Bertha Merfield
Bertha Elizabeth Merfield was an Australian painter, craft worker in metal and leather, and Art Nouveau muralist. She was a founding member of the Twenty Melbourne Painters Society, the British Society of Painters in Tempera, and the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria.
Merfield, born in Hawke Street, West Melbourne, Victoria on 30 January 1869 to Canadian Isabella and Englishman Thomas Merfield, was sister of Kate Hill Merfield, barrister Miriam Sarah Merfield, the eleventh woman admitted to the Melbourne Bar, May, Percy, Thomas and Charles James Merfield F.R.A.S., astronomer at the Melbourne Observatory and a founder, and first president, of the Astronomical Society of Victoria.
After her birth her family lived in Ararat and Cemetery Road, Stawell, where Bertha first studied art, and sometime after her father's death on 20 October 1888, they moved to Melbourne.
Training
After completing her secondary schooling, Merfield studied under George Clausen in England, and then in Paris at the Académie Colarossi, sharing a flat with Bernice Edwell.Back in Australia Bertha then attended E. Phillips Fox and Tudor St George Tucker's Melbourne School of Art which ran 1893-99, where she was taught in the manner of French Impressionist schools which the two teachers had attended. Fox's 1895 Art Students shows her with Sara Levi, Violet Teague, and Cristina Asquith Baker.
A summer school was also offered at Charterisville that Fox and Tucker had established in the old mansion above the Yarra River in East Ivanhoe, the lease of which they had taken over from Walter Withers in 1893. It was Australia's first recognised summer school of art. The women, including Bertha, Ina Gregory, Mary Meyer, Henrietta Irving, Ursula Foster and Helen Peters were accommodated in rooms of the stone house and a chaperon and housekeeper looked after them. Violet Teague may have been their tutor.
Bertha, then employed as a drawing instructor in the Education Department, joined Lilla Reidy in 1901 for an artists' retreat, with Lucy Sutton and Myrtle Lawrence, at the holiday cottage 'Petite Boheme' in bayside Black Rock.
Merfield next went to the National Gallery of Victoria Art School. In 1908, dressed in Japanese costume, she joined in the students' tableau of English history 'from the stone age to the present day'.
Painter and craftsperson
Merfield exhibited landscapes, portraits, figure compositions and still-life at the Victorian Artists' Society from 1900, serving on its council from 1917, and was a capable craftsperson in a variety of media including fabrics, metal and leather, which she combined with her painting and design. Her seascape in oils was displayed in the 1907 First Exhibition of Women's Work, at Melbourne's Exhibition Building, and at the first annual exhibition of The Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria, on the founding council of which she served, Bertha showed stencilled fabrics, an appliqué tablecloth, three decorative panels, a freestanding screen, a two-panel screen, a leatherwork case, a suite of furniture, enamels to her own and others' designs and including a jewellery case. The work received attention in the 1909 proceedings of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects which noted that it 'represented work on a large scale, all simply and effectively treated.' Her work was also marketed by W. H. Rocke and Co.In December 1910, having been granted a Longstaff traveling scholarship, Bertha returned on the SS Bremen to London, staying with Edith Onians in Chelsea's artists' quarter, to study again with George Clausen who was 'personally interested in her work,' and at the Slade School, and to survey the latest trends in European applied art. Her painting The Passing Cloud was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1911. In Finland Merfield visited weaver Baroness von Leaghen from whom she took samples to take back to the Melbourne Arts and Crafts Society.
Merfield returned to London in January 1912 intending to sail back to Australia that February, but stayed on as guest of Mary Sargant Florence and with her joined the group setting up the Society of Painters in Tempera who invited her to join. Its aim was raise mural painting 'to the level of perfection it attained under the ancient Greeks and Romans,' and counted amongst its members Dora Meeson, whom she acknowledged as an encouraging influence, Henry Payne, and Henry Tonks.
In February Merfield exhibited thirty landscape paintings of her homeland at the Australian Commonwealth Offices at 92 Fleet Street, London at the invitation of High Commissioner Sir George Reid. On 18 March she boarded the SS Scharnhorst bound for Australia. She held solo shows in 1912 and 1913 at the Athenaeum gallery.
Merfield made field studies; on their 1919 Tasmanian tour with Marion Mahony Griffin for example, and five years previous she was reported as taking a 'motoring tour', from Mount Buffalo to Mount Kosciuszko, to make 'extensive studies in the bush', leading to one-person and group exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne and London 1912–1918. In December 1915 she summered at Kirribilli Point to make paintings of Sydney Harbour, and in 1918 at Talisker homestead in Merino, sketching in the Grampians. Alexander Colquhoun reviewing in The Herald the consequent work shown in her September 1918 solo exhibition makes more of that mode:
It stands to Miss Merfield's credit that in making a speciality of applied work she has not ceased to regard nature as the fountain-head of all such endeavours and continues to work assiduously in the open, as the numerous panels of river, shore, and bush, now displayed, testify. The studies and compositions intended for mural purposes are the most elaborate and important in the collection, and represent a phase of pictorial expression interesting in its relation to architecture, and to the beautification and adornment of homes generally.Importantly, Merfield throughout her career exerted herself energetically and equally in both the fine and applied spheres of art, whether making landscapes and portraits in the conventional format of the easel painting, or designing labels for medicines.
A different aspect of nature, treated more literally, but with feeling and a sense of beauty, will be found in the small canvases, entitled Spring and Blossom. The blossom is not cut and stuck in an art jar, but is blooming on a peach tree on the hill side. The painting of these little studies is direct and pleasing.
Teacher and art collector
Registered in 1909 electoral rolls as 'art teacher' living at cnr Princess and High Sts., Kew, from about 1906, she taught painting, drawing, leather repoussé, fabric stencilling, enamelling, and marquetry, and 'preparation for University exams,' at her studio in Alexandra Chambers, at 46 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, where May Vale also had a studio, and whose classes Bertha covered while Vale was overseas in 1906. She donated a prize for leather repoussé to The Ladies' Home Industries Association Second Exhibition at the Athenaeum Gallery, Collins Street, Melbourne.On her return to Australia in June 1912 from England and Europe Merfield was appointed as art teacher at the University Practising School for Secondary Teachers, and set up a new studio in Scottish House, 90 William Street, Melbourne.
Muralist
Bertha was recognised as reviving mural painting in Victoria and internationally, a medium that developed from her decorative screens with 'broad effects, and...charming bits of bush landscape from clumps of gnarled trees or slender eucalyptus standing like sentinels against backgrounds of blue sky and fleecy clouds'. Recalling her experience of European architecture, she described the mural as 'the most democratic expression in art.A Leader article describes her method of staining 'arras cloth':
...she stains in her picture with dyes, outlining the whole of the design with a strong brown line. You could think of nothing more delightful than whole doors treated m this manner. One decorative panel is suggested by the sea seen through the ti-tree at, Portsea. You get the sense wind in the gnarled branches, and feel all the glamor of summer seas in the blue of the water beyond.
Horden's Gallery in Sydney, in an advertisement in The Bookman provides prices for her decorative panels shown there in June 1912; a threefold screen was 35 guineas, 19 for a mantelpiece insert., and paintings ranged from 6 to 28 guineas.
In 1916 The Studio reported that:
Among the craftworkers who are doing noteworthy work may be singled out Miss Bertha Merfield. She is particularly happy in dealing with typically Australian subjects, and especially in her treatment of Ti-tree and various members of the extraordinarily decorative Eucalyptus family.
In 1916 Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin undertook for the entrepreneurial Greek émigré restaurateur Antony J. J. Lucas the luxury remodelling of the Vienna Cafe at 270 Collins Street, Melbourne. They commissioned local artists, including sculptor Margaret Baskerville, jeweller Charles Costerman and Bertha Merfield. Marion and Bertha may have met through Emily Gibson to whom Merfield taught design, and who was later apprenticed to the Griffin company as landscape architect.
When complete in 1916 her mural depicting the Australian bush at dawn, with the sky painted over gold leaf, and the whole filling the south-end lunette under the decoratively perforated barrel-vault of the dining hall gallery, received public acclaim. The Bulletin remarked wittily on her efforts,
Bertha Merfield has been murally decorating the new part of the Vienna Cafe for the last two months. The job is 36 feet one way and 18 feet the other, so the artist has had some mountaineering.while Punch was more lyrical in its description:
The mural decoration on the end wall, which is semi-circular, is purely Australian in design and colour, and represents "Dawn in the Australian Bush," just when the sun has risen and the sky with the grey of dawn, with the sun breaking through in patches of golden light. The mist still paints the valley with misterym , and the peace and calm of Nature make harmony. The symbolism in this brings out the dawn of architecture in Australia which combines the arts that the ancient Greeks embraced in their structures—those of sculpture and mural paintings—when craftsmen banded together, each loving his part, to form one harmonious whole.Her decorations were short-lived, as the building was demolished in 1938. Among her commercial commissions, aside from the popular murals and screens Merfield made for private homes, was the backdrop for a window display for F. H. Brunning seed merchants in Elizabeth Street.
Marion Griffin and Bertha's friendship continued after the Café Australia interior remodelling was finished. They shared an interest in the decorative potential of the eucalyptus form, and when Bertha invited Marion to go with her, and Mabel Hookey and another 'lady painter', sketching together around Tasmania, she agreed. Marion's memoirs record the rough journey across Bass Strait in the SS Loongana, compensated over December 1918–January 1919 with 'a wonderful fortnight which enabled me to add a number of unique trees to my set of Forest Portraits.'
Merfield was a founding member of the Twenty Melbourne Painters Society. The Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria, initiated with the 'First Exhibition of Women's Work' in which she exhibited, first met in her studio in March 1908, and she participated in its first exhibition that year in the Guild Hall. In 1909 her demonstration of stencilling in the Society's exhibition was graced with Dame Nellie Melba's attendance. She was elected a member of the London Society of Mural Decorators and Painters in Tempera, and exhibited in their 1914 Annual show.
Of her last solo exhibition, at Hordern's in Sydney, Daily Telegraph critic William Moore commented on her 'keen eye for the decorative possibilities of Australian trees... able to pick out their peculiar characteristics their essential rhythms... wilder, freer, less regular' than the European, and 'suggestive subjects for decorative art'.