William Dobell

The estate of the late Edwina Baillieu

William Dobell: exhibition of paintings, David Jones' Art Gallery, Sydney, 27 January-17 February 1954, cat. 22 (as Girl in red Mother Hubbard)

UV inspection confirms there has been no retouching. The surface has a "crocodile skin' like crazing, however, the work appears in good stable condition.
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In May 1949, William Dobell travelled to the Central Highlands of New Guinea, the guest (along with Senator John Armstrong and the writers Frank Clune and Colin Simpson) of Sir Edward Hallstrom, at Hallstrom's experimental Livestock and Fauna Trust establishment at Nondugl. The artist was immediately and totally captivated by the New Guinea landscape, its people and their traditional customs. Colin Simpson recalled him saying on their first night: 'you know, I feel a bit of a fool. I've made a big mistake. I came on this junket because Hallstrom invited me but, frankly, I didn't expect to see anything that mattered, I thought, "Oh, New Guinea – tourist poster stuff." But it's bloody wonderful! ... it's like walking through a botanical garden. And the natives – they have character, they have dignity ... I really think I've found something I want to paint... something that hasn't been done before.'¹ 

Dobell stayed for two months, and returned again the following year (visiting Port Moresby, the Wahgi Valley and the Sepik River), and spent the next few years at home in his Wangi studio refining and reworking the numerous field studies from these two expeditions. Dobell's private tropical obsession was finally made public in an exhibition at David Jones' Art Gallery early in 1954, an imperial or rather Commonwealth gesture designed by Hannah Lloyd Jones to mark the visit to Australia of the young Queen Elizabeth II.

The present work is one of several portraits of New Guinea natives included in that show. Of this group of paintings, the artist and writer James Gleeson observed: 'Gauguin is the artist who immediately comes to mind when we think of natives in a tropical setting, but Dobell refused to look in his direction. Though he was fascinated by the intense colour of the landscape, and by the way dark skins can take and hold every sort of light, these things could never be as central to Dobell's art as they were to the art of Gauguin. For him a native is a person rather than a pattern... Decorative generalizations make little appeal to Dobell and he has given us a series of actual portraits of natives ... real people.'²

Some of these works – Kuta girl (1953, private collection); Boy with a parakeet (1952, private collection) - show Highlanders in their plumed and painted nakedness. In others, such as Boy in a white lap lap (1952, private collection); Mathias (1953, private collection); Frandam (1953, private collection); and the present work, the sitters are more 'civilised', or at least more covered up; the men in cloth skirts, the women in somewhat incongruous (and possibly impractical) high-necked and puff-sleeved European dresses.

The girl in red with the curious nickname has not been identified, but is probably, like Kuta girl, from near Mt Hagen. On his first trip to the Highlands Dobell had walked the 80 kilometres to Kuta, and contemporary photographs of women working on Dan Leahy's property there show them dressed in similar cotton shifts. Charmingly, despite the Methodist modesty of her attire, the sitter retains her savage finery of necklaces, earrings and bangles, with a fascinator of ferns and flowers in her hair.

The work is in some ways characteristic of Dobell's formal portraits: in its dramatic chiaroscuro, in its opalescent palette of rose-maroon and complementary blue-green and in its technique of broad, rapid washes overlaid with rich dry-brushed impasto and flashing white highlights. However, as Gleeson's comments suggest, this is far from a formulaic portrait. The thin body, the tense, upright pose and anxiously clasped hands and their contrast with the young, open, generous face make Girl in red (Mother Hubbard) a singular and self-sufficient character study, and a potent image of culture clash in Australia's former colony.

1. William Dobell, quoted in Colin Simpson, Plumes and arrows: inside New Guinea, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1962, p. 229
2. James Gleeson, William Dobell (rev. ed.), London: Thames & Hudson, 1969, pp. 168-169