John Hepburn Cadell b. 1880

Also known as John Cadell
  • Artist (Ceramist),
  • Artist (Painter)
John Hepburn, painter and ceramicist, had the training and the diversity of skills necessary to make his mark on Australian art but for his early death in 1923.

John Hepburn Cadell was born in Brisbane in 1880 to John Cadell, a public servant and his wife Mary, née Anderson. He had at least one sibling, a brother. He studied at the then Brisbane Technical School under Godfrey Rivers in the evenings and achieved his diploma by passing at a high level in freehand, model and life drawing, design and perspective. He continued his training by attending the life drawing classes conducted by the Queensland Art Society. He was employed as a draftsman in the Department of Mines from 1900 and once, on his holidays, he studied at the Julian Ashton School in Sydney. He exhibited frequently at the Queensland Art Society in the years 1901-10 as well as designing the catalogue cover for the Society’s 1907 annual exhibition.

He was involved with the production of the hand written magazine The Wog with a group of fellow students and Queensland Art Society members: W.G. Grant, George Elms, Harry B. Harrison, P.A. Morse, and later, Peter Templeton in 1903 and 1904. Cadell had a close association with W.G. Grant and his future wife Gwendolyn née Stanley.

He served with the Australian Medical Corps during World War I and produced portraits and sketches at this time – a sketch book is in the collection of the Australian War Memorial.

In 1917 Cadell forwarded a sketch of The boxer from France.

While on leave in London he enrolled at John Hassel’s Art School and studied the ceramics in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. On his return to Australia he also spent additional time studying in Melbourne with Max Meldrum. He submitted a group of still lifes and landscapes to the annual exhibition of the Queensland Art Society in 1920. But although several landscapes with Meldrumite treatments survive in a family collection, the individual works can’t be identified.

During the early 1920s there was a vast upsurge of interest in ceramics in Brisbane largely inspired by the activity of L.J. Harvey, but Cadell’s work, because of his independent training, is distinctly different. Works in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection dated 1922 bear primitive designs reminiscent of that of the Omega Studio or the South American ceramics (which he may have seen in London museums).

He married Ethel Taylor in Brisbane c.1921 and moved to live in Mosman, Sydney, but died shortly thereafter on 20 April 1923 when his daughter was only nine months old.

His short career is described in an unidentified obituary from a Brisbane paper in 1923 perhaps a little eulogistically but it indicates that Cadell had the potential to establish a significant career:

'A fine painter, particularly of still life (perhaps never equalled in this branch by any other Queensland artist), a potter of outstanding merit, a cartoonist of no mean order, a designer of theatrical scene and costumes, one of the most versatile and original artists which this State has produced, peculiar, cynical, ignored by the professed patrons of art here, admired by all earnest students, appreciated in London by such eminent artists as Arnesby Brown PA, A.E. Hartwell APA, John Hassell ARSA and Robert Burns ARSA – he kept peculiarly to himself and his friends here’ (unidentified press cutting).

Writers:
Gooke, Glenn R
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011