Design and Art Australia Online

painter, illustrator and cartoonist, was born Francis Mahony (often wrongly spelt 'Mahoney’ – his son’s usual spelling) in Flinders Lane, Melbourne, tenth of the 11 children of an Irish father and a Cornish mother. Later he invariably signed his work 'Frank P. Mahony’, having adopted the middle name 'Prout’ in honour of the Irish priest Father Francis Sylvester Mahony, reputedly a relative, who wrote as 'Father Prout’ in Fraser’s Magazine . At the age of 10 Frank moved to Sydney with his family. He worked in an architect’s office for a brief period after leaving school and attended classes at the NSW Academy of Art under Anivitti. He exhibited paintings in the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition and worked on the Illustrated Sydney News . He was included among the illustrators on the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia (1886), e.g. the spearing of Edmund Kennedy and E.J. Eyre and Wylie exploring. He contributed to the Sydney Mail and the Australian Town and Country Journal . Together with A.H. Fullwood and Julian Ashton (c.1887), he pioneered the Sydney weekend sketching camps.

Mahony became well known for his depictions of bush topics, especially horses and action subjects, in both paintings and cartoons. For a while he was instructor in art at the Royal Art Society (RAS). His oil painting, Rounding up a Straggler (1889), was purchased for the AGNSW when he was barely out of art school, while in 1896 the gallery purchased The Cry of the Mothers (1895), which shows horses and cattle on the banks of a flooded river. By 1899 the AGNSW owned three of his oils, having added the bushranging subject As in the Days of Old (Kerry & Co. photo of it reproduced Bookfellow 25 March 1899, 37). Restive 1902, a pen and ink drawing done in Sydney showing a horse being held by an Aborigine and observed by a caucasian male rider, was purchased by the AGNSW from the Bertram Stevens Memorial Exhibition in 1922 for eight guineas. Six of his paintings and six of his illustrations were included in the NSW Art Gallery’s Loan Exhibition of Australian art in 1918. A&R lent his originals for Boake’s Where Dead Men Lie and his drawings for Ethel C. Pedley’s Dot and the Kangaroo (London, 1899) were also shown (both now ML). In May 2001 Bridget McDonnell Gallery was offering his watercolour and gouache Polo Player 1893 from the estate of Jane Glad, Norman Lindsay 's elder daughter (ill. cat. no.9).

Mahony contributed to the annual Antipodean (no.2, 1893), published in London, and to other papers and journals. He illustrated several books, including Louise Mack’s Teens (Sydney, A&R, 1897), which like Dot and the Kangaroo was printed in black and white from coloured originals. ( Karna Birmingham illustrated the 1920s edition of Teens .) Other commissioned illustrations were for Barcroft Boake’s poems and for Henry Lawson’s While the Billy Boils (A&R, 1896: 2nd series 1914) and On the Track and Over the Sliprails (A&R, 1923). At the 1898 Grafton Gallery Exhibition of Australian Art in London, Frank P. Mahony of The Society of Artists, Sydney, showed: cat. 1, three wash drawings, and cat. 273, 'That Quiet Hack’, lent by the Bulletin Newspaper Co. with originals by other artists.

Mahony was a member of the RAS in 1883-95 and a founding member of the breakaway Society of Artists in 1895 until it rejoined the RAS. He showed The Centaurs with the Society of Artists in 1898 ('on a larger canvas a more ambitious design – two centaurs struggling for mastery on the edge of a cliff, with a bevy of nymphs waiting for the conqueror’). Along with Randolph Bedford, Tom Roberts, W.A. Holman, Henry Lawson and others, he was a 'material’ member of the Dawn and Dusk Club, founded at Sydney in 1899. (The 'spiritual’ members included Shakespeare, Rabelais and Aristophenes, with many other famous names blackballed for lack of humour.) The six 'art Duskers’ held regular sketching evenings. 'F.R. [sic] Mahony’ did a large oil painting of Soldiers of the Queen which, along with three other paintings (by Arthur Collingridge, Joseph Wolinski and Tindall), decorated an arch erected for the Federation procession in Sydney on 1 January 1901 (information Stephen Foster).

He contributed cartoons to the Bulletin from the 1890s. One of his earliest known commissions was to improve a reader’s drawing of a bushie and a dapper monocled gent signed 'B. Strange’ ( Ben Strange ?) entitled The average Mining Report , with the gag, 'Manager (of the Dead Goat Mining Co): “Splendid stone – it averages five ounces to the ton”/ Shareholder. “That’s good, how many tons did you crush?”/ Mine Manager: “Tons? I crushed fourteen pounds.”’ The new version, signed 'Frank P Mahony’ and dated 'P.[Paid?] Jan 14th 1892’, has a slightly altered caption verso and the annotation '£1.10.0’ (ML PXA 2695). Post-mortem Item by Mahony was published 26 August 1893, 8.

Other Bulletin cartoons include 17 originals 1896-1908 (and undated) in the ML Bulletin collection, plus The New School of Duffing 1898, re: stealing bicycles instead of horses because of shorter sentence if caught (ill. Rolfe, 49); men on a park bench 1893 (ill. Rolfe, 96); an illustration to Zef’s 'The Man from Australia’ showing an archetypal homesick Australian bushie asking an English chemist for 'a smell at the eucalyptus bottle’ (25 July 1896, p.11: included in Ross Woodrow’s racial types archive website 2001); a racist sheep and rabbit fable (paralleling them with Chinese Australian immigrants and other foreigners invading a bush hut with a Caucasian woman and baby at the door) 1898 (ill. Rolfe, 97); a boy tying up an old horse 1898 (ill. Rolfe, 98); Steeplechasing up to Date 10 December 1898, 25 (see JK Archive); sharp prickly pear joke 1899 (ill. Rolfe, 112); illustration to poem For Beauty’s Sake by Will Ogilvie, signed 'Frank P. Mahony/ Nov 99’ [knight on horseback with damsel “Beauty” filling his stirrup-cup] (ill. Rolfe, 94); (bushie drawing) 'First tramp: “Say, mate, where did you get the dorgs?”/ Second ditto: “Yer see, they wus born outback here three months ago, and I ain’t found enough water ter drown’d 'em in yet”’ 1900 (ill. Rolfe, 111). An ink wash and white original In the Sale Yards , published Bulletin 30 June 1900, 15 (1st Dealer: “What was all the fuss when you came in just now?”/ 2nd Dealer: “Oh one of my cows didn’t have tuberculosis”’), was offered by Bridget McDonnell Gallery, Melbourne, in July-August 2000 for $1,250.

Mahony and his wife, Mary née Tobin, a barmaid from Yass whom he married on 20 January 1897 at St Patrick’s Catholic Church, Sydney, left Australia for London in late 1901, according to the ADB ; a bush cartoon signed 'London Aug. 1902’ is illustrated in Rolfe, 114. (Mills says he went to London in 1902, while Lindesay and McCulloch say he went in 1904.) At least until 1908 Mahony regularly sent drawings back to the Bulletin and Lone Hand but then disappeared. He, Mary and their son Bill ( Will Mahony/ Mahoney ) lived in poverty in the Portobello Road district. Frank Mahony died in a charitable home on 28 June 1916 after a long illness. (Many give his date of death as 1917, including Bridget McDonnell Gallery May 2001.) His 'Australian admirers’ (in Australia and UK) took up a subscription for a headstone.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007