Bertram Mackennal

Collection of the artist; thence by descent
Collection of Pippin Drysdale, Western Australia

Deborah Edwards, Bertram MacKennal, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, p.37 (illus.)

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While the figure of Circe in the National Gallery of Victoria is one of the best-known and most popular sculptures in the canon of Australian settler art, its author has until recently remained relatively obscure. However, as the Art Gallery of New South Wales's triumphant 2007 exhibition showed, Bertram Mackennal is arguably the most successful Australian artist of the early twentieth-century: the first Australian to be elected to membership of the Royal Academy, the first to have work purchased by the Tate Gallery and the first to be knighted. 

Widely acclaimed in the 1890s for his striking allegorical figures, Mackennal was a major figure within the tendency known in Britain as New Sculpture: a style or rather an attitude which incorporated the multiple metaphors of Symbolism, the flaming curved lines of Art Nouveau and a dynamic naturalism then characterised as 'Neo-Florentine'.  From this initial recognition, Mackennal quickly found professional acceptance, then royal patronage, eventually becoming one of the most highly regarded civic sculptors of his age, designing monuments ranging from statues of king and queens (Victoria, Edward VII and George V), architectural decorations such as Phoebus Driving the Horses of the Sun at Australia House, London, to public memorials such as the Cenotaph at Martin Place, Sydney. 

The present work is a relatively early one, a bronze from 1894, and is representative of Mackennal's work in the period of his first European success.  In the catalogue of the recent exhibition, Deborah Edwards describes how 'Mackennal thematises "truth" as a psychological act; the figure's nakedness a metaphor for "unclothed" truth, the tautness of her body carrying resonances of Circe's force and sternness, her face "frank, fearless and earnest", and her wings indicative of a being with the moral authority of a higher realm.  Like Circe, her gesture extends to the imagined viewer.  Truth holds up a burnished disc which reflects a reality incapable of compromise ...  In its burnished surfaces and idealised naturalism, referencing the now well-established neo-florentin tendencies of British sculpture, and in itself conscious, connection to Circe, Truth demonstrated those means - poetic, allegorical, decorative, classicist - by which Mackennal would, over the 1890s in London, drive to succeed.'¹

As well as being a sophisticated symbolist statuette in its own right, like the figures of Salome (circa 1895) or Fame (circa 1897-1900), Truth can also be read as the young artist's rebuke to, even revenge against, the art establishments of Melbourne and London.  It should be remembered that while Mackennal was in Melbourne in 1891 after studies in London and Paris, the National Gallery of Victoria held a sculpture competition.  Mackennal submitted a model for a monumental group, The Triumph of Truth, but to his great disappointment no first prize was awarded. His entry received only the faint praise of a second prize.  So, with the encouragement of his new friend the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and with the financial support of a group of Melbourne patrons headed by clothing manufacturer, land speculator and politician Frank Stuart, Mackennal returned to Paris.  There he did finally receive that elusive recognition: two sculptures were accepted into the Salon in 1892, and the following year the life-size and startling naturalistic Circe received a mention honorable from the Salon jury.  The latter work was also accepted for the RA summer exhibition of 1894, though displayed with its symbolist pedestal frieze of tumbling orgiastic nudes modestly wrapped in drapery.  Both the quality of the work and the cause célèbre of its censorship guaranteed attention to the young artist, and Mackennal's career began its ascent. 

The present work was created at about this time as a token of appreciation to those Australian supporters who sponsored his return to Europe, and its references would have been clearly understood.  The patrons' faith and Mackennal's confidence are here vindicated.  Three years after her rejection by the NGV commissioners, the artist's ideal of truth is finally triumphant.

1.  Deborah Edwards, '"Adaptability and versatility": Bertram Mackennal - an overview', in Deborah Edwards (ed.) Bertram Mackennal (exhibition catalogue), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, p. 36