia's first professional sculptor. Law's busts were offered by public subscription at four guineas apiece, a relatively high price, and certainly well above the 30 shillings being asked by Benjamin Duterrau for his somewhat coarser and rather more modest plaster reliefs.υ1
The superior quality of Law's portrait busts was immediately apparent to all who saw them. Of the first it is reported that Woureddy himself was 'highly pleased with the model'υ2, while the Courier declared it 'a beautiful cast' and 'most happily executed.'υ3 Law's wife Hannah wrote to a relative in September 1835 that 'Casts ... are called for not only in all Quarters of the Colony, but are being sent to India, to Sweeden [sic], to England, Scotland, and one went last week to Cambridge Colledge [sic], the Gift of the rural Dean of this Land the Governor [Lt-Gov. George Arthur] has purchased one and ordered a second he is sending one to the Home Secretary, the Attorney General etc., and indeed all the great people...'υ4 Several years later, when the companion portrait of Truganini had been completed, the True Colonist reported that 'scientific gentlemen' had described the pair as 'works of very great merit'υ5, while even the hard-to-please John Lhotsky described them as 'perfect likenesses ... altogether a respectable work.'υ6
The verisimilitude of the sculptures is well-illustrated by the response of Dumont d'Urville's Pacific research expedition of 1837-1840. The scientists' conventional practice was for their naturalist and phrenologist, Dr Pierre Dumoutier, to take life casts of heads of the various ethnic types encountered en route, but on visiting Hobart Town in December 1839 they were happy to acquire a set of the Law plasters, and indeed to reproduce them in the official account of the voyage. This decision may, however, have been based on practical as much as aesthetic considerations; by 1839-1840, when the Astrolabe and the Zelée visited Hobart Town, most of the surviving Palawa (Tasmanian Aborigines) were in protective custody on Flinders Island, while Robinson's 'friendly natives' (amongst them Woureddy and Truganini) had joined him in the Port Phillip District.υ7
Indeed, the tragedy of the Tasmanian ethnocide during the 1830s and 1840s meant that Law's sculptures came to be regarded as of greater scientific than artistic interest, and the majority of casts surviving in public collections were originally acquired as ethnographic artefacts.υ8 Furthermore, despite Woureddy being applauded by the great chronicler of Australian art William Moore as 'a striking work boldly and effectively rendered'υ9, Law and his sculptures languished in the common neglect of colonial art through most of the 20th century.
However, with the publication of Mary Mackay's pioneering research in 1981, with the Australian National Gallery's acquisition of a set of the sculptures in the same year and with the works' inclusion in the Australian Bicentennial Authority touring show The Great Australian Art Exhibition, 'by the end of the 1980s Trucanini [sic] and Woureddy were on course to becoming the iconic colonial sculptures.'υ10 They are now respected as much for their intrinsic artistic quality as for their ethno-historical significance, with Christopher Allen describing them as 'among the few nineteenth century Australian sculptures worthy of serious consideration as art.'υ11
The striking, almost intimate naturalismυ12 of the two portraits can obscure their underlying artifice. Although he described himself for purposes of immigration as an 'agriculturalist', and while his profession was to be stunted by the economic and cultural realities of colonial Van Diemen's Land, Benjamin Law was in fact a skilled and experienced artist, scion of a distinguished Sheffield artisan family.υ13 Despite their exotic subject matter and their precise ethnographic details (skin cloaks, Woureddy's kangaroo-sinew necklaces and ochre-dreadlocked hair, and Truganini's strands of marineer shells), the two busts are entirely consistent with the aesthetic of Law's training, that of late 18th and early 19th century neoclassicism,υ14 from their static, frontal orientation and associated clarity of contour to the conventional 'slicing' of the upper arms and the restrained, neo-Attic socles. Paradoxically, however, Law is here able to avoid the perennial problem of the neo-classical portraitist: the issue of 'decorum', the question of whether to show the sitter in modern or antique dress. Woureddy and Truganini's kangaroo-skin wraps are both contemporary and ancient-historical, with the further advantage of suggesting the Greek chlamys or Roman toga.
When considered in this framework, it is possible to read Law's sculptures as consciously idealising, showing Woureddy as (in Mary Mackay's memorable words) 'hunter, warrior and man-in-command, a Greek hero in kangaroo skin',υ15 and Truganini, the ultimate victim of the European invasion, the so-called 'Last Tasmanian', as an archetypal mourning figure: Electra grieving for her father, or Niobe for her children. Ultimately it is this curious colonial hybridity, this mélange of artistic intentions and languages that gives the present works their great distinction. As Deborah Edwards has written: 'Law's mastery lay in the creation of works which were (and are) simultaneously ethnographically shaped objects, intended mementos of a "doomed race", and exceptional portraits.'υ16
The busts additionally notable for being accompanied by a pair of elegant colonial turned cedar columns, their original supports from 'Temple House', Hobart. A handsome two-storey Georgian townhouse which still stands on the corner of Argyle and Liverpool Streets. 'Temple House' was built by Judah Solomon and his brother, Joseph, in the late 1820s and remained in the hands of their descendants until 1921, with the busts standing on these pedestals in the hallway. This provenance is highly suggestive; not only is 'Temple House' only two blocks from George Augustus Robinson's residence in Elizabeth Street (where Woureddy and Truganini were living or visiting at the time the portraits were taken), but the purchase might also signal a particular sympathy on the part of the doubly-exiled Jewish convict Judah Solomon for the displaced original Tasmanians.
We are most grateful to John McPhee for his assistance in cataloguing this work
1. In the Hobart Town Courier of 5 August 1836, Duterrau offered for sale 13 plaster bas-reliefs of Robinson and his 'friendly natives'. Casts of most of this group are preserved in the collection of the Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery. 2. George Augustus Robinson, letter to Thomas Northover, in papers of George Augustus Robinson, vol. 23, letter Book 1836-1838, p. 88, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales (MSAA7089) 3. Hobart Town Courier, 27 March 1835, 3 April 1835 4. Hannah Law to Thomas Ellin, 26 September 1835, Sheffield City Archives (MD1713-8), cited in Paul Paffen & Margaret Glover, 'The Hannah and Benjamin Law letters', Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings, vol. 45 no. 3, September 1998, p. 17 5. True Colonist, 14 October 1836 6. John Lhotsky, 'Australia, in its historical evolution', The Art Union, July 1839, pp. 99-100 7. Curiously, however, there are four other Palawa faces featured in the 'Anthropology' volume of the official account, and these evidently life casts: Guenney (Maulboyheenner) and Timmey (Probelattener) on plate 22 and Bourrakooroo and Ménalarguerna (Manalargenna) on plate 24. There are also images of male, female and juvenile Tasmanian skulls (pl.36) and a dissected skull, showing the brain (pl. 47). See Sandra Bowdler, The mystery of the Dumoutier busts (seminar paper), Colonialism and its Aftermath Research Centre, University of Tasmania, 30 July 2009 8. From the 30 reputed original casts, eight pairs are known to exist in public collections - National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, South Australian Museum (on loan to Art Gallery of South Australia), Australian Museum (on loan to Art Gallery of New South Wales), Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, British Museum and Musée de l'Homme - while individual busts are held at the Melbourne Museum and the University of Melbourne (Truganini) and at the University of Edinburgh and the Field Museum, Chicago (Woureddy). 9. William Moore, The story of Australian art (2 vols.), Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1934, vol. II, p. 73 10. Tim Bonyhady, 'The politics of colonial sculpture', Art and Australia, vol. 28 no. 1, Spring 1990, p. 103 11. Christopher Allen, Art in Australia: from colonization to postmodernism, London: Thames and Hudson, 1997, p. 36 12. The presumed close familiarity between Law and his Aboriginal sitters is supported by a passage in Ellen Law's correspondence, in which she writes: '...I assure you I have a great respect for them Trucaninny has often sat on the carpet at my feet and sung to me while I was working then she would say shuppe wine Missie Law I would give her a glass she would sing again, then shuppe wine I would say no Triggy you'll be ill, O you ugly Ole woman she would say very well Triggy go away don't expect any thing from me again then she would cry O vou vary nice Lady Messa Law fine fellow..." (Letter to Thomas Ellin, 22 May 1838, in Paul Paffen & Margaret Glover, 'The Hannah and Benjamin Law letters', Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings, vol. 45 no. 3, September 1998, p. 178) 13. Law's grandfather Thomas was one of the pioneers of the Sheffield cutlery industry, and his father John and brother Joseph were also silversmiths, while another brother, Edward (1798-1838) also practised as a sculptor. 14. See Glenys Davies (ed.), 'Plaster and marble: the classical and neo-classical portrait bust (Papers given at the Edinburgh Abacini colloquium', Journal of the history of collections, vol. 3 no. 2, 1991 15. Mary Mackay, 'Early Tasmanian sculptures. A reassessment', Bowyang, no. 5, April-May 1981, p. 11 16. Deborah Edwards, Presence and absence: portrait sculpture in Australia, Canberra: National Portrait Gallery, p. 25
