Orlando Dutton
Orlando Henry Dutton was an English-born Australian monumental, figurative and architectural sculptor.
Early life
Orlando Dutton was born in Upper Rushall Street, Walsall, Staffordshire on 1 April 1894, the first son of Eliza Priscilla and Henry, a baker, confectioner and proprietor of the Silver Grill in Park Street. Orlando was the third of five siblings Lillian, Dorothy, Sydney, and Montague, and was a chorister in the town's St. Matthews Church.Training
Dutton began his education at the Blue Coat school in St. Paul's Street, and then attended the School of Art at 22 Goodall Street, Walsall and in 1909 was apprenticed to Robert Bridgeman's Lichfield firm of ecclesiastical sculptors. As a stone carver, he was employed on buildings in the Midlands, such as, in 1910, the girls' high school building in Handsworth.War service in WW1
During World War I, he enlisted on 23 October 1915 and served in the United Kingdom with the Manchester Regiment in the Labour Corps, and was awarded the 1914-1915 Star He then was assigned to the 29th Trench Mortar Battery with the Salonica Force fighting in Valletta, Malta. Orlando's father inquired after his location and condition in March 1918 by cable from his home at 265 Gillies St., Adelaide and received a reply in July that year reporting that since 16 May 1918 his son was being treated for malaria in the 4th London General Hospital, Denmark Hill. Orlando's brother Sydney died fighting in France on 8 August 1918, aged 22.Australia
Other members of Dutton's family migrated to Australia in 1913 while he stayed to complete his apprenticeship. Still suffering from malaria and other ailments acquired during his war service, he emigrated to Australia on a free passage as an ex-Serviceman under an overseas settlement scheme, with £25 gratuity. On the voyage he met Emma Jane Hancock, a former wartime V.A.D. nurse, and they married on 15 August 1922 in Adelaide. Living first in Adelaide near his family, he entered a partnership with a monumental mason. In 1922 he made four bronze reliefs based on his own war experiences for a WWI monument in Booleroo Centre. In 1923 he exhibited at the Royal South Australian Society of Arts.The couple made Melbourne their permanent home, living at first at 13 Devonshire Road, East Malvern, and there, from 1929 he worked as a stonemason on the Shrine of Remembrance and also that year made four figures for the tower of St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne.
Depression years
The Great Depression, especially harsh in Australia, resulted in there being few art lovers buying, or even showing interest in, sculpture with even the most professional failing to sell a single work. Their medium was always last to be mentioned in reviews of exhibitions, and sculptors struggled to survive. Nevertheless, the depth of the global economic crisis proved to be a busy time for Dutton, with work on buildings of two insurance companies and an art gallery.In 1930–31, with the assistance of 17-year-old Stanley Hammond, he cast two identical groups of large figures of Faith, Hope and Charity, for placement six stories above the Collins and Swanston Streets entrances of the Art Deco Manchester Unity building. An uncredited article in The Herald describes the technical approach;
Statuary groups— Faith, Hope and Charity will be a feature of the new Manchester Unity building. This emblematical statuary will appear on both the Collins Street and Swanston Street facades, close to the corner entrance, and, being in ivory white, will stand out well against the mother-of-pearl glazed terra-cotta. Much work is involved in the completion of such a group of life-size figures. First a quarter scale model is completely finished in clay, and after approval of detail has been given by the architect, the figures are modelled full-size in special modelling clay. Since the figures cannot be handled full-size in the kilns, and on account of the necessity of reproducing two or three sets, they are carefully cut into convenient sizes, from which plaster moulds are made. The individual pieces are then pressed in clay, dried, glazed, and burnt in the kiln to 2100 deg. Fahrenheit, after which they are closely fitted together, and are ready for setting in place on the job. The modelling, to the design of the architect, Mr Marcus R. Barlow, is being done at Wunderlich's terra-cotta factory, Sunshine, by Mr O. H. Dutton, sculptor, who carried out a considerable amount of work for the Shrine of Remembrance.
In the same years, for the main entrance of the AMP building at 419-429 Collins Street and 64-74 Market Street Melbourne, he carved the emblematic statuary group from three blocks of stone weighing more than 17 tonnes, and he and Hammond cast in artificial stone an allegorical panel over the entrance of architect Percy Meldrum's Art Deco Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum, for which Harold Herbert, who made a watercolour of the building, had praise in his 1930 article describing the techniques employed;
A very interesting panel, in relief, to be placed over the entrance doorway to the Castlemaine Art Gallery has been completed by Mr. O. H. Dutton. It is excellently designed, and the flat relief of 14 inches depth has been very effectively carried out. The panel is about eight feet long. The process, too, is interesting, as the work is to be cast in artificial stone of a yellow-grey colour. The design is symbolic in character, and expresses civic pride by the seated central figure with the arts and culture on one side and the goldmining, which was responsible for the birth of Castlemaine, on the other. Appropriate also is the suggestion of cultivation and progress. This panel, which will be the sole item of decoration included in a very simple and dignified facade, will prove a very telling note, and has been admirably conceived for this purpose. The architects are Messrs. Stephenson and Meldrum, of Melbourne.
Sculptors’ Society of Australia
In 1932 W. Leslie Bowles met with Dutton, Wallace Anderson, Ola Cohn, George Allen and Charles Oliver, proposing to form a Sculptors' Society in the hope that commissions could be shared amongst the Society members. The Sculptors' Society of Australia was duly instituted with Bowles, as Secretary, its only office bearer in a position he held through the life of the Society. Sydney sculptors Paul Montford and Raynor Hoff and Daphne Mayo of Brisbane joined the Society and later the younger professional sculptors, Lyndon Dadswell and Stanley Hammond, also became members. In its next ten years until its demise because of the War, the Society promoted seven competitions for major public sculptures, of which Bowles won four, Hammond two and Anderson one; while none of the other members were successful.In April 1933 the first group exhibition of sculpture to be held in Melbourne was organised by members Dutton, Bowles, Wallace Anderson, Ola Cohn, George Allen, and Charles Oliver. Arthur Streeton enthusiastically welcomed the exhibition and expressed surprise that Australia, which had a clear atmosphere and a suitable climate to show sculpture to its best advantage, did not make more of it. An illustration of Dutton's plaster maquette of St. George from the show was published in Art in Australia in December that year. After joining the Victorian Artists Society, his Troubadour was exhibited at their galleries in East Melbourne in May 1935.
Like others in the Society, Dutton was active from the mid-1930s in entering sculpture awards. He submitted for the Melbourne City Council competition for sculpture to decorate the Fitzroy Gardens, which was won by Leslie Bowles. In December 1935 Dutton submitted for the Monash Equestrian Memorial commission a finished maquette as one of the competitors, with Paul Montford, Lyndon Dadswell, Raynor Hoff, Wallace Anderson, Henry Harvey and A. de Bono, whose entries apart from that of winner, who again was Bowles, were exhibited in Melbourne at the new Arts and Crafts Society gallery.
Dutton's architectural decoration continued in 1938 with his contribution of a symbolic bas-relief to the facade of Anzac House in Collins Street of a man holding high the Lamp of Honour while crushing the Serpent of Evil with his heel. That year in Adelaide, he received the Melrose Prize for a portrait bust of writer Robert H. Croll and the Art Gallery of South Australia, belatedly strengthening its sculpture collection, was the first to acquire Dutton's work, purchasing his stone carving Jeune Fille from the 1939 South Australian Society of Arts spring show through the Morgan Thomas Bequest Fund.
World War II
During World War II Dutton again served, enlisting at Caulfield in the 2nd AIF with the service number VX22013, and as an older recruit in his late forties his skills were employed in the Mapping Division making landscape models for training purposes. Over 1941–42 he worked on Professor Edwin Sherbon Hills' large scale map of the Australian topography nine metres square, at a scale of 5.2 km to the centimetre. It was made in plaster over plywood cut to follow fifty-foot contour intervals, and Dutton finished the final model with a scalpel before its casting in sections. The full map was displayed for the 1967 ANZAAS conference. Since the late 1970s a section showing eastern Australian states has been displayed in the School of Earth Sciences' Fritz Loewe Theatre, Melbourne University on the corner of Swanston and Elgin Streets, Carlton. Scienceworks retains the Commonwealth archives copy.The War did not curtail Dutton's artistic practice and in 1939, though not yet a member of the conservative Australian Academy of Art, he showed a limestone carving Night, and a small sculpture of an aboriginal fisherman, in the Academy's second exhibition then participated in its third in 1940. That year he carved figures in the spandrels above the entrance of the monastery St. Paschal's House of Studies in Box Hill. Harley Cameron Griffiths painted his portrait in 1941 in an army greatcoat. Just before, and after, the War he resided in and kept his studio at 29 Muir St., Hawthorn.
Dutton exhibited with the Victorian Artists' Society from 1934, and as a member in 1939 he was a judge for an Age newspaper sculpture competition. Made its president in 1946–47, he encouraged sculptors to join and founded a sculpture group, inaugurating in 1947 an annual exhibition of the medium at the VAS in the first of which he included a life-sized Orpheus.
Lenton Parr remarks that it was the membership of the professional artists of high standing, James Quinn, George Bell and Orlando Dutton which lent the VAS credibility when amateurs dominated during the rise of the Contemporary Art Society, and when roundly criticised by The Age art critic for its drop in standards on the eve of Dutton's presidency.
Later, he and the other sculptors concerned set up their own society, asking George Allen, Head of the Sculpture School at RMIT and Stanley Hammond to write into its constitution aims including; promoting sculpture in the community; conducting competitions for professional sculptors; and encouraging young sculptors and students with opportunities to exhibit, and to learn by association with practising sculptors. Accordingly the Victorian Sculptors’ Society was founded in 1949 and it achieved its objectives until the departure in 1967 of splinter group the Centre 5.
In other official capacities Dutton on 25 May 1948 opened an exhibition of Bebe Rigg stained-glass windows and cartoons at the Independent Church Hall, Collins Street. With Daryl Lindsay and Louis McCubbin he judged the 1951 Jubilee art competition in Brisbane.