Deutscher and Hackett

We are grateful to Peter Perry for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

In 1944, Max Meldrum painted two interior scenes featuring his daughter playing the piano, each bearing essentially the same title – namely The rehearsal, purchased by the National Gallery of Australia in 1981, and the present work, simply titled Rehearsal. They were painted in Meldrum’s studio in Kew and depict Oscar Mendelsohn (1896 – 1978) on the far right – polymath, writer, public analyst, musician and art collector – together with Meldrum’s second daughter Elsa Meldrum playing the piano, while the artist’s other daughter, Ida, is seated listening to the music. The same year as the two versions were painted, Mendelsohn had circulated a letter to a group of Meldrum supporters seeking to raise a fund of 350 pounds towards the employment of a shorthand-typist and a photographer so Meldrum could complete a publication on depictive art. By February 1945, a contribution from sixteen supporters was sent to Meldrum with a letter stating in part: ‘We think it is important that the transcending work you have done during your life as an investigator in what you so aptly call the science of appearances, should be written down by you in a definitive form, so that there can be no risk of distortion. It is equally important that your teachings should reach a wide a field as possible.’¹ The Science of Appearances was finally published in 1950, with a deluxe edition priced at 10 guineas and a cloth edition at 4 guineas. Significantly, the central portrait on the studio wall is a self-portrait painted in 1944 and today housed in the collection of the Benalla Art Gallery.
 
1. Letter to Max Meldrum from Oscar Mendelsohn and Friends, dated 24 February 1945, held by John S. Rydge.