More Than Ornamental by Delia Nicholls
The creative lives of the three Mitchell women you are meeting in this exhibition – a mother and two daughters – lasted from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.
In Dear Kate, The Vision of the Mitchell Women, artist Jane Giblin guides us to our “site of enchantment”. It is here, writer Marina Warner argues, that we find the key to knowledge and understanding.
These three women, Jane believes, will change our contemporary, inherited values and assumptions about how women saw and lived their lives on an island on the edge of the world. Most importantly, the exhibition honours and acknowledges how they used their creative skills to do so.
“Dear Kate” is Catherine Penwarne Mitchell (1847–1878), their irrepressible emissary. A few years ago, Jane contacted me after reading a piece I had written in Island magazine describing a large, battered, handbound scrapbook of drawings. It had been compiled by Kate’s sister, Sarah Elizabeth Emma Mitchell (1853–1946), or “SEEM” as she referred to herself.
Sarah’s memento mori honours her older and possibly bolder sister, who tragically died of hydatids within a year of marrying the Reverend John Aubrey Ball of Bright, Victoria. I was introduced to the journal by Lynn Davies, a long-time defender of the Special & Rare Collections at the University of Tasmania, where it is held for the scrapbook’s keepers, The Royal Society of Tasmania.
Jane brings Catherine Augusta, Sarah and Kate Mitchell to our time – out of the archives, the drawers, the storage chests, the journals and the scrapbooks and onto the walls. And to do so in the “home” of the artist Mary Morton Allport (1806–1895) is what they would have desired.
The Mitchell women show us their lives in very different ways: Catherine Augusta and Sarah’s works were more typical of the colonial society’s expectations – pencil drawings or picturesque watercolour scenes to send home or share with friends. Kate, the irrepressible storyteller, ignored such conventions and penned visceral images of daily family life and community events rarely found in our history books and certainly not by women. Like many colonial-born girls of their station, she received what was called an “ornamental education” with a governess, along with drawing lessons in Melbourne and Hobart.
Jane’s pen and ink drawings, together with her paintings and lithographs, are driven by her desire to understand how Kate may have worked and why her medium of pen and ink, her subjects and her scenes were unlike any by other women of her time. As she responded to Kate’s drawings with her own stroke and line, Jane began to sense their mutual passion: “I began to feel a sense of her hand moving and her skill developing over time, and by 1874 and 1875, she was showing facial expressions. She had control of her medium”.
Kate’s work is unconventional not only for her sex but for the times. There is no historical evidence of Australian colonial artists – male or female – using pen and ink to draw personal events and activities. The occasional pen and ink landscapes are found, but these are often from private journals.
Her pictorial telling of their daily lives is bold, boisterous, funny, poignant and informative and shatters any vision that these sisters and their female friends lived circumscribed lives – certainly not physically. Kate was determined to record detailed visual stories of the people who were part of her life and why, what the family achieved, how they and the community explored the land and the seas, what they overcame, and the dangers and consequences of their isolation.
As we researched Kate and her sister Sarah, we made two unexpected and poignant discoveries. Catherine Augusta Mitchell (1812–1899), their mother, had drawn and painted her own memento mori of Port Arthur prison’s Isle of the Dead Cemetery, where, between 1841 and 1844, she buried two baby boys. She titled the pencil drawing Isle de Mort, Port Arthur, Tasmania, with the annotation, “my two first darlings lie here – Francis Keast Mitchell and Henry John Mitchell. First 8 months, second 10 months old”. This work is included in the opening exhibition at the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts and is one of a number of her works in its collection.
Catherine Augusta arrived from Cornwall in 1839 to marry fiancé John Mitchell (1812–1880) and joined him at Port Arthur, where he served in a series of roles, including Superintendent for Point Puer boys’ prison until its closure in 1848.
The second revelation came from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery when Jane was told of a wooden chest containing more than 770 watercolours painted by Sarah in the years after Kate’s death until sometime in 1937 when she donated them to the Museum. Many of Sarah’s works were glued to long strips of fine, black serge, and it is thought this was a practical way to show the works to friends and family – she simply unfolded the fabric. One of Sarah’s watercolours, a four-panel panorama painted in 1900, Oyster Bay from Mayfield Beach, is part of the opening exhibition.
This exhibition is a prelude to Jane’s University of Tasmania School of Creative Arts and Media PhD submission and begins her exploration into the creative lives of unacknowledged Mitchell women. Very few colonial women have been recognised for their paintings and drawings because they were not practising art but demonstrating an “ornamental skill”. As Jane researched, she found that a number of colonial women did produce drawings and paintings of their lives, but such works have been ignored, and very little scholarly work has detailed their contributions.
Through her upcoming PhD exegesis and exhibition, Jane will endeavour to highlight the works of the three Mitchell women and to have them included in the Australian art history canon.
Her current quest to excavate the lives of those who have been forgotten and disregarded is not new. In the past, Jane focused on family and kin. For a major travelling exhibition, I Shed My Skin, A Furneaux Island Story (2019 to 2020), she created 91 works, including black and white photographs, ink and pigment works on paper, and lithographs from interviews with ancestors about their lives on Vansittart Island and the other islands in the Furneaux Group. And there is a familial connection to the Mitchell women: Kate drew Jane’s female ancestors in many of her images.
The now delicate and crumbling scrapbook cannot be displayed; it was gifted to the Royal Society of Tasmania by Sarah’s niece, Grace Mitchell, in 1946, after Sarah’s death. Over many decades, Sarah and Grace gathered and annotated Kate’s folio of more than 200 black ink drawings, binding them in crimson floral fabric and then in black serge.
The exhibition includes a contemporary homage to Sarah’s scrapbook. Jane commissioned artists Penny Carey Wells and Diane Perndt to reimagine it for our times in The Mitchell Women: Unknown Stories. Into its pages, she has glued copies of Kate’s 200-plus works, along with Sarah’s words of explanation. The exhibition scrapbook also includes copies of Jane’s paintings and lithographs in response to Kate’s drawings. It will travel with the women’s works from the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Hobart, to the East Coast Heritage Museum, Swansea, the Bright Art Gallery and Cultural Centre, Victoria, and the Launceston Library. At each exhibition, Jane will invite the public to create their own pen and ink drawings, paintings and writings for inclusion in the exhibition scrapbook.
What captures our contemporary imaginations are Kate’s images of energetic women of a certain style of dress and station, unfettered by any assumptions about how they should behave. They were probably regarded as “young ladies” from a landed class: they wore long full skirts, layered petticoats and buttoned-up blouses, and always a bonnet.
Strikingly to us, their behaviour appears in stark and impractical contrast to how they dressed: they rode through wild, unexplored, densely forested hills and valleys or through heavy, rolling waves, and bafflingly, they did so side-saddle (or no saddle). They rode galloping horses over fences and through the bush as they hunted kangaroos or searched for lost sheep. And Sarah noted in her reminisces that Kate “was a wonderful rider and used to jump fences with ease and break in horses”. And the real-life consequences were also graphically recorded: Kate drew them tumbling from their horses or from the carts they were driving. Sarah wrote of scraped faces and broken arms and fingers but rarely serious injuries. Kate drew their pre-dawn departures from the Lisdillon Estate on horseback for a two-to-three-day journey to Hobart. The sense of their spirit and energy is palpable.
Kate put herself into most scenes: cooking chops over an open fire during a seaside picnic; poised with her fishing rod before launching herself off a log onto boggy soil; threatening to pour hot tea on two boys torturing a march fly (a march fly?); attending dances; wading thigh deep, in her full skirt in the sea to bring a boat to shore; or heading out with her drawing book with her dog Caleb, carrying her easel strapped to his back.
This is Kate’s robust visual autobiography, but she never identifies herself in her drawings. But her intent is clear: I am here, I am integral to this story, and this community is mine – and she signed her drawings with a workmanlike “KM”. Today, we know who she is in each story because Sarah has captioned her images with “Dear Kate” or “CPM”.
Kate’s drawings of people – her dominant subject – were not always deftly done, but over the years, they became more skilled and accurate enough for Sarah and Grace, years later, to identify many of the people in the scenes. The initial inspiration for her cartoon style and irrepressible commitment to action and realism was, Jane believes, Punch, the illustrated satirical magazine first published in London in 1841. Punch was a popular and appropriately middle-class publication, and for a brief time, a Tasmanian Punch edition was published.
Kate’s life was the people she knew and encountered as she travelled along the east coast to and from Hobart and as far north as Launceston. Not for her the demure written journal, modest landscapes or botanical drawings, she wanted visibility for her community, to tell of lives of achievement and action, adventure and celebration.
Did Kate and Sarah think about the Traditional Owners of the land and what these people had lost? In 1874, Sarah wrote that “Trugananni [sic]” had given their father a basket and a length of rope. And later, in 1909, she donated the basket and rope to the Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, stating: “It is a great treasure being Truganinni’s [sic] last basket she made”. Trucanini died in 1876, and there is no proof that this was her “last basket”, but it does highlight some awareness by Sarah of the original people on whose lands they lived.
In early November 2022, Jane organised for some Mitchell relatives to re-enact picnic scenes in the Lisdillon Estate garden and on the nearby beach. She photographed each scene and endeavoured to draw them en plein air just as she anticipated Kate had done. She quickly realised this was impossible. The use of pen and ink was challenging (Kate rarely left smears or blots on her drawings, and there is no evidence of pencil drafting of a scene), and the amount of time required to draw such intricate scenes was impossible in situ.
Photography was on the cusp of becoming popular, and the scrapbook includes a few photographs. Sarah often annotates Kate’s drawings with the statement, “Taken 1874”. In her own way, Kate’s drawings were her “snapshot” of each living scene.
While each drawing is not large (15 cm × 21 cm), they are graphic and cinematic, always placing the viewer front and centre: dramatic falls from stumbling horses or careering carriages on rough or uneven tracks, or her family huddled in a horse-drawn cart travelling along the Prosser River through torrential rain. They harvest hops and upend a bearded Mr Shaw into a hop basket; there are multiple families picnicking, camping and hunting scenes, and boating mishaps. There are indoor scenes of community theatre, crowded dances and dinners for visiting dignitaries.
After studying Sarah’s paintings, Jane believes the two sisters sat and recalled the days’ events, the people and what they were doing and wearing. And Kate boldly allowed her imagination the freedom to draw each scene.
Three women artists from one family painted and drew with purpose: the first, Catherine Augusta, following the approved practice of a Victorian gentlewoman drawing landscape scenes and sad mementos to send home to England with letters; her daughter Sarah, whom we now know worked for many years after Kate’s death to produce not only Kate’s story but also an enormous collection of watercolour landscapes, with the occasional solitary, distant figure to offer perspective; and most intriguingly, Kate, whose intense gaze focused in on her community and her family and how their lives intertwined.
However, Kate’s landscapes are very different. She saw the landscape as the backdrop against which lives and events happened, although, occasionally, she recorded the unexpected animal or flock of birds.
And now we are here in our time with Jane Giblin. Jane has brought the Mitchell women back to us through her study of Kate’s work. As she responds to Kate’s drawings with her own stroke and line, she begins to sense their mutual passion. Like Kate, Jane strides and rides (in her trusty four-wheel drive) through the landscapes she loves from Tasmania’s east and northwest to the Furneaux Group of her ancestry. Jane, like Kate, wants to understand not just who she is but how she has been shaped by this land and her community. Until encountering Kate, Jane has not frequently placed herself in her works, but now, because of Kate, she is there in every PhD drawing. Jane has described her approach to Dear Kate:
I start with her ink drawings first, and so I take an element that I respond to with very little thought. I look for evidence of her particular skill, but then, as time goes on, the story becomes more important than her mark. I am more intrigued, for example, to capture the moment they were chasing sheep; there’s a possum she’s drawn in beyond her figure. And there’s her brilliance: drawing the women falling off the cart. Or the little moment when Kate is standing near a bog, and there’s a little tiny dog standing beside her. She’s carrying the fishing gear, and [her figure] is only a centimetre tall, but everything you need is there. She’s tentatively standing on the edge of a swamp and being told to “Come on”. I am right there in the scene with her.
We see action, but it’s been reduced down to the stylised rendering. I think that is a result of her doing it after the fact; doing it, I strongly suspect, with Punch magazine in mind. She’s projecting herself into their storytelling mode. So, I believe she saw it and wanted to record her world.
So, what do we make of Catherine Penwarne Mitchell? Was she the nineteenth-century precursor to the twenty-first-century “selfie-taker”? Yes, and she was much more. She ignored what society expected of her female abilities. She looked independently to other inspirations to determine how to express herself – perhaps to the drawings of Sir John Tenniel (artist for Punch magazine from 1850 to 1895). And off she took, going boldly where few women had.
Poignantly, Kate’s last known drawing is of the Bright parsonage, where she met her future husband, the Reverend John Aubrey Ball. It is a conventional and well-executed pencil drawing of a house in a rural setting. We do not actually know when it was drawn. Sarah has marked the date as “1876” – some 18 months before Kate’s death. Already something has changed: the artist is no longer Kate, the bold storyteller, she is Kate, the conventional colonial woman. But had she lived beyond her 31 years, what else, we wonder, would she have shown us?
Delia Nicholls
Writer and Curator