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Tennyson Cole ( 1862 - 1939)
London.
An English Society Painter made a brief visit to New Zealand in 1892-3
Governor Grey. Painted in Perth. Australia. 1896.
Maharaja. India. Not labelled.( Refer the book Vanity Varnished. T Cole. 1939)
Lucy Tiffen, 1893
Prime Minister. Right Honerable John Ballance. 1893
Tennyson Cole. Studio. Durban. ( In Cole's autobiography Vanity Varnished. 1939)( Prive collection)
Tennyson Cole Studio. South Yarra. Melbourne. 19th Century.
Tennyson Cole died a pauper in 1939
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Tennyson Cole Signature. Lucy Tiffen. 1893
The painter of Lucy was also on tour as a singer when he travelled out of Hobart to Wellington and beyond, as much as he was a competent portrait painter. This was interesting. Songs sung to him by his mother in babyhood really got Tennyson Cole going.(1862 - 1939). He sang Alto. He took singing to a fairly competent level of pleasure and expertise. He wrote a book about this in 1931, Vanity Varnished. Reminiscences in many colours.(1931) Cole went on an Empire jaunt singing. A few English speakers did it, particularly in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Most went back home.
His ability had got him into a musical group called the Foli troupe at Melbourne. A Londoner through and through in that he was from the Soho set, he did early drawing practice by attending the opera backstage, looking through the curtains, sketching seated profiles so that he got faces quickly, structurally. He went to South Africa for the most part of his ‘ colonial sortee’. He returned to London from South Africa once he decided he could secure more satisfying, in depth painting commissions.
Predominantly, Cole had worked upon gaining commissions from the military upper class strata - painting torsos, uniforms and medals. He was to move to regal gowns. In provincial quarters he tapped into one or two society images. Women in England invariably sat with pet dogs or cats. Women in the colonies looked back with no dressed decoration. Because his touring was legitimately English colonial, he also spent some time in India and in old Mogul territory. Cole had started very young. He had started his own studio at age seventeen, quitting his father’s care. Cole wrote his memoirs in 1931, and died in 1939. He wrote his autobiography in 1931. Vanity Varnished, reminiscences in many colours.