Bathers
1952
John Passmore
(artist)
John Passmore
He/Him
Born in Gadigal (Sydney), New South Wales, Australia.
Bio
John Richard Passmore (1904-1984) was born in Redfern, Sydney, and trained at Julian Ashton's School before moving to London: "Passmore arrives in England in 1933, having left his wife of five years and three-year-old child behind. According to the curator of his 1984 retrospective, Barry Pearce, it was an unhappy relationship from the beginning. In London, he stayed in the Bayswater flat of William Dobell, an old friend from art school in Sydney, where each morning they would model for each other.
Indeed, Passmore is said to be the model for Dobell’s 'Boy Bathing' (1939) as well as for 'Boy Washing' (c.1933). The twenty-eight-year old Passmore then almost immediately finds work as a commercial artist for Lintas, the advertising arm of Unilever, where he soon became “close friends” with the English painter Keith Vaughan, who is eight years his junior, and befriends the queer New Zealand painter, illustrator and muralist Felix Kelly. For Pearce, “Vaughan idolised Passmore and, to a certain extent, Passmore reciprocated his attention”.
Passmore is “remembered by colleagues at Lintas as being snappily dressed with a penchant for orange or yellow knitted ties against vivid shirts, his whistling of Rimsky-Korsakov’s ballet music at his desk and a shy, courteous manner that kept others at a distance”. He returned to Australia in 1951 and taught at Julian Ashton School. John Olsen was one of his pupils.
Passmore died in 1984 in Stanmore, survived by one son and his wife, who he never divorced. In his will, Passmore left the entirety of the Passmore Trust to one Elinor Wrobel, who he had met at an art gallery. His work is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, all State collections and many regional galleries and university collections.
Extract from Rex Butler and ADS Donaldson "The Myth of Heterosexuality: Queer Australian Artists, Art Historians and Gallerists in London, 1930-1961", forthcoming 2024, with quotes from Barry Pearce, John Passmore (Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 1985).
Based in
London, England