Searching for the Lost Mother – The Painting and the Person – Anne Summers

Issue 3 | 21 July 2009

Anne Summers has been the Canberra Bureau Chief for the Australian Financial Review, Editor-in-Chief of Ms., a prominent American feminist magazine, and co-owned Ms. and Sassy magazines. She was head of the federal Office for the Status of Women during the Hawke government and was an advisor on women’s issues to Prime Minister Keating. Anne Summers has authored six books, amongst them the bestseller, Damned Whores and God’s Police. Currently, Anne Summers is a regular columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Sunday Age. On Tuesday 21 July 2009, Anne Summers addressed The Sydney Institute on her new book, The Lost Mother.

THE LOST MOTHER

ANNE SUMMERS

I very much welcome the opportunity to talk to you this evening about my new book The Lost Mother. If you read Good Weekend a few weekends ago you will know that the book is about my search for a lost painting of my mother. Or at least that is what it started out being about.  It quickly became a lot more than that. The book has been described as being “part art history, part detective story and part meditation on the relations between mothers and daughters”: something for everyone, in other words.

It is a story that has several beginnings but, as yet, no end. It begins the first time in 1933 in the Melbourne beachside suburb of Brighton where my mother, then a 10-year-old schoolgirl, has just attended Sunday Mass at St Joan of Arc’s church.  As she is leaving, a young woman approaches her, says she is an artist and would like to paint her portrait.  Did she think her parents would allow it?

It begins again in 2005 when, after the sudden death of my mother a few months earlier, the portrait came to me. Although I was very familiar with this portrait, which had hung on the wall of my parents’ various houses for more than 30 years, it somehow looks different when I hang it on the wall of my living room in Sydney. Perhaps it looks sharper because it is on a simple white wall, whereas my mother always had it hanging on a patterned papered wall.  Or perhaps it has taken on a new and more compelling aura because my mother is now dead. I stand back – to get a better look.

There is my mother as a ten-year-old looking down at me.  She is dressed in what she described as her “good” clothes: a brown pleated skirt, black stockings, a blue jumper and a red beret.  Her plaits hang down in front of her and are obscured by the large book she is holding. It is a children’s version of Alice in Wonderland. But it is the eyes that draw you into the picture. They are big and blue, clear and mesmerising, staring out at me with an expression of astonishing wisdom and maturity.

It must have been, I realised, these eyes that attracted the artist to the schoolgirl.  She must have seen, or perhaps wanted to see, not just a girlish face but something else, something sage and eternal. I found it hypnotic and alluring but also challenging. It held a story – I knew that much, and although I was not sure what the story was or would become, I decided that I wanted to delve into it and see what I could find. I was probably motivated by grief and by the need for atonement, to make up in death for what I had been unable to achieve in life: a warm and close relationship with my mother.  At the same time, I sensed – as a journalist and as an historian – that the history of this painting might reveal some surprising things.  It turned out that I was right.

Fortunately, some years earlier, Mum had written out an account of how she had been approached by the artist. She had done this in the early 1990s after we had learned that the “C. Parkin” who had signed the painting of my mother in 1933 was in fact Constance Stokes, a distinguished artist of some renown. I had urged Mum to write an account of how she had come to be painted, and how – almost 40 years later – the painting was finally bought into our family by her mother, my grandmother.  I had heard the story many times but I knew I would forget the details, especially when my mother was no longer around to recount this extraordinary story of circumstance and serendipity. I bought out this little memoir now and read it again.

Although I had read it many, many times over the years, this time I saw something I had never before focussed on: “Constance painted two portraits of me,” my mother had written. “One in the clothes in which she had first seen me…”  Yes, there it was on my wall.  “The second painting…”  A second painting!  That stopped me.  “The second painting,” she had written, “was done as the Madonna (a veil draped over my head and shoulders) and what happened to that I do not know…”

Mum as the Madonna! What an unusual thing to do! Even for an artist who had recently returned from the museums of Italy where paintings of pubescent girls as Madonnas were commonplace. I don’t think too many artists in Melbourne in 1933 were painting Madonnas. I decided then that as well as trying to find out more about the one on my wall, I would also search for this painting. I would seek out the missing Madonna, the lost mother, and hope that if I found it, I might learn something more about my mother, through the image created by an artist more than 70 years earlier. If she had been able to create such a compelling image of my mother in her red beret, I could only imagine what the artist had been able to do with my mother as the Virgin Mary.

My story has three central characters: my mother, the artist Constance Stokes who painted her and the mysterious and ultimately tragic Russian collector, Lydia Mortill, who bought the two portraits. In following the story of the painting and of these three women, I encountered an astonishing array of other people. I could hardly have foreseen that my search for a portrait that was painted in Melbourne in 1933 would involve encounters with such luminaries as Anna Pavlova, Fedor Chaliap in, the Ballets Russes, and Nellie Melba – as well as locals such as Archbishop Mannix and Dame Enid Lyons, let alone Woodrow Wilson, Hitler, Stalin and the Foreign Minister of Latvia – to name just some of those who became part of the story. Nor could I have imagined that tracking that painting would take me from Melbourne to Moscow, Canberra to Cairo, to Paris, New York, Riga, Hawaii and even to Hollywood.   Sadly, these travels were mostly virtual rather than actual, a testament to the modern miracle of Internet-based research.

Constance Stokes

I quickly learned that the painting on my wall in Sydney was called Alice – rather than Girl in Red Beret which is what my family had always thought was its title. It was, the artist said in an interview near the end of her life, an Alice in Wonderland image and soon it had me going down all sorts of rabbit-holes into previously undreamed of wonderlands.

Once I began my investigations, I learned a great deal about the artist Constance Stokes. She had been one of Australia’s leading artists in the 1940s and 1950s, up there with Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and her contemporary in the George Bell group, Russell Drysdale. Indeed, when Stokes and Drysdale exhibited together – as they did frequently in the late 1940s and 1950s – it was Stokes’ works that were the higher priced and got the most attention. Remarkably, in 1947 Stokes’ Farmer’s Family hung alongside Drysdale’s The Drover’s Wife. The two paintings were very similar in style as well as subject-matter. Yet it is Drysdale who is credited with developing the strong red colours and the thick glazes that both artists used. Stokes’ role in the evolution, perhaps even the creation, of these techniques is totally overlooked, forgotten.

Stokes had enjoyed tremendous critical and commercial success from the 1930s until the 1980s. She was collected by all the public institutions (with the exception of the AGNSW) and was revered by private collectors such as Keith Murdoch, Joseph Burke and Daryl Lindsay. People put their names down to buy her paintings and drawings. She was admired by people like Sir Kenneth Clark who described her as one of the best draughtsman of the twentieth century. Stokes had been part of Australia’s entry in the Venice Biennale in 1953, and she had been one of the painters to be included in a special exhibition, Twelve Australian Artists, in London in 1953 to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

So what happened to her? Why hadn’t I heard of her? Why wasn’t she a household name like the male artists who hung alongside her? (All of whom, I might add, had also been knighted. She received no recognition whatsoever.) I had not even seen her name mentioned in the context of the women artists such as Grace Cossington-Smith, Margaret Preston, Stella Bowen, Clarice Beckett and others whose reputations – and works – had been rescued in recent years, often as the result of feminist scholarship. Why had Stokes remained lost?

I soon found out that she had married and had three children. This was highly unusual for a woman who wanted a career as an artist.  None of the women artists I have just referred to had children and only one of them, Margaret Preston, was married. Stokes felt that having a family held her back. “You’re half-mother and half-painter,” she complained.  She never reconciled these two parts of herself. An important part of my story involves trying to understand what happened to Stokes’s career as an artist, to the choices she made between creativity and love and the consequences of those choices. Although I had little knowledge of the art world, it became necessary for me to step into it, to try to understand why Stokes had been dropped from the canon.

The theme of loss soon became central to my story. Each of these women was lost in their own way. My mother’s portrait as the Madonna was lost – as was my relationship with her.  Constance Stokes was very much the “lost artist”, someone whose brilliant star has faded into virtual obscurity today. As for Lydia Mortill, well she lost everything. Lydia’s story is one of the extraordinary byways that I explored, not knowing where it would take me, or how relevant it would be to my search.

Lydia Mortill

Lydia Alexandrovna Klaiguin was born in Orel in Russia in 1893 to a noble, landowning family. She was educated at the Stroganvosky College in Moscow where she received a gold medal for her studies in political economy.  She later went to Paris where she studied music and languages. Lydia enters my story in early 1916 when she somehow found herself in Cairo where she married a young Australian officer who had been wounded at Gallipoli – on Anzac Day! Lydia’s new husband, Captain Dudley Hardy, was sent to the Somme a few weeks after their marriage and eight months later was killed in the Battle of Pozieres.

Lydia Hardy, aged 24, was alone in the world, unable to be reunited with her mother in Russia where revolution was imminent nor to return to Paris. She got in touch with her in-laws in Australia and in 1917 made her way to Kadina, a tiny town on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula. This desolate town must have been a great shock to the system of the tiny, vivacious and sophisticated woman who had shone in Paris and Cairo.  She decided to get out Kadina as soon as she could and, according to a family member who actually knew Lydia and who I interviewed, to marry a rich man.

Within two years she had succeeded. Lydia Hardy married William Mortill in Melbourne in 1919.  She was 27, he was 51 and immensely wealthy.  Before long, the Mortills were stars of Melbourne society, especially in the area of the arts.  They entertained every visiting arts dignitary at their mansion, Tay Creggan, in Hawthorn (including Pavlova). Their parties were legendary, as was their art collection.  Among the many paintings Lydia bought were the two portraits of my mother.  And it was at one of these parties, where a visiting French actress was photographed by the Melbourne Herald admiring a portrait of a young girl on the wall of the mansion, that my grandmother learned where the painting of her daughter was.

It was because Lydia had bought the two paintings that I decided she was central to my story, even when following her meant going down paths that seem to lead away from my search. To Latvia, for instance, where I learned that Lydia’s sister, Natalia, was married to a man by the name of Vilhelms Munters who was Latvia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and who in 1938 and 1939 was responsible for negotiating directly with both Hitler and Stalin about the fate of the tiny Baltic state. The geopolitics of Latvia became relevant to my story in March 1939, on the day that Hitler invaded Czechoslavakia, when the Mortills suddenly sold their Melbourne mansion, complete with its art collection, and headed for Europe, to Latvia.

There were two extraordinary things about this event.  Firstly, just five years earlier Lydia Mortill had refused my grandmother’s entreaty to buy the portrait we now know as Alice. But, she told my grandmother, if ever she were disposing of her paintings she would let her know. Evidently, the 1939 sale occurred in too much of a hurry for her to do that. Secondly, why would the couple travel to Europe just as war was breaking out?  William Mortill was now 71 years old, not an age when most people would embark on a potentially hazardous trip.  Whatever it was that was drawing them to Latvia, whatever it was that impelled them to sell everything, to abandon their precious art collection, must have been very compelling indeed…

Why had they done this?  And why, six years earlier, had Lydia bought not one, but two portraits of my mother? Did my mother remind her of someone? Someone she had left behind in Russia?  Her little sister perhaps? There are many mysteries in this story.  Some of them remain unsolved.

The book

I would now like to spend a few minutes talking about how I researched this book because it presented some unusual challenges even for someone who has a background as a journalist and an historian. There were two principal problems. There appeared to be very little information available on the public records about the key characters, and key archival information that ought to have been available was simply missing. The first problem was similar to that faced by women (and other) historians in the 1970s when they began to search out the lives of women who had been “hidden from history”.  These were women who had no official existence; women who entered the public record only when they were born, when they married and when they died. Other sources were needed to try to delve into their lives.

I could talk about this all night because I love research but let me give you just a few examples of how I was unable to unearth information about the people in my book. In the case of Lydia Mortill, there seemed to be no information at all.  When I first began this research I knew nothing at all about her.  Not even her name. In fact, I had a different name for her. My mother’s little memoir had said that the woman who purchased her portrait was a “Mrs Mortell”.

Mum was careful about spelling so I was inclined to believe her, especially after I discovered the State Library of Victoria had some beautiful photographs of a Russian-looking woman who was identified as “Mrs Mortell”. However, there were other clues pointing to a “Mrs W. Mortill” and I could not be sure which was right.  In the end, I resolved the matter by checking the title deeds of the Hawthorn mansion, Tay Creggan, which revealed that the house was owned by William Mortill. That solved it. I informed the State Library of Victoria that I believed they had the wrong name in their catalogue; they believed me and changed their records.

But although I had resolved the last name, I still did not know anything about her, beyond the suggestion that she was Russian. I did not know her first name. My first port of call was the excellent BDM records for Victoria, the only state that has this resource online and fully accessible and downloadable (for a fee).  It took only minutes to ascertain that there was no marriage between William Mortill and a Russian woman, although there was a marriage certificate for a William Mortill and a Lydia Hardy that did not seem to be relevant.

But, I reasoned, the Mortills may not have married in Melbourne but perhaps Mrs Mortill died there and, sure enough, I quickly found a death certificate for a Lydia Alexandrovna Mortill who had died at the age of 48 in 1942. I went back to the 1919 marriage certificate and discovered that Mortill had married a Lydia Alexandrovna Hardy.  I had the right woman!  And her name was Lydia!  But who was Mr Hardy, her first husband?

I might never have known were it not for the research genius of Elena Govor, a Russian academic who lives in Canberra and who I contacted to ask for help in trying to find out more about Lydia.  Govor was compiling a data base of all Russians in early twentieth century Australia and while Lydia Mortill was not on it, she had lots of other suggestions as to places I might look to learn more about the woman who had bought the paintings of my mother.

None of these led anywhere, but one night Govor had what must be called a “Eureka moment”. She has done a lot of work on the Russian Anzacs and knows her way around the Australian War Memorial and National Archives of Australia, and something made her search for a death record of a Mr Hardy on the day that, according to the marriage certificate of the Mortills, Lydia became a widow. She was instantly rewarded. Soon I had the entire dossier on Captain Dudley Freeman Hardy who had been killed in the Second Battle of the Somme of August 18, 1916.  His Australian military records and the quite extensive British Red Cross files on him are online and instantly available.  From them I learned the very sad story of how the young Russian woman came to be in Australia.

The second form of research that I used extensively was the interview. I was fortunate that many of the people of my story are either still alive, or their descendents are and many of them proved to be relatively easy to trace. In many instances, material I learned from interviews sent me back to the archives – to learn more.  In one case, someone mentioned that she thought William Mortill had owned Yellow Cabs. I learned that Yellow Cabs had been a listed company so it was easy to find their records, in the ASX archives that are held by the University of Melbourne.  From these I found documents that showed that the source of Mortill’s great wealth had been the sale of his Melbourne Carrying Company to Yellow Express Carriers, which owned Yellow Cabs. There were many other such examples of research serendipity, such as finding the actual receipt for the sale of the second portrait of my mother to Mrs Mortill in a box of papers held by Constance Stokes’ son.

The second research problem I encountered was that of the missing archives. I had been utterly confident that the Archives of the Archdiocese of the Catholic Church in Melbourne would be a rich source for me.  After all, the Catholic Church had paid £6000 in 1939 (in a transaction that was driven personally by Archbishop Mannix) to acquire the Hawthorn mansion Tay Creggan and all its contents, including its art collection.  I expected the Archdiocese would have records of this sale and, I’d hoped, an inventory of the paintings that they had thereby acquired. I could scarcely believe that there were none.  I later learned of Mannix’s fondness for destroying all records.  He is reputed to have had a huge bonfire in the grounds of Raheen where he consigned all sorts of material to ashes.

However, that did not explain why there was no record in the Archdiocese of the second transaction: the sale of Tay Creggan in 1969 to the Baptist Church, a transaction that reaped $123,000 – a not inconsiderable sum for the time.  I found the lack of records frustrating for my search, but it also raises the larger question of the accountability of institutions and the need for them to act responsibly in preserving their records.

Plots and twists

Let me just say that, despite all these challenges and problems, the book was tremendous fun to research. As a journalist I like nothing better than a good story, and this one had everything: great characters, unexpected plot twists, an emotional thread, plenty of intrigue and some as yet unresolved mysteries. It is an unusual book for me. It covers subjects, such as art and war and international diplomacy, which I had not written about before. It is an immensely complex story, spanning well over a century, with a large cast of characters. But if it was fun to research, it was hell to write – at least until I was able to get the narrative structure worked out.  That took a very long time.  I hope that I have got it right in the sense that the book is a good read, but you will have to be the judge of that.

I have already mentioned that early into my research I discovered that the portrait on my wall, which we had always believed was called Girl in Red Beret was in fact called Alice. I soon realised that this was a reference to Alice in Wonderland because the artist had placed an Alice book in my mother’s hands, a book I later discovered was the artist’s, something she had retained since her childhood.  At the age of 9 she had contracted diphtheria and while bedridden had first encountered Alice and her wonderland.

Alice, the portrait of my mother, had first been exhibited in October 1933 in the artist’s first one-woman show, at the Decoration Gallery in Little Collins Street, Melbourne and it had hung alongside a painting that was called A Saint. I soon had to conclude that the painting Mum had thought was a Madonna was most likely A Saint.  It was still a religious image but did not have quite the potency of an image of the Virgin Mary.

It also upset my theory about what the artist might have had in mind when she painted my mother. I realised that these two portraits of Mum were painted just weeks before the artist’s wedding – she married Eric Stokes in August 1933 – and that they were the last pictures the artist painted as a single woman. It is likely the portraits represented some of her anxieties about her future.  Perhaps she placed the picture book Alice and the White Rabbit in my mother’s hands to signify her yearning for the freedom to escape down the rabbit hole that would soon be denied her. Painting a young girl as the Madonna, as she told my mother she was doing, might have been a sign of her acceptance that, for a Catholic woman at least, marriage almost inevitably meant motherhood.

Or maybe not. Maybe the artist had something else entirely in mind when she painted the second picture.  I conclude the book by speculating that perhaps the second picture of my mother depicts her as Joan of Arc, the saint for whom the church/school where the artist met my mother was named. Joan of Arc was a new saint. She had been canonised just thirteen years before, in 1920, and unlike most women saints she had been honoured not just for her piety, her chastity and her martyrdom but because she was a fighter.  She epitomised the modern woman. It is likely that the young Constance Parkin admired this new saint and it is more than probable that as she went to Gallery School each day for three years in the late 1920s that she stepped past the massive statue of Jeanne d’Arc in the forecourt of the State Library of Victoria. It made sense that the artist would choose a young girl as the sitter for Alice and for Joan of Arc as both of them were just girls themselves.

Alice Liddell was 10 and Joan of Arc was just 12 when she heard voices telling her to banish the English from France.  My mother was, the artist must have felt, the perfect child to represent these valiant girls.  So much so that she made two portraits. All this time I was looking for a Madonna, a mother.  But perhaps I should have been looking for something else: a saint, but a very modern one, independent, assertive, free. Something that my mother and the artist Constance Stokes, both prisoners of their generations and their circumstances, never managed to be.