| Orlando Dutton | |
| Birth Date: | 1 April 1894 |
| Birth Place: | Walsall, United Kingdom |
| Death Place: | Fairfield, Australia |
| Field: | Sculpture, Painting |
| Training: | School of Art, Walsall. Apprentice to Robert Bridgeman |
| Movement: | Art Deco |
| Awards: | 1938 Melrose Prize |
| Spouse: | Emma |
Orlando Henry Dutton (1 April 1894, Walsall – 7 August 1962, Melbourne) was an English-born Australian monumental, figurative and architectural sculptor.
Orlando Dutton (sometimes styled H. Orlando Dutton, and known as Harry)[1] was born in Upper Rushall Street, Walsall, Staffordshire on 1 April 1894, the first son of Eliza Priscilla (née Leayton) and Henry, a baker, confectioner and proprietor of the Silver Grill in Park Street.[2] Orlando was the third of five siblings Lillian, Dorothy, Sydney, and Montague,[3] [4] [5] and was a chorister in the town's St. Matthews Church.
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[6] (now Luvane Fine Art gallery) and in 1909 was apprenticed to Robert Bridgeman's Lichfield firm of ecclesiastical sculptors.[7] As a stone carver, he was employed on buildings in the Midlands, such as, in 1910, the girls' high school building in Handsworth.
During World War I, he enlisted on 23 October 1915[8] and served in the United Kingdom with the Manchester Regiment[9] in the Labour Corps, and was awarded the 1914-1915 Star[10] 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 (King's College Hospital).[11] His brother Sydney died fighting in France on 8 August 1918, aged 22.[12]
Other members of his family migrated to Australia in 1913 while he stayed to compete his apprenticeship. Still suffering from malaria and other ailments caused by war service he embarked 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 (born 6 March 1880),[13] 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 made four bronze reliefs based on his own war experiences for a WWI monument in Booleroo Centre.[14] In 1923 he exhibited at the Royal South Australian Society of Arts.[15]
The couple made Melbourne their permanent home, living at first at 13 Devonshire Road, East Malvern,[16] 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.
The Great Depression, especially harsh in Australia,[17] 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.[18]
In the same years, for main entrance of the A.M.P. building, 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,[19] 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 (a mixture of crushed stone and cement) 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.[20]
In 1932 W. Leslie Bowles met with Dutton, Wallace Anderson, Ola Cohn, George Allen and Charles Oliver,[21] 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; none of the other members being 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.[22] 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.[23] An illustration of his plaster maquette of St. George from the show was published in Art in Australia in December that year.[24] After joining the Victorian Artists Society, his Troubadour was exhibited at their galleries in East Melbourne in May 1935.[25] 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 (Sir John) 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.[26]
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.[27] 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[28] [29] from the 1939 South Australian Society of Arts spring show through the Morgan Thomas Bequest Fund.[30] [31]
During World War II he again served, enlisting at Caulfield in the 2nd AIF with the service number VX22013,[32] and as an older recruit in his late forties his skills were employed in the Mapping Division making landscape models for training purposes, and production of a large scale relief map of Australia nine metres (thirty feet) square, at a scale of 5.2 km to the centimetre.
The War did not curtail his 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[33] [34] then participated in its third in 1940.[35] That year he carved figures in the spandrels above the entrance of the monastery St. Paschal's House of Studies in Box Hill.[36] Harley Cameron Griffiths (Sen.) painted his portrait in 1941 in an army greatcoat.[37] [38] Just before, and after, the War he resided in and kept his studio at 29 Muir St., Hawthorn.
He exhibited with the Victorian Artists' Society from 1934,[39] and as a member in 1939 he was a judge for an Age newspaper sculpture competition.[40] Made its president in 1946–47,[41] he encouraged sculptors to join and founded a sculpture group,[42] inaugurating in 1947 an annual exhibition of the medium at the VAS in the first of which he included a life-sized Orpheus.[43]
Lenton Parr remarks that it was the membership of the professional artists of high standing, James Quinn, George Bell and Orlanda Dutton which lent the VAS credibility when it was dominated by amateurs during the rise of the Contemporary Art Society.[44] The Society had been roundly criticised by The Age art critic for its drop in standards on the eve of Dutton's presidency.[45]
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 prepare its constitution tasked with 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.[46]
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.[47] [48] With Daryl Lindsay and Louis McCubbin he judged the 1951 Jubilee art competition in Brisbane.[49] [50]
Well versed in, and habitually applying, allegory in his art, at the August 1935 meeting of the Victorian Institute of Architects Students Society Dutton described the preparation of scale models and sculpting techniques in the execution of large piece of stone carving with reference to his work on the spire of St. Paul's Cathedral. In outlining evolving symbolism in the medium from Egypt and Assyria, and its diversity of forms brought about by Christian adaptations, he criticised “the great lack of sculptural significance in the decoration of most Melbourne buildings,” arousing discussion with his audience of the modern application of sculpture to architectural design.[51]
Asked in 1935 to comment by The Herald on Jacob Epstein's sculpture Behold the Man, Dutton, described as "noted ecclesiastical sculptor" gave a less reactionary, but still ambivalent, response than the others including Paul Montfort who called it "a bit of bunkum", saying; "There are two aspects in which to look at the work. One is the literary. If it were not called Christ, but The Captive, or something like that, nobody would, bother about it. As a piece of sculpture, looking at its humps and bumps and hollows I find it very dull. I believe Epstein has done it on a large scale so that it cannot be carried around the country on tour, as happened to his Genesis."[52]
In 1936 his presentation on ABC radio station 3AR, was titled 'A Sculptor at Work' as part of a series 'An Australian Period' devised by R.H. Croll, whose portrait bust by Dutton was awarded the Melrose Prize in 1938.[53]
In promoting of Dutton's cause while he held presidency of the Victorian Artists Society, decrying the "Neglect of Sculpture" an article with that heading opened with a paragraph signed "'The Age' Art Critic," asserting that it was the;
least appreciated of all arts. In fourteen years, sales from exhibitions in Melbourne have amounted to less than £100 a year, and, although recent exhibitions stimulated interest, they were not very successful financially. It is evident that, for the time being, survival of this art form depends on the courage and spontaneous love of a few, who, without hope of reward, must carry on in unwarranted obscurity.[54]The article mentions Arthur Fleischmann and Lyndon Dadswell, but is illustrated only with Dutton's The Torch Bearer and Iris, and quotes him as attributing the problem to "the Impact of Impressionism" as "detrimental to appreciation of sculptural form" and calling for a "return to formal relationships, composition and design," as seen in the then current painting, to "contribute to a readier understanding of these qualities in stone. These quatitles are an essential postulate of good sculpture, and their acceptance will lead to a return to the strength of lineal relationships and masses o! form.
In the 1950s Dutton continued to express his strong opinions about public sculpture.[55]
The Bulletin remarked in its review of the May 1933 Melbourne Fine Arts gallery show of sculpture, the first to be held in the city, that;
Rodin, the greatest of modern sculptors, summed up sculpture as 'the art of the hole and the lump.' Orlando Dutton comes nearest to realising Rodin’s dictum. His “A V.A.D.” and the pleasing “Head of a Girl” may be a trifle too highly finished, but they definitely suggest that he had human beings in front of him instead of a set of rules and regulations.In reviewing the 1938 Victorian Artists’ Society's Show of 206 works the same magazine commented that "Orlando Dutton’s bust of his mother is limpid, alive." Of his contribution to the 1938 spring exhibition of the Victorian Artists Society, The Age recommends that "among the sculpture exhibits attention is drawn to a model for garden ornament by Orlando Dutton which is original in design and sound."[56] and of the 1940 spring show at the same venue remarks on "a sculptured head of Harley Griffiths, the artist, Orlando Dutton, has been happy in catching the illusive smile of his sitter." In the sculpture section of the fifth Australian Academy of Art exhibition held 20–31 July 1943, The Age, beside Bowles' work "of a more stylised type," rated Dutton's portrait of Dr. Austin Edwards as "probably the best. It has admirable qualities of portraiture and modelling."[57] It was a work shown also in 1946 and again praised by The Age critic who identified it as "the chief work In the exhibition...very ably and sensitively modelled from ail profiles: has full "content": and conveys to one who has no acquaintance with the original the feeling that It is a very true likeness."
In his later years Dutton also painted, showing a self-portrait praised by The Age at the Victorian Artists Society in September 1948,[58] and in its first portrait show in 1949,[59] and from 1961 is his formal oil painting on board of C.S.I.R.O. geologist Sir Frank Stillwell in academic regalia, held in the University of Melbourne.[60] [61] In 1962 he submitted a painting Friday Night to the Crouch Prize at the Ballarat Art Gallery which was noted by critic Arnold Shore as being of "special worth."[62]
In December 1955 he returned with wife Emma to England on the SS Largs Bay intending to live there. He declared in a 1955 article in the Walsall Observer on life in Australia, that "with the stout help of a dear wife, an interesting life has been savoured to the full. We look back with affection to England and after 35 years returned there. but we never allowed our backward glances to prevent us from looking hopefully ahead."[63] Though in the article he expressed horror at the loss of green fields to housing estates,[64] and while there, agitated for a museum of art in his home town of Walsall.[65] Mourning his wife Emma who died while they were still in England, he returned again to Melbourne in 1960. On return, he taught sculpture at Prahran Technical College for an unknown period.
Dutton was reported on 24 August to be missing from his flat in Brougham St., Kew after walking to post a letter 0.8 km away. A number of friends and sculptor colleagues searched Melbourne for him. Police surmised he may have been suffering dementia[66] after a reported sighting of him in Chadstone,[67] though he had written in June a clearly argued letter to the editor of The Age,[68] and in August had joined with Alan Sumner, principal of the Prahran College, in a deputation to the State Government's Chief Secretary Arthur Rylah to advocate for appointment of Melbourne artists to the National Gallery of Victoria board of trustees.[69]
On 2 September, his body was found in the river Yarra at Fairfield.[70] His funeral service was held at Springvale Crematorium on 4 September 1962.[71] The Coroner conducting an inquest into his death in October found no evidence, or signs of violence, to show Dutton might have been pushed into the river, and could discover "no reason why he should have taken his own life," before returning an open finding.[72]