Madge Freeman
Frances Margot Freeman was an Australian painter of landscape and urban scenes working internationally who was known for her watercolour, and for her craft of lacquerwork and enamelware.
Early life and education
Born in Bendigo to Frances Maud and George Henry Freeman, Freeman was the older sibling of brother George 'Ross' Freeman. Her father was a teacher, holding the post of Principal at Saint Andrews College and then Vice Principal at Bendigo High School. The family lived at Barkly Place and their neighbours were the family of Ola Cohn.While aged seven at Junior school in Saint Andrew’s College, Bendigo, where her father was principal in 1902, Freeman took out prizes for writing and sewing, one for sewing again in the following year and another for ‘Church Instruction’ in 1906, the year in which she and Ola Cohn played castanets in a school concert.
Teaching qualification
In 1911, the Education Department issued results in which Freeman, studying under Arthur Woodward at the School of Mines, achieved an ‘Elementary Pass for ‘drawing from a flat example’ advancing to a Pass for ‘drawing from models or objects’ and ‘drawing plant forms from nature and in 1912 and 1913 passing the exam in ’drawing an ornament from a cast in outline’. Other tasks which she passed were ‘Elementary modelling’ and ‘modelling ornament from the cast.Freeman was employed in July 1913 as assistant art instructor at the Bendigo High School. Meanwhile she continued study at the School of Mines, receiving a Pass in ‘Modelling Human Figure from Cast’ and an ‘Advanced Grade 1 Pass’ in ‘Modelled Design’. She received her Secondary Certificate as a Drawing Teacher in December 1914.
Socialite
In 1914, the Bendigo Independent announced her debut at the Tennis Ball with her photograph being published in the Bendigonian. For a fancy dress ball in March 1915 at Girton College, as an ‘old girl’ of the school, she dressed as ‘Powder and Patches’ and in May that year returned for a ‘Dickens Evening’ dressed as Dick Swiveller. For Australia Day celebrations in Bendigo, and to raise funds for soldiers at the local camp, Freeman joined ‘the Keystone Moving Picture Company’ in a street performance, and also another fundraiser, featuring ‘The Keystone Komedy Kompany’ at Bendigo’s Princess Theatre, in both of which she appeared as the silent movie dancer 'Carmencita.’ Freeman’s soldier brother Ross, a signaller, was stationed in Lemnos and newspapers noted that he was the chance recipient of some of his family's war donations.Art school
In February 1916, Freeman commenced her studies at the National Gallery of Victoria art schools under Bernard Hall, and where others from Bendigo, Clarice Beckett and her sister, and Elma Roach, attended. They were reported as ‘working very hard’. They periodically returned home to Bendigo on holidays, where on one occasion Coleman hosted a student friend Joan Lindsay. Freeman appears in a 1920 snapshot, perched at centre top of a group of the students at the base of Emmanuel Fremiet's Joan of Arc statue outside the Art School.Aside from her art studies, Freeman enjoyed her social life and performing; while in Melbourne she appeared at the Playhouse in a ‘moving tableau of early Melbourne’ in a dress worn at Government House in the 1850s, and in 1920 was invited to the Lord Mayor of Melbourne’s ball in honour of Edward VIII, the Prince of Wales. With Roach, in July 1920, she acted with other Gallery School students in an oriental romance based on Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh. She was a member, with Norah Gurdon, Dora Wilson, Elma Roach, Isabel May Tweddle, Helen Ogilvie, Louis McCubbin, and Daryl Lindsay of a club for former students formed in 1916 and presided by the oldest, Peter Kirk, which held a number of reunions receiving wide publicity in the early 1920s. In June 1923, members of the club were responsible for a fancy dress ball at St Kilda Town Hall, with Freeman, who dressed as a peacock for the event, contributing the huge stencilled lanterns that lit the venue. They next held an all-night dance at St Mary’s Hall in East St Kilda on 31 August 1923.
Artist
Freeman was invited with Joan Lindsay to the Crivelli’s at Ferrars Place, Albert Park to a dance celebrating Rene Crivielli’s Legion of Honour, and in January 1923 spent time at his family's Mount Macedon property to break from sketching in the Malmsbury district where she, and probably Elma too, were taught watercolour techniques by Matthew James MacNally who was working there beside Harold Herbert.Freeman and Elma Roach formed a close alliance and in March 1923 rented a cottage in Mooroolbark where they made paintings toward a joint exhibition that opened the following May. The reviewer Alexander Colquhoun, though gently critical of Roach’s technical shortcomings, in Freeman’s work found ‘more technical grip and a better sense of values,’ continuing that she showed ‘a creditable disinclination to rely on a pretty water-color manner and a consistent striving after true definition.’ Arthur Streeton in the Argus, while acknowledging that this was their first exhibition so ‘rather immature’, agreed that ‘Miss Freeman reveals herself as the better craftsman , and displays an interesting sense of colour to which is added free handling of pigment’. The show received kind attention also from The Age, whose critic made no distinction between the artists’ capabilities and remarked that their works were ‘distinctly Australian in atmosphere and subject matter’ while The Australasian merely repeated Streeton’s commentary. George Bell, writing in the Sun News-Pictorial under a heading ‘Gums and Glimpses’ saw promise in how:
Madge Freeman expresses the white gum in all its poetic beauty, and is tenderly sympathetic with the atmosphere of her skies. The freedom, the clear, true palette she uses, and her forthright work throughout mark her as an artist of whom more will be heard.Only weeks later the pair contributed to the display and sale of arts and crafts at the Melbourne Town Hall. Their artefacts, which were reported to have ‘drawn a crowd’, included ‘hair combs, umbrella handles, egg cups, serviette rings, bag handles, hat pins and quaint pendants dangling on necklets of black ribbon’ all in ‘polished, tinted and painted woods.’ Another show of their 'Madgelma' branded lacquerware including powder boxes, card trays, fruit bowls and dress ornaments, was held in Jessie Traill’s Collins Street studio for Christmas shoppers, and was noted in Table Talk.
Europe and Africa
In 1923, numbers of former National Gallery students had left Australia to continue studying or exhibiting in Paris, London or America, including Ethel Spowers, Edith Grieve, Nancy Lyle, and Lilian Pentland, and winners of the Gallery's travelling scholarship Marion Jones, Adelaide Perry, and Laurie Honey. Freeman and Roach were saving from their craft sales for their own overseas excursion which they planned for 1924, and spent the early weeks of that year bidding farewell to friends and family, then departed for London, travelling second-class on the SS Medic on 16 February that year.In England, they settled in the Chelsea artists’ precinct. There, they briefly attended the Slade School under the tutelage of Henry Tonks. On 23 June Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll opened an exhibit of Australian artists that included work by Freeman, that was hailed by Sydney’s The Sun newspaper critic as ‘Healthy Art,’ having been told that the London organisers were ‘glad to find that Australian art continues to be healthy and vigorous, rebuffing the decadence shown by the freak schools’. Freeman encountered other Australian artists also in Paris. Her assimilation was rapid; in May 1925 she had a work accepted for the Paris Salon. The two friends shared flats in London and Paris and embarked on painting journeys across France, Italy, Spain, and North Africa. In St Ives, Cornwall, they shared a studio with Gwen Horne. During their time in Paris, Freeman and Roach met and were taught by Adolphe Milich, a French painter and teacher originally from Poland. Milich was associated with the School of Paris and specialised in oil and watercolour paintings of a wide range of subject matter. His artistic approach, heavily influenced by Paul Cézanne, had a profound impact on the Australian artists.
By October Freeman and Roach had arrived in Italy where they were painting in Venice and Choggia, The Age describing them as ‘good draftsmen , good colorists; both understand light, shadows and mass, and both have the strong feeling for sentiment and against sentimentality, for vitality and against pictorial incident and mere anecdote’ with Roach’s approach being devoted to a ‘poetic element’ and Freeman’s ‘more detached,…making her subject speak more obviously for itself.’ The latter sent her Reflections, Choggia for the first exhibition of the year at the New Gallery, 107 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne. Freeman returned to France in early 1926, where she endured a freezing winter. In October Table Talk drew attention to Freeman’s Bendigo origins in announcing an exhibition at Bendigo Art Gallery that included Marion Jones and other ‘ex-Bendigonians who have made a name for themselves In the old world’.
Late in 1926 Freeman, then aged 31, met and married in Kensington mining engineer Lanfear Thompson from Western Australia a government contractor due to work in Africa. Freeman had met Thompson as a child. After a honeymoon motor tour of rural England they initially settled in Obuasi, West Africa, and despite The Bulletin report that she had 'evidently abandoned ideas of an art career', she resumed her painting when they visited Kumasi, Ashanti as guests of Justice and Mrs. McDowell, where she found the landscape reminiscent of Australia. before staying in Western Australia, and visiting Bendigo in December 1926. She travelled to Belgium and London in August 1927 with Ruth Howell. After working as manager of the Bibiani gold mine, Freeman's husband died of malaria aged 37 in a London nursing home on 25 March 1929.
File:Madge Freeman, Helen Stewart, Dina Roach at Caudebec-en-Caux, Normandy.jpg|thumb|Madge Freeman, Helen Stewart, Dina Roach at Caudebec-en-Caux, Normandy. Photo: The Home: An Australian Quarterly. 1 January 1932
Back in Melbourne in 1930, Freeman shared a studio with Margaret McLean in Collins Street and continued exhibiting, showing her watercolours of European scenes alongside Roach’s at the Athenaeum Gallery, to a favourable review by Harold Herbert, before holding a one-person show at the Karrakatta Club Hall, Perth, where she stayed with Lanfear’s brother Dr Ashburton Thompson, then announced her intention to return to London for further studies. In November that year she was in Paris studying with André Lhote, and staying with Elma Roach and Helen Stewart in a large flat with an attached studio amongst seven other studios. Roach, a frequent correspondent to newspapers, wrote to The Herald to describe how those who, like them, studying art in Paris were: ‘progressing and getting away from the 'Victorianism' which has been such an enemy to Art The modern art is wonderfully interesting, and men such as Van Gogh, Cezanne, Pissarro, Matisse, etc., are very much appreciated— it is wonderful being able to see their works.’
The pair returned to Cheyne Walk, Chelsea in February 1932, where they had befriended theatre director Molly Ick whose farewell Freeman hosted in June. Freeman herself left the city for Málaga, Spain to walk through and paint picturesque villages, to Ronda, during 1933, where she was soon joined by Roach. They returned to Paris and Milich's studio in early 1934.