Plein Airs and Graces: The Life and Times of George Collingridge

265 Pages·2013·3.541 MB·English

by  Adrian Mitchell

‘. . . the life of a man who is a fountain
of energies and enthusiasms, and an
Australian who must be remembered.’
Tom Keneally
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF
GEORGE COLLINGRIDGE
ADRIAN MITCHELL
Wakefield Press
Plein Airs and Graces
Adrian Mitchell has had a long career at the University of Sydney, where he is
now an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of English. Among
many projects, he edited Bards in the Wilderness: Australian Colonial Poetry to
1920 together with Brian Elliott, and with Leonie Kramer edited the Oxford
Anthology of Australian Literature. He is the author of Drawing the Crow, a book
of essays about what it meant to be South Australian in the 50s and 60s, and of
Dampier’s Monkey: The South Seas Voyages of William Dampier.
George Collingridge in old age.
Photograph, Collingridge family collection.
Plein Airs and Graces
The life and times of
George Collingridge
Adrian Mitchell
Wakefield Press
1 The Parade West
Kent Town
South Australia 5067
www.wakefieldpress.com.au
First published 2012
This edition published 2013
Copyright © Adrian Mitchell, 2012
All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for
the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under
the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission.
Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.
Edited by Penelope Curtin
Cover design by Stacey Zass
Typeset by Wakefield Press
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author: Mitchell, Adrian, 1941– .
Title: Plein airs and graces [electronic resource]: the life and times
of George Collingridge / Adrian Mitchell.
ISBN: 978 1 74305 213 6 (ebook: pdf).
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Subjects: Collingridge, George, 1847–1931.
Artists – Australia – 19th century – Biography.
Authors, Australian – 19th century – Biography.
French – Australia – Biography.
Dewey Number: 759.994092
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 Old Man’s Valley 1
2 Godington 7
3 French Impressions 22
4 The Promised Land 48
5 The Hermitage 62
6 The Woodpecker 74
7 Oil and Water: The landscapes 88
8 Carte Blanche 108
9 Jave la Grande 135
10 The Academy 158
11 Mirror Images 173
Bibliography 195
Notes 203
Index 223
Plates
Acknowledgements
Best to get this out into the open, right up front. This book is my wife’s idea.
She has been badgering me for years to write a book about George Collingridge,
to acknowledge his remarkable life as well as his contribution to the making of
Australian cultural history – a pioneer in every sense other than the familiar one,
in fiction and in fact, of chasing cattle around the outback. George was never one
for running with the conventions. Neither, truth to tell, is my wife.
Now I hope she is satisfied. I would like to think George is satisfied too. This
book is for both of them, but for Maureen especially.
George Collingridge’s name is all but forgotten these days, yet in his time
he was quite a public figure, busy in fostering the art community in Sydney,
promoting progress associations, developing his hypotheses about the early
European discovery of Australia and conducting classes in painting, in French
conversation, in Esperanto and ceaselessly writing thumping letters to the editors
of the newspapers, mainly in Sydney but occasionally in the other colonies too.
He was not easy to overlook then, and he made his mark. But what he stood for
has been steadily overtaken, if not largely set aside. His granddaughters, though,
Winsome and Edith Collingridge, have been valiant in keeping their grandfather’s
story alive. They have been steadfast keepers of the flame. This work benefits
from that perseverance, from their kind hospitality, and from their generosity in
allowing me to view their holdings of his work. I thank them for their permis-
sion to reproduce images and graphic material. So likewise I am grateful for the
enthusiasm of Chris Pond, a great-grandson, who assisted with archival material
and maintained a supportive interest in my progress.
I am indebted to others too who have their own more indirect connection
with the George Collingridge story. Special thanks go to Mrs E.P. List of Neve’s
Croft of Godington in Oxfordshire for her local history and for information
readily provided; to Rev. Father John Burns, Holy Trinity Church, Hethe, also
in Oxfordshire; to Annie Crowe, current owner of Capo di Monte on Berowra
Creek and another enthusiast; to Wendy Escott and Simon Bryan, who provided
the pleasure craft on the day of the excursion there and who also have an
ongoing interest in this history; and to Jill Harvey for sharing her recollections of
Collingridge Point.
I was given ready assistance in matters of local history by Penny Graham; Neil
Chippendale, Local Studies Coordinator at Hornsby Shire Library; Geoff Potter,
Local Studies Librarian, Gosford Public Library; and members of the Hornsby
Historical Association, Elizabeth Roberts and Ralph Hawkins in particular. My
thanks to the Art Gallery of New South Wales for permission to reproduce the
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Plein Airs and Graces
J.S. Watkins portrait of George Collingridge, and especially to Tracey Keough
for assistance in arranging this; to the Library Council of New South Wales for
permission to reprint George Collingridge’s facsimile of the Descaliers map of
Jave la Grande held in the Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales,
and in particular to Elise Edmonds and Maggie Patton, Map Librarians at the
State Library of New South Wales, for timely assistance; and to Hornsby Library
for permission to reprint pictures in their possession. I am especially grateful to
Nicholas Keyzer, who photographed the paintings and sketches included here,
battled with domestic crises of various kinds as he worked his magic on them, and
found himself growing more and more taken with the Collingridge project.
My thanks also to the team at Wakefield, especially to Michael Bollen for so
readily accepting the typescript; and to Penelope Curtin for reading it more care-
fully than I had, for catching patches of inconsequential thought and purposeless
expression; and for politely prising my fingers off the semicolon key, though not
always with the success she might have hoped for.
Early in this undertaking I had very productive conversations with John
Spencer, Librarian, Schaeffer Fine Arts Library; Professor Virginia Spate; the
late Dr Noel Rowe; and Professor Ivan Barko, all of the University of Sydney. The
University of Sydney made available a small period of leave to begin the research
for this project.
Some parts of this book are more or less recognisable from earlier appearances,
in papers presented at the Australasian Universities Modern Language Association
conference at the University of New South Wales in February, 2007 (and published
in the proceedings, 2008), and at the conference of the Bibliographical Society of
Australia and New Zealand at the University of Sydney in 2008; and in an article
published in Explorations in December 2008.
vii
1
Old Man’s Valley
At the northern fringe of Sydney, just beyond what is called the Upper North
Shore, and on the high ridge between two large deep creeks that open out into the
Hawkesbury River, is a community known as Hornsby. Now one of the consoli-
dating suburban hubs, for a good many years it managed to preserve something
of the feel, and look, of a country village. George Collingridge, a local landscape
painter, art teacher, woodblock engraver, multilingual historical cartographer,
activist in local matters, editor and author, was one of the early settlers in this part
of the world, one of the first to discover and appreciate the picturesque attractions
of the close-by Hawkesbury River.
Tucked in just below the ridge is a deep valley, Old Man Valley, named it has
been said, for the kangaroos there. The earliest documentation shows the original
lease was for a farm to be known as Old Man’s Valley, the modified name coming
into common use some time later. These days the locals have once more taken to
calling it Old Man’s Valley; that seems somehow more proprietorial, suggesting a
kind of ancestral presence, a connection to the sense of the past, which is still a felt
presence all through the area. Little is disturbed down there. Even the road down
into it seems to have been there a long time, the verges overgrown. The breezes that
whip and toss the thinner branches of the eucalypts on the ridge line and the upper
slopes do not reach down into the valley. Mist hangs about until mid-morning.
Dewdrops map out the dainty webs of spiders. In the late afternoon, the damp
starts to rise again, and mists emerge out of thin air.
At some stage the sun, always slow to rise above the crest, shines through the
drooping leaves and heavy vapour, and just briefly you might catch the whole
underside of the tree canopy scintillating. Right at the bottom of the valley, where
the lyrebirds flicker in and out from under the fern trees, is a creek, a tributary of
Berowra Creek. Native fish gather in shady pools below a waterfall. Small birds –
whistlers, yellow robins, blue wrens – skitter busily about the edges of natural
clearings. The magic of Old Man’s Valley is that it shows itself only in glimpses.
Sunsets are hidden by another high ridge at the far end of the valley; in fact,
much of this country is an ancient plateau eroded into twisting channels that
1
2 Plein Airs and Graces
deepen into gorges. Long shadows are cast hereabouts. At night, when the cloud
cover drifts away, the temperature plummets, and the bluish moonlight is as cold
and sharp as a stiletto. In amongst the tall timber the clumps of foliage look like
ink smudges.
The colours of the forest are mostly cool, although when the sun is directly
above the foliage changes to something close to the familiar yellow-green of
willows, or the monotonous drab olive that the first settlers complained of. That
was of little interest to George Collingridge: at either end of the day or in overcast
weather he found a range of either very dark greens, terre verte, or blue-greens –
the colours familiar from his training in France. A prolific painter, he was not fond
of the high-toned summer skies favoured by the emerging school of Australian
impressionists. At about the time of Federation, or just after, Arthur Streeton’s
elderly father lived on the lip of this valley, and on a visit one Christmas Streeton
painted there, in the middle of the day. Collingridge preferred a cooler register,
though he too had a Christmas epiphany.
In the valley, when it rains, the planes and depths of colouring begin to merge
towards one dark mass; the sombreness of the under-canopy becomes the whole.
Trunks, branches, twigs become more distinctive in the wet, a charcoal tracery, and
then the structure of the trees becomes more visible; but that was not Collingridge’s
interest either. He was not a Hans Heysen, he was more interested in effect. He
had learned directly from Corot, and transposed what he had learned of land-
scape painting in mid-nineteenth-century France to the region around Hornsby,
Berowra, Brisbane Water and the Hawkesbury, again and again defined by and
against water. Water, lakes, rivers, primordial seas fascinated him.
In the 1890s, when George Collingridge de Tourcey took up residence in
Hornsby, there were six houses in the valley. Now there are none. It had been
settled by a clan of Higginses, who started out felling and sawing by hand the
thick stands of blackbutt, blue gum and cedar, and carting off the timbers to the
building sites about Parramatta. In the clearings they planted fruit trees, which
were protected from the brisker weather up on the ridge above, and sustained by
a patch of rich volcanic soil. Theirs was a quiet life, the sides of the valley steep
enough for the Higginses to keep pretty much to themselves on their picturesque
orchards. They had all that they wanted there in the valley, even their own ceme-
tery. Hardy, self-reliant men and women, they established themselves by dint of
their own labour and they were content with their lot. The view down into the
valley from above was a delight. It was a landscape that presented itself to the
artist’s eye. Here, the two values that George Collingridge held most dear – art
and settlement – were on tranquil display. Here, he could find something like those
hints and traces of the Golden Age that had sustained the development of art in
mid-nineteenth-century France, intimations of an idyllic life: in part the manifesta-
tions of a simple and contented existence, and in part, the proximity to that which
had been here from the beginning, ancient, primal.