Aby ALTSON

English 1866–1948
emigrated to Australia 1883; worked in India 1924–27, United States 1939–48

Aby Altson, one of the most talented students at the National Gallery School in the late 1880s, won the second Travelling Scholarship in 1890. This enabled him to study overseas for three years. He headed for Paris and immersed himself in the Parisian art world. In his third year, as required by the Trustees of the Melbourne Public Library, National Gallery and Museums, he painted his ‘Scholarship’ painting—an original work that showed what he had been looking at and what he had learnt. That painting, The golden age, 1893 (in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria) was exhibited to great acclaim at the Paris Salon in 1893 and at the Royal Academy, London, the following year, before being dispatched to Melbourne. As in The golden age, Altson used a classical subject in Idyll of the sea, 1896, to demonstrate his skill at composition and painting the nude. Four nymphs take a break from luring unsuspecting sailors to their deaths, and amuse themselves by playing with a fish. The figures are dramatically top lit, as if from an opening in the roof of the cavern. A gap in the rock wall gives a view to the open sea, contrasting the sequestered world of the grotto with the real world outside. This was a trick Altson had learned from his teacher G. F. Folingsby at the National Gallery School, and had first used in his winning scholarship picture Flood sufferings (National Gallery of Victoria) in 1890. Idyll of the sea attracted some attention when it was exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists in 1896, and was illustrated in The Sketch.

It is unusual for an Australian artist’s work to prefigure that of a major British artist, but Altson’s Idyll of the sea anticipates Sir Edward Poynter’s The cave of the storm nymphs (Private collection) of 1903.

Terence Lane