Leonard FRENCH

Australian 1928–2017

Leonard French is celebrated in Australia as an artist who worked in paint and glass. In the beginning he worked at signwriting to support his studio art. When he received the commission in 1963 to make the stained-glass ceiling for the new National Gallery of Victoria designed by Roy Grounds, he became one of the best-known artists in the country. Leonard French was born in Brunswick, Melbourne, on 8 October 1928. He studied at the Melbourne Technical College from 1944 to 1947. His first commission, when he was nineteen years old, was a church mural in Brunswick. He was an adventurous traveller, looking at art in Europe from 1949 to 1951, in Asia in 1960 and 1961, and the United States in 1965. His exhibited his Iliad series in 1951, establishing early on his interest in classical, biblical and mythical subjects which he often exhibited as a complete series on a theme. The most notable example of this, and with which he became nationally known, was the Campion series, based on the life of the Jesuit mystic and martyr Edmund Campion, and first exhibited in Sydney in 1960. On his first trip to Europe, French was attracted to Byzantine art and, with his skills with signwriting enamels, oil paints and mastery of scale, began a long and, in the end, brilliant realisation of the Byzantine glazed and gold-leaf method of working. Death and transfiguration, 1958–59, with its theme from the Gospels, is an early example of this exploration of materials and form. There is something of the French artist and muralist Fernand Léger in French’s rounded and schematic forms. The painting reads as two figures—Christ lying with head to left, then rising, with arms outstretched, through the top of the canvas. Since 1968 Leonard French has carried out monumental stained-glass and painting commissions for the National Library of Australia, the Australian National University and Monash University.

Jennifer Phipps