![]() If Hall, with some justification, has been called the artist whom the art world forgot, Loudon Sainthill is an artist who for many in the art world has been long buried. His employers and many of his friends, in contrast, abandoned him after his death, and funds could not be found to bring his ashes back from England, where he died.įrom this book, we certainly know a good deal more about the enigmatic Hall, but I doubt that our overall assessment of his role in the history of Australian art will be changed substantially. It is a very empathetic biography of a person whom many found difficult to like.ĭescribed by some as aloof and arrogant, in this biography he emerges as a slightly tragic figure, one whom his second wife, Grace Thomson, rescued from oblivion through holding on to all the documentation on the life of her husband. Historian Gwen Rankin has painstakingly assembled a mass of documentation from family archives to give us a detailed account of Hall's life, his struggles with the trustees of the gallery and later with the Felton Bequest, his passions and his friendships. Hall's fear and loathing of European modernism guaranteed his neglect after his death. It found favour with the conservatives in the Melbourne and Sydney art scene, including Lionel and Daryl Lindsay, and J.S. Hall's art practice was dominated by portraits and titillating neo-classical nudes, painted in a rather dull 19th-century English academic style. They had been properly trained and knew what they wanted to rebel against. Hall's early students included the mercurial Hugh Ramsay, George Bell, Max Meldrum, Violet Teague and Rose MacPherson (Margaret Preston), all of whom ultimately moved away from his tradition of painting and arguably all of whom were to become finer painters than their teacher. His marital bliss was short-lived and less than seven years after their marriage, while in the late stages of pregnancy with their second child, both Elsie and the unborn child died. His arrival in Melbourne was far from plain sailing, because the local art community felt, with some justification, that the job should have gone to the acting director, Australian-born Frederick McCubbin, an artist of the Heidelberg School fame.ĭespite challenges to his authority and position, Hall hung on and, before the end of 1894, he married the woman who had caused his antipodean adventure, but his salary was severely cut because of the economic depression that was affecting all the colonies.įor much of his life, he was forced to exist on limited means. ![]() With his head in a whirl, he put in a late application for the directorship in Melbourne and got the job. The design shown here is Sainthill’s initial drawing: the finished design is also held by the V&A Theatre and Performance Department (S.2416-1986).Hall was an English-born, English-trained artist, who had no intention of travelling to Australia, until he met beautiful Australian Elismore (Elsie) Shuter. The action took place within a permanent setting in the form of a ship. Edric Connor, the first black actor to appear at Stratford, played the narrator, Gower, as a sailor who related Pericles’s adventures to his fellow shipmates. Richardson gave unity to the wide-ranging action of Pericles by imagining it as a shipman’s tale brought to life. His lavish sets and costumes for Michael Benthall’s 1951 production of The Tempest at Stratford established him as a leading designer and he became associated with a flamboyant and fantastical style, though he could also create a convincing everyday reality, as demonstrated by his interiors for the film version of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1959). ![]() He had designed for the stage in Australia but it was in Britain that his theatrical career developed and flourished. ![]() The design, inspired by Greece and Byzantium, was by Tasmanian-born artist Loudon Sainthill (1918–1969). Directed by Tony Richardson (1928–1991), it had a cast of 39, led by Richard Johnson as Pericles and Geraldine McEwan as his daughter, Marina. Stratford's 1958 Pericles was a spectacular affair. Preliminary set design by Loudon Sainthill for Shakespeare's play Pericles, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1958. ![]()
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