L'homme Qui Boit
18/20
JCA Traill 1914
L'homme Qui Boit [The Drinking Man). Etching with heavy plate tone, printed in brown/black ink on ivory wove paper. Number 18 of an edition of 20. Titled, signed and dated in pencil beneath platemark.
Image window measures 20.5 x 25.3 cm. Frame roughly 41.5 x 47 cm.
Weighs 1500 grams. Light wear to frame.
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Jessie Constance Alicia Traill (29 July 1881 – 15 May 1967) was one most important Australian printmakers of the inter-war period, producing a number of distinctive etchings which paired lyrical subjects from nature with dynamic industrial imagery.
Born in Melbourne to a wealthy family with an interest in the arts, the young Jessie Traill befriended artist Tom Roberts, who encouraged her to become an artist. Through extensive travel in France, England and Australia, she developed a cosmopolitan outlook that would continuously inform her career. After the death of her parents, she commenced art studies at the National Gallery School from 1901 to 1906 and was taught by the Australian impressionists Frederick McCubbin and John Mather. Mather was one of the first artists to practice etching in Australia; his plein air prints of the countryside around Melbourne would later provide inspiration for Traill’s own work.
In 1906 Traill left for Europe where she studied at the Academie Colarossi and La Grande Chaumière in Paris and was inspired by the art nouveau movement. This was particularly evident in her sensuous depiction of trees, such as in the decorative frieze of trunks and branches that define the composition in Ti-Tree Frieze 1910. From Paris, Traill travelled to London in 1907 where she studied with Frank Brangwyn, who exerted a powerful influence on her work. He encouraged her to use larger plates, more forceful lines and the dramatic effects of chiaroscuro as reflected in her early Charing Cross Bridge 1908. Traill uses a Whistlerian sense of design and tone to great effect to define mass, space and mood.
Traill exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Old Salon in 1908 and upon her return to Australia in 1909 held her first solo exhibition in Melbourne. During World War One Traill was a member of the British Voluntary Aid Detachment active in France. After the war she joined the newly-formed Australian Painter-Etchers Society and regularly took part in their exhibitions entering into a productive phase of work in the 1920s. Her prints produced during this period were dominated by two major subjects: the bush, particularly nocturnes, and industrial subjects such as factories and buildings under scaffolding.
In 1922 Traill visited Red Cliffs, in northwest Victoria, where she made a number of etchings, including End of the day, Red Cliffs 1923, which were exhibited at Broken Hill. Returning to England via New Zealand and the United States in 1925, she submitted several etchings to the annual exhibition of the Society of Graphic Arts and was elected a member of the society. Back in Australia Traill visited Central Australia in 1928 and was the first white artist to paint the region and mount an exhibition at Alice Springs, where she pinned her watercolours to blankets at the police station.
As interest in the medium declined, Traill stopped producing etchings in the 1930s and spent her later years at her cottage near Berwick, Victoria, as well as in England and France.
The National Gallery of Australia held a retrospective of her work in 2013, and described her as "a key figure in the history of Australian printmaking". Author and art critic Sasha Grishin reviewed the exhibition for The Canberra Times, concluding that the show "reasserts the supremacy of Jessie Traill as one of the great Australian artists of the 20th century". Roger Butler observed of Traill's etchings that they were "the most poetic and technically refined prints produced in Australia before World War II".
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