Castlemaine Art Museum

Castlemaine Art Museum is an art gallery and museum situated in Castlemaine, Victoria in the Shire of Mount Alexander. It was founded in 1913. Its collection concentrates on Australian art and the museum houses historical artefacts and displays drawn from the district. It is governed by private trustees and managed by a Board elected by subscribers and provided with state and local government funding and support from benefactors, local families, artists and patrons. It is housed in a 1931 Art Deco building constructed for the purpose.

History

The founding of Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum was preceded by four other public regional galleries in the state of Victoria: Ballarat in 1884, Warrnambool in 1886, Bendigo in 1887 and Geelong in 1900, but its significance by comparison was that it was in a small town, not a regional city like its forbears.

A cultural precedent had been established when the town opened a Mechanics Institute in 1855 which included a library; and numbers of artists, including S. T. Gill, Samuel Calvert, John Skinner Prout, George French Angas and early photographers Antoine Fauchery and Richard Daintree, had visited to document the swarming goldfields.

Castlemaine Past and Present

The Castlemaine Progress Association's display of items of a 'novel and interesting nature', Castlemaine Past and Present, the town's first major exhibition, running 18-20 August 1910, celebrated the commercial, civic and cultural achievements of the town with "a collection of geological specimens and curios from the Government collection," photographs of historical interest, maps, furniture, applied art, books and artefacts, as well as landscapes by local artists intended to "popularise our town as a resort for artists and painters." The committee included a "special feature" of "modern art, the only stipulation being that works of art as well as all other exhibits must relate in some way to Castlemaine or its district," and called for "historical curios, weapons, maps, manuscripts, medals, trophies, or any other article of local significance." The exhibition thus established the principle of collecting of Australian art and of looking locally, for works connected to Castlemaine in some aspect, despite a policy of concentrating on British art that was pursued by most galleries of the period, in particular the National Gallery of Victoria purchases in Europe by L. Bernard Hall through the Felton Bequest.

Public meeting

Two years later, in October 1912, the first solo exhibition of paintings by a local resident, Elsie Barlow, was held in the reading room of the Mechanics Institute, raising hopes "that the Castlemaine public will have the same opportunity in this matter as is afforded to the Melbourne public, which now-a-days is rarely without an Art Exhibition." Susequenlty, a meeting at Barlow's home on 9 July 1913, proposed the creation of a permanent gallery for Castlemaine and approached the Mayor to "'affirm the advisability of establishing a Museum and Art Gallery in Castlemaine" at a public meeting of Mayors and Councillors from Chewton, Maldon, Metcalfe, Newstead and Mount Alexander with Col. Davies, Secretary of the Bendigo Art Gallery, Mr A T Woodward Director of the Bendigo School of Arts, Mr Bernard Hall, Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Trustees of the National Gallery and Museum and the Old Pioneers Association, and with support of the local High School committee. Winifred Brotherton, who took the minutes, emphasised the importance of establishing a museum in order to preserve the heritage of the town, and the museum was given her name in her honour. Colonel Davis spoke from the experience of Bendigo Art Gallery where he was secretary, advising not to expect government funds such as they had received as the grant was only £2,000 to be divided amongst all the arts organisations, but to secure donations of pictures, be prepared to go into debt, and make use of loans from the National Gallery of Victoria. The housing of the gallery was considered and proposals included the cooking classroom of the Technical High School, the Market Building, the Town Hall, and the School of Mines.

Realisation

The gallery became a reality when Mrs Leviny of Buda homestead provided use of a room in a shop in Lyttleton St. for one year free of charge, and Bendigo Art Gallery offered a loan of paintings. A loan exhibition of 30 works in the Stock Exchange Room of the Town Hall launched the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum on 24 October, 1913. Significant exhibitors who made donations of their work included Harold Herbert and Jessie Traill.

When the Gallery moved into the room offered by Leviny in Lyttleton St., more donations were made, and loans by artists including Alexander Colquhoun, and by the National Gallery of Victoria which contributed Franz Courtens' Morning, David Wynfield's Death of the Duke of Buckingham," Robert Dowling's Sheikh and His Son Entering Cairo; Hermann Eschke's Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight; Cave Thomas' Canute Listening to the Monks at Ely; and Louis Buvelot's Summer afternoon, Templestowe.

The 1914 annual report recorded 30 memberships and a collection of 23 pictures with others on loan and a balance of £75. Initial opening hours in 1914 were daily from 3 to 5 p.m., and Wednesday and Saturday evenings from 7.30 to 9.30, changed later to weekdays 10 am-12 pm and 2-5 pm, and Sundays 2-5 pm.

Castlemaine Post Office

The next home of the Gallery and Museum, by June 1915, was in the rooms above the Castlemaine Post Office which it rented for £1 per annum, and where it remained until 1931 in three well-lit rooms: two small ones, and one measuring 9 metres by 5.5 metres which served as the main gallery. Nevertheless, the Victorian Government rejected their grant application of 1915 because the Gallery's tenure of its premises was not secure. Electirc lighting was added in 1927.

The facility proved popular, with attendances rising from 800 in 1920 to 3,600 in 1923 and the insurance value of the collection rising in 1925 to £2,000, with a further 37 paintings gifted in 1926 by, among others, Arthur Streeton, George Coates, Dora Meeson, Jo Sweatman, and A.M.E. Bale, and purchases including The Dark Horse by George W. Lambert, and “The Coming Storm” by Blamire Young, as reported by Lieut. Col. Francis S. Newell, then President of the Castlemaine Art Gallery in Art in Australia of December 1926. Newell also commented on attendance by 5,248 visitors; "When it is remembered that the population of this town is about 7,000, the progress of this gallery is remarkable. The committee has now purchased a site for a new building, but more funds are needed before the project can be carried out."

Building

Castlemaine Art Gallery

A building fund was set up in 1923 using a donation of £100 by Sir John and Lady Higgins. A site in Templeton Street was purchased for £1200 but later sold to acquire the present block in Lyttleton Street in 1927 for about £300. That year in a visit to Castlemaine the Hon G. M. Prendergast met with a deputation seeking a grant to augment the building fund, to which he offered a grant of £1000 on the basis of £1 for every £2 raised locally. Walter J. Whitchell promised £500 for the building fund should the balance be found when the fund held only £760 and building was costed at £3,500 so an appeal for funds from the public was launched at the onset of the Depression. Nevertheless, £3,250 was raised in only six weeks from private individuals and the Bank of Australasia, Ball and Welch and Bryant and May.

Architect Percy Meldrum presented to a reluctant management committee a design in an American Art-deco style "modern and artistic." It consisted of a main gallery 64 feet by 24 feet for the display of oil paintings, and two smaller galleries each 22 feet by 20 feet for prints and water-colours, with the Museum in the basement with storerooms. The main gallery walls and those of the both additional gallery spaces were naturally and indirectly lit from a concealed windows above suspended ceilings. The entry steps were in Harcourt granite, the parapet of Malmsbury bluestone and Barker's Creek slate paved the forecourt and the facade included an artificial stone bas-relief featuring a female figure representing Castlemaine surrounded by two attendant gold-miners of the past, and artist and sculptor at left. It was designed and carved by H. Orlando Dutton (1894-1962), an English artist working in Melbourne.

Builder Frank Pollard completed construction between June 1930 and April 1931 for the officially opening, free of debt, on the 18th of that month by the Governor of Victoria Lord Somers at a ceremony conducted in front of a crowd at the entrance to the Gallery and flowing across the street. It was reported as far away as Canada that "In opening the art gallery, in the presence of a very large gathering, Lord Somers said that he had been amazed at seeing a gallery and a collection so fine. He did not suppose that a gallery of those dimensions would be found in a town of that size anywhere else in the British Dominions. Extraordinary enthusiasm must have been shown to make the gallery possible."

Collection

The Museum, housed in the basement, presents the history of Castlemaine and its region in objects, maps, models, photographs and prints, including a large group of hand-coloured lithographs from watercolours by S. T. Gill; pithy vignettes of life on the goldfields. Historical objects of glassware and ceramics extends from the Roman era. Local fauna is represented by taxidermy specimens. Items of Victorian-era fashion are also displayed, and arts and crafts is represented in early-to-mid century enamelware and silver.

The Gallery has always specialised in Australian art as the Gallery's constitution stipulated in 1913, emphasising "... the cultivation of a taste for the Fine Arts by the collection and exhibition of works of especially Australian Artists..." Accordingly, the collection covers a range of periods Colonial, Impressionist, Early Twentieth Century Modernism, Mid-Century and beyond, and Contemporary. Indigenous art is progressively being transferred from the Museum to the walls and display cases of the Gallery and its collection is being expanded. Portrait photographs of Australian artists form another specialist section.

Earlier artists include Louis Buvelot, Fred McCubbin, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Violet Teague, May Vale, Walter Withers, David Davies, Rupert Bunny, Max Meldrum, John Russell, Hugh Ramsay, Clarice Beckett, A.M.E. Bale, Arthur Lindsay and John Longstaff.

Modernists include Margaret Preston, Roland Wakelin, Russell Drysdale, Fred Williams, John Brack, Albert Tucker, John Perceval, Clifton Pugh, Lloyd Rees and Roger Kemp. More contemporary painters include Rick Amor, John Dent, Ray Crooke, Peter Benjamin Graham, Robert Jacks, Jeffrey Smart, Ian Armstrong, Paul Cavell and Brian Dunlop. Portraits of Australian artists are by Australian photographers Max Dupain, David Moore, Richard Beck and Olive Cotton and others.

Copies of about a dozen examples of the work of Christian Waller (née Yandell) are available in the museum, which also holds photographs and information related to other members of the Yandell family, who were among the notable founding residents of the town of Castlemaine. One of the most prominent Yandells was Augustus Courts Yandell, whose success as a gold-finder in the 1850s enabled him and his family to own as many as 15 Castlemaine properties at one time. One example is the house at 14 Doveton Street, dating from 1858.

Exhibitions

• 1913, 22-25 October: Loan Exhibition, Castlemaine Town Hall
• 1914, October: Fifty Medici Society coloured photographic reproductions of Old Masters 14th-19th century, on loan from Bendigo Art Gallery

Threatened closure

The museum was due to close on 11 August 2017 due to lack of funds, but was saved by a donation of $250,000 by an anonymous couple and local fundraising efforts.