A red brick wall fills the picture, displaying wall art. To the left in white the words “THE DUKE” in block capitals, the letter T is picked out in bright red with a yellow border, which is the corporate colours and trade mark of Tennents Brewery. To the right is a depiction of a Glasgow landmark, a recreation of the statue of The Duke of Wellington on his horse Copenhagen, his right arm sits at a jaunty angle hand on his hip, in his left hand he holds up a full pint glass of lager, the same red T logo on the glass. On his head sits a fluorescent orange traffic cone with a white band round its middle. Famously the cone has been replaced nightly on the real statue’s head since at least the early 80’s and has become a permanent fixture outside the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in the city centre. The wall is the boundary wall to the Tennent’s Brewary , many other panels of the wall features similar quirky art related to Tennent’s products.

The Duke

iPhone/Lightroom

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Tennent stages a pointed conversation with Édouard Manet’s Olympia … not by copying it exactly, but by aligning ts charged geometry in Hawaiʻi and changing what power looks like. Here, a reclining figure is clothed and self-possessed. The emphasis shifts from spectacle to presence. A young woman with medium-brown skin reclines across pale bedding, her body angled diagonally so her shoulder and hip form a long, quiet line. She wears a simple sleeveless white slip that catches soft green and lavender shadows with the paint laid in broad, chalky strokes that leave the weave of the surface faintly present. Her dark hair is gathered up, and she turns her face toward us with a steady, assessing gaze that is calm, unflinching, and slightly weary, as if she has been interrupted mid-thought. At the right edge, a second figure is cropped at the torso showing a warm, earth-toned shoulder and arm, and hands lifting a bright blue-and-white floral bundle hovering near the reclining woman’s body. The cropped attendant at the margin recalls Manet’s scene of display while also inviting Hawaiʻi-specific symbolism for hospitality, gifting, adornment, and the complicated economies that shaped how island bodies were looked at and marketed. Painted in the late 1920s, when Tennent was re-committing herself to figure painting after years of portrait commissions, the work shows her testing how European modernism could be reworked to center an island subject. Her thick hatch-like marks and palette-knife passages don’t prettify skin; instead, they build weight, heat, and motion, insisting that this woman is not a decorative “type” but a person with interiority. As critic John Charlot put it, Tennent pursued a beauty made of “imposing mass with grace … power with finesse, of form with flow.” In “Olympia of Hawaii,” that ideal becomes an ethics of looking as the gaze is returned, the body is dignified, and the old template is turned … still recognizable, but no longer under control.

“Olympia of Hawaii (with Apologies to Manet)” by Madge Tennent (British American) - Oil on canvas / c. 1927 - Honolulu Museum of Art (Hawaii) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #MadgeTennent #Tennent #HonoluluMuseumofArt #art #artText #BlueskyArt #arte #HawaiianArt #WomenPaintingWomen