Buonarotti Club
One of its owners was the art collector Henry Figsby Young (1845–1925), who decorated the hotel with nineteenth-century European and Australian paintings and displayed a selection of 'South Sea island weaponry' on the walls, making it an exciting and stimulating venue for aspiring bohemian artists and associates.
Club members joined one of three 'sections';'Artistic', 'Literary' and 'Musical', though most of its men and women were professional painters, including Frederick McCubbin, Louis Abrahams, Tom Roberts and Jane Sutherland.
[11] The Club enjoyed the patronage of a sophisticated following of art lovers and collectors through a quarterly conversazione (called sometimes 'The Ladies' Nights'), which took place in the prestigious Melbourne Coffee Palace.
The programmes issued show that musical members sang or played (Mason himself was earlier the publisher of an original score The Song of the Bush)[13] while the Artistic Section exhibited new work.
Alexander Colquhoun, in satirical verse, urged the Victorian National Gallery to hang French painter Jules Lefebvre's controversial 1875 nude Chloé loaned to it by its purchaser Dr Thomas Fitzgerald.
Members painting landscape in the open air included Fred Williams (1883–1884); Tudor St. George Tucker, 1884 and 1885; Walter Withers 1884; and Tom Humphrey late 1886 and early 1887.
Buonarotti Club members camped and painted at Eaglemont contemporaneously with the early Heidelberg School period (1883–1887) and also at Koo-Wee-Rup Swamp, setting out from Mason's Tynong estate.
Composer and member Louis Lavater regarded the lack of leadership by the Artistic Section as responsible for its demise after the loss of stalwarts Longstaff (left for London September 1887), Julian Gibbs (killed February 1887), and Cyrus Mason himself.
Over 30 attended, including Cyrus Mason, Elizabeth Parsons, Alice Brotherton, Jane Sutherland, McCubbin, Lavater, Abrahams, Humphrey, J. Llewellyn Jones, Altson and guest Arthur Streeton.
The Australasian reported; The Buonarotti — an artistic, literary, and musical club — held its monthly meeting on Wednesday evening at the Melbourne Coffee Palace.
The president, Mr. Cyrus Mason, referred to the many happy meetings held since 1883, when the club was founded, at which Mr. Longstaff had assisted, and said that he was the fifth comrade who had proceeded to Europe for the purposes of study.
[30] From 1888, Tom Roberts conducted a series of conversaziones in the Grosvenor Chambers in Collins Street where he and other former members of the Buonarotti Club had studios, inviting other artists to bring their newest French and other art journals for coffee, song and discussion "in true Bohemian style.
