Design and Art Australia Online

Harold Septimus Power, painter and illustrator, was born in Dunedin, New Zealand on 31 December 1877, one of eight children of Peter Power, an English emigrant to Australia, and his Scottish-born wife Jane, nee Amers. Both had originally come to Victoria, where they married, but moved to New Zealand where they had their family. They returned to Victoria when Septimus was young, settling first in Brunswick and then in Hampton, just outside Melbourne.

Power’s minimal formal schooling was distinguished by an unstoppable desire to illustrate his schoolbooks. Power’s father, a hatter by trade, had turned to painting, teaching it in Brunswick. This possibly sparked his son’s interest in painting, something encouraged by his mother but positively discouraged by his father. At the age of fourteen he ran away from home, going into the bush where he painted the country and its animals. Returning to Melbourne, he found work with a carriage painter and painted animal heads on butchers’ delivery vans, getting his models from abattoirs. Later, he worked as an assistant to a veterinary surgeon who advised him to stick to drawing animals. This advice settled for Power the career he should pursue: he would become an artist.

After spending eight months in the Gippsland bush sketching and painting, Power returned to Melbourne and achieved early success when he first exhibited his work. In about 1896 Power won a silver medal at the 'Collingwood Junior Exhibition’, another silver medal in 1899, and a gold medal at the 'Melbourne Art Club Exhibition’ that year. Power had been befriended by Walter Withers, whose influence can be seen in Afternoon Heat (1896). He now received his father’s approval when Withers spoke to him about his son’s talent.

In 1900, Power moved to Adelaide where he worked as a political cartoonist with the Register and an illustrator for the Observer, Saturday Journal and Evening Journal, among other papers, contributing witty and sympathetic sketches of politicians, local identities and street scenes. He met Hans Heysen and they painted together in the Adelaide Hills, selling their work through a local dealer. In 1903, Power became the first Australian artist to receive a commission from the Art Gallery of South Australia; he was commissioned to paint an animal picture for 100 guineas, and the resulting work, After the Day’s Toil (1904), showcased his emerging specialty as an animal painter, especially of equine subjects, depicting two farm lads mounted on draught horses and leading other horses. In September 1904, Power married Isabel Laura Butterworth of Adelaide.

In 1905, Power and his wife left for Europe. With this departure began a long period in the artist’s life during which he divided his time between Australia and England, only returning permanently to Australia in the late 1930s. The couple settled in Paris where the largely self-taught Power enrolled in the Academie Julian (1905-07) studying under Jean-Paul Laurens. Moving to London, Power established a successful practice and acquired a reputation as an animal painter par excellence, something of an Antipodean George Stubbs, the foremost English animal painter (1724-1806). He exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy of Arts and was later elected a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours and the Society of Animal Painters. In 1913, the Powers returned to Australia, the artist bringing with him a large collection of paintings made during his eight years abroad.

In Melbourne, Power held two successful solo exhibitions, his first, at the Guild Hall in June 1913, and later that year at the Athenaeum Gallery. He exhibited Stag Hunt Exmoor, hung at the Royal Academy’s exhibition in 1911, and this was purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria. Following a successful exhibition in Adelaide in March 1914, Power returned to England. During the interwar years he made several return visits to Australia of relatively short duration (two to three years or less); these would be marked by the holding of at least one solo exhibition showcasing work recently exhibited at the Royal Academy, and often ended with a 'farewell exhibition’ announcing his impending departure from Australia.

The outbreak of the First World War found Power in England. At the age of thirty-seven he was an established artist who specialised in, but was not limited to, animal subjects, principally horses. He could manage the human figure and landscape, and his best pictures combined human and animal figures with the landscape. Portraiture, too, was not beyond him. He was a competent draughtsman; and though best known for his oil paintings, he could work successfully in watercolour. Executed in the academic tradition with frequent romantic overtones, his work eschewed any modern influences and intellectual qualities. Technically proficient, he could be relied upon to make a picture both pleasing and effecting a “satisfactory realism” (J S MacDonald 1958), well-qualified to enter upon arguably the most significant phase of his career.

From London, Power followed the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of 1915 to the battlefields of the Western Front during 1916-17. In the early years of the war he completed Anzacs (1915, National Gallery of Victoria) and The enemy in sight (1916, Art Gallery of New South Wales). On 3 September 1917, he was appointed an official war artist by the Australian High Commissioner and attached to the AIF with the honorary rank of lieutenant. He crossed to France, making a second trip in August 1918, in the company of another appointee, Fred Leist, and C.E.W. Bean, Australia’s official war correspondent, and spent his first evening in Hazebrouck huddled with them in the cellar of a house as the Germans bombed the town. The terms of Power’s appointment obliged him to make at least twenty-five sketches for the Commonwealth; he delivered roughly seven more, a gift to the “Australian Nation”, as he explained to the Australian High Commission (letter, 20 November 1918). These sketches are mostly drawings and watercolours and contain only a few small oil pictures. According to Jean Campbell (1983, pg 113), Power’s “vigour and strength” are seen at their best in his war watercolours, for example, Going into action (1917).

Commencing in July 1918, Power was commissioned first by the Commonwealth and later by the Australian War Memorial to paint a number of battle pictures and military scenes depicting significant events in which the AIF and the Australian Light Horse had been involved. This work occupied him throughout the 1920s and late into the 1930s and includes First Australian Division Artillery going into the 3rd Battle of Ypres (1919) and Saving the guns at Robecq (1920), both action paintings focusing on horses and artillery. The battle pictures and scenes are imaginative reconstructions which Power meticulously researched with guidance from Bean to ensure, so far as possible, their historical accuracy.

Power’s several visits to Australia during the 1920s were long enough for him to carry out other official commissions. In 1922, he was commissioned to make a large mural for the Melbourne Public Library, depicting the Eastern and Western Fronts and the finished work, War, comprising three panels with an overall length of 15.2 metres, was installed in 1924. In 1927, the Commonwealth commissioned him to paint a picture of the outside ceremony for the opening of Parliament House, Opening of Federal Parliament at Canberra, 9 May 1927 (1928). Power was also active in art circles, becoming a member of the Australian Watercolour Institute (1926-28) and exhibiting in its first exhibition at Horden’s Gallery in 1924. He was associated with the establishment of the new Melbourne Art Club in 1933; and was a foundation member of the deeply conservative Australian Academy of Art (1937-46).

Following the death of his wife in March 1935, Power returned to Australia, arriving in January 1936. In September that year he married Margery Desmazures of Adelaide and the couple settled in Melbourne. Throughout the 1930s Power painted steadily and exhibited regularly, sticking closely to his chosen idiom, and this continued during the 1940s. He enjoyed enormous popularity and his work commanded consistently high prices, even during the Depression. Equine and other animal subjects dominate the canvases of these decades with occasional portraits and numerous flower pieces. If there were any changes, perhaps a loosening of brushwork and a more colourful palette can be detected, but in Power’s hands these produced frankly sentimental pictures such as Summertime (1935, Art Gallery of South Australia) and The Toilers (1940, National Gallery of Victoria). He held his final exhibition in Melbourne in 1949. From 1940 Power taught painting privately; one of his students, Max Middleton, primarily a landscape painter working in a traditional style, contributed a useful biographical essay to The Art of H Septimus Power (Rigby, 1974).

A peculiar form of deafness had afflicted Power from an early age, creating an impediment in his social life. To C.E.W. Bean, the artist presented as shy and intensely nervous, and his heart went out to “this lovable man”. In spite of his disability, Middleton claims that Power was a cheerful man who enjoyed entertaining friends at home, and revelled in telling stories about the experiences in his life.

Power died of cancer in Melbourne on 3 January 1951, aged seventy-three, and was buried in Brighton Cemetery. He was survived by his second wife and two sons, one from each marriage. On his death, Louis McCubbin, a long-time director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, himself an official war artist of the First World War, perhaps accurately summed up Power’s achievement: “His abilities particularly fitted him to be a painter of war subjects such as charging horses… He was outstanding as an animal painter – the most important Australia has produced in this field” (Argus, 4 January 1951). A small retrospective exhibition was held in 1985 at Trevor Bussell Fine Art Gallery, a Sydney suburban gallery. The Australian War Memorial holds by far the largest collection of Power’s works (roughly fifty-four); otherwise he is thinly if widely represented in Australia’s public collections.

Writers:

Scheib, MichaelNote:

Date written:

2009

Last updated:

2011

Status:

peer-reviewed