National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | The Edwardians

Introduction

Steer painted many nudes in which his figures are set in a domestic environment. In Seated nude:The black hat he depicted his model sitting at ease among her discarded clothes, still wearing her hat. Her incomplete state of undress emphasises her nakedness. Steer never exhibited this work because his friends suggested that it was improper to paint a nude wearing a hat.

In the 1880s, British sculpture was revitalised with the introduction of ‘art bronzes’, or small-scale sculptures. The aim was to democratise sculpture, to make it an affordable domestic ornament for the increasingly affluent Victorian and later Edwardian middle classes. In Greek mythology Orpheus is the musician who descended to the underworld in an attempt to retrieve his love, Eurydice, back to the living. Parker’s Orpheus plucks his lyre, a symbol of his divine talent, yet his melancholic gaze foreshadows his human vulnerability and the tragic end to his quest.

The Negro gardener reflects Harold Gilman’s admiration of Velasquez and the Spanish tradition of portraiture. Gilman depicted his subject in the pose of a gentleman; with the gardener’s shovel replacing the gentleman’s walking cane. In portraying a servant as if someone of social standing, Gilman approached his subject in a similar fashion to Agnes Goodsir when she depicted a servant in La Femme de ménage.

In June 1912 The Firebird was performed in London for the first time by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Gaudier-Brzeska portrayed the moment in Scene One when Ivan the Tsarevich captures the Firebird. He translated the figures into a series of simplified planes and conveyed movement through the crouching figure linking arms with the upwardly thrusting Firebird.