ETHEL SPOWERS (1890-1947)
Illustration to the Frog Prince 1925
Estimate: $7000 - 9000
Sold For:
$10000 hammer
$12273 inc. buyer's premium
Description
ETHEL SPOWERS (1890-1947)
Illustration to the Frog Prince 1925
watercolour, pen and ink on paper
20.0 x 22.0 cm; 39.0 x 36.0 cm (framed)
signed and dated lower right: EL Spowers. 1925.
Provenance:
Mrs Beryl Russell, Victoria
Gift from the above to Mrs Lillian McPhee, Victoria, c1930
Thence by descent, private collection, Victoria
Exhibited:
Exhibition of Works by Ethel Spowers, The New Gallery, Melbourne, 4-15 August 1925, cat.21, 7 gns
Reference:
Art Notes: Water Colors by Miss Ethel Spowers', The Age, Melbourne, 4 August 1925, p.9
'The Studio: Miss Spowers' Water-Colours', The Australasian, Melbourne, 8 August 1925, p.362
Keats, J., 'Illustration to the Frog Prince [2]', Ethel Spowers 1890-1947 [digital catalogue raisonné], accessed August 2024, https://ethelspowers.com/illustration-to-the-frog-prince/
Estimate: $7000 - 9000
Result Hammer: $10000
Born in 1890, Ethel Spowers was the embodiment of a modern woman living and working in the 1920s and 30s. As a female artist of that era, Spowers struggled with the gender bias of male art critics who believed women’s art was secondary and women artists should be in a guild of their own.(1) The impact of World War I and the further loss of life from Spanish influenza provided an opportunity to liberate women from historically feminised roles to pursue interests in male dominated fields. Spowers’ dedication as an artist eventually afforded her great admiration from her peers and critics, participating in at least 85 exhibitions nationally and internationally, including six solo exhibitions.
Throughout Spowers’ artistic career she frequently returned to themes of fairy tales, nursery rhymes and children. The Battle 1933 is set in a children’s nursery, with four children at play; the scene may depict her own nieces and nephews in Toorak House, Melbourne. Battlelines are drawn with a child mastering the formation of tin soldiers and horses, ready to face off against a single cannon aimed with poise by another child. The ensuing combat is watched over intently by two other children, leaning on and astride a stationary rocking horse.
The Battle is the third time Spowers included the rocking horse in her works of art, with earlier examples, a watercolour and a linocut print (see Figure 1), featuring two children astride the horse in motion, as if they themselves are galloping off to battle. Compositionally, The Battle combines her modernist style influenced by the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, London, and her earlier period, which were more ‘delicate and charming.’(2) The modernist influence, creating motion and drama, can be seen in the sweeping curves of the armed forces, and the children arched over the scene as they pivot around a single cannon. While the children are actively engaged in war-games, the painting exudes a very personal and private moment of children at play, unlike her other oil paintings The Gust of Wind c1931 (see Figure 2) and Skaters 1931 (see Figure 3; both in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) which celebrate life outdoors, with drama and dynamism.
The daughter of newspaper media mogul William Spowers, Ethel Spowers, and her siblings were encouraged in pursuing an education and becoming masters of their crafts. One sister, Ellison Spowers, became a highly regarded and accomplished bookbinder, while another was a talented violinist. Her family upbringing encouraged her in the arts, with her mother Annie Spowers (née Westgarth) and Grandfather William Westgarth, both skilled at painting and drawing. A family trip to Europe in 1909-1910 afforded her an opportunity to attend an art school in Paris.(3) This introduction encouraged her to complete a full course in drawing and painting at Melbourne’s National Gallery School from 1911-1917.(4) Selected members of the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria were invited to exhibit in 1918 with the Arts and Crafts Society of New South Wales.(5) At this exhibition Spowers sold her first work to a public institution, with the Art Gallery of New South Wales acquiring The Kite.(6)
By 1927 Spowers had exhibited in numerous group exhibitions a paired exhibition with fellow Australian artist Mary Reynolds at the Macrae Gallery, London,(7) and had held four solo exhibitions: one at the Decorations Gallery in 1920, two at the New Gallery, Melbourne in 1925 and 1927, and one in Sydney at the Grosvenor Galleries in 1926.(8) By 1928 regard for Spowers’ artistic talent was recognised in numerous print publications, with her works of art adorning the cover of Woman’s World: An Illustrative Monthly for Australian Woman,(9) and an article in The Australian Home Beautiful.(10) In addition, Spowers illustrated a book of poetry by Maurice Furnley(11) and pages in the Adam Lindsay Gordon Memorial Volume.(12)
The 1948 Ethel Spowers memorial exhibition noted her style had two distinct periods. Works produced between 1924 and 1928 as ‘delicate and charming, soundly constructed and gay in colour, comprising water-colour and line drawings, wood-engravings and colour linocuts in the Japanese method.’(13) Spowers attended the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in 1928 under the tutelage of Claude Flight and Iain Macnab.(14) This experience would form what became known as Spowers’ ‘modern’ period. The Grosvenor School of Modern Art’s training in the linocut print and the use of block colour shifted Spowers’ artistic style to a simplified and dynamic form that embraced a rhythmic design.
Unlike other students of Iain Macnab and Claude Flight, who explored the modern age through transport and industry, Spowers imbued her works with a sense of vivacity and elegance through the liveliness of her everyday, with scenes of children and family life including picnics, urban street scenes and children at play. Critical attention was bestowed upon Spowers’ works for their vibrancy and bold and simplified forms.(15) By 1930, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and The British Museum, London, had acquired works by Spowers.(16) In 1931 Spowers returned to study with Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School of Modern Art. Following this, Spowers continued the advancement and promotion of the modernist style though the media and public lectures, frequently challenging the established doctrines in Australia.(17) Spowers became a founding member of Contemporary Group in Melbourne and acted as an agent for Claude Flight and his circle in Australia. Advancing art practices in Australia, Spowers taught at the Swinburne Technical College, Melbourne, in the mid-1930s.
Aside from her creative pursuits, Spowers was an active philanthropist, participating in fundraising exhibitions (including an exhibition to raise funds for a permanent water supply for Hermannsburg Mission) and making donations to children’s and women’s hospitals, bushfire relief, the Red Cross and war relief efforts. In 1938, probably owing to Spowers’ ailing health, she arranged for artist Helen Ogilvie to paint a specialised children’s ambulance with nursery rhyme themes to improve the experience for children undergoing medical transport care.(18)
Spowers was diagnosed with breast cancer in the late 1930s and died in 1947 from related metastasises.(19) A memorial exhibition of her works was held in Melbourne in 1948.(20) The Battle was included in this important exhibition, lent by her sister Celia (Mrs H.W. Parbury) under the title Children Playing. This rare and remarkable painting now comes to auction for the first time, having been closely held in the family collection of Spowers’ sister Celia Parbury for 90 years.
Footnotes:
1. Herbert, H., ‘Art: Miss Ethel Spowers’, The Australasian, Melbourne, 9 December 1933, p.16
2. Memorial Exhibition by Ethel Spowers [exhibition catalogue], Georges Gallery, Melbourne, 7-16 September 19483. Topliss, H., Modernism and Feminism: Australian Women Artists 1900-1940, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1996
4. Certificate of Completion, National Gallery of Victoria Art School, Melbourne, signed Bernard Hall, 15 February 1918
5. Falaise, ‘Arts and Crafts Society’, The Australasian, Melbourne, 12 April 1919, p.680
6. Ethel Spowers, The Kite 1918, watercolour, pen and ink on paper, 24.6 x 22.8 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales collection, Sydney, purchased 1918
7. ‘About People’, The Age, Melbourne, 2 November 1921, p.7
8. Decorative Drawings by Miss E.L. Spowers, Decoration Galleries, Melbourne, [22]-[29] June 1920; Exhibition of Works by Ethel Spowers, The New Gallery, Melbourne, 4-15 August 1925; Ethel L. Spowers, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 1-19 June 1926 and; Exhibition of Wood-cuts and Water-colours by Ethel Spowers, The New Gallery, Melbourne, 2-13 August 1927 [exhibition catalogues]
9. Taylor, F. (ed.), Woman’s World of Australia, Melbourne, vol.6, no.1, 1 December 1925 (illus. front cover)
10. ‘The Linen Cupboard’, The Australian Home Beautiful, United Press, Melbourne, vol.6, no.1, 2 January 1928, pp.34-36 (illus.)
11. Furnley, M., Arrows of Longing, Alexander McCubbin, Melbourne, 1921
12. Vidler, E. (ed.), The Adam Lindsay Gordon Memorial Volume, The Lothian Publishing Co, Melbourne, 1926
13. Memorial Exhibition, op. cit.
14. ‘Social Notes’, The Australasian, Melbourne, 4 August 1928, p.14; ‘Wood Engravings: Brought from London’, The Herald, Melbourne, 14 May 1930, p.11, and; Coppel, S., Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School, Scolar Press in association with the National Gallery of Australia, United Kingdom, 1995
15. ‘Art Exhibitions: Lino-Cuts’, The Times, London, 13 July 1931, p.10; Young, B., ‘Art Shows Reviewed: Color Prints by Younger Artists: Interesting Collection’, The Herald, Melbourne, 4 April 1932, p.10; ‘Designs in Lino. Cut.’, The Age, Melbourne, 5 April 1932, p.8; Streeton, A., ‘Art Exhibitions: Display of Lino Cuts’, The Argus, Melbourne, 5 April 1932, p.9; ‘A Woman’s Letter’, The Bulletin, Sydney, Double Christmas Number vol.53, no.2757, 14 December 1932, p.55; Simpson, C., ‘Prints by 50 Artists’, The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 8 March 1933, p.10
16. ‘Personal’, The Argus, Melbourne, 24 September 1930, p.6
17. Spowers, E., ‘Modern Art’, The Australasian, Melbourne, 26 April 1930, p.17
18. ’Nursery Rhymes in Ambulance’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 11 August 1938, p.25
19. Certificate of Death, Ethel Spowers, 5 May 1947, signed A. Fegan, Registrar, 9 June 1947
20. Memorial Exhibition, op. cit.
John Keats
John Keats is a great-nephew of Ethel Spowers and is compiling a catalogue raisonné of her prints, drawings and paintings which may be accessed at www.ethelspowers.com
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Location
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Auction
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Exhibition
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Sydney
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Melbourne
14-16 November 2024
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18-19 November 2024
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