Lot 2: Bernard Hall , British b.1871 'DO YOU WANT A MODEL SIR?' Oil on panel

Signed B. Hall (lower right); bears signature and title on label on reverse Oil on panel

22.5 by 31cm

Crawford Fine Art, Melbourne
Purchased from the above in 1984

Painted circa 1885
In his memoir of the artistic life in fin de siècle London, the cartoonist Harry Furniss describes how terrace houses occupied by painters commonly had 'the three large windows on the first floor ... half blocked up, either by closing their lower shutters, or, what was more common, by using a high curtain of a green opaque material. This proceeding was necessary in order to obtain a top and naturally, if possible, a north light.' Furniss goes on to note that houses thus identifiable as artists' studios 'received dozens of callers from among the numerous tribe of models who were wont to prowl about the neighbourhood in search of work.'υ1

Such a call is described in the present work, an interior by the young Bernard Hall, painted in London around 1885. The work is very much in the 'modern' or French-naturalist manner of the time, the style that Tom Roberts absorbed during his studies in England. Indeed, although Hall would not himself arrive in Australia until 1892, 'Do you want a model, sir?' could easily represent the interior of one of the more 'aesthetic' studios of Marvellous Melbourne. It contains all the signifiers of bohemia: the little plaster model of the Belvedere Torso, the blue glass vase of forget-me-nots, the 'turkey rugs', the Georgian-style chair and flashes of fashionable Orientalism: the Japanese umbrella hanging from the ceiling, the ginger jar full of paint brushes beneath the table and the 'bamboo' sprays of dried rushes. It even shows that precious 'top light', falling on the artist's shoulders, the tablecloth and the upper edges of the picture frame.

Beyond these advertisements of Whistlerian advanced taste, the painting also contains the kind of modest narrative and small mystery still loved by the Victorians. The dandy artist in his short-cut striped blazer, spats and the rakishly forward-tilted pork pie hat, with his palette in one hand and his mahl stick in the other, stands firm and determined (if with a slightly wrinkled coat collar); the applicant arises from the staircase dark and hesitant. Will he engage her? Have they met before? And who is the woman in the portrait?

In its psychological subtlety, formal balance and technical deftness, this charming, witty painting epitomises the worldwide Anglo-French naturalism of the 1880s, and shows just how much the Australian Impressionists drew from the example of their British contemporaries.

1. Harry Furniss, My bohemian days (2nd ed.), London: Hurst & Blackett Ltd, 1919, pp. 46-47