HUGH RAMSAY

Mrs E. Best, Melbourne,1966
Joel's Melbourne, 18 November 1997, lot 58, as 'The Family Friend'

Over the centuries, the role of the dog in art has been a particularly interesting one. As symbols of fidelity, hence the name 'Fido', they have appeared in carved stone at the funerary feet of their lordly masters, or graced the presence of a marriage portrait by Jan van Eyck. Found in hunting, family and self-portraits, they have even been Futurist expressions of furry velocity as in Giacomo Balla's 1912 painting, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, USA). Nearer to home, Charles Conder chose the 9 x 5 Impression Exhibition of 1889 to display his brilliant little essay, How We Lost Poor Flossie (Art Gallery of South Australia), of fellow artist Frederick McCubbin's dog Flossie, lost through romantic adventure. Hugh Ramsay's Flo, 1897 is different again, a direct, tonal study of the family collie dog, nature observed without symbolic overtones or narrative.

Ramsay joined the National Gallery School, Melbourne, in 1894, studying under Bernard Hall and Frederick McCubbin. His great promise soon emerged in the annual prize givings, Nude Study (Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne), being identified as possibly the work which gained him first prize at the Gallery School in 1897. Earlier in this same year in which Flo was painted, Ramsay spent some time with his brother, Dr John Ramsay, in Launceston. His scenic local landscapes are now in the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, and Hobart's Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Another, Lamplight, of his Melbourne home suburb of Essendon, is in the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum. They are all strikingly different in their darker tones from the sun drenched canvases and nocturnes of the playmakers of the day, Arthur Streeton and David Davies.

In the recumbent Flo, Ramsay captures an informal moment of canine relaxation, well removed from the darker sombre of his portraits and figure compositions.

While his approach is still tonal, and the palette characteristically of olive greens and subdued browns, there is here a lightness of touch more suited to the subject. Perhaps the lighter tonal manner shows the influence of Emanuel Phillips Fox and Tudor St. George Tucker, whose Charterisville summer school Ramsay attended during the year Flo was painted. Flo appears again in a 1904 full length portrait of Ramsay's younger sister Jessie, variously titled Jessie with the Dog and, as exhibited in the Victorian Artists' Society annual exhibition of 1904, Young Girl with Dog. It has long been in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery.