Circulating Empire Eugenics: Masculinity & Maternity c.1900

In 1888, two major figure paintings were acquired from the Paris Salon for the nascent Art Gallery of New South Wales. What role might Gaston La Touche’s First Born (L’Acouchée, 1887) and François Sallé’s The Anatomy Lesson at the École des Beaux-Arts (1888) have played in the early visual figuration of national ideals of healthy masculinity and maternity in the British antipodean context? 

Coincidentally, New Zealand ‘eugenist’ Dr Frederic Truby King brought his Edinburgh medical/psychiatric training and his Parisian experience of Dr Jean- Martin Charcot’s ‘Tuesday Lectures’ to Dunedin as, from 1889, Superintendent of Seacliff Lunatic Asylum. Aiming to improve the health, quality and quantity of New Zealanders of European origin (the ‘Dominion master race’), from 1907 onward King established ‘Mothercrat’ initiatives through his Karitane Hospitals and Plunkett Society Nursery Nurses. These he successfully exported to Australia and, full circle, in 1917 established the ‘Babies of the Empire Society’ in London, thus seeding back in the ‘Mother’ country the patriarchal Mothercraft practices first honed in New Zealand.

Anthea Callen FRSA, Dip.AD, MA, PhD. (she/her). Art historian & expert, writer, lecturer and painter, Anthea Callen is a world specialist in nineteenth-century French artists' materials and techniques, most notably Impressionism & post-Impressionism. 
As a feminist, she has a longstanding interest in gender and sexualities as constructed in visual representations of the human body: she uses interdisciplinary methods encompassing the arts, medico-surgical sciences and the social body politic notably in Western visual-material culture. 
Callen’s book Looking at Men: Art, Anatomy and the Modern Male Body (2018/2022, Yale University Press) and her essay Bloodlines (BAJ, 2021, ed. Dr Keren Hammerschlag) uses these cross-disciplinary tools to examine the male body, masculinities, sexualities and power in the long nineteenth century.

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