Aletta Lewis
Factories on the Yarra
oil on plywood
signed and dated lower right
SOLD
Provenance:
Christies, Sydney, in October, 1975; Stephen Scheding; Sotheby’s, 24 November, 1991; Minter Ellison Collection; Stephen Scheding, 2002.
Exhibitions:
Macquarie Galleries , 1928, No. 19, 18 gns., Sydney Moderns – Art for a New World, curated by Deborah Edwards and Denise Mimmocchi, Art Gallery of NSW, 2013.
Literature:
Sydney Moderns – Art for a New World, curated by Deborah Edwards and Denise Mimmocchi, Art Gallery of NSW, 2013, illustrated p84.
Aletta Lewis had studied at the Slade School, London, before arriving in Sydney in the mid 1920's. She exhibited at the Modernist exhibition at the Grosvenor Galleries in 1926 and taught at the Sydney Art School. An exhibition of her works was held at Macquarie Galleries in 1928. John Young, a director of the gallery, organised for Lewis to visit the Pacific Islands and after speaking to anthropologist Margaret Mead, who was in Sydney at the time, Lewis chose Samoa. (In 1928 Lewis had exhibited a portrait in the Archibald Prize of anthropologist Professor A. R. Radcliffe Brown, who also specialised in Pacific Island cultures). Her published account of her trip was titled They Call them Savages (Mathew, 1938). She married the English sculptor Denis Cheyne Dunlop when she returned to England c1930.
When she arrived back in England, Aletta Lewis exhibited 45 paintings at Claridge Gallery in London. The majority of these were probably painted in Samoa. An article in The Sunday Morning Star, on 1 February, 1931, described her as ‘a pretty young Kent girl artist’ living in a Chelsea studio ‘who sometimes piles together the Samoan mats that carpet her studio and sleeps on them. And in the place of the roar of London’s traffic she hears the croon of Pacific rollers creaming onto a coral strand in the South Seas…’
Lewis is quoted in the article as saying: ‘They told me in Australia that I was crazy to think of living alone among the savages. They said I would be roasted alive… But I was determined to see it through.’ Indeed, she was made a princess. She was offered ‘the choice of any of the unmarried men for a husband’ and is quoted as saying ‘it took all of my diplomacy to decline the offer without offending anyone.’
Although no oils from her time in Samoa appear to have survived, Lewis illustrated They Call them Savages with her drawings.
The following information is from emails sent to Stephen Scheding from Aletta Lewis’s daughter, Caroline White, in England in March 2007:
Dear Stephen … It was obviously very interesting to hear that you had been researching my mother for some time… I am so pleased that you value her as an artist… She is really not known in this country, but I have always been very curious about her both as an artist and a person, especially as she died so early in my life… in London when I was 13… I don't know what I can tell you about her… but I too have been trying to do some research… Naturally I know a little more about her life after she returned to the UK, when she met and married my father - Dennis Dunlop who was a sculptor, mainly known for his architectural work. I was born in 1942, but she developed cancer soon after. She continued painting until about the early 50's - a few commissioned portraits, landscapes and street scenes. She then became too ill to continue, and died in 1956. I know a little about her time in Sydney… [S]he had the room or studio next door to Roy de Maistre. In fact, when I was young, I used to think that they had had an affair, but I eventually realized [how] unlikely [this was]. Sadly, I have very little of hers. As I was so young when she died, and my father 3 years later, what we had of her work was sold off in the 1950's and I only have two paintings, one of myself painted in 1951 when I was 8, and another, rather dark one, of a church near where we lived in London… [So] there is not very much that I can add to your information… Best wishes, Caroline White.