RETHINKING THE CREATIVE SPACE

Abstract

Anything painted has a particular beauty when seen in a looking glass, provided it be free from faults; and it is wonderful how every defect in the picture will therein show more considerable. (Leon Battista Alberti, quoted in Kahr 1976, 176, n. 74)

Notes

1. Other than the accounts cited here, see also Joyce McGrath (1979, 158–59) and Judith Rodriguez (1991, 54).

2. Her Richmond School of Design Members’ Ticket, dated 30 September 1884, is held by the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum.

3. See Hammond and Peers (1992, 35, cat. 10).

4. See the Record Book of Loans and Purchases, Melbourne High School, Melbourne, Victoria. Bale loaned the picture known as Interior [Morning Papers] to Melbourne High School in 1937 under the title The Doorway.

5. See Peter and John Perry (1996, 76). Bale's Electric Light and Flower Study were exhibited in London, her portrait Mr and Mrs Carl Hempel was hung at the Royal Academy in 1933, and her Portrait of a Lady at the 1939 Paris Salon. See also MacDonald (1926, 63).

6. A letter to the editor of the Argus (20 December 1937) entitled ‘No Sex in Art’ in which Bale challenged a proposition by the Housewives Association that women should be among the Trustees of the National Gallery, often quoted as evidence of anti-feminism, must be recognized to reflect the circumstances in which it was written. The Housewives Association had asserted women should have censorship powers over art of an ‘indelicate nature’.

7. For a full account of this matter, see issues of VAS from September, October and November 1918 and February 1919, and also the Minute Book of the Victorian Artists’ Society, 1819–1919.