Hugh RAMSAY

Scottish 1877–1906
emigrated to Australia 1878

At the end of the nineteenth century Hugh Ramsay was considered to be the most gifted student at the National Gallery School. In 1899 he was runner-up to Max Meldrum for the National Gallery Travelling Scholarship, yet made his own way to Europe, and arrived in Paris in 1901. Ramsay enrolled at the Académie Colarossi and studied the works of traditional and modern artists in the academies and galleries:

I am quite settled down now in Paris to hard work, and what a grand place it is to work in. You simply get drawn into the swim … Start in the morning here at 8 and work till 12, and then again at night from 7 till 10. In the afternoons I work in the studio with another student, in fact, we live there, in true quite student fashion … It improves your work wonderfully when you work without any restrictions, doesn’t it, Professor?1

While greatly impressed by the paintings of Diego Velázquez, Anthony van Dyck and Eduoard Manet, Ramsay also responded to the subtle and delicate palette of the more contemporary James McNeill Whistler and to the bravura style of John Singer Sargent. In 1901 one of Ramsay’s paintings was exhibited at the Old Salon and in 1902 four out of his five submissions to the New Salon were accepted and hung ‘on the line’. Tragically, Ramsay’s extraordinary early success was cut short by a diagnosis of tuberculosis, forcing his return to Australia in August 1902.

Suffering a relapse, Ramsay travelled to Barnawartha in August 1904. Situated near Albury, on the New South Wales border, the fresh and dry air offered a reprise from the damp, cold Melbourne winter. Here, in relative isolation, Ramsay completed several self-portraits which reveal with striking candour the physical strain of his illness. Unable to paint on a large-scale and forced to wear glasses to combat his failing eyesight, Self-portrait with glasses, 1904, is a particularly poignant study by an artist renowned for his self-portraits.

Of all the students who have sprung from the capacious lap of Australia, none has shown greater gift or higher promise of mastership than Ramsay, whose self portrait in our National Gallery and The sisters in the Sydney Gallery are as virile and original as anything produced before or since. His death is the greatest loss Australian art has suffered; if he had lived it is difficult to imagine what would have been the limit of his unusual powers.2

1 Hugh Ramsay, letter to Professor Baldwin Spencer, 12 February 1901.

2 Arthur Streeton, address to National Gallery School students, Melbourne, 1929.

Geoffrey Smith