A small painting by Sydney artist Herbert Badham, recently acquired by the Library, depicts a family of three relaxing in their living room. Painted in 1959, towards the end of Badham’s life, Domesticity shows a woman dozing in an armchair, knitting dropped in her lap. A man reads the newspaper with a cup of tea and cigarettes to hand, leg raised and ankle resting across his knee. A child of about 10, probably the couple’s daughter, reads on the floor between them, her toys scattered around her.

Until recently, when a number of his works came on to the market and began realising ever-higher prices, Herbert Badham was a largely neglected artist. Having studied at the Sydney Art School under Julian Ashton, George Lambert and Henry Gibbons, he later taught at East Sydney Technical College. He was one of many Australian artists who rejected the focus on the Australian bush and landscape and embraced instead the modern city. With the acquisition of Domesticity, the Library now holds seven of his paintings.

This painting typifies Herbert Badham’s focus on commonplace subjects, always recorded with careful detail. His work reconstructs urban and domestic scenes of the mid 20th century.

While Domesticity ’s caricatured style suggests a work of unidentified sitters, the woman — as so often in Badham’s paintings — is a depiction of his wife Enid Wilson. The man includes elements of Badham himself. And although she was in her early 30s in 1959, the girl represents Badham’s daughter, Chebi, suggesting the painting might be a nostalgic work from memory.

Domesticity records the mundanity and the casual intimacy of everyday family life. Badham conveys the universal nature of the scene while also indicating its time and place. Fashion, taste, hairstyles and room furnishings — the walls unadorned except for a calendar and a framed print — are rendered with detail and accuracy.

But surely the Library has photographs to document family scenes such as this. Why do we also collect paintings? This is a question I have been asked since the acquisition of Badham’s Domesticity.

With the ubiquity of photography today, we can easily forget that it was not always so. We capture and post online not only photographs of significant events but of every outing, every gathering of family and friends, every meal we’re served. We photograph our children’s every deed, momentous and mundane, from birth onwards. But this is a recent phenomenon, not only in the history of visual documentation, but also in the much shorter history of photography.

In its infancy during the mid 19th century, photography was specialised, complex and technical. The advent of the Kodak camera in America in 1888 meant that suddenly, from the 1890s, a large number of Australians were able to take photographs. Still, even into the 1950s when Badham created his small painting, it was unusual to photograph people lounging around in their living rooms, playing, reading and dozing off. These seemingly inconsequential activities, which bind families together and even help define them, are the everyday things that Badham documents so well.

Though less posed than the stilted family photographs produced during the 19th century — when small children and babies were clamped or held in position in studio settings during the camera’s long exposure — family photographs tended to have a formal quality even in the 1960s and 70s ...

Before photography, of course, some of our most intimate glimpses into family life came from artists, many of them amateurs. One example is a small, incomplete watercolour from the 1840s of the drawing room at Tarmons, the grand family home of Sir Maurice and Mary O’Connell that once stood in

Darlinghurst. Painted by an unknown artist, it shows a group of five people sitting to sew or read, companionably, either around the draped, centre table, the focus of family life, or in other parts of the room.

An earlier family portrait, drawn by Robert Dighton in 1799, shows Philip Gidley King, his wife Anna Josepha and their children seated around a table. The following year King left England with his wife and their youngest child,

Elizabeth, to take up the governorship of NSW.

Until recently, photographs of families relaxing in their homes were more elusive than drawings or paintings. A beautiful exception is Joseph Check’s photograph from the 1890s of the Frazer family of Ballina, in northern NSW, seated around the family dining table tucking into their meal. Aiming to seem natural, Check’s photograph has clearly been set up and resembles the King family portrait in its arrangement, with the dining table cleared on one side to capture the whole family, leaving one young man sitting awkwardly askew.

Artists have the advantage of being able to compose the scene in the ‘frame’ of the canvas, while still accurately documenting their subject. This helps them avoid some of the pitfalls of photography, especially amateur photography …

Professional photographers often dispensed with the occupants altogether in order to create beautiful images of domestic settings. The room itself became the focus rather than the family and how they interacted within the space.

Artists have had no need to trade off the background of their image for the sake of the foreground, or vice versa. In Domesticity Badham has recorded small background details such as the family’s neighbour, who can be seen through an open window, standing at the sink washing up. This peripheral detail in Badham’s painting would have been impossible to capture in a photograph in the same period.

And while paintings and drawings have their own preservation requirements, the chemical processes of film-based photography make deterioration unavoidable. Colours fade and distort — colour photographs taken before the turn of this century are nearly all on what is called ‘fugitive’ material. Stored in albums that can be harmful, photographs are often at risk. Even digital prints are not exempt from colour fading and loss of detail.

The Library’s picture collections are enormous, certainly the largest in the country. They are also highly varied in terms of formats, quality and durability. What they have in common is their documentary value. They illustrate Australian society, landscape and buildings, and the life and times of Australian people. They are, in a sense, anthropological in nature. Pictures in the Library collection have been selected on the basis of the information they contain rather than artistic merit, yet this information is filtered through an artistic or photographic eye.

The Library continues to be active in collecting contemporary documentary photographs, including digital photographs. But just as the birth of photography did not see the much-predicted end of painting, the predominance of photography in our culture has not seen the end of collecting paintings and drawings. The Library recognises that artists, like photographers, can capture people, places and ideas, and almost ephemeral impressions, with clarity and directness.