The story
Young and Jackson is a pub, a corner hotel at Flinders and Swanston Streets, across from Flinders Street Station in the centre of Melbourne. It earns its place in this guide through one painting. In a room now called Chloé's Bar hangs Chloé, a life-size nude by the French academic painter Jules Lefebvre, first shown at the Paris Salon in 1875.
The picture came to Australia for the international exhibitions in Sydney in 1879 and Melbourne in 1880, and a Melbourne surgeon, Thomas Fitzgerald, bought it. In 1883 he lent it to the National Gallery of Victoria. After three weeks it was withdrawn, following protests from churchmen, the Presbyterian Assembly loudest among them, against showing a nude to visitors on Sundays. Chloé went back to Fitzgerald's house on Lonsdale Street and stayed there until his death in 1908.
The hotel itself had opened in 1861 as the Princes Bridge Hotel and took the names of two Irish cousins, Henry Figsby Young and Thomas Jackson, when they took it over in 1875. At the sale of Fitzgerald's estate Young bought the painting, and from 1909 it hung in the hotel's bar. Soldiers passing through Melbourne in both world wars, Korea and Vietnam adopted her, and letters addressed to Chloé reached the hotel from the front. In 1988 Victoria's heritage authorities declared the painting a permanent fixture of the hotel.
