The legacy of Rita Marquand
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 10: Family Politics
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Carmel Bird
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Carmel Bird's biography and other articles by this writer
The first Rita Marquand oil painting I ever saw was at a garage sale on the sloping lawn of a huge old house in Launceston a few years ago. Ever since I was a girl at art school I have been collecting the works of lesser known and unknown Australian women painters. The collection is now quite extensive. Rita's picture was on a smallish piece of plywood, framed in an elaborate chipped gilt frame – two young girls in filmy white dresses playing among yellow grass. The grass is alive with subtle colours, the girls caught in a moment of intimate laughter. It was titled and signed on the back in red pen – "The Deedees" Rita Marquand, Fatima, 1927. I bought the painting for two dollars from a man who said it had been done by a distant relative of his late wife. This is a typical story from my files – the discovery of a new "unknown" woman painter who sets me off on a journey into the poignant past. There was so much talent, passion, beauty locked away in the lives of women before the liberation of the 1970s came along and gave girls the chance to show what they were made of.
This journey led me from Launceston to Devonport, to Blackwood Creek, to Hobart, and finally to the Huon Valley where I found at last the house called "Fatima" in which Rita Marquand had lived and painted. Along the way, I was able to collect five other pictures that had somehow been preserved – one was a glowing image of a blindfolded angel standing sorrowfully beside a burnt-out gum tree. There was a strangeness to Rita's work that fascinated me, a strangeness that I do not often encounter in the paintings of my unknown women, most of whom paint fairly simple landscapes, gardens, houses. I get pictures from op shops and skips and cellars and attics – and sometimes from kitchen shelves where they have been for two or three generations.
By the time I tracked Rita down to "Fatima" I was very interested not only in her paintings but also in the story of the lives of the two girls in The Deedees. With her large family and a small farm to manage, it is a miracle Rita ever put brush to canvas. But this is something I have discovered about my women painters: they kept their sanity by snatching moments of creative passion from the hours of duty and family responsibility.
I discovered that Dymphna and Dolores were sisters, born at "Fatima" in a small rural town in the Huon Valley. I have pieced together as best I can the story of what happened to them. I have taken the liberties of a storyteller at times, trying to imagine how people must have felt, how they must have thought about things. Some of the material I found in small diaries that Dymphna kept over the years. These were often illustrated, showing that Dymphna had inherited her mother's talent. However, I never saw a finished work by Dymphna. Between the pages of the diaries I found old letters and cards from Dolores to Dymphna, and one pale blue love letter to Dolores from a man called Geoffrey (My Sweetest Angel, Dolly...). The girls had two older brothers, a baby sister and baby brother, Sissy and Jo-Jo. The place was described as a dairy farm but, in fact, it was a small property where the Marquands kept some cows, grew some apples and kept their heads above water. Everyone on the farm – Rita, her husband Paul, and all the children – worked really hard: up before daybreak, finishing long after dark. I sat in Rita's old kitchen, at the table where she had made the bread for the family, and I listened to Margaret, the young wife of another Jo-Jo, Rita's grandson. Her baby crawled around on the wooden floor where Dymphna and Dolores must have crawled. Born in 2005, he is the only descendent so far of Rita and Paul in this generation. The older boys died in the Second World War and Sissy never had children. Margaret and Jo-Jo were amazed that anybody would be interested in Rita's paintings.
DYMPHNA WHO WAS NAMED FOR AN AUNT WHO WAS NAMED FOR THE PATRON SAINT of the mentally ill (or, as they said in the 1930s, the insane). Dolores was named for the very sad aspect of the Virgin Mary. The names turned out to be, I am sorry to say, prophetic. The two girls were known as the Deedees. They were inseparable. Dolores (Dolly) was eighteen months older than Dymphna. Dolly was very bright and pretty, with softly curling brown hair, and Dymphna (Dimples) had, as it happened, a dinky little dimpled smile, and hair "as straight as a packet of candles". When in the bath, with her stringy hair wet and stuck across her forehead in strands and down her back in damp ribbons, her mother said she was a dying duck in a thunderstorm.
Apart from their connection with the painting, the lives of Dymphna and Dolores are now of a certain historic interest as they illuminate a past that exercises a fascination in the present. Television is larded with programs where innocent people are forced to relive the lives and times of girls like the Deedees, struggling with the lack of conditioner for their hair, eating bread and dripping (which is the fat that is saved in the baking dish after meat has been roasted). These programs generally emphasise the terrible difficulties of past lives. What I will tell you about the early lives of the Deedees will probably seem impossibly romantic, with a hint of paradise, in spite of what I have said about their being up before dawn.
So, on the Marquands' dairy farm they blossomed. In the spring, apple trees, plums and almonds, too, turned the hillside into a frothy springtime snow leading down to the river. Note what I said about paradise. Snow, they always called it snow, as they ran, children on legs like elves' legs, across the long grass where the red sorrel grew, wild and rough underfoot, knee-high, and they rolled over and over down the hill. Over and over and over. And then, in the summer, they picked the plums for jam and bottling and harvested the almonds to stir into the dark damp Christmas cakes and the pobbly puddings that hung for months in their calico cloths in the dairy. The girls pelted like the wind, the wind in their hair and in their eyes, danced down the hillside, falling and rolling, tumbling under the almond trees, pastel cotton dresses made by their mother at midnight, skirts flying up, pink pants rude and visible, bare feet hot and lovely, and they lay there, the dappled shadows of the leaves flittering across their faces, faces flushed and glowing. Laughter twittering up into the blossom trees, coin spots of sunlight glimmering across them. Well, was it paradise or wasn't it? This is what Rita captured in The Deedees.
The future was wonderful then. The Deedees were living and laughing – with potatoes and sausages to eat and milk to drink – and fruit – while around them was the Depression. They were in the Depression but they did not know it. They knew a copper full of boiling sheets seething in soap, sheets rinsed in blue from the bluebag, flapping on the clothes line in the sun. Running in and out diving through the flapping sheets, that were sewn down the middle with a heavy seam because they had been split and "turned" to make them last longer. Their beds were high – tall maple ends with curved edges and a raised wreath of leaves like a medallion in the centre. These were grand old beds from their mother's old home. They called them the American beds, I am not sure why, but maybe they associated them with faraway luxury. They gleamed golden by candlelight. When I came to "Fatima" and saw the beds they were still beautiful, although the surface of the varnish was now dulled. A child had written her name on one of the bedheads – "Sissy Marquand slept here" – and somebody had tried to clean it off. But the room, now a guest room, was, Margaret said, much as it had been when the Deedees lived there in the 1930s.
Above Dymphna's bed was the traditional picture of the Immaculate Heart. If you are looking for sentimental horror, this is it – the sweetly peachy smiling woman (sad) with her greenish blue cloak and her crown of rosebuds. But then, in her hands, surrounded by a wreath of thorny roses is her heart, which radiates pink and gold light and is surmounted by a hot red flickering flame. This picture would not have been seen as strange by the children. It was the normal image to hang above a bed, but if you think about it, it is really most peculiar.
Then, on the wall over Dolores' bed, hung what I thought was a print of a work of art – Madonna of the Goldfinch by Tiepolo. But, lucky for me, Margaret drew my attention to it, saying, "Rita did that. She used to copy things, apparently. I think it's so ugly, but we keep it because Rita did it. It's not original – we haven't got any originals – but I suppose it has sentimental value, you know, because she did it." This is not the only masterpiece I have found reproduced by one of my women – Georgia James used to do excellent copies of Goya – but it added an exciting new dimension to Rita, in my opinion.
NOW, I WOULD RATHER LIKE TO RUSH AHEAD AND TELL YOU WHAT eventually happened to Dymphna and Dolores but, in fact, the pictures over their childhood beds are relevant to the outcome in a strange way, and so I must pause here to think about them. Life, I find, can sometimes be infused with prophecies or at least shadows and foreshadows. And I need to dwell for a moment on the "Madonna of the Goldfinch" by Rita Marquand, which hangs in the wall of memory above Dolores Marquand's old American bed. The child Jesus holds the goldfinch firmly in his left hand, tight, a bundle of taffeta bluish feathers with a bobbing scarlet head. The Holy Child is naked – a striking feature of the picture being the deep red bloody highlights on the mouth of the mother, her collar and sleeve, the head of the bird. The mother gazes downward, the child looks straight at the world, at the viewer, his deep blue eyes still, knowing, sad. Startling and sickening is the bruised red luscious cherry of the baby's lips, as if he had sucked on berries or fresh game. The flesh of the mother and child appears to be not so much alive as on the point of corruption. These observations are mine. Similar thoughts just might have crossed the minds of the Deedees, although I doubt it. Yet it is my understanding that the effects of the images above the beds entered the girls' deep imaginations.
Rita told them that long long ago, at the time of the Crucifixion, a goldfinch took a thorn from the crown-borne-crown of Jesus, and the blood from the holy brow went splashing out and landed on the head of the bird. Hence the little bird's scarlet head. Privately, the Deedees liked to puzzle over that story – if the goldfinch didn't get its red head until it pulled the thorn out of the crown on the dark day of the Crucifixion, how was it the baby Jesus was holding a goldfinch with a bright red head? Ours not to reason why, Rita counselled.
Apparently, there are about 600 known paintings of Madonna and child with goldfinch. I don't wish to burden you with a lot of academic detail, but I think it is worth knowing that in 1952, a writer named Jacques Schnier published an essay entitled "The Symbolic Bird in Medieval and Renaissance Art" and in that essay he says that the goldfinch signifies the mother herself, the mother is the lost object over which the child desires control. The goldfinch also signifies fertility and is associated with Lucina, ancient goddess of childbirth.
THESE SOMEWHAT HEAVY LITTLE MESSAGES HANGING ABOVE the American beds at "Fatima" can be seen to cast an ironic shadow over the lives of the Deedees. I need here to draw attention to the matters of sex before marriage, unplanned pregnancy and abortion – matters that naturally give rise in the modern mind to the question of contraception. Safe contraception was not dreamed of until the 1960s and would not even then have been possible for the Catholic Deedees. You can see that to get pregnant before marriage in this family at that time was to go to hell in a handbasket, and you feel the problem looming, dangling like the pictures over the American beds. Who is going to get pregnant, and what is she going to do next?
Well, it was Dolores, the cheerful one with the very sad name. To the delight of the proud family, Dolores went off to Hobart to study at the Teachers' College. She was to live at the Sacred Heart Hostel, safe and sound with the nuns, the curfew and the Catholic faith. Her mother made her skirts, coats, blouses, dresses. All afternoon and well into the night the sewing machine would be going k-chick-k-chick-k-chick. Dolores would flit about and try things on and her mother, with pins in her mouth, would say, "Stand still" and "Hold up your arm" and "Stop wriggling". Auntie Bee knitted jumpers and cardigans for Dolly. Sitting by the fire or under the holly hedge her needles singing away tik-woo-tik-woo-tik. Hot-water-bottle covers. Two brown suitcases filled and folded and fluffed up with everything including a new silver compact with face powder. She took a small framed picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour and also the painting her mother did in the orchard, The Deedees.
When she was in Hobart, Dolores went to dances on Friday nights. She started smoking and drinking and dancing with all kinds of young men. And some not so young. To start with, she was back at the hostel by ten, but then she discovered how to climb in the laundry window after midnight, having bribed another girl to sign her in at ten. She got up on a stage and sang in the After-Dinner Conservatory. She was incredibly pretty and popular.
She was on the downward slide. Lying in bed during the holidays, she would tell Dymphna about some of the things she did, and Dymphna was amazed and fascinated and frightened for her sister's immortal soul. She would wonder how safe it was to ride in cars with men you hardly knew. Dymphna had heard of at least two girls who had been killed when a car ran into a tree and, of course, there lurked, just below the surface, the terror of pregnancy. Girls would sometimes disappear for a few months, gone to stay with relatives on the mainland, and then they would come back and stay at home with their families and never marry, scarred for life.
Dolores was kissing and hugging and driving fast into the countryside. At night, she would cuddle in dark cars beside the river. "But you have to be a virgin dressed in white and pure when you get married," Dymphna said, and Dolores said, "Maybe you do." She looked at her sister sideways from under her hair and she smiled her little winking crooked pink cherry-cherub smile. It was a naughty smile, a smile that Dymphna somehow linked with the smile in a story the nuns had told them – a girl smiles at a man who beckons her to a doorway, and in the doorway he takes her hand, and he rings the bell and the door opens and they go in and are never seen again because it was the doorway to hell.
Then, one day, Dolores told Dymphna she had a real sweetheart, Geoffrey.
"Why don't you tell Mum and bring him home then?"
"He's a Baptist."
"Have you been to confession?"
"No."
The answer came swift and defiant, and Dymphna knew there and then that the writing was on the wall and that the whole thing was out of control. To be involved with a Protestant was worse than having sex and getting pregnant. Geoffrey was going to be a lawyer and he was not a very good Baptist, smoking and drinking and dancing as he did. Dolores planned to get him to convert. Surely he would see reason. If his own family's religion mattered so little to him, why couldn't he become a Catholic? But when she lay in his arms on the grass by the river, none of this mattered, and her wicked heart sang for joy and her blood simmered with a hot excitement that sent her conscience off to sleep.