Sleeping Beauty Story Navy Blue Flower Dress Target
For most of us, the word 'fairy-tale' conjures up the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and the magical worlds of Disney.
But Australia needn't look to Europe or the US to find inspiration — we have a surprising, rich history of our own.
At the beginning of the 20th century, one woman in particular was bringing fairies to life for generations of Australian children.
Her name was Ida Rentoul Outhwaite.
Well before modern fairy-tale iterations saw Frozen's Anna and Elsa crowned as unexpected feminist icons, she was celebrating the power of the feminine in subtle ways.
"I think my favourite scene of hers is from [the book] Elves and Fairies, in which you have koalas sitting around a table and they are all in tails and smoking cigars," says Rebeccca-Anne do Rozario, a lecturer in fantasy and fairy-tales at Monash University.
"That really encapsulates that kind of Anglophile, middle-class Australian at the time, particularly the men I am afraid.
"And then she has the ephemeral fairies serving them.
"That really struck me as emblematic of what society was like ... at the time."
The story of Rentoul Outhwaite's rapid rise to fame, and then her dwindling popularity, charts the difficult path to recognition many female artists faced in the 20th century.
It is also the story of changing artistic tastes, and a subject matter that, while beguiling, was easily dismissed as a mere feminine folly.
When the artist and illustrator died in 1960, minimal column inches were devoted to her.
But 40 years earlier she'd been the belle of Melbourne society; famous both in Australia and abroad.
Australian fairy stories fit for a Queen
Her exhibitions were opened by the likes of Dame Nellie Melba, the governor-general and governors' wives.
Royalty bought her paintings, and one of her books, Fairyland, was gifted to an infant Princess Elizabeth, now the Queen.
"Ida was tremendously influential during her lifetime and afterwards for creating an Australian version of the fairy-tale and creating an Australian identity for childhood in many ways," says rare book dealer Doug Stewart.
"So many people today have got fond memories of growing up in a house where they found a book illustrated by Ida Rentoul Outhwaite and they were entranced by it."
Do Rozario says Rentoul Outhwaite brought a unique Australian flavour to the tradition.
"The first fairy-tales in Australia really start in the mid to late 1800s," she says.
"Most authors would include the bush or wattle or references like that, to really establish that these are Australian fairytales."
Born into a literary and artistic family, Rentoul Outhwaite published her first book in 1904, at the age of 16.
Called Mollie's Bunyip, it was written by her sister Annie Rentoul, and published at a time when Australian artists and writers were forging a distinct national identity in the post-Federation years.
Alongside the more traditional European images of collecting blackberries and mushrooms, Rentoul Outhwaite included distinctly Australian motifs of kookaburras and billy tea.
A pivotal moment
Her magnum opus, Elves and Fairies, is still regarded as a pivotal moment in Australian publishing history.
One of the first fine art books printed in this country, it was published in 1916, just a few months after her publisher, Lothian, released a similarly lavish production on the art of Frederick McCubbin.
With its cloth-bound cover and high-grade paper, Elves and Fairies, and the exhibitions of her work that followed, propelled Rentoul Outhwaite onto the world stage.
"It created a huge buzz around her work," Mr Stewart says.
"If you look at the list of subscribers, which is printed in the book, you find a litany of the greatest social, artistic, cultural figures in Australian society at the time — you've got governors, you've got Dame Nellie Melba, you've got singers and writers and collectors.
"I mean, this is unusual as these are children's illustrations. These are not Arthur Streeton's or Tom Roberts."
Rediscovering a legend
These days, the name Ida Rentoul Outhwaite is rarely spoken of in the same breath as other late 19th and early 20th century artists such as McCubbin, Streeton or Roberts.
But renewed interest in her work — from collectors and scholars alike — is leading to a re-evaluation of its importance.
Johanna Selleck, a flautist, composer and honorary fellow at the University of Melbourne, has been researching a series of song books on bush themes that Rentoul Outhwaite illustrated.
The first in the series was launched in 1907 at the Women's Work Exhibition in Melbourne — a ground-breaking event at the time.
It was the era of the suffragettes and feminism's first flush, and the exhibition was a showcase of women's achievements in art, music, craft and other pursuits.
Anita Callaway, the Nelson Meers Foundation Lecturer in Australian Art at Sydney University, says the path Rentoul Outhwaite's career took was not uncommon for female artists at the time.
Women, she says, "had to be somewhat devious" in order to maintain a professional career, and commercial art was something that was open to them.
Rentoul Outhwaite illustrated advertising material for everyone from local furniture stores to the British Imperial Oil Company.
It is also for this reason, Dr Callaway believes, that her artistic achievements have been slow to be recognised.
Her work was the realm of illustration, not high art.
Furthermore, her subject matter was predominantly of fantasy and fairies — not serene Australian bush landscapes.
"If we are talking about traditional art history, textbook art history, Ida is afforded very little space," Dr Callaway says.
"If we are talking about the turn of the 19th century into the early 20th century, art was a profession that was really a closed shop for male artists who painted those wonderful bush landscapes.
"You know, full of blue skies and golden pastures dotted with sheep and so on, and purple hills in the hazy distance."
But Dr Selleck says that while critics might dismiss Rentoul Outhwaite's fairy illustrations as merely "pretty illustrations", she would argue they go much deeper than that.
"They are often emotionally quite intense," she says.
"There is always the fairy or the child, and it is usually feminine. She might be floating above this very rocky landscape or very scary deep sea, but there is never any fear.
"It is as though the projection of the feminine in Ida's drawings is very, very powerful."
bridgeforthupeor1956.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-02/australian-fairytale-legend-ida-rentoul-outhwaite/10285990
0 Response to "Sleeping Beauty Story Navy Blue Flower Dress Target"
Post a Comment