M J MacNally by Silas Clifford-Smith
During the early decades of the twentieth century, watercolour painting became increasingly popular with Australian male artists. Perhaps inspired by the work of J.J. Hilder and Blamire Young, many artists took up the medium which had once been the domain of natural history painters. One artist who personifies this trend was James MacNally. Despite being a respected painter during the interwar years, his contribution to Australian art has been largely forgotten since his death. We will try and redress this neglect by discovering more about his life and career, and examine his little known contribution to art criticism.
Matthew James MacNally was born in the north east Victorian town of Benalla on 5 July 1873.The Benalla district of his youth was then the late life hunting ground of legendary bushranger, Ned Kelly. While Kelly and his gang were establishing their reputations, James MacNally’s Irish-born parents were already well established Benalla shopkeepers. James was an only child so his parents were able to pay for his education, firstly at Benalla College, and subsequently at St Patrick’s College in Melbourne.
As a youth MacNally wanted to be an architect, but due to failed family speculations he was forced into an insurance career in Melbourne. Several years later, in the mid-1890s, he moved to Sydney and became captivated with the world of art while continuing to work as a clerk. In Sydney he took drawing lessons with artists Hal Waugh and Hal Thorpe, and through them became friendly with several other painters, including Tom Roberts, who became an intermittent but lifelong friend.
After being dismissed from his clerical post, MacNally returned to Melbourne in 1899 and enrolled in the National Gallery of Victoria’s School of Design. He worked under Frederick McCubbin for a year, but the discipline of drawing from plaster casts was irksome. He later studied watercolour and printmaking with John Mather and etching with John Shirlow. MacNally’s tentative etchings from this time are his earliest known surviving images.
Family financial pressures again forced MacNally to abandon his art for a return to commerce. Turning his back on insurance, he began working for a butter exporting business. He found financial success in this venture, and soon purchased a studio apartment on the top floor of Oxford Chambers in Bourke Street, right at the heart of the fashionable Melbourne quarter known as ‘The Block’. A sociable man, MacNally began to mix with many of Victoria’s prominent artists, musicians, critics and connoisseurs.
Despite his time-consuming business commitments, MacNally became increasingly dedicated to watercolour, often painting around Malmsbury (95 km north-west of Melbourne), and in 1908 he submitted several works to the Victorian Artists’ Society annual exhibition. He established a ‘Thursday’ sketch club with a dozen or so artist friends. When the weather was fine, the group (which included George Courtney Benson, Percy Lindsay and Ambrose Paterson) drove to the picturesque sketching spots around Melbourne when they were not working in MacNally’s city studio.
MacNally’s involvement with the Melbourne art scene was curtailed for several years when he was relocated to England for extensive periods by his employer. Despite his English posting, MacNally continued to experiment with his art and enrolled at the Herkomer Art School in Hertfordshire. Although mostly taught by the school’s art tutors, MacNally later acknowledged that the five minute watercolour lesson he received from Sir Hubert Herkomer RA was the most valuable lesson he ever had in his life. MacNally claimed that while in England he became a member of the prestigious Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours. While this may indeed be true, the Royal Institute has found no lasting evidence of his membership in their archives.
As war clouds formed over Europe, MacNally returned to Melbourne, but soon retired from the world of butter when his business was requisitioned by the government. MacNally’s wartime works were mainly pastoral panoramas dominated by large rain-filled skies that showed the influence of J.J. Hilder. As well as his watercolours, MacNally experimented in oil and revisited the art of printmaking. He also began to regularly exhibit his work with the Melbourne art dealer W H Gill at his Fine Art Gallery.
Dame Nelly Melba became friendly with MacNally, and in her circle he mixed with important art-loving establishment figures, such as Sir Baldwin Spencer and the war-time Governor-General, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson. The Governor-General became a good friend of MacNally and during his time in Australia was a frequent visitor to his studio. Leon Gellert (a co-editor of Art in Australia), later revealed that MacNally’s Melbourne studio ‘was open house to the local intelligentsia, and the first call for brother artists from neighbouring States’.
During the final years of the war MacNally joined two professional art groups, the Melbourne-based Australian Art Association, and the all male, Sydney-based, Australian Arts Club. Both organisations had small select memberships, which included some of the most influential artists in the country. MacNally’s friendly nature, art knowledge and powerful friends soon saw him appointed, in 1918, as the Victorian representative on the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board.
That same year, MacNally gained national attention with an illustrated profile in Art in Australia.Written by Harry Julius, in the eulogistic style associated with the magazine, the article tells of MacNally’s harsh editing of his own work, especially in the early years of his career when he often destroyed his work. The lack of early examples of his painting – especially his European period work – certainly raises doubt to the artist’s claim that he was a member of the prestigious Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours when he was living in England before the war.
MacNally was recognised, by several commentators, as a man who helped and encouraged emerging artists such as the Ballarat-born painter, Harold Herbert. MacNally had noticed the skill of this watercolourist and helped him get attention on the Melbourne art scene. This mentorship led to the pair holding three joint exhibitions of their work in Sydney and Melbourne during the early 1920s. These shows were popular, especially after the publication of a MacNally and Herbert joint special edition of Art in Australia in 1920, a significant compliment for two early career artists.
The period from the end of the war to the mid-1930s was arguably the busiest exhibiting period in MacNally’s art career and during that time he held over a dozen one-man shows in the eastern state capitals. The popularity of his heavy wash watercolours reflected the public interest in the medium in the early interwar period. This artistic style was not appreciated by all; George Lambert on his return to Australia in 1921 cuttingly described the Australian watercolourists as being of the blotting paper school of Australian painting.
Despite Lambert’s criticisms, the new interest in watercolour painting led to the establishment of the Australian Watercolour Institute (AWI) in 1923. The first AWI exhibition in Sydney in March 1924 was a triumph, both for the AWI and MacNally.
During the 1920s and 30s almost all of the Melbourne newspapers employed well known artists to comment on the goings on in the local art world, so it was hardly surprising that The Age engaged MacNally as their principal critic from 1924 to 1926. MacNally took easily to journalism and his art writing and book reviews soon became a regular feature of the paper.
While working on The Age, MacNally – now aged in his early fifties – met the journalist and poet Margaret (Rita) McLeod, eighteen years his junior; the couple married on 19 March 1925. The following year the couple left Victoria for a new life in Sydney. Initially settling in the Pittwater area, MacNally began to paint the northern beaches area of Sydney. MacNally had several addresses in Sydney but by 1928 he was living in Cronulla, a beachside suburb on the southern fringes of the city. The couple’s home, Lynn Cottage in Arthur Avenue, Cronulla, became a destination point for artists and writers. The birth of a son named William (Billy) made the family complete.
MacNally became the Daily Telegraph art reviewer after moving to Sydney. Along with his exhibition reviews, he wrote profiles on established traditional artists such as Lister, Heysen and Lionel Lindsay. While these articles were not ground-breaking, his observations on mild Modernists are sometimes revealing. After leaving the Daily Telegraph in 1927 MacNally wrote little during the late 1920s and early 30s apart from the occasional journal article and review in the Sydney Sun newspaper.
During the early thirties MacNally became friendly with W.H. Ifould OBE, then director of the Mitchell Library and an important trustee of the NSW Art Gallery. Through Ifould, MacNally received a large commission to paint many of the historic buildings in the ‘Macquarie Towns’ west of Sydney. For the project the MacNally's relocated to historic Claremont House in Windsor. This early period home was his base as he travelled to heritage properties in the district.
Some of these architectural-themed works were included in a 1931 show at the Macquarie Galleries, while others were later exhibited at the Mitchell Library. Through this commission, MacNally became increasingly known as a painter of historical buildings and he painted many grand Sydney houses during the Depression years.
Late in 1935 the MacNally's decided to relocate to Adelaide. Rita explained the move in a letter to a family friend:
I received a good offer to go back to journalism from the Adelaide “Mail”, the paper I was on before the Melbourne “Age”, & I decided to accept it. Matt has got tired of the country & he has an opportunity of taking up the journalistic work he did on “The Age” when we go to Adelaide. He will do something for one of the papers there & start art classes. We like Adelaide very much. Claremont is a lovely place but too big for us – it’s like living in Buckingham Palace with one page boy!
MacNally soon connected with the Adelaide art community by joining the Royal South Australian Society of Arts. Despite regularly exhibiting with the Australian Watercolour Institute, he rarely did so interstate after moving to South Australia. As planned, MacNally, after his move to South Australia, became the principal art writer on the Adelaide News and Mail.
In 1938 the New York-based Carnegie Corporation made a grant to the National Gallery of South Australia to assist in the establishment of extension services. MacNally became a ‘Carnegie Lecturer’ at the gallery and gave talks on art appreciation from 1938 until the early 1940s. Titles for MacNally’s lectures included: ‘What is Art?’; ‘Australian landscape’; and the intriguing ‘Psycho-Analysis: What effect has it had on Modern Art?’
One of the few living artists who knew MacNally is Jeffrey Smart. The Adelaide-born painter was reviewed by MacNally in the early 1940s. In a recent interview with the author, Smart mentioned MacNally’s review:
He gave a favourable review at one of my early shows. That was at the Royal South Australian Society of Arts. He wasn’t a very perceptive person really. He was what you might call one of the gentleman artists. He was always dressed in tweeds, well dressed and had a great air about him.
Smart fondly remembers the comic side of MacNally’s personality when he was lecturing at the Adelaide gallery:
He was rather amusing. One time he was lecturing a group of us and Louis McCubbin walked passed, and MacNally stopped and his eyes bulged and his finger came out and he followed Mr McCubbin and he said in a throaty voice, “there is the director of the gallery, look!” Poor Louis McCubbin felt terribly embarrassed.
MacNally rarely exhibited in Adelaide during his final years, the exception being at Preece’s Gallery in 1938 and at the Royal South Australian Society of Arts rooms in 1942. After a long illness the 70 year old artist died at his Mount Lofty home on Thursday 24 September 1943. Although his death was noted in the Adelaide press, his passing was largely ignored by the interstate papers.
During his career he had painted in Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia and overseas. His works were mainly landscapes or house paintings, but reflecting his sporting interests also included the occasional image of golfers, boxers and fly fisherman. Since his death there have been two major exhibitions of his work, one at John Martin’s Art Gallery in Adelaide (1946) and a retrospective at the Benalla Art Gallery (1974). MacNally’s work is included in most state galleries, large libraries and several regional galleries, but, as watercolour is a light sensitive medium his images are rarely on view.
Although MacNally became an artist relatively late in life, he approached his new profession like he had his business career. Through a combination of hard work, talent and adept social networking he soon became a leading member of the art world during the post war boom in Australian art. Although he did experiment with oil and printmaking, his reputation is based mainly on his skill with watercolour, and after the medium became less fashionable in the late 1930s, so did his reputation. While MacNally is best known as a painter, his little known writings may be his lasting legacy. While rarely an insightful art critic, his articles and letters reveal much about the friendships and conflicts in the Australian art world during the interwar period and deserve further study.
© Silas Clifford-Smith, 2013
Special thanks to the late Jeffrey Smart for passing on his early memories of MacNally. Thanks also to George Large, Ron Radford, Barry Pearce and Catriona Moore. This piece is an abridged version of an article first published in the February 2008 issue of Australiana magazine (the journal of the Australiana Society). The original piece included references and more images.
Matthew James MacNally was born in the north east Victorian town of Benalla on 5 July 1873.The Benalla district of his youth was then the late life hunting ground of legendary bushranger, Ned Kelly. While Kelly and his gang were establishing their reputations, James MacNally’s Irish-born parents were already well established Benalla shopkeepers. James was an only child so his parents were able to pay for his education, firstly at Benalla College, and subsequently at St Patrick’s College in Melbourne.
As a youth MacNally wanted to be an architect, but due to failed family speculations he was forced into an insurance career in Melbourne. Several years later, in the mid-1890s, he moved to Sydney and became captivated with the world of art while continuing to work as a clerk. In Sydney he took drawing lessons with artists Hal Waugh and Hal Thorpe, and through them became friendly with several other painters, including Tom Roberts, who became an intermittent but lifelong friend.
After being dismissed from his clerical post, MacNally returned to Melbourne in 1899 and enrolled in the National Gallery of Victoria’s School of Design. He worked under Frederick McCubbin for a year, but the discipline of drawing from plaster casts was irksome. He later studied watercolour and printmaking with John Mather and etching with John Shirlow. MacNally’s tentative etchings from this time are his earliest known surviving images.
Family financial pressures again forced MacNally to abandon his art for a return to commerce. Turning his back on insurance, he began working for a butter exporting business. He found financial success in this venture, and soon purchased a studio apartment on the top floor of Oxford Chambers in Bourke Street, right at the heart of the fashionable Melbourne quarter known as ‘The Block’. A sociable man, MacNally began to mix with many of Victoria’s prominent artists, musicians, critics and connoisseurs.
Despite his time-consuming business commitments, MacNally became increasingly dedicated to watercolour, often painting around Malmsbury (95 km north-west of Melbourne), and in 1908 he submitted several works to the Victorian Artists’ Society annual exhibition. He established a ‘Thursday’ sketch club with a dozen or so artist friends. When the weather was fine, the group (which included George Courtney Benson, Percy Lindsay and Ambrose Paterson) drove to the picturesque sketching spots around Melbourne when they were not working in MacNally’s city studio.
MacNally’s involvement with the Melbourne art scene was curtailed for several years when he was relocated to England for extensive periods by his employer. Despite his English posting, MacNally continued to experiment with his art and enrolled at the Herkomer Art School in Hertfordshire. Although mostly taught by the school’s art tutors, MacNally later acknowledged that the five minute watercolour lesson he received from Sir Hubert Herkomer RA was the most valuable lesson he ever had in his life. MacNally claimed that while in England he became a member of the prestigious Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours. While this may indeed be true, the Royal Institute has found no lasting evidence of his membership in their archives.
As war clouds formed over Europe, MacNally returned to Melbourne, but soon retired from the world of butter when his business was requisitioned by the government. MacNally’s wartime works were mainly pastoral panoramas dominated by large rain-filled skies that showed the influence of J.J. Hilder. As well as his watercolours, MacNally experimented in oil and revisited the art of printmaking. He also began to regularly exhibit his work with the Melbourne art dealer W H Gill at his Fine Art Gallery.
Dame Nelly Melba became friendly with MacNally, and in her circle he mixed with important art-loving establishment figures, such as Sir Baldwin Spencer and the war-time Governor-General, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson. The Governor-General became a good friend of MacNally and during his time in Australia was a frequent visitor to his studio. Leon Gellert (a co-editor of Art in Australia), later revealed that MacNally’s Melbourne studio ‘was open house to the local intelligentsia, and the first call for brother artists from neighbouring States’.
During the final years of the war MacNally joined two professional art groups, the Melbourne-based Australian Art Association, and the all male, Sydney-based, Australian Arts Club. Both organisations had small select memberships, which included some of the most influential artists in the country. MacNally’s friendly nature, art knowledge and powerful friends soon saw him appointed, in 1918, as the Victorian representative on the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board.
That same year, MacNally gained national attention with an illustrated profile in Art in Australia.Written by Harry Julius, in the eulogistic style associated with the magazine, the article tells of MacNally’s harsh editing of his own work, especially in the early years of his career when he often destroyed his work. The lack of early examples of his painting – especially his European period work – certainly raises doubt to the artist’s claim that he was a member of the prestigious Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours when he was living in England before the war.
MacNally was recognised, by several commentators, as a man who helped and encouraged emerging artists such as the Ballarat-born painter, Harold Herbert. MacNally had noticed the skill of this watercolourist and helped him get attention on the Melbourne art scene. This mentorship led to the pair holding three joint exhibitions of their work in Sydney and Melbourne during the early 1920s. These shows were popular, especially after the publication of a MacNally and Herbert joint special edition of Art in Australia in 1920, a significant compliment for two early career artists.
The period from the end of the war to the mid-1930s was arguably the busiest exhibiting period in MacNally’s art career and during that time he held over a dozen one-man shows in the eastern state capitals. The popularity of his heavy wash watercolours reflected the public interest in the medium in the early interwar period. This artistic style was not appreciated by all; George Lambert on his return to Australia in 1921 cuttingly described the Australian watercolourists as being of the blotting paper school of Australian painting.
Despite Lambert’s criticisms, the new interest in watercolour painting led to the establishment of the Australian Watercolour Institute (AWI) in 1923. The first AWI exhibition in Sydney in March 1924 was a triumph, both for the AWI and MacNally.
During the 1920s and 30s almost all of the Melbourne newspapers employed well known artists to comment on the goings on in the local art world, so it was hardly surprising that The Age engaged MacNally as their principal critic from 1924 to 1926. MacNally took easily to journalism and his art writing and book reviews soon became a regular feature of the paper.
While working on The Age, MacNally – now aged in his early fifties – met the journalist and poet Margaret (Rita) McLeod, eighteen years his junior; the couple married on 19 March 1925. The following year the couple left Victoria for a new life in Sydney. Initially settling in the Pittwater area, MacNally began to paint the northern beaches area of Sydney. MacNally had several addresses in Sydney but by 1928 he was living in Cronulla, a beachside suburb on the southern fringes of the city. The couple’s home, Lynn Cottage in Arthur Avenue, Cronulla, became a destination point for artists and writers. The birth of a son named William (Billy) made the family complete.
MacNally became the Daily Telegraph art reviewer after moving to Sydney. Along with his exhibition reviews, he wrote profiles on established traditional artists such as Lister, Heysen and Lionel Lindsay. While these articles were not ground-breaking, his observations on mild Modernists are sometimes revealing. After leaving the Daily Telegraph in 1927 MacNally wrote little during the late 1920s and early 30s apart from the occasional journal article and review in the Sydney Sun newspaper.
During the early thirties MacNally became friendly with W.H. Ifould OBE, then director of the Mitchell Library and an important trustee of the NSW Art Gallery. Through Ifould, MacNally received a large commission to paint many of the historic buildings in the ‘Macquarie Towns’ west of Sydney. For the project the MacNally's relocated to historic Claremont House in Windsor. This early period home was his base as he travelled to heritage properties in the district.
Some of these architectural-themed works were included in a 1931 show at the Macquarie Galleries, while others were later exhibited at the Mitchell Library. Through this commission, MacNally became increasingly known as a painter of historical buildings and he painted many grand Sydney houses during the Depression years.
Late in 1935 the MacNally's decided to relocate to Adelaide. Rita explained the move in a letter to a family friend:
I received a good offer to go back to journalism from the Adelaide “Mail”, the paper I was on before the Melbourne “Age”, & I decided to accept it. Matt has got tired of the country & he has an opportunity of taking up the journalistic work he did on “The Age” when we go to Adelaide. He will do something for one of the papers there & start art classes. We like Adelaide very much. Claremont is a lovely place but too big for us – it’s like living in Buckingham Palace with one page boy!
MacNally soon connected with the Adelaide art community by joining the Royal South Australian Society of Arts. Despite regularly exhibiting with the Australian Watercolour Institute, he rarely did so interstate after moving to South Australia. As planned, MacNally, after his move to South Australia, became the principal art writer on the Adelaide News and Mail.
In 1938 the New York-based Carnegie Corporation made a grant to the National Gallery of South Australia to assist in the establishment of extension services. MacNally became a ‘Carnegie Lecturer’ at the gallery and gave talks on art appreciation from 1938 until the early 1940s. Titles for MacNally’s lectures included: ‘What is Art?’; ‘Australian landscape’; and the intriguing ‘Psycho-Analysis: What effect has it had on Modern Art?’
One of the few living artists who knew MacNally is Jeffrey Smart. The Adelaide-born painter was reviewed by MacNally in the early 1940s. In a recent interview with the author, Smart mentioned MacNally’s review:
He gave a favourable review at one of my early shows. That was at the Royal South Australian Society of Arts. He wasn’t a very perceptive person really. He was what you might call one of the gentleman artists. He was always dressed in tweeds, well dressed and had a great air about him.
Smart fondly remembers the comic side of MacNally’s personality when he was lecturing at the Adelaide gallery:
He was rather amusing. One time he was lecturing a group of us and Louis McCubbin walked passed, and MacNally stopped and his eyes bulged and his finger came out and he followed Mr McCubbin and he said in a throaty voice, “there is the director of the gallery, look!” Poor Louis McCubbin felt terribly embarrassed.
MacNally rarely exhibited in Adelaide during his final years, the exception being at Preece’s Gallery in 1938 and at the Royal South Australian Society of Arts rooms in 1942. After a long illness the 70 year old artist died at his Mount Lofty home on Thursday 24 September 1943. Although his death was noted in the Adelaide press, his passing was largely ignored by the interstate papers.
During his career he had painted in Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia and overseas. His works were mainly landscapes or house paintings, but reflecting his sporting interests also included the occasional image of golfers, boxers and fly fisherman. Since his death there have been two major exhibitions of his work, one at John Martin’s Art Gallery in Adelaide (1946) and a retrospective at the Benalla Art Gallery (1974). MacNally’s work is included in most state galleries, large libraries and several regional galleries, but, as watercolour is a light sensitive medium his images are rarely on view.
Although MacNally became an artist relatively late in life, he approached his new profession like he had his business career. Through a combination of hard work, talent and adept social networking he soon became a leading member of the art world during the post war boom in Australian art. Although he did experiment with oil and printmaking, his reputation is based mainly on his skill with watercolour, and after the medium became less fashionable in the late 1930s, so did his reputation. While MacNally is best known as a painter, his little known writings may be his lasting legacy. While rarely an insightful art critic, his articles and letters reveal much about the friendships and conflicts in the Australian art world during the interwar period and deserve further study.
© Silas Clifford-Smith, 2013
Special thanks to the late Jeffrey Smart for passing on his early memories of MacNally. Thanks also to George Large, Ron Radford, Barry Pearce and Catriona Moore. This piece is an abridged version of an article first published in the February 2008 issue of Australiana magazine (the journal of the Australiana Society). The original piece included references and more images.