Design and Art Australia Online

Philip (Phil) William Goatcher, theatrical scene painter, was born in London on 23 November 1851. Recent biographies describe him as having been apprenticed to his otherwise unidentified scene-painter father, although Goatcher’s own reminiscences (Australian Star, 27 December 1890; Table Talk, 31 October 1890, 8 January 1892; New Zealand Herald, 11 March 1927) never portrayed his father in this way. However, any such apprenticeship could not have lasted long, for in 1865 he ran away to sea. He first visited Melbourne in 1866 as an apprentice seaman in the True Briton and, on his second voyage the following year in the Dover Castle, jumped ship and headed for the goldfields.

Having failed to strike it rich, Goatcher was employed backstage at the Ballarat theatre by the scene painter John Hennings, and then at Melbourne’s Theatre Royal where Hennings was joint lessee. Nearly a quarter of a century later, when Goatcher returned to Melbourne boosted as “a splendid scenic artist…from New York” (Bulletin, 25 October 1890) under contract to the theatrical entrepreneur J.C. Williamson, he acknowledged that he was “an Australian by training, having received his earliest instruction in art from the popular scenic artist, Mr John Hennings” (Table Talk, 31 October 1890). This public deference to the veteran Hennings, whose backstage seniority Goatcher had now overturned, would seem touching were it not for the similar story that later appeared in a San Francisco newspaper, in which he credited his success to the Californian scene painter William Porter (Morning Call, 26 March 1893). Goatcher’s various reminiscences of working backstage with Hennings and H.M. Freyberger in Melbourne in 1867-68, with Charles Massey in New Zealand in 1869, with Porter in San Francisco in 1870, then working his way east until he joined up with Matt Morgan in New York in 1871, resemble a Boy’s Own scene-painting adventure—not too surprising, perhaps, for a young man not yet twenty.

Back in England by 1872, Goatcher worked as an assistant painter in major London theatres, then as head scene painter in provincial theatres such as the Middlesborough Theatre Royal. In 1875 he married Alice Little in London, where he joined fellow scene painter Walter Brookes Spong in setting up a decorative-arts business in the West End. However, as Spong ruefully recalled (Table Talk, 17 January 1890), Goatcher and his wife soon “decamped to America without the formality of saying 'Goodbye’”.

Goatcher’s flight to the United States was a wise commercial decision, as the impending centennial celebrations of 1876 guaranteed employment to almost any competent scene painter. He soon found work with the Kiralfy Brothers, painting a 'Moorish’ act drop for their new Alhambra Palace Theatre in Philadelphia (host city for the Centennial Exhibition), and assisting with the staging of Around the World in 80 Days, a visual spectacle which mimicked on stage the international scope of the Exhibition itself. The scenery, copied by licence from the original 1874 Paris production and initially staged by the Kiralfys at New York’s Academy of Music in 1875, was far more ambitious than the small-scale domestic interiors Goatcher had been required to paint back in England. When he left for New York at the close of the Alhambra season, Goatcher took with him this newly acquired scenic technique that relied upon the artifice of a painted backcloth (rather than a layered or 'cut-out’ set) to produce a convincing perspectival illusion. He also became known for his act drops—painted canvases lowered to conceal the stage between acts and thus divert the audience during intermission—which he supplied on commission to theatres as far afield as San Francisco.

Goatcher was employed as the leading scene painter for the Wallack management in New York for most of the 1880s. He was naturalised as a US citizen in 1882, describing himself as an artist and giving his address as Lexington Ave, New York. By 1886, Goatcher, Alice, and their children (Philip junior, James and Louise) were living out of town in a theatrical colony in New Rochelle (Sun (New York), 8 June 1886); however, in mid-1888 he moved back to Manhattan, where he set up an independent scenic design studio in partnership with John H. Young (as Goatcher & Young) at 44 West 30th Street. Despite commissions as varied as scenery for Lillie Langtry’s performance as Lady Macbeth (which reputedly cost $7000) and a special 'cycloramic view of the Shenandoah Valley’ to commemorate the hundredth performance of Shenandoah at Proctor’s Opera House, the business was a commercial failure. Goatcher admitted (New York Times, 10 March 1890): “An artist has no time to be a business man…I prefer my frame in the theatre to a shop of my own.”

Early in 1890 he sued for divorce, listing Philip Krackehl of New Rochelle as co-respondent, whereupon Alice countered that her husband was now living with Kate Kearton, a theatrical seamstress in his employ. The judge dismissed the case on 12 April (New York Herald Tribune, 13 April 1890). Within a week (still married, and heavily in debt) Goatcher set sail for England, where he found work at London’s Adelphi Theatre. By the end of July, J.C. Williamson, who had worked with the young Goatcher in New York back in 1870, had signed him to a three-year contract to work in Australia at a salary of 1000 guineas per annum.

Goatcher’s first assignment for Williamson in Melbourne—painting scenery with John Brunton for the premiere of The Gondoliers at the Princess Theatre in October 1890—was strategically puffed in the Melbourne press beforehand, so that the first-night audience was primed to applaud Goatcher’s Venetian piazza and to demand he take a curtain call at the end of the first act. Public response to his subsequent efforts in 1890-91 seems to have been less enthusiastic, partly because Goatcher was not the sole star scenic artist in Melbourne. Apart from old hands such as Hennings, his competitors included recent London imports, such as Brunton, George Gordon, and Goatcher’s erstwhile partner Spong. Goatcher “wearily” announced (Bulletin, 10 October 1891) that he would return to New York—surely a somewhat empty threat, considering that his wife and creditors were waiting for him. It was an effective threat nonetheless: Goatcher allowed himself to be persuaded to stay by the almost fulsome press notices of his scenery for The Merry Monarch at Christmas 1891 (especially the illusory perspective and “barbaric splendour” of his Hall of Elephants, with its “fantastic [pachydermal] caryatides”) (Table Talk, 8 January 1892).

The tedium of Goatcher’s routine was relieved by the extravagant scenery he devised (often in conjunction with Gordon) for the annual pantomimes. Among his most applauded scenic effects was his 'Australia’s March of Triumph’ transformation for Cinderella and the Little Glass Slipper (Lyceum Theatre, Sydney, 1894; Princess Theatre, Melbourne, 1895; and Theatre Royal, Adelaide, 1895) which presented an Australian 'course of empire’ narrative in eight separate scenes that began in a “Primeval Forest” and ended with the “Glorious Vision…of United Australia” (Toso Taylor, 1894). Goatcher also specialised in oriental design, as seen in his lavish sets for The Merry Monarch and Djin Djin (Melbourne 1895, Sydney 1896), and a reprise of his famous 'Hall of Elephants’ scene inserted into the Beauty and the Beast pantomime (Sydney 1893, Melbourne 1894). Harking back to his time in Philadelphia, he recreated scenery for Round the World in Sixty [sic] Days at the Lyceum Theatre in 1894, including the interior of an Indian Temple and a panorama of a journey through the Suez Canal—scenery so spectacular that newspaper critics complained that the scenery overwhelmed the story (Bulletin, 17 February 1894). In 1895 he was commissioned to decorate the interior of the new Palace Theatre, Sydney (now demolished), which he did—magnificently, according to contemporary reports and extant photographs—in an eclectic oriental style since described as 'Hindoo Gothic’. The auditorium was lined with Wunderlich metal sheeting painted in vivid colours, the proscenium arch was surmounted with a golden Buddha, and the boxes were designed as Indian temples. The opening of the Palace should have been the high point of his career. Instead, oblivious to the failure of his previous commercial ventures, Goatcher took over the management of the theatre himself and, unable to meet the costs of his imported cast, was soon declared bankrupt. Goatcher returned to scene painting.

Other decorative commissions included the oriental-style Singer Sewing Machine showroom in Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building (1898) where he once again employed painted Wunderlich metal; the painted auditoria of Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne, in 1900 and His Majesty’s, Auckland, in 1902; and the decorations for the smoking room at Melbourne’s Menzies Hotel (now demolished) in 1907, which included a painted allegorical ceiling and a nationalistic frieze illustrating the development of post-contact Australia. Still extant is the allegorical ceiling he painted in 1907 for the Singer Sewing Machine shop in the Block Arcade, Melbourne, in which female figures represent the American company’s scientific and technical achievements.

Goatcher exhibited designs for act-drops at the Victorian Artists’ Society in 1890, and at the New South Wales Society of Artists in 1895. The State Library of Victoria holds his design sketch for trompe l’oeil blue-green curtains that enfold an allegorical pastoral scene in an apparently solid ornate gold frame. His act drop for Sydney’s Lyceum Theatre in 1892 was remembered as “the finest piece of drapery painting ever seen on any Australian, or, perhaps, on any stage” (Argus, 21 November 1911), and described at the time as:

deep, heavy folds of crimson velvet…looped up by gold cords above gold-fringed curtains of ivory satin on which are painted three figures representing comedy and tragedy crowned by fame…The perspective is wonderful, and the gold fringes fall upon what appears at first to be two marble steps, so solidly do the lines stand out from the canvas (Table Talk, 8 January 1892).

Goatcher had long been noted for these trompe l’oeil effects. In 1882, an article in Art Amateur had commended his new act drop for Wallack’s Theatre (New York):

Let those who have looked upon scene painting as merely mechanical, examine for one minute the effect of that piece of work, wherein some of the folds in the drapery are painted with such realism as to create almost a feeling of disbelief that it is not the real fabric.

Like all theatrical scene painting, act drops were regarded as temporary affairs, quickly discarded and the canvas reused. Remarkably, the curtain that Goatcher painted in 1908 for the Boulder Town Hall, in the gold-mining region of Western Australia, has survived. The canvas had been over-painted white for use as a movie screen sometime in the 1940s, and was not rediscovered until fifty years later. This Bay of Naples scene, framed with trompe l’oeil white satin and ermine-fringed red velvet, is one of the few surviving painted act drops anywhere in the world, and certainly the only known extant example of Goatcher’s theatrical scenery.

Goatcher married Emma Stone in Sydney in 1899. His sons from his first marriage, Phillip W. junior and James, joined their father in Australia, while his daughter, Louise, remained in the USA. (A much younger son, Arthur, appears to have remained there also.) Phillip junior trained in London with the scene painter William Telbin (Era, 9 January 1897), returning to Melbourne in 1910. Goatcher, who had chronic respiratory problems, moved from the eastern states with Emma and his younger son James Goatcher to the drier climate of Perth, where they set up in business as “Phil W. Goatcher & Son, Art Decorators and General House Painters” in 1904 (West Australian, 5 September 1904). He also acquired farmland in the wheat belt district north-west of Perth. Now and again he travelled to Melbourne and Sydney for painting commissions, but the frequency of these engagements naturally decreased with time. His scenery for The Chocolate Soldier, which opened in Melbourne in August 1911 before transferring in November to Sydney (where it was performed on his 60th birthday), was welcomed as “proof that he has returned to his old love, and prefers the paint-frame to the plough!” (Sydney Morning Herald, 25 November 1911). However, this was possibly his last major theatrical engagement outside Western Australia. Besides the Boulder Town Hall curtain, local commissions included a painting of The Assumption at St John the Evangelist, Fremantle, and the Come unto me all ye who Labour mural at All Saints, Collie (both oil on canvas, and both extant). The latter (depicting the adoration of the Virgin and Child by saints and church dignitaries, as well as Aborigines and miners from the Collie coalmines) was painted in 1922 when Goatcher was seventy. He remained active—even travelling unaccompanied to New Zealand in 1927—and died in Perth in 1931.

During the 1890s, Goatcher and his fellow artists—John Brunton, George Gordon, and William Spong—had been what the younger John Gordon recognised as “a school of scene-painters unexcelled in the world” (Lone Hand, 2 November 1908). However, their extravagant, illusionistic scenery had no role in the pared-down stage design of twentieth-century theatre.

Writers:

Callaway, Anita Note:

Date written:

2009

Last updated:

2011

Status:

peer-reviewed