William Strutt trained in Paris under several distinguished academic masters, including the history painter Paul Delaroche. He arrived in Melbourne in July 1850, the year before the discovery of gold. Although he was unsuccessful in his pursuit of major public commissions, he nevertheless undertook the necessary fieldwork for such works and left a rich record of the personalities and events of Victoria’s first tumultuous decade of gold. He continued to paint Australian subjects after his return to Europe in 1862.

   His portrait of Maria O’Mullane and her children dates from the time of his return to Melbourne from the goldfields. He recorded in his autobiography how in 1852 he was busy with the preparation for publication of his sketches of diggers’ life, and how commissions for portraits flowed in and he was at last self-employed. His subject in this instance was the family of Dr Arthur O’Mullane, a prominent medical practitioner, land speculator and businessman who had arrived, like his future wife, Maria Barker, in Melbourne in 1839. In 1852 Mrs O’Mullane engaged Strutt to teach her children drawing.

   The O’Mullanes lived in Bourke Street, Melbourne, but this stark interior, with its blank walls and strange window onto a patch of agaves (much-planted in early Melbourne gardens) is thought to be imaginary. The florid ‘Great Exhibition’ carpet is broadly painted, but the portraits and details of the furniture and upholstery are painstakingly recorded in a miniaturist’s technique – Strutt’s father was a miniature painter. For perspective, Strutt employs the two-point or ‘fish-eye’ method that makes his subject appear to bow out in the centre, as if in a convex mirror.

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   With his fine family, Dr O’Mullane could have felt that his line was secure. Two of his sons, Arthur and George, on the right in this portrait, went on to become outstanding sportsmen at Melbourne Church of England Grammar School, and in 1862 George was a member of the Victorian Cricket XI. But the portrait is testimony to the horrifying toll that death took on so many nineteenth-century households: Arthur died in 1865 at the age of twenty-three, and George the following year, aged twenty-four. Jeremiah, on the left, still in his childhood skirts, died in 1856, aged eleven. Dr O’Mullane died in 1863, aged fifty-one, and Maria, who is shown here dressed in mourning black for her son Frederick, who had died in 1851, had to bring up her five grandchildren when their mother, Ann Eliza (on the far left), died in 1883, nine days before her husband, Dr William Garrard.

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