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Mary Eagle

Mary Eagle

Mary Eagle is an art historian, with additional experience as an art critic and art curator. She is former Head of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia, is a Harold White fellow at the National Library of Australia, and is currently writing about the life and work of the Anglo-American artist Augustus Earle (1793–1838).

'The importance of reverie' by Mary Eagle

August 2005, no. 273 • 01 August 2005
The traits women are encouraged to develop nowadays, such as outwardness, attitude, assertiveness, and professionalism, did not characterise Grace Cossington Smith (1892–1984). Family snapshots showed the young woman with tousled hair, guileless face, and buck-toothed smile: a neat-figured, long-skirted Edwardian tomboy after the style of Australian heroines in novels by Ethel Turner and Mary Gr ... (read more)

Mary Eagle reviews 'Strange Country: Why Australian painting matters' by Patrick McCaughey

January-February 2015, no. 368 • 01 January 2015
The cover assembles the book’s title and author’s name (writ very large) with a photograph of him, in an art gallery, before a wide yellow landscape by Fred Williams. Turning to the viewer, Patrick McCaughey is about to launch into a story that will satisfy the curiosity teased by the name of the book, Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters. I first encountered Patrick in the early ... (read more)

Mary Eagle reviews 'Turner from the Tate: The Making of a Master' edited by Ian Warrell

July–August 2013, no. 353 • 26 June 2013
Turner posed a conundrum when he withheld nothing from his bequest to the nation. On the positive side, the unsorted contents gave room to later, highly flattering interpretations of Turner, which a collection pruned to the taste of the Victorians would not have supported. On the downside, the digestive processes of posterity took Turner away from his roots in England between 1775 and 1851. In the ... (read more)

Mary Eagle reviews 'Affairs of the Art' by Katrina Strickland

May 2013, no. 351 • 27 April 2013
What happens when a famous artist dies, leaving a wife, husband, or children to tend the flame? The question recurs in Ian Hamilton’s spellbinding Keepers of the Flame (1992), an account of a dozen literary estates over a period of three hundred years, and remains suspended in this journalistic assessment by Katrina Strickland of the management of Australian art estates in our own time. I ... (read more)

Mary Eagle reviews 'Fred Williams: Infinite Horizons' by Deborah Hart

October 2011, no. 335 • 27 September 2011
The writers of two books about Fred Williams published in the 1980s, Patrick McCaughey and James Mollison, were friends of the artist, and involved with him in their roles as art critic/historian and gallery director. Their respect for Williams led them to write against the grain of their usual modes. Mollison, professionally always on the knife-edge of making judgement, held back, exploring with ... (read more)
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