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Wilhelmsen Line container ship berthed in Darling Harbour

Maker Aileen Rogers (1916 - 1994)

Date1992

Object number00029645

NamePainting

MediumWatercolour paint on paper

DimensionsOverall: 1395 × 1190 × 45 mm, 12.5 kg

ClassificationsArt

Credit LineANMM Collection

Terms

DescriptionA watercolour painting by Aileen Rogers of a Wilhelmsen Line container ship berthed at Darling Harbour, Sydney.HistoryAileen Rogers (1916-1994 ) was an unusual artist who came to painting late in life and struggled to develop her own style. Working as a stenographer at the National Trust in Sydney, she studied part-time with Desiderius Orban from 1965 to 1977. She lived frugally in a basement room in Elizabeth Bay, and spent everything she had on painting. She was not able to devote herself full-time to art until she retired at the age of 71, in 1988, and it was only when she was in her seventies that her work began to achieve recognition. Aileen Rogers won the Mosman Art Prize in 1977, the Pring Prize for Women Artists (AGNSW ) in 1985, the ACTA Maritime Art Award in 1991, and the Portia Geach prize in 1993. Her work was regularly hung in the Archibald and Blake prizes over two decades. She had a solo exhibition at the Blaxland Gallery in 1992 and a retrospective at the Ray Hughes Gallery in 1994, shortly before she died. Her work is represented at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the State Library of New South Wales, and the SH Ervin Gallery of the National Trust. In an obituary in The Australian newspaper on 18 May1994 , art historian Professor Joan Kerr appraised Aileen Rogers as a 'significant Australian painter', and wrote: 'Like many women artists, Rogers found she could express her personal vision most powerfully through the traditionally modest mediums of watercolour and drawing... her best pictures have the freshness and immediacy of a passionate, involved person seeing and responding to the world as if for the first time." Aileen Rogers worked at the National Trust on Observatory Hill, overlooking Darling Harbour, and often painted the ships and wharves in the immediate vicinity. The painting which won the ACTA Maritime Art Award was entitled 'Ship in Darling Harbour' 1991 and was said by the judges to stand out from a strong field because of its freshness and naive vision. The two paintings by Rogers held in the Australian National Maritime Museum collection have this fresh and immediate character, the same quality noted by Joan Kerr. An initial impression of naivety is followed by a sense of the underlying strength and complexity of composition. This untitled view of a Wilhelmsen line container ship in Darling Harbour, painted in 1992, is immediately familiar as a typical wharf scene in what was once the notorious 'Hungry Mile' of the Sydney wharfies, along the northern end of Sussex Street. At the same time it has Aileen Rogers' distinctive way of viewing it, to emphasize the long length of the ship under its piled containers, the flat surfaces and large angles of the cargo shed roof, and the cranes reaching like tall creatures up in to the sky. The background of the Pyrmont skyline and glimpse of the water behind the ship are contrastingly soft and delicate. Both paintings give a distinct sense of the observer's point of view, large things seen from a small human perspective. They are unusual for watercolours because of their size, strength, and powerful use of colour. Aileen Rogers initially painted in watercolour because the materials were all she could afford, but she developed a style in the medium with expressed the force of her vision and creative drive. SignificanceThis painting of Darling Harbour presents a fresh and unusual view of commercial shipping in Sydney in the 1980s and 1990s .While serving as a document of the Australian maritime industry, the painting also has the aesthetic value of an original creative eye by a female artist.