painter, illustrator, etcher and political activist, was born on 24 December 1873 at 28 Swanston Street, Melbourne, fifth surviving child of Edwin Geach and Catherine, née Greenwood. She studied Design (1890-92) and Painting (1892-96) at Melbourne’s National Gallery School, winning second prize for painting from the nude in 1895. She then went to London where she became the first Australian to win a tuition scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools, studying under Lawrence Alma-Tadema, John Singer Sargent and other visiting masters (1896-1900). She also studied stained glass at the London School of Arts and Crafts and spent time in Paris where she reputedly studied with Whistler and at the Académie Julian. Like other artists of the period, notably Thea Proctor , her early works (especially) show the influence of the pale tints and languid ladies of Charles Conder’s fin de siecle aestheticism, particularly as expressed in fan paintings then enormously popular in London and Paris.
Back at Melbourne in January 1901 Portia Geach held an exhibition of her work in her studio at 245 Collins Street. She was a member of the Victorian Artists’ Society and exhibited with it regularly from 1901. The Geach family moved to Sydney in about 1904 and Portia divided her time between Sydney and Melbourne. She began exhibiting with the Royal Art Society of NSW in 1906, when she showed the Pre-Raphaelite Tales from Tennyson, “Queen Guinevere” (oil on board 29.8 × 39.8 cm, Elinor & Fred Wrobel collection, Sydney), which was reproduced in its associated publication The 100 Best Pictures of the Royal Art Society’s Exhibition, 1906 , and is possibly the 'scene of a medieval noblewoman with her attendants’ previously shown with the Victorian Artists’ Society in 1902. Undated paintings of mediaeval subjects such as Queen Rose in her Rosebud Garden of Girls (private collection, illustrated in Harris, p.115, courtesy Savill Galleries, Sydney and Melbourne) are in private collections. In the 1907 Women’s Work exhibition at Melbourne, Geach won the second prize for watercolour figure painting with A Procession of the Horses priced at fifty guineas (no first prize was awarded) and second prize for etching (after Dora Wilson ). The National Gallery of Australia holds three of her etchings made in England c.1915: The Sower , Homeward and a view of a sailing barge on the Thames.
From 1922 Portia lived in the family home at Cremorne Point, Sydney, until moving with her sister Florence Katherine to an apartment on the ninth floor of the fashionable Astor Flats in Macquarie Street. (The Cremorne house, decorated with her murals, was demolished in 1991.) She continued to travel a great deal, being described as 'a well-seasoned traveller, who divides her year by Continents’ when she returned from California in 1924. She painted murals in New York c.1917 – and lamented that Australian commerce had no time for such things – and she exhibited with the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts at Paris in 1926. She painted in New Guinea, New Zealand, Noumea and Tahiti.
Now known mainly for the portrait prize established in her memory by her sister Florence in 1962 rather than for her own art, Portia was an active feminist all her life. She had painted a suffrage banner for Vida Goldstein in 1905 and crusaded for many years against the 'closed front’ women artists encountered in Australia. In 1917 she attended a meeting of the Housewives Association in New York and immediately became convinced that a similar organisation was necessary in Australia; on her return she founded the Housewives Progressive Association of NSW, which she ran for forty years. She painted a portrait of Edith Cowan, the first woman to enter an Australian state parliament (c.1922, WA State Parliament House Art Collection, Perth). Although she still saw herself as a professional painter in the early 1930s, when she depicted the newly-built Sydney Harbour Bridge in some of her landscapes (private collections), she spent much of her life tirelessly campaigning on behalf of women’s rights, including equal pay and the right to hold public office, as well as quality and price control for everyday domestic life, launching The Housewives Magazine (1933) and The Progressive Journal (1935) as her mouthpieces.
Portia Geach died in Sydney on 5 October 1959. Her body was cremated at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium.
Gem-like both in its dimensions and in the brilliancy of its colours, the painting represents Guinevere, attended by her maids of honour, in her bridal procession.- for good reason. As Jerome Buckley points out, Tennyson’s Arthurian cycle is 'not a single unified narrative but a group of chivalric tableaux’ which cry out for pictorial realisation. One of the best known depictions of the Arthurian legend, stylistically comparable to the Late Pre-Raphaelitism of this work, was undoubtedly the series of fifteen murals installed in the Boston (USA) Public Library in 1895 by the English Royal Academician Edwin Austin Abbey. Illustrating 'The Quest and Achievement of the Holy Grail’, these well-publicised murals told the story of Sir Galahad; Portia Geach, a lifelong feminist, chose the key woman of the legend for her painting. Geach may well have intended Tales from Tennyson: 'Queen Guinevere’ as a study for a mural, or even one of a series; the title suggests that it was part of a proposed cycle. It is painted in that flat, claustrophobic style associated with turn-of-the-century murals Rossetti’s medievalism, of Walter Withers’s Purrumbete murals or of Blamire Young’s historical paintings, yet rarely is.) … Just as Geach’s Queen Guinevere was a pictorial realisation of Tennyson’s poem, it in turn would have lent itself perfectly to dramatic realisation as a theatrical tableau. Such a transformation was not unusual, for theatrical productions as diverse as low melodrama and Shakespearian spectacle commonly appropriated literary and High Art imagery for dramatic advantage-as Portia would have known from her theatrical producer brother, Edwin Geach. During the nineteenth century literature had become more pictorial, and paintings more literal. … Geach’s painting highlights the way that this type of subject-in crossing the boundaries between the poetic and the visual, the narrative and the pictorial, and the temporal and the spatial-found its ultimate expression on the stage.
- Writers:
- Callaway, Anita
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2011
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