E.047 The judge 1991; reworked 1998

• I. 1st state of 6, 1991

  Mezzotint. A rear view of a large statue on a pedestal, portraying a figure in legal robes and wig; the statue is illuminated from the left. Silhouetted in front of it are city buildings, and in the upper right corner is the moon, which is only partly visible. To the left of the statue is a pandanus-like tree, there are other trees beyond it, and in the right distance is a palm tree. The definition of the image is incomplete and the burnishing marks are evident.

  Impression on wove paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘1 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘The Judge’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’91’.

• II. 2nd state of 6, 1991

  

  The sky has been lightened and the pedestal divided by three narrow horizontal bands. Above the pedestal, and just below the robes, is a narrow horizontal rectangle of light.

  Impression on wove paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘2 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘The Judge’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’91’.

• III. 3rd state of 6, 1991

  Half-lights have been burnished into the robes, at the top and at the bottom left. The narrow rectangle of light has disappeared, as have, for the most part, the three bands of light on the pedestal.

  Impression on wove paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘3 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘The Judge’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’91’.

• IV. 4th state of 6, 1991

  

  Stronger highlights have been burnished into the robes, the sky has been lightened, and numerous areas of the composition have been burnished in order to clarify the subject. The figure of a man now appears in the shadows at the lower right of the image, just below the gap between the buildings.

  Impression on wove paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘4 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘The Judge’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’91’.

• V. 5th state of 6, 1991

  

  The upper part of the sky has been reworked with the mezzotint rocker and is now darker. The robe has been defined more clearly and its light areas have been tonally evened out.

  Impression on wove paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘5 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘The Judge’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’91’.

• First edition, 1991

  Variable edition of ten numbered impressions, on wove Fabriano and BFK Rives papers (according to Amor’s intaglio record books), printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. The edition included a bon à tirer impression and three artist’s proofs, of which two (AP II and AP III) survive; AP II is hand-coloured with watercolour by the artist. Edition impressions 1/10 and 2/10 were destroyed by the artist, and ed. 5/10 was printed in sepia ink. Each impression is inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘[status of impression]’ [or] ‘[3 through 10]/10’; lower centre: ‘The Judge’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’91’.

  Edition sheet size: 385 x 285 mm

• VI. 6th and final state, 1998 (Featured Image)

  

  The wig, the left shoulder, and the robe at left, have been made considerably lighter. The figure now appears distinctly to be leaning forward and to the right. The trunks of most of the trees at the lower left have been removed, though the spiky foliage remains. The three intervals of light between the trees in the middle left distance have been removed.                 

  Impression on wove paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Alphington studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘AP’; lower centre: ‘The Judge’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’98’.

• Second edition, 1998

  Nominal edition of ten, but only four impressions were printed and numbered. The edition is variable. The impressions are on wove paper and were printed by Rick Amor in his Alphington studio. Each impression is inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘[1 through 4]/10’; lower centre: ‘The Judge’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’98’.

• Third edition, 2002

  Edition of ten numbered impressions, on wove Hahnemühle paper with watermark, printed by Martin King at the Australian Print Workshop, Fitzroy (Melbourne). Each impression is inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘[1 through 10]/10’; lower centre: ‘The Judge’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’98–’02’. APW chop mark embossed in lower right corner.

  Edition sheet size: 395 x 265 mm

• Comment

  The statue in this work is based on the Edmund FitzGibbon Memorial, by James White, a bronze funded by public subscription in Melbourne in the early twentieth century. Edmund FitzGibbon (1825–1905) was a civic administrator in nineteenth-century Melbourne; born in Ireland, he arrived in Australia in 1852, became town clerk of Melbourne in 1856, and was admitted to the Bar in 1860. His memorial statue, unveiled in 1908, was initially situated at Princes Bridge but has been moved several times since. When Amor first depicted it, in 1988, it was located in Spring Street, near the Princess Theatre. It now stands on the corner of St Kilda Road and Linlithgow Avenue, Melbourne, diagonally opposite the National Gallery of Victoria.

  Amor’s earliest representations of the FitzGibbon Memorial are two watercolour drawings in a small sketchbook from 1988: one of these shows the statue on its tall pedestal, rising high above its setting in public gardens; the other shows just the figure in its voluminous robes. In 1989, Amor made the sculpture the subject of a painting, which is compositionally similar to E.047 but in reverse orientation (Geelong Gallery). In 1990, the statue appeared in a woodcut titled The judge, with the final manifestation of the image occurring in the present mezzotint. In all of these depictions, the figure of the lawyer, seen from behind and from a low viewpoint, takes on a looming anonymity, standing for something beyond itself. Writing of the 1989 painting, Gary Catalano observed that it ‘cows us through its forbidding bulk’ and inspires fear (Catalano 2001). E.047, although smaller in scale, is comparable in character and in the atmosphere it conveys.

  Amor brought to the mezzotint the inspiration he found in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial (Der Prozess; first published 1925) and in Orson Welles’s 1962 film of the book. The artist saw the Welles film before reading the book, and remembers the scene in which K met the painter Titorelli and saw his painting propped up on an easel (a scene drawn from the book). This painting depicted a figure who looked like an enlarged dwarf, and it is just this sense of dislocated scale that characterizes E.047. Stephen Coppel sees in the print’s ‘domineering monumentality’ and anonymity the ‘implication … that justice is blind. The shadowy highlights created by burnishing the heavily worked mezzotint plate lend the moonlit scene its curious amalgam of Kafkesque nightmare and De Chirico’s deserted public spaces’ (Coppel 2011).