Sam Byrne (painter)

Sam Byrne was born Michael Eldrige Samuel, the second child of James and Elizabeth Burns, on 10 July 1883, in Humbug Scrub, South Australia in the Barossa Valley, South Australia.[6] His Irish-born father was an itinerant worker who travelled between various Australian gold and silver rushes, seeking out fortune. His mother was Australian born. The pair met and married in the Barossa Goldfields, where they conceived their first two children. Prior to Sam Byrne's birth, his father had left to join the short-lived Mount Brown gold rush in Northern New South Wales.[7] Following that, he joined the silver rush on the Barrier District, where he worked as a blacksmith on the Daydream and Umberumberka silver mines. When Sam Byrne was two years old, his father returned and relocated the family to the small silver mining town of Thackaringa, west of Broken Hill.[8]

The next few years of Sam Byrne's life saw the birth of three more brothers. He attended a primary school in Thackaringa, which was later destroyed by a storm.[9] In 1890 his father died from an injury incurred whilst shoeing a horse.[8] The absence of widow's pensions at the time left Sam Byrne's mother with no means to support her young sons. She made the decision to move the family East to Broken Hill, where she could earn income as a washerwoman. Housed in a canvas hut without heating, and working long hours, she soon succumbed to pneumonia.[10] Byrne and his siblings were then adopted by two of his married aunts. He was sent to the Broken Hill Central Primary School, where he remained until he was old enough to work on the mines.[8] A further family disruption occurred when his foster uncle abandoned the family for the Western Australian gold rush. He was never heard from again.[11] To support the family, Byrne's foster aunt then took to washing duties, whilst Sam Byrne sold newspapers and collected bottles.[12] Another income stream for Sam Byrne came during the great rabbit plagues of 1895–1896. The municipal council, incorrectly thinking that dead rabbits were causing a typhoid epidemic, paid rewards to children who collected the carcasses off the streets. Byrne recalls with fondness filling prams and wheelbarrows full of rotting rabbits to take to the council.[13] Later in life, Byrne would become well known amongst art collectors for his paintings of rabbit plagues.[14]

At the age of fifteen Sam Byrne started work on the BHP Mine, a company in whose service he would remain for the next fifty-one years. His employment was crucial to financially support his family following the sudden death of his older brother from pneumonia. Byrne was underage, however was admitted upon presenting his late brother's union registration card.[15] Initially working as a messenger boy, around the age of seventeen he took on the hard labour of men's work: Breaking rock with picks, boring, timbering, shovelling ore into trucks and then pushing them along the drives to the shafts.[8] He experienced harsh working conditions: hot and dusty mine shafts, no water, underground fires. Workmates were killed by falling rock, or poisoned from touching and breathing lead ore.[12][16] Byrne himself narrowly escaped several cave-ins as the result of inadequate amounts of timber reinforcements being used on the mine stopes.[12][17] Whilst engaged in hard labour, he often felt worried he would meet the same untimely death from miner's diseases or an accident as his workmates did.[12] He has criticised the mining companies for their "heartless" treatment of workers in the early days; "when a man got killed he was sent straight to the morgue [but] if a horse got killed there was a hell of an inquiry a horse was far more important than a man."[18][19]

Broken Hill Miners Tar and Feather Strike Breakers, 1892 Strike (1963). Sam Byrne's depictions of striking miners attacking non-striking miners are unique in Australian art. They are perhaps the only remaining visual records of such barbarous events. They have been likened to medieval retribution paintings.

Byrne was witness to several industrial disputes between Broken Hill's mine labourers and mining companies. As a nine-year old child he recalls the 1892 strike, triggered by proposed wage reductions as a result of low metal prices. To replace the striking workers, the mining companies brought in cheap labour "scabs" from South Australia and Victoria. This led to the workers losing the strike and accepting a wage reduction.[12] Byrne and his childhood friends used to throw rocks on the houses of the scabs, and trip up mine officials who were delivering anti-union newspapers.[20] He witnessed the striking miners, which included his foster uncle, capturing the scabs and subjecting them to a ritual of public humiliation, whereby they were covered in hot tar and feathers.[21][8] His paintings of this event, unique in Australian art, have been likened to medieval retribution paintings; gestures of social justice.[22]

Another industrial dispute in 1909 resulted in the closure of two of Broken Hill's major mines, leaving over a thousand men without work. Byrne was working on a mine unaffected by the lockout. English socialist Tom Mann was brought into Broken Hill to act as an industrial organiser.[12] G. D. Delprat, the general manager of BHP, in anticipation of riots, contacted the New South Wales premier Charles Wade, requesting police reinforcements to be sent from Sydney.[23] Sam Byrne played in his union brass band, which lead the pickets in procession to the mine boundary.[8] He was part of the audience of spectators who witnessed the police attack the procession of the locked-out miners.[24] The riot culminated in the arrest of Tom Mann; the miners had lost their struggle.

In 1908, on a sojourn to South Australia to work as a labourer on a salt pan, Sam Byrne courted his cousin Florence Pope. Florence came from a farming family along the banks of the Murray River.[25] After exchanging letters over the coming years, she moved to Broken Hill and the couple married with Anglican rites in 1910.[6] They bought their first house in the suburb of Railway Town, next to Byrne's foster aunt's house. The house was destroyed by a fire in 1911.[26] Over the next few years, the couple had three sons.[27]

Just before the outbreak of the First World War, Sam Byrne had a near death experience underground when his arm was savaged in a piece of machinery. The resulting injuries were severe enough to put him out of work for a whole year. Whilst recuperating at home, Byrne decided that continuing underground labouring work was too dangerous, and so he studied to gain work as a surface engine driver. He joined the Federated Engine Drivers' and Firemen's Association (FEDFA) union.[28] It was the security of this specialised trade that meant he was insulated from the economic downturn of the great depression.[29] Sam Byrne did not enlist to join the war effort due to his injury and domestic responsibilities. His youngest brother did enlist and was killed at Gallipoli.[28]

Byrne secured scholarships to send his three sons to a teacher's college; adamant that they would not go to dangerous work on the mines.[30][31] When the Second World War started, Byrne did not enlist for military service because mining was a protected industry.[32] He retired from the mines in 1949 at the age of sixty-six, when he became eligible for the old-age pension.[33]

The Silver City (1960). Sam Byrne's early panoramas are characterised by fastidious detailing.

From his childhood, Byrne had a fascination with maps and mapmaking.[31] The works produced at the beginning of his artistic career are reminiscent of cartographic style.[78] The cartographic impulse continued through his oeuvre, manifesting in his use of line, colour, his feel for space and his interest in the man made aspects of the desert landscape such as railway tracks and roads.[79] His earliest documented paintings, dating from the late 1950s, take the form of detailed, large-scale panoramas of the Broken Hill township as it appeared from atop the Line of Lode. The works bear a striking resemblance to the early topographical drawings of Australia's colonial settlements.[80] There is a focus on technical observedness, reflecting Byrne's desire to document his township exactly as he saw it, without taking any artistic liberties. Despite the need for accuracy, Sam Byrne never painted his townscapes en plein air.[40] Instead he preferred to make pencil sketches on location directly onto the masonite, noting down colours.[8] He would then paint over them at home, where he worked in an old tin laundry on the side of his house.[20] To achieve the detailing on distant buildings and trees, the artist used a technique similar to pointillism.[80] Author Geoffrey Lehman describes the technique as "miniaturisation", observing that the tiny houses "congregate and accrue like a colony of coral polyps."[81] Taking around 3 weeks to complete,[48] fewer than ten panoramas are thought to have been created. Byrne would later suffer from failing eyesight and, out of physiological necessity, move on to subjects less concerned with microscopic finesse and the conventions of technical draughtsmanship.[82]

Broadly speaking, the body of work from Sam Byrne's middle period depicts his memories of the early days of Broken Hill. With a focus on the life of miners, civic and domestic life, as well as key events, Byrne's paintings were often stories drawn from his own folk experience. Art critics were early to realise the associations between Byrne's visual narrative style, the folk anecdote, and the literary genre of the bush ballad.[50] Providing a basis to each narrative, each of Sam Byrne's paintings characteristically have an explanatory title printed in the lower left hand corners. Describing this, the artist said "A painting has to tell a story. That's why I write the title in. I write a lot across the bottom of my paintings because I want people to know about the history of the place."[83] Not an admirer of contemporary art, Byrne only enjoyed paintings in which the meaning was transparent to him.[8]

Structurally, Byrne's narrative paintings from the 1960s onward abandon the realism of orthodox painting that he strove for in his early Broken Hill panoramas. He began to mostly ignore the laws of diminishing perspective, in a way stylistically reminiscent of early Renaissance art.[84] In reviews of Byrne's first solo exhibition, John Olsen and James Gleeson both felt that Byrne seemed simply not aware of the existence of technical problems within his compositions.[3][2] Byrne would structure his paintings according to the elements of the narrative he wished to tell.[20] He would use distortions and magnifications to emphasise the importance of particular objects within a landscape or narrative. Sometimes he distorted buildings in a way which displays multiple sides from the same perspective.[85] His Sturt pea landscapes are an example of the use of magnification: a tiny prostrate flower in reality, is given gigantic proportions against the surrounding landscape.[35] In other occasions, cartoonish manipulations of human proportions have been used for comic effect.[86] John Olsen observes that another aspect of Byrne's "unusual spacial abilities" is his use of impasto on foreground objects that he considers more important in the schema.[3]

Sam Byrne has been considered an innovator in his approach to solving the problems of painting the Australian interior.[20] Despite having parallels with mainstream artists, his techniques are notable in that Byrne developed them in geographic isolation; with no lessons nor access to textbooks about painting.[44] James Gleeson, in reviewing a Sam Byrne exhibition, wrote of charming results when untutored artists like Byrne provide their own solutions to pictorial problems without relying on the conventions taught at art schools.[87] The featureless, flat expanse of the Australian outback presented a problem for painters in the pastoral tradition, as it lacked picturesque props such as trees or foreshores to make the images interesting. Byrne solved this problem by a compression of vision, not unlike the approach used by Fred Williams.[20] His paintings often show a tilting of the landscape; relegating the horizon and sky to the upper quarter of his compositions. With a larger land area, Byrne filled the landscape with the objects and characters of his narrative. In substitution of trees, so sought after by the pastoralists, Byrne uses the structures of early mining equipment.[88] In painting surface detail such as rocks and vegetation, Sam Byrne also has parallels with artist John Olsen. Both artists use abstracted forms such as blobs and squiggles to capture the essence of the outback landscape.[20]

Warm colour palettes, enhanced by gloss varnish are a characteristic of most of Sam Byrne's middle period. He deployed colour in a bold way that helped achieve harmony, pattern, and a sense of balance in his compositions.[66] In scenes showing cut-away earth, all possible earthy colours are used, sometimes arranged like rainbows, capturing Broken Hill's rich veins of mineral deposits. For above-ground scenes, textured yellow ochres are contrasted against the artificially bright red used for Sturt's pea flowers and vegetation.[81] His skies are almost always clear and chalky blue, populated by well defined cumulus clouds resembling "surreal zeppelins".[89] Byrne would usually paint the sky first and then work his way down to the foreground.[81] John Olsen likened Sam Byrne's colour schemes to Breughel: "he delights in cherry reds, happy colours [which] dance over the picture plain with glee and wonder."[3] In many paintings depicting lead mining, Byrne sprinkled actual galena dust (lead ore) into the wet paint to represent where galena is being depicted. The dust provides an additional tactile and sparkly quality to the compositions; becoming somewhat stellar when used in underground scenes. Although the use of galena dust has been described as "a bizarre urge for realism" resulting in an unnatural appearance, Byrne felt the look it achieved was completely truthful to nature.[79][90]

Crowd scenes depicting town life in the early days of Broken Hill are a recurrent theme in Sam Byrne's repertoire. So too are scenes of violent struggles between striking miners and law enforcement authorities; often watched on by townsfolk spectators. Sam Byrne's characteristic treatment of crowds is to paint giving frontality to human figures.[4] By painting all characters facing the viewer, Byrne achieved a means to convey their emotional reaction to the folk story that is being depicted.[85] Although his faces tend to be crude and cartoonish, the subtle positioning of dots in a character's eyes still manages to evoke their distinct emotional states. Painting the correct facial expression was of importance to Byrne; often his faces would build up like impasto in multiple attempts at achieving the correct state.[60] Comparison has been drawn between Byrne's figures and the crowds in the London streetscapes of L. S. Lowry.[91] For author Geoffrey Lehmann, Byrne's figures appear "puppet like", as if all actors on a staged narrative, small and standardised against a dominating landscape, and rarely with any emphasis on any individual figure.[92]

In the last few years of his life, Byrne was suffering from arthritis and glaucoma. His output declined. A hole at the centre of his vision meant he could not discern the details of what he wished to paint.[93] Troublesome too were colours, which were impossible to distinguish between without the help of a friend who would organise the paint pots into an order for him.[65] Paintings produced during this period are described as having a certain abstracted quality,[94] crude in individual elements but possessing immense energy in their total effect.[13] Thematically, the last few years of life saw Byrne concentrate obsessively on painting long epic panoramas of Broken Hill's Line of Lode as he remembered it from the pioneering era.[65] The larger scale of these works allowed Byrne, almost blind, to perceive enough detail and was more accommodating to irregularity of lines and forms.[95]

Sam Byrne's first painting medium was watercolour. Due to the impracticalities of shipping paintings with glass, he abandoned the medium in the early 1960s.[53][16] For the most part of his career, Byrne painted with a mixture of oils and synthetic gloss enamels. He would often outline in the thicker oil paint and then fill using enamels.[60] Dulux house paints were his preferred medium for clouds and skies on account of the shine and brilliance they afforded.[16] In the latter years the artist switched to the exclusive use of Dulux and Taubman's gloss enamels. The slippery nature of this new media led to a shift in painting technique. Forms were no longer outlined; paint was tipped on and then spread into position.[96] To prevent the paint running, Byrne would paint with the board lying flat upon his bench.[20]

Sam Byrne developed his own unique aesthetic to express the proliferation of mines and smelters upon the barren landscape in the early days of Broken Hill. His accurate recollection of the pioneering mining processes is reflective of knowledge gained through a close working relationship with the machinery across his lifetime. Author Ross Moore compares Byrne's mining panoramas to the industrial landscapes of Jan Senbergs, saying both express a "machine romanticism" in the love of architectural forms of industry.[88] Particularly in his final Line of Lode paintings, the artist made use of certain structures in the mining industry that provide strong vertical and horizontal lines. These have the effect of intersecting the picture planes, drawing the viewer's eye through the composition. Such vertical structural devices included poppet heads, smelter stacks, and red streams of molten slag being poured. Horizontal structural devices included railway bridges, cross-sectional views of mines, and drifting smoke plumes which bend at right angles to the tops of smelter chimneys.[88]

• Lehmann, Geoffrey (1977), Australian primitive painters, University of Queensland Press, ISBN 978-0-7022-1039-6
• McGrath, Sandra; Olsen, John (1981), The artist & the desert, Bay Books, ISBN 978-0-85835-497-5
• Moore, Ross (1985), Sam Byrne, folk painter of the Silver city, Viking ; Ringwood, Vic. : Penguin, ISBN 978-0-14-006428-5
• McCullough, Bianca (1977), Australian naive painters, Hill of Content, ISBN 978-0-85572-081-0