painter, is known for an oil on canvas painting of a monk illuminating a book in a scriptorium entitled A Labour of Love and dated 1885 (69 × 47 cm, inscr. l.r. 'J.L. Griffin/1885’), first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1885 as 'Miss J.L. Griffin’ of 24 Eardley Crescent, London. The artist, a landscape and figure painter, also showed one painting at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and one with the Society of Women Artists in 1883-84.
After exhibiting at the Royal Academy Griffin moved to Sydney. She was living in the beachside suburb of Manly in 1886 when she showed A Labour of Love at the seventh annual exhibition of the Art Society of New South Wales. It was an unusual subject for Sydney at a time when portrait, still life and landscape paintings dominated exhibitions and an historical work of any sort was rarely seen, let alone a religious painting. It therefore attracted attention, rightly of a favourable kind. The Herald art critic wrote:
A “Labour of Love” (72) by Jane L. Griffin, is perfect in an artistic sense. It is simply a young priest seated illuminating a book of prayer, but the idea has been carried out boldly and the picture must rank among the best in the Exhibition.
Despite the artist’s gender, nationality and relative obscurity, the painting was considered for acquisition for the colony’s national collection, but the all-male board of trustees declined to purchase it. It ended up in the Art Gallery of New South Wales as a loan from the artist until J.G. Griffin (obviously a relative) made the loan permanent in 1918 by which time this sort of religious genre picture was quite unfashionable.
By 1926 Labour of Love had disappeared from memory as well as sight. It was not even listed in the new edition of the Illustrated Catalogue of the National Gallery of New South Wales published that year. Presumably, it had been exiled to a country collection since the catalogue omitted works out on such long-term loans. It has long since returned to the vaults of the gallery but had never in living memory been on public view until the 1995 National Women’s Art Exhibition. Its obscurity was clearly a blessing in the 1940s and 1950s when numerous works from the collection were de-accessioned, particularly Victorian narrative paintings. (Examples of the latter, minus monks and by eminent English Royal Academicians, were sold off at ridiculously low prices in the late 1940s, several being purchased by St Joseph’s Catholic College, Hunters Hill.) Not until 1953 when Bernard Smith, the then curator, published his Catalogue of Australian Oil Paintings in the National Art Gallery of New South Wales could even the most diligent art historian discover that the gallery owned such a work-and that it was by a woman resident in Australia. Little has since been added to Smith’s information.
In 1887 'Miss Griffins [sic]’ showed Lake Scene with the Art Society of NSW (unlocated), her only known work that may have been done in Australia. It was called a 'very good’ if very small study of sky and water and mountains by the Herald 's anonymous art critic, presumably the same man who had so highly praised the previous year’s exhibit, although he had some reservations about her treatment of this far more conventional subject:
The light breaking through the hills is very soft and clear, and the hills and distance are well managed, but the water is not so well done. It has been worked too much and what would be otherwise a most worthy little picture is injured in effect.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2011
