Continuing my exploration of the National Gallery of Victoria for ‘National Science Week’, I decided to try the search term ‘scientist’. This proved less fruitful than I expected, with only one entry. However, I was directed to the photographs of the mid 20th century Melbourne doctor – Dr Julian Smith.
Julian Smith was prolific and the NGV has 219 of his photographs in the collection. Smith was born in Surrey, England in 1873 and emigrated to Australia with his family as a toddler. He was educated in Adelaide and Melbourne and studied medicine which led to him becoming a highly-regarded surgeon at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne (after a stint working on vaccines in London). On his retirement from active practice, Smith invented a pump which greatly expedited the operation of blood transfusion from donor to patient and proved life-saving by the Australian Army Medical Corps in the Second World War.
Smith was also the subject of an Archibald Prize winning portrait by W. B. McInnes (acting-director of the NGV and head of the painting school) in 1936.
Smith was better known to the public as an ‘artist of the camera’. He took up photography late in life and was an advocate of the Pictorialist approach to the medium. Pictorialism explored photography’s relationship to fine art, the imagination and self-expression. Smith developed this in his portrait studies, mostly of men, which were exhibited both locally and internationally. Elected as an honorary member of the Royal Photographic Society, his works were selected by them on two occasions as the outstanding photographs of the year.
Smith photographed well-known people including the artists Daryl Lindsay and John Shirlow; the photographers Harold Cazneaux and John Eaton; and fellow doctors Sir Howard Florey and Sir Thomas Dunhill. He was described as the ‘Charles Dickens of photographic representation’ and he was particularly fond of staging portraits of Dickensian subjects which exemplified their personalities and motivations. His study of anatomy and his work as a surgeon doubtless gave Smith an understanding of the human body which allowed him to create such vivid and expressive portraits.
Smith also developed an unorthodox, but remarkably successful, technique for the processing of his prints which made his work readily identifiable. Shortly after his death, Kodak published a portfolio of Smith’s portraits, ‘Fifty Masterpieces of Photography’ 1949 (this can be purchased from rareillustratedbooks.com for $850).
NGV Collection
Following the trail of doctors in the NGV collection generated more promising results. I discovered a portrait of Dr Maund by Nicholas Chevalier from 1863 and a portrait of Dr Will Maloney by John Russell from 1887. Both these doctors were extraordinary in their endeavours to improve the lives of the disadvantaged in the state of Victoria. Maund was one of the founders of the Women’s Hospital (originally known as the Lying-In Hospital) and Maloney was not only a doctor but a progressive politician who championed the care of children, the aged, the unemployed, and returned soldiers. Their lives and times will be the subject of a future blogpost.
On my journey, I also came across a photographic peer of Dr Smith’s – a Dr L. A. Love. There is little information on this Melbourne doctor but his photographic portraiture was clearly influenced by Smith. I was particularly struck by his photograph of The Microbe Hunter and its contemporary relevance for the coronavirus pandemic. His name – ‘L.A. Love’, while evoking images of a swingers party in California, also reminded me of the affection felt for our current Chief Health Officer and celebrity epidemiologists.
Further delving in the NGV collection produced a painting of Dr John Dale by Colin Colahan. Wearing a striking red dressing gown, smoking a pipe and intent on what he is writing, the portrait of Dr Dale suggests that, for the devoted doctor, work never stops. Dale (1885-1952) was born in Warwickshire, received his undergraduate medical degree and public health degree from Birmingham, and served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War. He was decorated by the English with an OBE and the French for ‘overcoming a typhoid epidemic’.
After demobilisation, Dale and his family migrated to Australia in 1920 – first to Perth and later to Melbourne so Dale could become medical officer of health to the City of Melbourne. In this role, he significantly lowered the infant mortality rate, improved the general health of impoverished children and their mothers, and played a major role in the poliomyelitis epidemic of 1937-38.
Dale, who called himself ‘a wandering Pommy’ was a much-loved member of the medical profession and Melbourne community. Described as tall, lanky and angular, with a rugged face, a charming smile and a ‘deep resonant musical voice’ (suited to singing German lieder), he had many friends who shared his cultural and sporting interests. Dale was the perfect Chief Health Officer to reassure the public during a health crisis.
The portrait by Colahan was a finalist in the 1932 Archibald Prize but lost out to a painting of Sir William Irvine by Ernest Buckmaster. Painting a doctor in a red dressing gown had a precedent in John Singer Sargent’s ‘Dr Pozzi at Home’ 1881 which hangs in the Hammond Museum in Los Angeles. (Curiously, this was the last painting I photographed in the last public museum I visited in March before returning to lockdown in Melbourne). Samuel-Jean Pozzi was a pioneer in the field of modern gynaecology, as well as an aesthete, art collector and charismatic ‘man of the world’. He, and his milieu (including the art world of the Belle Epoque) are the subject of a fascinating recent book by Julian Barnes ‘The Man in the Red Coat’ 2019.
In general, doctors do not have a particularly visible public profile. However, during a pandemic they become the sources of information, the voices of reason, and the providers of reassurance and hope. And, depending on their persona, they can also be the ‘charismatic object of desire’. Our own Chief Health Officer, Professor Brett Sutton, has generated considerable positive commentary and a whole range of merchandising possibilities. The redbubble.com website lists 471 possible Brett Sutton objects from mugs to bed linen and from masks to tee shirts. With slogans like ‘Brett wants you (or me) at home’ and ‘Cute as a Sutton’, there are others which are described as ‘mature content’!
I imagine Sutton was bemused by a recent article from ‘The Conversation’ 11 August, which discusses how he has been fetishized and even sexualized: https://theconversation.com/calling-brett-sutton-a-chottie-is-not-objectification-but-its-not-feminism-either-144134
In the spirit of depicting doctors in art during National Science Week, I will finish with Charlotte Kealey’s portrait of our Chief Health Officer as #CHOttie.
How times have changed!!!