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The ‘Prosaic’ and ‘Poetic’: John Mather's and John Ford Paterson's Decorative and Fine Art

Aesthetic effects and decorative beauty were at the forefront of contemporary Australian visual culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mood, atmosphere and the poetic registering of colour effects from nature were intensified and transposed into visual art, inspired by the Whistlerian aesthetic of decorative painting. Art historiography in Australia has downplayed or erased this connection, possibly because admitting the relationship between painting and decoration would diminish the authority of orthodox art history. But the impact of the decorative or so-called lesser arts on painting was at the forefront of international trends and gave the perceived qualities of region and places a poetic, even universal dimension. Form, line, colour and mass were major elements in art that engaged the senses and emotions of viewers and reduced the importance of storytelling in painting. Art historians need to incorporate the significant value of decoration and aesthetic effects within Australian visual culture of the late Victorian and early Edwardian period. This article redresses this erasure in art history and takes as its case study two once-leading and now little-known Melbourne-based Scottish-born Australian decorators and easel painters, John Mather (1848–1916) and John Ford Paterson (1851–1912). Both trained as artists and decorators in Scotland and came to Australia, respectively, during the 1870s. These artists have been discussed together in exhibition catalogues, and recently brief but interesting information on them was included in the major publication that accompanied the exhibition on the cultural contribution of the Scots in colonial Australia. However, there has been no analysis of their painting in relation to their decorative artwork. How did each artist balance decorative art effects in their easel painting, if at all? Did they depict and aestheticise Australian nature in their art decoration, or was this interpretation reserved for their fine art? Close analysis of Paterson and Mather's work reveals their different approaches to decorative and fine art, this latter term used during their contemporary period.