Henri van Raalte stirs up South Australia art gallery in 1920s, hitting 'backwater ' collection, board 'ignoramuses'
Henri van Raalte working at his studio at Second Valley on the coast south of Adelaide in the late 1920s and one of his mezzotints Leaning tree.
Etcher and painter Henri van Raalte’s four years (1922-26) as curator were the most challenging to standards in the history of the Art Gallery of South Australia. Van Raalte rated the gallery’s collection as “a pleasant backwater” and resigned calling its board “a company of ignoramuses”.
Henri Benedictus Salaman Van Raalte was born in 1881 at Lambeth, London, to a Dutch-born merchant and his English wife. Educated at City of London School, St John's Wood Art Schools and the Royal Academy of Arts schools, he became an associate of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, and exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Van Raalte migrated with his brother to Western Australia in 1910. He enjoyed “bush art wandering”, with the tuart eucalyptus trees symbolising the grandeur of his adopted landscape. His first major gum tree etching, The Monarch (1918), shown at the Royal Academy in 1920, brought a record £45 price in Australia and his work – imaginative but disturbed – was praised by Lionel Lindsay in Art in Australia (1918).
In 1914, Van Raalte settled in Perth where, he claimed, “art was dead". He worked in a department store before teaching at schools and his private classes grew into Perth School of Art by 1920. In 1916, when Perth's citizens gave him a printing press, his art appeared in the Westralia Gift Book. He had a successful one-man exhibition in 1919 work sent to the Melbourne dealer W. H. Gill sold well. In 1920 and 1924, his work was shown at Preece’s Gallery in Adelaide. Van Raalte was a founder (1920) of the Australian Painter-Etchers' and Graphic Art Society. A pioneer of Australian etching, he also specialised in aquatint and drypoint, with an expressionist style in his prolific output.
Van Raalte arrived in Adelaide as art gallery curator in 1922, after Gustave Barnes died. Van Raalte was volatile and outspoken but The Advertiser found him “unaffected, courteous and a capital raconteur”. Besides criticising the gallery’s collection, he found its crypt in “a hopeless confusion”, with valuable canvases in the cleaners' lavatory. More conservatory/curatorial space and staff were needed. He developed and catalogued the gallery’s large print collection.
A member of the South Australian Society of Arts council, Van Raalte was president of its offshoot, the Sketch Club, that he helped to found. He soon resigned from the Society of Arts and the Painter-Etchers in protest against mediocrity and “the shackles imposed … by amateurs'”. In 1924, the United Arts Club was formed in Adelaide, with Van Raalte as president. it ran a highly successful Artists' Week exhibiting interstate and local artists’ work.
Van Raalte had strong support among the art fraternity but, in 1925, problems with some gallery board members intensified. During his absence, the chairman William Sowden overrode his decision not to hang certain inferior works. In 1926, Van Raalte resigned and his press statement called the board “a company of ignoramuses”. Sowden also resigned that year.
Van Raalte retired with his wife, three sons and his press to a rented cottage at Second Valley, on the coast south of Adelaide, where he produced some of his finest work. Accepted by the local community as a dapper figure in his old T-model Ford, Van Raalte's melancholy was exacerbated by alcohol and financial stress. In 1929, in his wife's absence, he sent two of his sons for the doctor, then shot himself in the head. In December, a memorial exhibition of his work was held in Adelaide.
Van Raalte had influenced printmaking in Australia during the inter-war years in a world-wide revival and he was one of the first to produce colour etchings. His work was in most Australian state galleries, the National Gallery of Australia, the British Museum and in many private collections.
