She has graced magazine covers, had wine named after her and poems written to her. She has experienced fame and adoration and has won high acclaim from critics. Her career began, like the many models after her, in Paris. She was created and moulded by a Master. She is a Melbourne icon, mascot for the HMAS Melbourne, an extremely fine work of art; she is an ingénue, a nymph, a celebrity. She is Chloe, the famous nude portrait which has graced the walls of the Young and Jackson Hotel since 1909. Throughout her life, Chloe has kept company with artists, poets, wharfies, Prime Ministers and drunks, soldiers, sailors, celebrities, bushies, labourers and art connoisseurs. Her history involves transformation, death, intrigue, love, war, depression and passion. Chloe now hangs in Chloe's Bar, so you can enjoy a drink or a meal while you admire this true Australian icon." - From the Young & Jackson Hotel website - click here.
But, as they say in the commercial, there's more! Chloe may now be an Australian icon, but she was painted in Paris in 1875 by the then noted artist Jules Lefebvre. His model was Marie, a 19-year-old who posed for several artists but whose beauty was no consolation for a failed love affair. She held a farewell party, spent her last francs on poisonous matches, boiled them and drained the glass. Marie could not have imagined she'd live to become, like Rider Haggard's She, an eternal young queen worshipped in the Young & Jackson Hotel in faraway Melbourne, generation after generation after generation.
Chloe made her debut at the Paris Salon where she and Lefebvre won the supreme award, the Gold Medal of Honour; the first of three the painting was to win. In 1879 Chloe was the central figure in the French Gallery at the Sydney International Exhibition and at the great Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880 she scooped the pool, winning the highest awards.
Dr Thomas Fitzgerald, a noted Melbourne surgeon bought her for 850 guineas and, when he left for Ireland for three years, asked the National Gallery of Victoria to give her a home. Until then, Chloe had been highly respected, but her arrival at the gallery coincided with its new policy of opening on Sunday and the first letter, calling for Chloe to be removed, appeared in the Argus newspaper on 7 May 1883.
'... the indecent picture of a naked woman called by a classic name which hangs in the north-east corner of the gallery should at once be removed. Would any of the gentlemen trustees permit a nude picture of their daughter, or sister, to be hung there; and if not, why anyone else's daughter?'
The correspondence in the letters pages of the newspapers bubbled along nicely for a month until Dr Fitzgerald asked for the painting to be returned. When he died, the Young & Jackson Hotel bought Chloe for £800 (slightly less than the doctor had paid for her) and she has been adored there, downstairs at first, and now upstairs, ever since.
And none is in greater adoration of Chloe than my friend in Cairns.
