Gustave Barnes bow's many strings: violinist with Elgar to curator of the South Australian art gallery from 1918
Gustave Barnes in about 1918 and his 1896 watercolour on card Hans Heysen painting at King's Sound.
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia and the Art Gallery of South Australia
Gustave Adrian Barnes was a artistically versatile force in early 20th Century Adelaide, with abilities taking him to playing violin in Edward's Elgar's orchestra in London and being appointed curator of South Australia's art gallery of North Terrace, Adelaide city, in 1918.
Barnes was a designer, modeller, etcher and especially a landscapepainter in oils and water colours – besides being a skilled violinist and enthusiast for great literature.
Born in 1877 at Islington, Middlesex, England, Barnes came to Adelaide as a boy with his family. By 1889, his father had formed Barnes & Neate, builders, plasterers and modellers, who worked on buildings such as the art gallery and the Adelaide Steamship and Saving Bank of South Australia buildings.
Gustave Barnes entered the business, also studied the violin, and joined a group of young artists painting in the Adelaide hills. His friend Hans Heysen called him “always an enthusiast … out at sunrise and you couldn't get him back till dark”.
From 1896, Barnes attended classes at James Ashton’s Academy of Arts. In 1900, Barnes went to Britain, played violin in Edward Elgar's second orchestra, and attended night classes at the Royal College of Art, South Kensington. He was also employed at the Royal Doulton pottery works, designing, modelling and painting. Scholarships later enabled him to study full time at the college and in 1908 he exhibited a watercolour, Suffolk Marshes, at the Royal Academy of Arts.
He married Annie May, a factory worker, in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, in 1909 and Heysen spent a summer with him in Fifeshire. After his father died in 1912, Barnes returned to Adelaide to run the family business.
In England he had collected old prints, engravings and etchings. This expertise led to him being appointed as artist and art supervisor in 1915 to the Public Library, Museum and Art Gallery of South Australia. Barnes sorted and arranged prints to be exhibited, help select works for the gallery, and supervised modelling. A sensitive man and a vegetarian, Barnes was unassertive but emerged as “a cultured and convincing speaker” in his gallery lectures on the development of local art.
During World War I, Barnes's large-scale model of Gallipoli Peninsula was displayed in the public library. A larger relief map went to the Australian defence department’s war museum. Barnes’s bronze bust of headmaster Frederic Chapple was commissioned by Prince Alfred College old boys and presented to the school in 1918.
That year, Barnes he was promoted curator of the South Australian art gallery and regularly exhibited rural landscapes with the South Australian Society of Arts. The gallery bought Barnes’s paintings Monarch of the Glen, Morning in the Hills and Mount Barker from Crafers. He also played violin in Hermann Heinicke’s ensemble.
He moved to the new Adelaide suburb of Kensington Gardens in his later year. After a complicated respiratory illness lasting two months, Barnes died in 1921. He had just been appointed to a position at the National Gallery of Victoria.