Art

Item Description

Hailed as "the most significant individual contributor to Hawaiian art in the 20th century," Madge Tennent (1889-1972) was born Madeline Grace Cook in Dulwich, England in 1889. When she was five she moved with her family to Cape Town, South Africa. At the age of twelve, she entered an art school in Cape Town, and the following year her parents, who recognized and encouraged her talent, moved to Paris to enable Madeline to study there. In Paris, she studied figure drawing under William Bouguereau, an experience that laid the technical foundation for her later figural drawings and paintings. She and her family subsequently returned to South Africa, and after her marriage in 1915 to Hugh Cowper Tennent, she relocated to his native New Zealand. In 1917 they moved to British Samoa, where Tennent started her love affair with the Polynesian people.

While on leave in Australia, she studied with Julian Ashton “and learned,” she said, “to draw for the very first time. Julian Ashton founded the Sydney Art School in 1890. He was an ardent disciple of Impressionist painting and claimed to have executed the first “plein air” landscape in Australia. In 1923 the Tennents left Samoa to go to England, stopping in Hawai’i. They were entranced with the islands and decided to stay. Tennent helped to support her family by taking commissions to paint and draw portraits of children. A friend’s gift of a book on Gauguin set her on an artistic course that lasted fifty years, during which she portrayed Hawaiian women in a style that increasingly became her own.

She was active in Hawai’i from the 1930’s to the 1960’s. “The Hawaiians are really to me the most beautiful people in the world:, she once said, “no doubt about it – the Hawaiian is a piece of living sculpture”. Using grand swirls of oil Tennent portrayed Hawaiian women as solidly fleshed and majestic – larger than life – capturing in rhythmic forms the very essence of their being. They are strong, serene and proud. Her method of working with impasto – applying thick layers of paint to achieve a graceful, perfectly balanced composition – is evident in “Lei Queen Fantasia”. Everything on the canvas whirls. The paint is applied in whirls in what might be called the “Tennent whirl” – the colors bright and luminous. Tennent envisioned Hawaiian Kings and Queens as having descended from Gods of heroic proportion, intelligent and brave, bearing a strong affinity to the Greeks in their legends and persons. She was criticized for her portrayal of larger size women but to her Hawaiian women fulfilled the standards of classic Greek Beauty.

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