Hôtel Baudy Giverny
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Portrait of Edward Cairns Officer
Photograph by T. Humphrey, published in “The Australasian”, Melbourne, 16 July 1921 — the year of his death.

Painter · Australian

Giverny painter

Edward Cairns Officer

The only Australian in the collection: he had made Giverny his home.

  • Dates1871 — 1921
  • NationalityAustralian
  • DisciplinePainter
  • Place of birthMurray Downs, New South Wales, Australia

Biography

Edward Cairns Officer was born on 19 September 1871 at Murray Downs station, New South Wales, near Swan Hill. He was the son of Suetonius Henry Officer and Mary Lillias Rigg, and the grandson of Sir Robert Officer. He studied at Toorak College, Melbourne, at the National Gallery schools in Melbourne in 1893 and 1894, then at E. Phillips Fox’s Melbourne School of Art. He then made for Europe: the Académie Julian in Paris, under Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant, then London with Solomon J. Solomon. He settled in France and exhibited at both Salons from 1897 to 1899. Elected to the Royal Society of British Artists in 1899, he directed the Melbourne School of Art from 1900 to June 1901. He won the Wynne Prize in 1903 and first prize in the National Art Gallery of New South Wales competition in 1908. He married Grace Eleanor FitzGerald on 14 December 1908 in Melbourne. He presided over the Australian Art Association from 1912 until his death, on 7 July 1921 at Macedon, aged forty-nine.

Giverny

The Australian Dictionary of Biography is explicit: during three years overseas, broken by a brief return home, Officer “established a home at the village of Giverny”. He was therefore not passing through — he lived there. He is the only Australian in this directory, and his presence is a reminder that the colony was not only American: the register of the house carries Englishmen, Scots, Norwegians, a Czech and a Uruguayan.

Principal works

Australian landscape (no established title) oil on canvas, signed at lower right “E. Officer”. A pale plain under high pink clouds, a few wind-bent trees, a flock of sheep and the roofs of a farm in the distance. An Australian subject, not a Giverny one. Date and location remain to be established.

Key points

  • 1871Born — Murray Downs, New South Wales, Australia
  • GivernyResident in the village, period to be established
  • 1921Died

Sources

Continue More than a century of history The archive History of the Hôtel Baudy The collections Name index