The boy Samuel amid the offerings at the Tabernacle 1875
oil on canvas
Signed ‘Wm Strutt’ lower right
116.5 x 165cm
PROVENANCE
W.W. Clark, Sussex, 1912
Clune Galleries, Sydney, 1972
Private collection, Sydney
EXHIBITED
Wivell’s Art Gallery, Adelaide, 1883
Victorian Jubilee Exhibition, Melbourne, 1884
William Strutt Retrospective (touring exhibition):Art Gallery of New South Wales,
Feb-March 1981
Queensland Art Gallery, March-May 1981
Melbourne University Art Gallery, May-June 1981
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, June-July 1981
William Strutt arrived in Australia from England aboard the Culloden on the 5
July 1850 after a long sea journey originally prescribed as a cure for continuing
problems with his eyesight. The journey served its purpose and within days of
arriving he found work as an illustrator for the Illustrated Australian Magazine,
one of the first illustrated periodicals to appear in Australia which had just
been launched by Thomas Ham.
Within two years, Strutt was able to finish his work with Thomas Ham and rely
solely on portrait commissions. “His earliest known Australian portrait
is a sensitive and perceptive study in pencil, completed in 1852, of Richard
Hale Budd, the headmaster of Melbourne Diocesan Grammar School, with two of his
pupils” (La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria).
In 1856 after having spent a year in New Zealand, Strutt returned to
Melbourne.
He found that to make a new start was “a thing much more difficult than
on my first arrival, for there was competition and but a slender demand for art”.
However the commissioning of a portrait by John Pascoe Fawkner and some illustrating
and lithography work ensured Strutt’s survival.
In November that same year, the Victorian Society of Fine Arts was formed
which was an important development for art in Melbourne. The object of
the society
was “to advance the cause of the fine arts in Australia” and the
committee included the artists John Alexander Gilfillan, Charles Summers, Eugene
von Guerard, Ludwig Becker, Nicholas Chevalier and of course William Strutt.
Strutt’s life in Australia spanned a period of twelve years and
his pictoral coverage of events virtually became a history of that period
in Victoria. His
Australian work reached its climax in his sketches for the Departure of the Burke
and Wills Expedition from Royal Park, 1860.
Returning home to England with his family in 1862, “James Smith, the art
critic for the Argus, realised that the colony was losing ‘a man of sterling
quality and unaffected worth, and an artist whose abilities have been scantily
rewarded and imperfectly appreciated in Australia’”.
The boy Samuel was completed by Strutt after his return to England and is one
of his most elaborate and accomplished paintings. During the period 1865-1893
Strutt exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy in London and was becoming known
as a painter of religious mythology.
“Strutt was at work on the picture between 1872 and 1875 and in 1883 it
was sent out to Australia and exhibited, with other works by Strutt in E.J. Wivell’s
Art Gallery in Adelaide. A review of the exhibition by the South Australian Advertiser
read: ‘The principal work … is that of ‘The Child Samuel Ministering
in the Temple’. Mr Strutt was engaged for a very considerable time on this
painting and as may be readily understood, the details have been worked out with
wonderful fidelity. The colouring is excellent and the closest inspection can
hardly detect any blemish”.
‘…The ‘Samuel’ is
a picture of much research in its many details. I must confess I feel
a little proud of the boy prophet, the drawing and painting of the figure
and the white drapery, so difficult you know, to treat’ (William
Strutt, Nov 1883).
In May 1891 an article entitled ‘Mr William Strutt and Religious Art’,
appeared in a periodical called The Welcome Hour. It described the ‘Samuel’ in
some detail, and noted that although the painting ‘represented the labour
of nearly a decade’ it had never been exhibited (to the knowledge of the
writer).
In July 1908 Strutt noted in his diary that the picture was hanging at ‘Riseden’,
the home of his daughter Rosa and her husband William White Clark, in Sussex,
and in November 1912 an article in the Windsor Magazine illustrated the picture,
noting that it was in the collection of W.W. Clark Esq.
From 1912 until 1972 (the date of the painting’s arrival in Australia)
the history of the ‘Samuel’ is obscure”.
An exhibition of Australian Art in the 1870’s, assembled to mark the centenary
of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1976, firmly established Strutt’s
reputation as one of the most significant colonial painters to visit Australia.
REFERENCE
The Welcome Hour, May 1891, page 79
Windsor Magazine, November, 1912, page 626 and illustrated in black and white
on page 611
Clune Galleries, Sydney, A Selection of Paintings and Prints (catalogue) 1974,
illustrated in colour
Heather Curnow, The Life and Arts of William Strutt, Alister Taylor, Wauira,
Martinborough, NZ, 1980, illustrated page 148, plate 33
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, William Strutt Retrospective (catalogue),
1981, catalogue number 13, pages 29, 38, 71, illustrated page 71
REPRESENTED
National Gallery of Australia
National Gallery of Victoria
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Art Gallery of South Australia
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery
Royal Academy, London
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