Bernard HALL

English 1859–1935
worked in Australia 1892–1934

Hall’s interest in the Symbolist movement reflects his continuing engagement with European art movements. The Symbolists were concerned with representing ideas and concepts through their work, rather than the naturalism, or literal representation, popular in Australian painting in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a stanza from the twelfth-century Persian text The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Study for The quest is a contemplation of moral isolation and self-dependence:

I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of the After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return’d to me,
And answer’d ‘I Myself am Heav’n and Hell’

Liverpool-born Bernard Hall studied at the Royal College of Art, London, and the Antwerp and Munich academies. He was appointed director of the National Gallery of Victoria in 1891 and arrived in Melbourne the following year. His job encompassed both running the Gallery and heading its art school, the National Gallery School. The trustees gave him the right of private practice and provided him with a handsome studio in the school, which, like the Gallery itself, was then part of the Public Library building in Swanston Street, Melbourne. During his long directorship (forty-three years) his administrative duties tended to take over, but he continued determinedly to paint and exhibit.

Study for The Quest, c. 1905, shows another facet of Hall’s oeuvre, his Symbolist subjects. The picture is based on a stanza from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the twelfth-century Persian anthology memorably rendered into English verse by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859 and subsequently published in countless deluxe editions. Hall used the fifth or final edition of 1889:

I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of the After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return’d to me,
And answer’d ‘I Myself am Heav’n and Hell’

Hall envisaged this philosophical concept as a nude woman (the soul) seated on a sphere symbolic of the Earth. Her face and legs are veiled, and a phosphorescent light silhouettes her head like a halo. The subject seems to have had a particular resonance for Hall and he repeated it a number of times (National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Art Gallery). For him the message is ultimately one of individual isolation and self-dependence, within Khayyám’s broader framework of ‘speculative problems of Deity, Destiny, Matter and Spirit, Good and Evil’. The iconography relates closely to G. F. Watts’s famous Hope, 1886 (Tate Gallery, London), with its blindfolded figure sitting on the globe, straining to hear a sound from her broken lyre.

Terence Lane

Not surprisingly, Hall found many of his subjects close to home — in Aigburth, his house at East Malvern, and in his studio and the formal spaces of the Public Library building. He exhibited two views of the staircase of the Public Library in 1919; The marble staircase, Public Library, 1925, is one of two views of that title exhibited in 1925. It features the Buchan stone and white marble staircase leading to the domed Reading Room of the Public Library, opened in 1913. A copy of a van Dyck portrait hangs on the staircase, and two other works from the Gallery’s collection, a Chinese chair and Charles Summers’s 1878 bust of the Australian explorer Charles Sturt (now LaTrobe Collection, State Library of Victoria) can be seen on the right. Hall’s interior is curiously dispassionate and objective – an excuse for an investigation of abstract form and tonal values. In an age of black-and-white photography, it is also a rare record of the colours and ambience of a corner of the Public Library building in the 1920s.

Terence Lane