Paintings of Brisbane by Isaac Walter Jenner (1836-1902) such as Brisbane from Bowen Terrace, New Farm 1888 (illustrated) and View of Brisbane 1885 (illustrated) are on display in the upcoming exhibition ‘Isaac Walter Jenner: A feeling for Light’ at the Queensland Art Gallery from 2 September 2023 – 28 January 2024. The exhibition explores the evocative paintings of the English born artist, a self-taught marine and landscape painter who spent eighteen years in Brisbane and was a major force in the city’s burgeoning cultural life.
Such paintings at the time of their execution supplied the population of Brisbane with artistic impressions of their new home, and in some ways validating it — art as a sense of place — and for us viewing the paintings today, as historical records of the busy shipping life of the young port city.
At the age of 47 Jenner travelled to Australia with his wife and seven children, and his eldest daughter Mary Ellen’s fiance. During his stay, Jenner worked tirelessly to secure opportunities where artists could show and sell their work.
Jenner spent eighteen years in Brisbane and was a major force in the burgeoning cultural life of the young city. Following his arrival in Brisbane in 1883, he lobbied for a public art gallery, exhibited widely, held art unions, and with fellow artists Oscar Friström (1856 –1918) (illustrated) and LWK Wirth (1858 –1950) was instrumental in the development of, and a founding member of the Queensland Art Society in 1887 and also lobbied consistently for the establishment of a national gallery in Queensland.
From 1887 Jenner had a private teaching studio at the Brisbane Technical College and from his studio at Taringa attracted leading Queensland artists, among them he encouraged Brisbane artist JJ Hilder (1881–1916) (illustrated).
Oscar Friström ‘View of Scarborough’ 1899
JJ Hilder ‘Island schooner, Moreton Bay’ 1910
When the Queensland National Art Gallery opened in 1895, Jenner was one of the first three artists to present a painting for the Gallery’s founding collection with Cape Chudleigh, Coast of Labrador 1893 (reworked 1895) (illustrated), together with R Godfrey Rivers (1858-1925) with Woolshed, New South Wales 1890 (illustrated), and Oscar Friström with Duramboi 1893 (illustrated).
The painting of the Coast of Labrador, imagined fifty years after the event and half a world away, is a romantic recollection from Jenner’s voyages to the frozen North with the distant crimson glow suggesting the fate of a ship which disappeared during a failed expedition to discover the North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The tragedy captured popular imagination during the nineteenth century.
Isaac Walter Jenner ‘Cape Chudleigh, Coast of Labrador’ 1893
R. Godfrey Rivers ‘Woolshed, New South Wales’ 1890
Oscar Friström ‘Duramboi’ 1893
Jenner was an untrained artist, who, after serving as a seaman with the Royal Navy (illustrated), retired at the age of 29 to Brighton, England, to pursue a career in art. Though this might be perceived as a somewhat unconventional decision, Jenner undoubtedly had a natural, conservatively expressed talent and he achieved moderate success in England. His first-hand experience of ships and the sea made it inevitable that he should become primarily a marine painter.
As a seaman, Jenner was knowledgeable about the construction and rigging of ships; he also worked as a ship’s painter, which included doing decorative work and signwriting.It is likely that Jenner would have observed marine artists at work on board ships throughout his naval career.
Isaac Walter Jenner serving in the Royal Navy
As historical documents, Jenner’s paintings of early Brisbane record the busy shipping life of the municipality. This is particularly true of Brisbane from Bowen Terrace, New Farm, not only for its depiction of early Brisbane, but especially of the rigging of the ships, which testify to Jenner’s love and knowledge of the sea. The main ship in the painting is the RMS Quetta (illustrated), which was regularly used on the London-Brisbane ocean mail service. A photograph of a similar view appeared in a local paper in 1895. In 1890, two years after Jenner completed this painting, the RMS Quetta sank in Torres Strait.
Isaac Walter Jenner ‘Brisbane from Bowen Terrace, New Farm’ 1888
RMS Quetta
The outlook employed by Jenner in Brisbane from Bowen Terrace, New Farm was ideal for capturing the impressive sweep of the Brisbane River and its lively traffic, with the rising cityscape in the background. The popularity of this vantage point is confirmed by several contemporary photographs, and by engraved illustrations in the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia that feature the same scene. Quite a few of Jenner’s compositions resemble individual engravings in the volume of the atlas that deals with views of Queensland. Though it has been suggested that the artist produced some of these paintings as ‘speculative’ works for the publication, it is more likely that Jenner himself was taking inspiration from the large pool of popular illustrative material that was in circulation at this time. The engravings appeared in the first volume of the atlas published in 1883, thus pre-dating Jenner’s paintings by several years.
Onésime Reclus ‘Contemporary views of Brisbane’
Brisbane from Bowen Terrace
Frederic B Schell ‘Brisbane from Bowen Terrace’
RMS Quetta
Jenner’s View of Brisbane (illustrated) also seem to be based on sources available in the Picturesque Atlas. This is not to suggest that Jenner was not personally familiar with the sites featured. Rather, his adoption of the viewpoints indicates that the rendering of these scenes had already become a pictorial convention. There is no record of the paintings being exhibited in Brisbane during Jenner’s lifetime, but it is interesting to note that all these works were reacquired from private English collections in the early 1980s. Whether they were taken to Britain as souvenirs of mercantile success or have had interesting, alternative histories is now impossible to trace.
Isaac Walter Jenner ‘View of Brisbane’ 1885
When Jenner arrived...
Evening (Mt Coot-tha from Dutton Park) 1898 (illustrated) is an accomplished work of a painter aware of the work of his Australian contemporaries Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder. FJ (Frederick James) Martyn Roberts, born in 1871 was 27 at the time he completed Evening using the Australian impressionists broad-brushed technique to depict the landscape looking toward South Brisbane with Mt. Coot-tha in the distance.
Dutton Park, an inner southern suburb is bordered by Highgate Hill, Fairfield and Woolloongabba, and is only 3kms from Brisbane’s CBD. Development in the suburb was relatively slow because of difficult terrain as the area was originally heavily timbered with deep gullies, initially a farming area, however by around the 1890s, the area became increasingly populated.
You can see similar perspectives photographed in 1884 taken from O’Rielly’s Hill (now Highgate Hill) looking across West End (then South Brisbane) towards Toowong, with Mt. Coot-tha in the distance with the unsealed road now Dornoch Terrace. Contemporary photography of the Brisbane River from Dutton Park in 1914 and later are a good indication as to what Martyn Roberts would have seen, with views documented from Mt Coot-tha looking back to Dutton Park showing the Brisbane River snaking through the recently formed municipality.
Contemporary views from Dutton Park
Contemporary view from Mt. Coot-tha to Dutton Park
Although artists like R Godfrey Rivers, perhaps Brisbane’s most prominent artist of the time when Evening… was painted, best known for Under the jacaranda 1903, he was not overtly influenced by the techniques of the Australian impressionists, however, the style was not unknown in Brisbane. All the significant artists working in the style came from the southern states — a number of works that had been influenced by the movement were being created and exhibited in Brisbane.
The inclusion of works by prominent southern artists, including Julian Ashton, Sydney Long and Tom Roberts, in the Queensland Art Society Annual Exhibitions during the 1890s was greeted with enthusiasm by local reviewers and artists. There was optimism that a continued presence by these artists would assist the development of the local art scene, and although few continued to exhibit with the Society after the turn of the century, and the works sent were not of the highest quality, Brisbane did experience at least a limited exposure to their work.
The most notable Brisbane artist experimenting with the style was a student and colleague of Rivers, FJ Martyn Roberts, whose painting Evening shows that by 1898, at least one influential local artist was using the impressionists technique to depict a landscape in the afterglow — a favourite pictorial device of the Heidelberg School artists. Roberts had spent a short time in Sydney during the 1890s under the tutelage of Julian Ashton, and he had painted en plein air with a number of other members of Sydney’s avant-garde.
FJ Martyn Roberts ‘Evening (Mt Coot-tha from Dutton Park)’ 1988
Evening was immediately recognised as a ‘modern’ work at its display in the Queensland Art Society’s 1898 Annual Exhibition. Roberts’s painting shared the Society’s prizes that year and the Brisbane Courier reviewed the work with guarded enthusiasm:
Mr Roberts is an impressionist, and an exponent of much of the broad modern school of work… Altogether the picture is a very vigorous and distinctly convincing suggestion, and a promise of the future excellence of the artist is contained in it.
Roberts’s style attracted much local attention, and many years later it was regretted that he had not been able to paint more prolifically, due to his teaching commitments at the Brisbane Technical College where he succeeded Rivers as Supervisor of the Art Department.
He was somewhat in advance of his time … had the opportunity been his to continue more as a practising painter than as a tutor he would have held a place to-day with Streeton, Gruner, and Lambert. His work and that of Streeton was [sic] very similar in those far-off days.
Edited extract from ‘Looking for the ‘Beau Mode’ in Brisbane: Godfrey Rivers Under the jacaranda‘ by Sara Tiffin from Brought to Light: Australian Art 1850-1965, Queensland Art Gallery, 1998.
Curatorial extracts, research and supplementary material compiled by Elliott Murray, Senior Digital Marketing Officer, QAGOMA
FJ Martyn Roberts
FJ Martyn Roberts was a major influence on students and artists in Brisbane. He began teaching in 1894 at the South Brisbane Technical College and after a number of moves within the system was appointed Supervisor of the Arts Department at the Central Technical College in 1916 following the resignation of R Godfrey Rivers in 1915. Roberts held this position until his retirement in 1936 despite widespread public agitation to have his appointment extended. Noted artists among his pupils at the Technical College were Lloyd Rees and Daphne Mayo.
