Three of Bendigo Art Gallery’s most beloved paintings will be returning to display this week after extensive conservation treatments.
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The large painting, A Horse Market in a German Town, by Franz Hochmann, was an early acquisition in the gallery’s history, being purchased in 1888, just one year after the gallery’s establishment.
The work depicts a busy market with a menagerie of domestic animals including goats, geese, horses and cattle. With its vignettes of everyday peasant life, this painting appealed to the late Victorian sensibility which dominated the early collecting at the gallery and has remained one of the most admired works on display. Hochmann’s epic painting (the work is a dramatic 2.2 x 3 metres) is currently on display in Bolton Court.
Two other works will shortly return to display in the gallery when the exhibition Collective Vision opens on Saturday, March 4. Thomas Clark’s Ulysses and Diomed Capturing the Horses of Rhesus, King of Thrace, is a very significant work in the gallery’s collection. Thomas Clark trained at the Royal Academy in London and taught at the School of Design at Birmingham and the Nottingham School of the Arts, before arriving in Australia around 1855.
He was appointed the first drawing master at the School of Design at the National Gallery School. This work was first exhibited in London at the British Institution Gallery in 1850. Ulysses and Diomed is the only known work to have survived from Clark’s artistic career prior to his arrival in Australia.
James Watney Wilson’s painting: King Cophetua and the Beggarmaid, will also be revealed this weekend for Collective Vision. The work is a contemporary copy of Edward Burne-Jones’s painting of the same name, which now resides in the Tate Gallery, London. Burne-Jones’s painting of the African king Cophetua and his love for the beggar Penelophon was based on an Elizabethan ballad and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem The Beggar Maid. The original painting was executed in 1884, while Bendigo’s copy was completed in 1906.
Each of these paintings has undergone extensive conservation, including removal of surface dirt and old and yellowed varnish, any loose or flaking paint has been secured and then the works have been revarnished. The frames, all of which is original to the work, have all undergone significant conservation work including cleaning, securing of loose elements, and in some cases missing elements such as decorative beading and flowers have been recreated. In the case of Thomas Clark’s painting, parts of the frame have also been regilded using the same techniques as those utilised in the nineteenth century.
These are just three of the outstanding works from the gallery’s permanent collection which will be on display in the exhibition Collective Vision: 130 years. The exhibition opens on Saturday, March 4, and entry is by donation.