(Portrait of a boy)

Tempe Manning was one of a number of artists whose works and views had larger influence on the directions of modern Sydney art during the interwar period than has thus far been widely recognised. She was one of a number of talented artists who studied under Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo at his atelier in Sydney from the mid 1910s. Along with her more celebrated peers, including Grace Cossington Smith, Roland Wakelin, Norah Simpson and Roy De Maistre, her work contributed to the first significant phase of modernist culture in this country.

Manning travelled to Europe and studied in Paris in 1912 prior to joining Dattilo-Rubbo's atelier on her return in 1914. While her training in Paris followed academic traditions, Manning's extant Sydney works demonstrate how she had moved away from academism to experimentation in colour painting by 1916. The same year, a reviewer of the Royal Art Society exhibition noted her work and claimed that Manning had "joined the pointillists ….and the results are certainly amazing".

With its palette of intensified, high-keyed colour, flattened backdrop and divisionist brushwork, '(Portrait of boy)' is indicative of the experimental paintings Manning was producing by the late 1910s. The work's speckled, opalescent palette is suggestive of the idiosyncratic approach to Manning's investigations into modern colour relations, through which she offered a distinct inflection to the colour practices propelling the artistic transformation of Sydney's early modernist milieu.