Art

Hugh Ramsay

National Gallery of Australia

by Keren Rosa Hammerschlag •

ABR Arts • 03 December 2019

Art

Hugh Ramsay

National Gallery of Australia

by Keren Rosa Hammerschlag •

ABR Arts • 03 December 2019

‘Australia I think does not yet realise what she has lost in him but she will in time & I & some others I know will do what we can to make his memory live.’

Letter from John Longstaff to John Ramsay, 3 October 1906

It is with the artist John Longstaff’s words of condolence, quoted above, that the Hugh Ramsay exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra draws to a close. Ramsay (1877–1906) was a promising Australian Edwardian painter who lived and worked for a time in Europe at the start of the twentieth century. His works constitute some of the most innovative and visually arresting examples of early-twentieth-century painting in Australian collections, while his sketches and illustrated letters tell of the experiences of youth and travel in the exuberant period that preceded the Great War.

Keren Rosa Hammerschlag

Keren Rosa Hammerschlag is a Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship in the Centre for Art History and Art Theory in the School of Art & Design at the Australian National University. Following the completion of her PhD in Art History at the Courtauld Institute or Art, she undertook a three-year Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Centre for the Humanities and Health at King’s College London. From 2013-2018 she taught in Art History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century painting, and the intersections between art and medicine during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. She is the author of Frederic Leighton: Death, Mortality, Resurrection (Ashgate / Routledge; 2015) and numerous articles on Victorian neoclassicism and medical portraiture. She is currently writing a book about the representation of racial difference and racial hybridity in Victorian painting.