The Exhibition of Australian Art in London was a show organised by the trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), notably Julian Ashton, and financially supported by the philanthropist Eadith Walker. Held at London's Grafton Galleries between April and September 1898, it featured 371 artworks made in Australia by 114 artists, and was the first major exhibition of Australian art to occur internationally.
The exhibition focused almost exclusively on art from the previous ten years, a time of intense patriotic feeling in Britain's Australian colonies, which were then on the cusp of federating to form the Commonwealth of Australia. By staging the exhibition in London, the capital of the British Empire, the organisers sought to promote the idea of an emerging Australian tradition in Western art, and to depict the maturity of Australia as an embryonic nation. Some Australians also felt that local artists, compared to local writers, had hitherto been overlooked in Britain, and, as the Grafton Galleries catalogue highlighted, it was time to showcase a collection of works "for the judgement of connoisseurs outside of Australia."
In order to build a "representative" collection, the AGNSW trustees sought submissions from artists throughout the colonies. However, the final selection of works received criticism for evidencing a bias toward New South Wales artists, and several organisers, including Ashton, himself a prominent artist and taste-maker, were accused of self-promotion. Despite these controversies, the exhibition won considerable, if unanticipated, critical acclaim in Britain, and such was the show's popularity that Grafton Galleries kept it open for four months past the original closing date. It remains the largest exhibition of Australian art in Britain, and is also notable for its near equal representation of women artists, a far higher percentage than any other show of its kind.
History
The main sponsor of the exhibition was Sydney philanthropist Eadith Walker, whose father, merchant banker and property developer Thomas Walker, left her with a sizeable inheritance in 1886. Taught that wealth "brought responsibilities and obligations", Eadith considered it her patriotic duty to support the development of Australian culture, in particular contemporary Australian art, as she was noted for her patronage of Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and other members of the impressionist Heidelberg School, acquiring many of their works. Upon appeal of the AGNSW trustees, Walker donated £740 for the staging of the London exhibition, or three quarters of its total budget. Although she expressly wished to leave the exhibition's curation "in the hands of those immediately involved with the movement", Walker loaned four works to the show, among them Purple, Green and Gold by Streeton and his own View of Sydney Harbour.
Apart from Walker, there were nine additional private lenders of art to the show. Conversely, "there was no shortage of supply for works offered by individual artists." Tasked with selecting works for the show, the AGNSW trustees created committees from Adelaide, Brisbane, and Melbourne to suggest works from their respective colonies. The trustees arrived at their final decision under the advice of members of the Art Society and Society of Artists, both based in Sydney. One of the trustees, influential artist, teacher and president of the Society of Artists, Julian Ashton, had nineteen of his works selected, the most of any artist. For this, Ashton was accused of abusing his power, and in early 1898, the Minister's Department was presented a petition asking for Ashton to resign as a trustee. However, he was not the only organiser who received preferential treatment. Albert Henry Fullwood, vice president of the Society of Artists, would have seventeen works included. Similarly, William Lister Lister included fourteen of his canvases after the trustees chose him to oversee the selection of works from the Art Society, for which he served as vice president. Nepotism seemed to extend beyond New South Wales to Queensland with two paintings by Godfrey Rivers, the Queensland Art Gallery's secretary of trustees and curator, being the only ones selected from the museum's batch of submitted works.