Helen and Jane, 1913, is an exquisite study of the two daughters that Philip Connard had with his first wife Mary Collyer (who died in 1927). The artist’s daughters featured frequently in his work during 1909 to 1913. They were represented as much younger children in Connard’s The guitar player, c. 1909 (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide), which was a majestic homage to Diego Velásquez’s Las Meninas, 1656 (Museo del Prado, Madrid). Contemporaneous with the National Gallery of Victoria’s painting are The young dancers, 1913 (private collection), and Jane, Evelyn, James and Helen, 1913 (Tate, London), where the girls are shown with their nurse Evelyn and the family cat James.1Christie’s, South Kensington, Sale 10454, Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite & British Impressionist Art; Maritime Art; Sporting & Wildlife Art, 3 Dec. 2015, lot 92.
In 1913, Amy Lambert, the wife of Australian painter George Lambert, who was living in Chelsea at the time Connard painted Helen and Jane, recalled how:
Pastoral plays, arranged by Mrs. Philip Connard, who was the mother of two fairy-like children, and who had a flair for folk-dancing and garden-entertainment, made frequent demands on our time and interest.2Amy Lambert, Thirty Years of an Artist’s Life. The Career of G. W. Lambert, A. R. A., Society of Artists, Sydney, 1938, p. 47.
Different from the interest in Italian primitive and French Post-Impressionist art espoused by younger British artists during the 1910s, Connard’s work often is, this painting in particular, steeped in art-historical references. In its compositional poise, it recalls Velásquez’s studies of the Infanta Maria Theresa undertaken at the Spanish Court in 1653 (such as that in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) and, in the comparative emptiness of its setting, Édouard Manet’s Le fifre (The fife player), 1866 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), which itself paid homage to Velásquez. The delicious bouquet of flowers, tied with blue ribbon, which lies upon the floor at the painting’s lower right, may also be a nod to Manet’s celebrated still-life compositions. The painting’s overall sombre palette focuses attention upon the richly coloured ribbons worn by the two subjects, whose brightness is balanced by the gleams from a large gilded frame posed on an easel (mostly obscured by a fabric hanging) at the left. Helen and Jane’s sparseness of composition accords with what art critic Marion Hepworth Dixon praised in Connard’s work at this time: ‘Each picture of his is in a sense a synthesis, a study in elimination’.3Marion Hepworth Dixon, ‘Philip Connard’, The Studio, vol. 57, no. 238, Jan. 1913, p. 270.
Philip Connard belonged, however, to the generation of English artists whose careers were eclipsed by both the impact of French Modernism on British art – as exemplified by the radical teaching of Roger Fry at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and as well as the two Post-Impressionism exhibitions that Fry organised at the Grafton Galleries, London, in 1910 and 1912 – and by the developing taste among younger artists for the perceived simplicity of pre-Renaissance Italian painting and sculpture.4The literature on this is vast. For a recent discussion, see Caroline Elam, ‘From Giotto to the Bushmen: Roger Fry at the Slade 1909–13’, The Burlington Magazine, vol. 160, no. 1368, Sept. 2018, pp. 727–33. In the eyes of one critic writing in 1915, Connard’s work was still perceived as revolutionary, offering a divergence from the prevailing conservatism of the previous generation of landscape and figurative painters:
What might be called the modern classic school is well represented in the work of such men as Edward Poynter, Sir. William Richmond and B. W. Leader, while a vivid contrast is provided in the canvases of the revolutionaries, among whom one may count William Strang, Philip Connard and D. Cameron.5L. G. S., ‘London Letter’, American Art News, vol. 13, no. 17, 30 Jan. 1915, p. 4.
Two years, earlier, however, Hepworth Dixon somewhat defensively praised Connard’s faithful adherence to the legacy of Impressionism:
We may deem ourselves lucky when fashion, the almighty arbiter, permits an artist to be something other than the adroit purveyor of a new sensationalism. For fashion, the desire for the strange and the bizarre, is so all-paramount at the present day that I marvel not at all that the Post-Impressionist, the Cubist, and the Futurist should have arrested the attention of our somewhat timid British critics. ‘It is new, it is strange and not a little incomprehensible’, these good gentlemen appear to say, ‘let us hasten to praise what is new and strange and incomprehensible lest we be convicted of old-fogeyism’ … In the dominant personality of Mr. Philip Connard … we have a healthy antidote to the something morbid which threatens to engulf our younger schools of painters … Mr. Connard is a painter’s painter in the sense that that his manifest delight is in his pigments … so distinctive is the handling of this trenchant impressionist.6Marion Hepworth Dixon, 1913, p. 269.
Helen and Jane was exhibited in Edinburgh with the Royal Scottish Academy in 1914, where it was singled out as among a group of works that ‘one would not willingly miss’.7‘Studio-Talk. Edinburgh’, The Studio, vol. 62, no. 255, Jul. 1914, p. 143. It then remained in the artist’s collection until 1932, when Felton Adviser Randall Davies, a London-based art critic, acquired it for the NGV. As Davies reported to the Felton Bequest Committee, who was charged with administering acquisitions made with the funds bequeathed to the Gallery by Alfred Felton in 1904:
‘Helen & Jane’ by Philip Connard R. A. Under the authority of the Schedule I have purchased this picture, oil on canvas, 5 ¼ x 4 ½ ft. from Mr. Connard. It was painted in 1913 and exhibited at The International Society and in Edinburgh priced at 600 guineas. Mr. Connard asked me £400 for it, but was quite satisfied when I suggested £350 as it was for Melbourne. It is a most charming picture of his two little daughters. I think it has been reproduced more than once. It was hanging over his sideboard and I did not think he wanted to sell it, but ‘Helen’ told me it would go to Melbourne with her blessing.8Randall Davies, letter to the Felton Bequest Committee, 25 Aug. 1932; Felton Bequest papers, National Gallery of Victoria. Davies was mistaken here, as Helen and Jane was not exhibited with the International Society of Sculptors, Painters & Gravers in 1913. Jane, Evelyn, James and Helen, 1913 (Tate, London) was, however, exhibited with the International Society in 1914.
Davies’s predecessor as Felton Adviser, Frank Rinder, had been criticised by certain quarters for concentrating on purchases of Old Master works for Melbourne, rather than more modern work; a situation that led eventually to Rinder’s resignation. When Davies himself travelled from London to Melbourne in February 1931 ‘to discover for himself the requirements of the National Gallery’, the local Argus newspaper expressed its hope that the new Felton Adviser would be given more scope to acquire work ‘by living European artists’.9‘The Felton Bequest. Mr. Randall Davies’s Task’, The Argus, 14 Feb. 1931, p. 4. Gwen Rankin has noted that: ‘Randall Davies’s visit to Melbourne that month passed without incident, although his appointment, which had not pleased the Melbourne community, reignited cries for a local rather than British adviser and an artist instead of a layman’. Gwen Rankin, L. Bernard Hall: The Man the Art World Forgot, New South Publishing, Sydney, and State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, 2013, p. 226. Connard’s Helen and Jane fulfilled this wish in part, although the painting did not please everyone on its arrival in Melbourne in 1933. The Australian painter Harold Herbert declared ‘The Connard is not good’, in The Australasian on 3 March 1933:
It is unlovely in flesh colours, and one must feel sorry for ‘Jane’, who stands behind ‘Helen’ in ’Helen and Jane’. She may be in shade, but her grey pallor indicates the necessity for a hospital. The picture has decorative qualities and may please many Connard enthusiasts.10Harold Herbert, ‘Art. New National Gallery Pictures’, The Australasian, 4 Mar. 1933, p. 15.
Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria
