# Leslie Wilkie

Leslie Andrew Alexander Wilkie (27 June 1878 – 4 September 1935) was an Australian artist and the president of the South Australian Society of Arts from 1932 to 1934.

## Early life

Wilkie was born at Royal Park, Melbourne, the son of David Wilkie and Mary Frances, née Rutherford. He was a grand-nephew of Sir David Wilkie. He was educated at Brunswick College and in 1896 entered the National Gallery of Victoria school at Melbourne under Lindsay Bernard Hall.

## Art career

Wilkie came first into notice in 1902 when he showed some very promising work at the Victorian Artists' Society exhibition. He went to Europe in 1904 for further study, and after his return to Australia was appointed acting master of the drawing school at Melbourne while Frederick McCubbin was on leave. Wilkie was elected a member of the council of the Victorian Artists Society, and was one of the founders of the Australian Art Association and its honorary secretary for three years.
He occupied a studio, during WW1 and into the early 1920s, on the fourth floor in the Austral buildings 115-119 Collins Street, Melbourne, where John Mather, Charles E. Gordon-Frazer, Alexander Colquhoun and the photographer J.W. Lindt also practiced. A brief profile of Wilkie after his return from Europe appeared in a 1907 edition of The Native companion, which mentions also that he sat for a bronze bust by G. Web Gilbert. In 1919 Colquhoun also wrote a short biography of Wilkie for the biannual Art in Australia.

## Reception

Wilkie was for several years, an illustrator on the staff of The Argus and The Australasian, and was briefly the art critic for The Age newspaper, and himself, from 1901, received several early reviews in The Bulletin that declared his art 'promising', but others after 1907 that were less complimentary about his use of colour and lack of 'grace' or 'charm' in drawing. By 1914, starting with a Punch review of a show in his studio, he became recognised as a successful portraitist. John Shirlow commented that 'the distinctive charm of the best of Wllkle's work is his tenderly sympathetic observation of the character of girlhood, and of young womanhood,' that assured him an 'honoured place' in the genre.

## Gallery director

In September 1926 Wilkie was appointed curator of the Art Gallery of South Australia at Adelaide replacing the recently resigned H. van Raalte, and proved himself a popular and most efficient and painstaking officer. He moved from Melbourne to Trevorten Avenue, Glenunga to take up the post.
Elected to the Royal Drawing Society, London in 1930, Wilkie became president of the SA Society of Artists 1932-35, with which organisation he exhibited a portrait of his daughter Jean, a frequent model, in their 1932 Spring Exhibition.
In 1934 Wilkie joined a University of Adelaide anthropological expedition to Central Australia where he painted portraits of First Nations people near Cooper Creek. The portraits were later exhibited at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Wilkie was forced to postpone a lecture on Modern Art in June 1935 when he became ill, with Mary P. Harris filling in with a lecture on Van Gogh, supported by a dramatisation by Wilkie's daughter Jean. He died aged fifty-six in an Adelaide private hospital on 4 September 1935 after successive operations for appendicitis. His wife Alma (née Tunnock), a dentist and musician, had died aged 44 in 1930, and he was survived by their daughter, Jean. Andrew Wilkie (c. 1853–1948), director of the Melbourne Zoo 1923 to 1936, was an uncle. HIs successor as Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Louis McCubbin, son of Frederick McCubbin, was appointed in December 1935.

## Collections

* Art Gallery of New South Wales
* Art Gallery of South Australia
* Royal South Australian Society of Arts Collections
* Australian Parliament
* Castlemaine Art Museum