William STRUTT

English 1825–1915
worked in Australia 1850–62

William Strutt arrived in Victoria in 1850 and was one of a number of artists working in the colony at the height of the gold rush. He was distinguished from his contemporaries, having received the most thorough academic training of them all, and for his interest in depicting the figure and contemporary events rather than the landscape as the primary subject of his Australian work.1

Strutt’s formal training began before the tender age of ten, when he and his brother, Joseph, received lessons from a French tutor and drawing instructor. Both boys showed promise and in the late 1830s the family moved again to Paris so that they could study with a master of the highest order. In 1838 they entered the atelier of Michel-Martin Drolling, who had studied under the Neoclassicist Jacques-Louis David, and regularly exhibited at the Paris Salon. Strutt later described his teacher as ‘a severe draughtsman and good solid painter of the older school’.2

The principle on which Drolling’s instruction—and indeed, most nineteenth-century art training—was founded was that drawing, especially from the figure, formed the very basis of art, and students consequently worked their way through various exercises that were calculated to provide them with the necessary skills. After copying engravings to develop an understanding of contour and tone, the students drew from plaster casts of classical statuary. Once this had been mastered, they worked from a live model, with the primary emphasis on depicting correct classical proportions and anatomy.3

According to Strutt’s inscription in the lower left corner of the sheet, this female nude was the first figure study he drew at Drolling’s atelier. With its careful delineation of the figure and subtle modulation of tones describing the play of light and shadow across the female form, it is a masterful study. Its achievement is all the more remarkable when one realises that Strutt was a precocious thirteen or fourteen years of age at the time it was drawn.

1 A. Sayers, Drawing in Australia, Melbourne, 1989, pp. 74–5.

2 William Strutt, quoted in Heather Curnow, The Life and Art of William Strutt, Martinborough, 1980, p. 5.

3 ibid., p. 6.

Kirsty M. Grant