Hal Waugh b. c.1860

  • Artist (Painter)
Painter, was born and apparently lived all his life at Eltham, Victoria. He mainly painted bush and country scenes, and spent some time painting with members of the Heidelberg School. The invitations to his 1908 solo exhibition were printed on gum leaves.
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painter, was born and apparently lived all his life at Eltham, Victoria. He mainly painted bush and country scenes, including the undated oil on canvas Ploughing inscribed 'after C. Clark’ (Bridget McDonnell, Early Australian Paintings catalogue, Carlton Vic, May-June 2001, no.4, not ill.) and an oil on canvas view of an orchard dated 1909 (24 × 34.5 cm, Stephen Scheding collection 1980s). He spent some time painting at “Charterisville”, a community house at Heidelberg, with other members of the Heidelberg School. Waugh rescued the poet and writer C.J. Dennis when Dennis was living in drab penury at Melbourne in 1907, while the Gadfly was failing in Adelaide, and in 1908 carried him off to the camp Waugh had established in the picturesque highland settlement of Tollangi, some forty miles east of Melbourne. The pair lived in two weather-beaten tents, which Dennis dubbed 'The Hall of Hal’ and 'The Den of Den’. After publishing Backblock Ballads and Other Verses (1913, cover design David Low ) Dennis could afford to rent a weatherboard hut (interor and exterior photograph c.1913, ill. Chisholm facing p.32).

While Waugh was in Melbourne in 1908 preparing for a solo show of his paintings, Dennis was set the task of collecting gum leaves to be painted up as invitations to the exhibition (Chisholm, 31). Chisholm quotes Dennis’s verse and prose commentary on his collecting effort, from a manuscript then in the possession of Waugh’s daughter, which includes:

If you ever get rheumatics through chasing leaves in the snow for some damsilly exhibition, you rub 'em night and morning with wombat fat, and it makes 'em a damsite worse… However, I will say this, if Jack [the goat] hadn’t eaten my shirt I might have gone down to see the show. But a poet in Collins Street without a shirt might easily be mistaken for an artist.

Sophie Ducker notes: 'In the State Library of Victoria is a prepared gum leaf which has actually been sent through the mail marked with a round postal stamp and an invitation to an exhibition of paintings.

( Vic Sandr m Je 29 08.)

Hal Waugh invites you to an Exhibition of his Bushpaintings at Bernard’s Gallery 266 Collins St – July 2nd 1908 – open for a month – 10 to 5.’

Much of Waugh’s art done throughout his life was destroyed in the 1939 bushfires.

Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007

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