Design and Art Australia Online

Marshall was an English landscape artist who was resident in Victoria during the early 1890s. Marshall was the son of the English painter Peter Paul Marshall, and seems to have spent his early years living in Norwich, Norfolk. He was regularly exhibiting paintings from 1881, and in 1886 and 1890 he exhibited East Anglian themed landscapes at the Royal Academy of Art in London. Marshall seems to have relocated to Australia in 1890 and by 1892 was listed living at 12 Lydia Street, Brunswick, Melbourne. Several works from his Australian residency date from 1890 to 1893.

It is known that Marshall and (fellow Englishman) Walter Withers were invited to Creswick, Victoria to teach painting in January 1893. A lasting legacy of this trip was Marshall’s oil, Fossicking for Gold (which was later sold by Christies, Melbourne in 1988). According to Norman Lindsay , Marshall and Withers were invited to the mining town by the middle aged amateur painter, S.A. Edmonds ( My Mask , p.29). While Withers taught plein air landscape, J. Miller Marshall taught watercolour. One of Marshall’s Creswick students was the young Lionel Lindsay , and in his early life memoir, Comedy of Life (pp 16-17) , he mentions the artist:

An English watercolour painter, Miller Marshall, came up with Withers, and from him I took lessons in watercolour. It was all very exciting, and played a leading role in our destinies. Marshall was a big, bearded simple soul who asked from life a full day’s painting and a pot of beer at eve on an ale-house bench. “Plenty of water,” he would preach. “Plenty of water and a full brush: that’s the secret of watercolour.” He had painted everywhere in England and just missed election to the R.W.S. [Royal Watercolour Society] ; but too long accustomed to the lush greens of the old country, he could not hit the bronze tones of the bush, which Withers in the end accomplished. Looking at the old dumps and diggings he said we had no romance in us or we would have reworked them, though I told him the Chinese had fossicked them to a dead-finish: he dreamed of Golcondas. I met him a few times in Melbourne, hard up but cheerful, an extinct immortalized by [Charles] Keene, and we had a parting drink together. He had a way of pronouncing “boudoir” that always ravished me; the thought must have been often present in his mind for he would say, apropos of nothing, “I always think there’s something beautiful and refined about a lady’s boogewar.”

It was unfortunate for Marshall that he arrived in Australia during the harsh economic slump of the 1890s. This was a difficult time for artists and may explain why he visited Creswick to teach, and why he subsequently returned to England. There are two works by Marshall in the collection of the National Library of Australia, Old Port Melbourne (1892) and Gold digger’s home in the bush .

A painting titled Caught in a Cyclone was exhibited in the 1894 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. This work may have been painted on Marshall’s return trip to England. After returning to his homeland, Marshall was listed living in Teignmouth, Devon. His last known work dates from 1927, he was then listed living in Minehead, Somerset.

Despite returning to England, Marshall was later immortalised as the fictional character Bradley Mudgett in Norman Lindsay’s 1938 risqué novel, Age of Consent ( My Mask , p 29). In this novel Bradley Mudgett (Marshall) is depicted by Norman Lindsay in a series of line portraits throughout the book. These drawings depict a burly bearded man in his forties. Norman Lindsay also described the Bradley Mudgett character in the text of Age of Consent (pp 5-6):

Burley and bearded and innocuously scowling… A navvy’s body bulked out his rough tweed suit, which was no sort of thing for an Australian midsummer; his hat was of brigand design, high crowned and broad rimmed; his boots were double-soled and he walked clumsily in them with a forward lurch of the shoulders, menacing and purposeful.

Writers:

Clifford-Smith, Silas

Date written:

2008

Last updated:

2011