Important Australian + International Fine Art by Deutscher and Hackett

â&#x20AC;&#x153;A beautiful wine in all respects, its heart soft and generous, its head stern POINTS and serious, the combination as complete as it is complex. It tastes of an assortment of red and black berries, tobacco and cloves, with tremendously well-integrated smoky oak and plenty of tang, tannin, flavour and run through the finish. An exhibition in both power and elegance.â&#x20AC;?

Halliday Wine Companion 2019

Yalumba The Caley Cabernet & Shiraz 2013 available now. Contact Yalumba Wine Room or buy online. T: 08 8561 3200 | E: info@yalumba.com

yalumba.com

Important Australian + International Fine Art Lots 1 – 111

IMPORTANT FINE ART AUCTION • SYDNEY • 10 APRIL 2019

MELBOURNE • VIEWING 105 commercial road, south yarra, victoria, 3141 telephone: 03 9865 6333 • facsimile: 03 9865 6344 info@deutscherandhackett.com

SYDNEY • VIEWING 16 goodhope street, paddington, new south wales, 2021 telephone: 02 9287 0600 • facsimile: 02 9287 0611 info@deutscherandhackett.com

SYDNEY • AUCTION cell block theatre, national art school forbes street, darlinghurst, new south wales, 2010 telephone: 02 9287 0600

sydney auction

melbourne viewing sydney viewing absentee/telephone bids live online bidding

LOTS 1 – 111 WEDNESDAY 10 APRIL 2019 7:00pm cell block theatre, national art school, sydney forbes street darlinghurst, new south wales telephone: 02 9287 0600 THURSDAY 28 – SUNDAY 31 MARCH 105 commercial road south yarra, victoria, 3141 telephone: 03 9865 6333 11:00am – 6:00pm THURSDAY 4 – WEDNESDAY 10 APRIL 16 goodhope street paddington, new south wales, 2021 telephone: 02 9287 0600 11:00am – 6:00pm email bids to: info@deutscherandhackett.com telephone: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611 telephone bid form – p. 181 absentee bid form – p. 185 www.deutscherandhackett.com/watch-live-auction

www.deutscherandhackett.com • info@deutscherandhackett.com

specialists CHRIS DEUTSCHER executive director — melbourne Chris is a graduate of Melbourne University and has over 40 years art dealing, auction and valuation experience as Director of Deutscher Fine Art and more recently, as co-founder and Executive Director of Deutscher~Menzies. He has extensively advised private, corporate and museum art collections and been responsible for numerous Australian art publications and landmark exhibitions. He is also an approved valuer under the Cultural Gifts Program.

DAMIAN HACKETT executive director — sydney Damian has over 25 years experience in public and commercial galleries, and the fine art auction market. He completed a BA (Visual Arts) at the University of New England, was Assistant Director of the Gold Coast City Art Gallery, and in 1993 joined Rex Irwin Art Dealer, a leading commercial gallery in Sydney. In 2001 Damian moved into the fine art auction market as Head of Australian and International art for Phillips de Pury and Luxembourg, and from 2002 – 2006 was National Director of Deutscher~Menzies.

HENRY MULHOLLAND senior art specialist Henry Mulholland is a graduate of the National Art School in Sydney, and has had a successful career as an exhibiting artist. Since 2000, Henry has also been a regular art critic on ABC Radio 702. He was artistic advisor to the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust Basil Sellers Sculpture Project, and since 2007 a regular feature of Sculpture by the Sea, leading tours for corporate stakeholders and conducting artist talks in Sydney, Tasmania and New Zealand. Prior to joining Deutscher & Hackett, Henry’s fine art consultancy provided a range of services, with a particular focus on collection management and acquiring artworks for clients on the secondary market.

CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE head of aboriginal art and senior art specialist Crispin holds a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts and History) from Monash University. In 1995, he began working for Sotheby’s Australia, where he became the representative for Aboriginal art in Melbourne. In 2006 Crispin joined Joel Fine Art as head of Aboriginal and Contemporary Art and later was appointed head of the Sydney office. He possesses extensive knowledge of Aboriginal art and has over 15 years experience in the Australian fine art auction market.

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH contemporary art specialist and gallery manager – sydney Lucie completed her studies in Belgium, obtaining Masters of Arts in Art History (Modern and Contemporary Art), together with a Bachelors of Art History, Archaeology and Musicology from the Université Catholique de Louvain. Since returning to Australia in 2014, she has gained sound experience in cataloguing, research and arts writing through various roles with the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre and with private art advisory firms Tutela Capital and LoveArt International.

ROGER McILROY head auctioneer Roger was the Chairman, Managing Director and auctioneer for Christie’s Australia and Asia from 1989 to 2006, having joined the firm in London in 1977. He presided over many significant auctions, including Alan Bond’s Dallhold Collection (1992) and The Harold E. Mertz Collection of Australian Art (2000). Since 2006, Roger has built a highly distinguished art consultancy in Australian and International works of art. Roger will continue to independently operate his privately-owned art dealing and consultancy business alongside his role at Deutscher and Hackett.

SCOTT LIVESEY auctioneer Scott Livesey began his career in fine art with Leonard Joel Auctions from 1988 to 1994 before moving to Sotheby’s Australia in 1994, as auctioneer and specialist in Australian Art. Scott founded his eponymous gallery in 2000, which represents both emerging and established contemporary Australian artists, and includes a regular exhibition program of indigenous Art. Along with running his contemporary art gallery, Scott has been an auctioneer for Deutscher and Hackett since 2010.

ALEX CRESWICK head of finance With a Bachelor of Business Accounting at RMIT, Alex has almost 15 years experience within financial management roles. He has spent much of his early years within the corporate sector with companies such as IBM, Macquarie Bank and ANZ. With a strong passion for the arts more recently he was the Financial Controller for Ross Mollison Group, a leading provider of marketing services to the performing arts. Alex is currently completing his CPA.

MARA SISON registrar Mara has a Bachelor of Arts (Humanities) from the University of Asia and the Pacific, Philippines and a Master of Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies from Deakin University. She gained her experience in the private and not-for-profit sectors as a Gallery Manager and Exhibitions Coordinator for MiFA Asian Contemporary Art and Melbourne Fine Art Galleries and as an Administration Officer for Australia China Art Foundation.

MELISSA HELLARD head of marketing and client services Melissa has a Bachelor of Communication (Media) from RMIT University, and a Master of Art Curatorship from The University of Melbourne. Melissa gained experience in the corporate sector assisting companies such as NAB, AFL and Fiat Chrysler Group in a variety of fields including marketing, events and sponsorship. With an enduring passion for the visual arts, Melissa was more recently the Finance and Administration Assistant for Deutscher and Hackett.

specialists for this auction

Chris Deutscher 0411 350 150 Damian Hackett 0422 811 034 Henry Mulholland 0424 487 738 Crispin Gutteridge 0411 883 052 AUCTIONEERS Roger McIlroy Scott Livesey ADMINISTRATION AND ACCOUNTS Alex Creswick (Melbourne) 03 9865 6333 Lucie Reeves-Smith (Sydney) 02 9287 0600 ABSENTEE AND TELEPHONE BIDS Lucie Reeves-Smith 02 9287 0600 please complete the absentee bid form (p. 182) or telephone bid form (p. 181) SHIPPING Mara Sison 03 9865 6333 CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTIONS Claire Kurzmann 03 9865 633

contents lots 1 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; 111

page 12

prospective buyers and sellers guide

page 174

conditions of auction and sale

page 176

catalogue subscription form

page 179

attendee pre-registration form

page 180

telephone bid form

page 181

absentee bid form

page 182

index

page 197

IMPORTANT NOTICE

CULTURAL HERITAGE PERMITS

Some imagery on bark and early western desert paintings in this catalogue may be deemed unsuitable for viewing by women, children or uninitiated men. We sug gest ar t co - ordinators at Aboriginal communities show this catalogue to community elders for approval before distributing the catalogue for general viewing. Co-ordinators may wish to mask or remove certain images prior to circulation. The English spelling of aboriginal names has evolved over the years. In this catalogue every effort has been made to use the current linguistic form. However original information from certificates has been transcribed as written with the result that there are different spellings of the same name, title, language group and story.

Under the provisions of the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act, 1986, buyers may be required to obtain an export permit for certain categories of items in this sale from the Cultural Property Section: Department of Communications and the Arts GPO Box 2154 Canberra ACT 2601 Email: movable.heritage@arts.gov.au Phone: 1800 819 461 Under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), permits are required for the movement of wildlife, wildlife specimens and products made or derived from wildlife. This includes species on the endangered species list. Buyers may be required to obtain an export permit for certain categories of items offered at auction. Permits must be obtained from: Wildlife Trade Regulation Section Environment Australia GPO Box 787 Canberra ACT 2601 Email: wildlifetrade@environment.gov.au Phone: (02) 6274 1900 Under the provisions of the Wildlife and Protection (Regulation of Exports and Imports) Act, 1982, buyers may be required to obtain an export permit for certain categories of items offered at auction (including plant or animal products derived from an Australian native species such as: ivory, tortoise shell, feathers, etc). Permits must be obtained from the Wildlife Protection Section, Environment Australia-Biodiversity Group at the address above, prior to items being export from Australia.

Important Australian and International Fine Art

Lots 1 – 111 Featuring Major Australian Works of Art from an Important Private Collection, United Kingdom Lots 9 – 20

Works from The Kerry Hill AO Collection, Singapore Lots 31 – 35

CRESSIDA CAMPBELL 1 born 1960 THE EBRO, GORE BAY, 1987 watercolour on incised woodblock 80.0 x 60.0 cm signed lower left: Cressida Campbell estimate :

$40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE Nevill Keating Pictures, London Private collection, Sydney

the crowded rows of terrace houses, warehouses, silos, dockyards and clumps of trees […] we are not looking at a quasi-photographic record of the view, but a creative re-imagining, devoid of deep space’.1

EXHIBITED Cressida Campbell: recent paintings, Nevill Keating Pictures, London, 6 – 27 July 2001, cat. 29 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, unpaginated) Destination Sydney, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 10 December 2015 – 21 February 2016

The Ebro, Gore Bay, is a key early woodblock depicting a composite view of an urban skyline, an industrial landscape, a panorama dotted with ships, and a cheeky botanical study bisecting the foreground. This amalgamation of artistic subjects and genres became the format of many of Campbell’s early harbour masterpieces, including Gore Bay, 1992, Parsley Bay, 1992, and the magnificent triptych West of Observatory Hill, 1989. The industrial cove of Gore Bay, used by Shell Transport and Trading Company since 1901, and the dense native bush found opposite on Berry Island Reserve, was the subject of a number of artworks of particular significance in the swift progression of Campbell’s successful career as a printmaker in Sydney, from the ACTA Maritime Art Award winning Gore Bay, 1990, to the Wynne Watercolour Prize winning Berry’s Bay, 1992. The westward view from Gother Avenue Walkway on Mann’s Point in Greenwich, over the oil tanks, is similar to the one featured in Through the Windscreen, 1987, an early print that is held in the collections of both the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. In an interview in 1990, Campbell explained the allure of this section of the harbour in her work, evoking the ‘serenity of the bay, with its ominous tanks both exciting and beautiful’. 2

LITERATURE Crayford, P., (ed.), The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures, Sydney, 2008, cat. W8705, pp. 96 (illus.), 97 (illus.), 98, 99 (illus.), 348 (as ‘The Ebro’) Pearson, C., ‘Block Star on a Quiet Roll’, The Australian, Sydney, 1 November 2008 Klepac, L., Destination Sydney, exhibition catalogue, Manly Art Gallery & Museum, Mosman Art Gallery, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 2015, pp. 110 (illus.), 120 (as ‘The Ebro’) RELATED WORK The Ebro, Gore Bay, 1987, woodblock print, edition of 2, illus. on cover of Vanstone, M. (ed), The Sydney Review, Sydney, no. 3, August 1988

There are few artists whose successes transcend state and national borders, even fewer who do it with art that is both original and profoundly imbued with a sense of place. Cressida Campbell is one such artist. Her unique prints and woodblocks have a casual reverence to them, one that exudes serenity regardless of its subject matter. While Campbell’s works have long been appreciated for their subtle decorative quality, it must be noted that in terms of subject matter, the artist does not shy away from depicting unexpected views, slices of contemporary reality. In The Ebro, Gore Bay, 1987 Campbell whittles into the panel of marine plywood the steel railings, cogs and smoke stacks – images of the industrial bedrock upon which this harbour town has been built. Campbell has diverted her gaze towards the west of the cove, away from the landmark of civic pride for Sydney-siders, the Harbour Bridge, to depict instead the reverse of the coin, a tranquil view of its operating industrial port. Appreciating the unusual composition and unsung view of the harbour, The Ebro, Gore Bay was included in the landmark exhibition on Sydney Harbour, Destination Sydney, at the S.H. Ervin Gallery in 2015, with John McDonald writing ‘the harbour is only glimpsed amidst

Although many of her later images of Gore Bay have a deliberately muted tonal palette, the serenity of which contrasts with the functionality of the harbour, this woodblock has the bold tones and contrasts of Campbell’s earlier work. The two prints produced from this block were exhibited in Mori Gallery in 1987 and despite the artist having already exhibited woodblocks as early as 1985, this particular example stayed in the artist’s own collection for fifteen years before being exhibited in London at Nevill Keating Pictures in 2001. Despite this relative early anonymity, this image in its printed form was chosen to grace the cover of the cultural and literary periodical The Sydney Review, in June 1988. The editors of the magazine later reflected that this work is a ‘[…] marvellous image of Sydney as a working port […] While the harbour’s beauty and potential vulnerability are there for all to see, viewers are left to draw their own conclusions. The artist has captured the extraordinary within the everyday’. 3 1. McDonald, J., ‘Cressida Campbell’ in Klepac, L. (ed), Destination Sydney, Manly Art Gallery & Museum, Mosman Art Gallery, S.H.Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 2015, p. 108 2. ‘Art Award’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 15 June 1990, p. 4 3. Pearson C., ‘Block star on a quiet roll’, The Australian, 1 November 2008

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

BRONWYN OLIVER 2 (1959 – 2006) UNITY, 2001 copper 112.0 cm diameter estimate :

$200,000 – 250,000

PROVENANCE Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 1 September 2010, lot 6 Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Bronwyn Oliver, Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne, 24 November – 21 December 2001 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) The Sculpture of Bronwyn Oliver, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Victoria, 19 November 2016 – 5 February 2017 LITERATURE Fink, H., Bronwyn Oliver: Strange Things, Piper Press, Sydney, 2017, pp. 158 (illus.), 212 – 213 (illus. installation), 220 McDonald, J., ‘Arts’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 10 January 2017

‘...Bronwyn Oliver had that rarest of all skills: she knew how to create beauty... Her art was fully resolved - perfect, really - and she stands alone in the annals of Australian art history. There was no-one like her: she invented her own deeply intelligent form, and entered fully into the world that it opened out to her...’1 One of Australia’s most highly regarded contemporary sculptors, Bronwyn Oliver remains celebrated for her extraordinary ability to produce meticulously articulated works of immense beauty and grace which unite timeless, organic forms of the natural world with the abstract logic of geometry. Simple yet complicated, fragile yet strong, eccentric though at the same time oddly straightforward, her delicately woven copper and bronze assemblages such as Unity, 2001 universally surprise and inspire – beguiling both the eye and mind through their enigmatic presence. With their tactility and anatomical physicality, such intricately executed forms moreover inevitably elicit a temptation to touch - the sensual, prehistorically-scaled versions of natural phenomena thus reminding us that the world is a corporeal place. Yet too often the easy, voluptuous curves of Oliver’s objects belie the punishing, labourintensive process to which the artist was so passionately committed. Inspired by the patina of age and veneration shared by ancient relics and humble artefacts, Oliver would painstakingly manipulate dizzying twistings and welds of pliant copper wire to create the ‘weave’ – the microstructure of her organic sculptural forms which gradually became more open and geometric to allow light to permeate and exaggerate their optical aspect. ‘Bronwyn’s sculpture belongs to a genealogy of female art: to the open grids of Agnes Martin, the looping, webbed and netted painted surfaces of Emily Kngwarreye and Yayoi Kusama, the undulating fields of Bridget Riley and Rosalie Gascoigne – works of art which occur in Julia Kristeva’s ‘Women’s Time’: fluid, cyclic, edgeless, eternal. 2 As Amanda Rowell muses in her introduction to Oliver’s exhibition at Roslyn Oxley Gallery in September 2004, ‘...the microcosmic, complex surface of an Oliver sculpture is an interface between the macroform of its overall shape and the internal cavity or void where the sculpture breathes. The ease of connection between these three formal aspects of her works, along with their gently mimetic character - as alluded by their titles - constitute their elegance and simple pleasure...’ 3 1. Fink, H., Bronwyn Oliver (1959 – 2006), Obituary, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 10 July 2006, see http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/news/releases/2006/07/10/112/ 2. Fink, H., Bronwyn Oliver: Strange Things, Piper Press, Sydney, 2017, p. 207 3. Bronwyn Oliver 2004, 9 September 2004, see http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/news/releases/2004/09/08/80/

VERONICA ANGELATOS

ROSALIE GASCOIGNE 3 (1917 – 1999) HONEY FLOW, 1985 painted and stencilled wood, nails on plywood backing 108.0 x 84.0 x 7.0 cm signed with initials, dated and inscribed with title verso: HONEY FLOW / 1985 R.G. estimate :

$120,000 – 160,000

PROVENANCE Collection of the artist, Canberra Thence by descent Private collection, Canberra EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne 1985, Fine Arts Gallery, University of Tasmania, Hobart, 8 – 28 September 1985, cat. 3 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) Rosalie Gascoigne, Pinacotheca, Melbourne, 15 October – 1 November 1986, cat. 1 From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, Drill Hall Gallery, Australia National University, Canberra, 5 September – 8 October 2000, cat. 17 LITERATURE Macdonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 106 From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, exhibition catalogue, Drill Hall Gallery, Australia National University, Canberra, 5 September – 8 October 2000, p. 62 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 275 (forthcoming catalogue) We are grateful to Martin Gascoigne for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

My grandmother came to art late. Rosalie Gascoigne was 57 when she had her first solo exhibition, but once there discovered it was her natural calling. By 1974, what had started for her as flower arranging had grown into a unique artistic practice. It did not take long for her assemblages of found materials to be recognised across the globe. In 1982 she was the first woman to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale and ten years later she was awarded the Order of Australia for her services to the arts. Her work is held in all major Australian public collections, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. From the beginning Gascoigne took her cue from nature, seeking materials that evoked their own story. Although flashes of yellow had appeared throughout her earlier assemblages, Honey Flow, 1985 was the first to be constructed solely of yellow boards. Works that she registered as ‘firsts’ were important to

Gascoigne, who liked to keep them to herself. Honey Flow, a work that heralded a legendary series of yellow assemblages,1 hung on her living room wall for years and remained in her possession all her life. Yet to me Honey Flow is more than the first in a series. I see it as expressing Gascoigne’s nature – its flow is the current that runs through all her significant work. The materials – signboards for soft drink boxes and two street barricades – came out of Gascoigne’s past work and would lead into the work to come. Here she literally unpacks the boxes that had formed the frame and foundation of her earliest assemblages from the 1970s onwards. 2 The work’s tripartite organisation is columnar – a form that ran through her art from first to last (people always talk about the grid but I think she favoured the column 3). The dismantled box-boards are arranged like ladders, some with lettering that is a visual riff of short repeated words, ‘swing’ and ‘wing’, reminiscent of a refrain in music. Finally, and decisively, she ran two bold lengths of retro-reflective road barricade down the centre: the retro-reflective a sign of things to come.4 Honey Flow shines with the shamanistic blaze that Gascoigne was able to summon from her materials. The blaze doesn’t relate to transcendence. Quite the opposite. It signifies a reduction. Just as it is a bee’s instinct to collect pollen to make honey, here one gets the sense of wood declaring its essential ‘wood-ness’. The heavy central panels drag down the horizontal flow of the fanning side columns. The three Vs sink down and spread outwards in a play of weight versus movement, (Gascoigne had admired those qualities in paintings by Pablo Picasso such as Deux femmes courant sur la plage, 1922). Looking at the work one has an almost physical sensation of the gentle warmth of wood and the viscous flow of honey – it is Gascoigne’s poetry that connects the two. Grandmother was a firm believer in the fact that one cannot escape one’s natural calling. She explained it to me, and to many others: ‘I’m an artist, it’s just the sort of animal I am’. Honey Flow is the natural product of the artist animal, working as naturally with her materials as a bee with pollen. 1. Including the monumental works Monaro, 1989 (Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth), Plenty, 1987 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) and Great Blond Paddocks, 1998 – 99 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney). 2. Works such as Enamel Ware, 1974, Italian Birds, 1975, Boxers, 1976 etc. 3. See for example Rain forest, 1980, Sharpe Bros horizontal, 1979/1980 – 81, Scrub Country, 1981 – 82, Spring 1 and Spring 2, 1981–82, and String of Blue Days, 1984. 4. See for example Highway Code, 1985, Tiger Tiger, 1987 and Metropolis, 1999.

HESTER GASCOIGNE

RALPH BALSON 4 (1890 – 1964) MATTER PAINTING, 1962 enamel on composition board 122.0 x 91.5 cm signed and dated lower right: R. Balson 62 inscribed on old artist’s label verso: No. 13 / … estimate :

$20,000 – 30,000

PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Private collection Niagara Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso) The Western Mining Corporation, Australia WMC Collection of Australian Contemporary Art, Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 15 March 2004, lot 110 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Ralph Balson Exhibition of Paintings, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 3 – 15 July 1963, cat. 13 (as ‘Painting No. 13’) Ralph Balson 1890 – 1964, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 21 June – 15 July 1989, cat. 10 (illus.)

Ralph Balson’s Matter Paintings were perhaps the most radical of his career. In the early 1960s, Balson completely abandoned the cool geometric formalism of his Constructive paintings, and surrendered aesthetic control to follow a spontaneous and semi-automatic style of gestural painting. Throughout his career, he had tirelessly sought a process of abstract painting that would respect the physical qualities of his material while illustrating what he would call the ‘ineffable’,1 the sublime and invisible forces of the universe. This pursuit led him through a disciplined, logical progression of different styles of pure painting – from planar geometric abstraction, to a painterly fragmentation and finally, the ‘Matter Paintings’ whose appearance was entirely governed by the inherent physical properties of poured paint. In this last major series of his career, the artist’s joy in the pure physicality of gesture and material supported the metaphysical underpinnings of his earlier painterly investigations, producing artworks whose swirling surfaces evoke the primordial tohubohu, the formless chaos of all things in the universe, great and small.

Matter Painting, 1962, is an expansive and organic example of this late style, where opposing forces compete in shallow pictorial space, jetblack enamel seeping into pools of cream paint with marbled frontiers and spattered incursions. In the absence of a clear focal point and the rectilinear format that had hitherto governed Balson’s compositions, the viewer’s eye is free to wander across the surface – a true Greenbergian all-over painting. While newspaper reviews of the time saw parallels with the nascent disciplines of molecular science, as well as space photography, 2 the ripples and spatters inherent in Matter paintings can subjectively seem to coalesce into a wide range of organic forms. The ebbs and flows of their state of flux seem to breach the confines of the artist’s own grey wooden frame. Surprisingly, as opposed to using the smooth and varnished face, the artist has used the reverse side of a Masonite sheet for this painting, its tooth providing resistance against the flow of paint and a delicate foundation of texture beneath its veined surface. Balson was a well-read artist, keenly following the developments of international art theory in books and periodicals. In 1960, he travelled abroad for the first time since emigrating to Australia as a boy, visiting exhibitions of the most progressive painting in Paris, London and New York. The gestural and spontaneous approaches of Tachisme and Art Informel were particularly stimulating for Balson. However, the artist also sought stimuli from beyond the field of visual arts, citing the ‘density and fluidity’ of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake as inspiration for his newfound stream-of-consciousness and surrealist automatism in painting. 3 The hypnotic surfaces of the Matter paintings are governed by the physical laws of the medium, following ‘its own rhythm, its own structure – a natural paint structure’.4 The painting process became an allegory for Balson’s deep understanding of the physicality of the natural world, the relentlessness of universal flux, and the ultimate inevitability of entropy. 1. Adams, B., ‘Metaphors of Scientific Idealism: The theoretical background to the paintings of Ralph Balson’ in Bradley, A. and Smith, T. (eds), Australian Art and Architecture: Essays presented to Bernard Smith, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1980, p. 188 2. Henshaw, J., ‘Spattering and Scattering’, The Bulletin, Sydney, 24 February 1962 3. The artist, 1956, quoted in Gleeson, J., ‘Fluid Forms and Colours’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 5 November 1967, p. 108 4. The artist quoted in Thomas, D., ‘Ralph Balson’, Art and Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 2, no. 4, 1965, p. 290

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

GODFREY MILLER 5 (1893 – 1964) CRUCIFIXION, 1961 – 64 oil, pen and ink on canvas on plywood 36.5 x 53.5 cm (canvas) 45.5 x 60.5 cm (board) signed twice lower right: Godfrey Miller bears inscription upper left: 149 / JH PROVENANCE The Estate of the artist, Sydney Mr and Mrs John Henshaw, Sydney Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 2004 Thence by descent Private collection, New South Wales EXHIBITED Godfrey Miller Memorial Exhibition, Darlinghurst Galleries, Sydney, 16 February – 27 March 1965, cat. 28 Godfrey Miller, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, 2 – 28 September 2004, cat. 15 (illus. in exhibition catalogue and on back cover) LITERATURE Henshaw, J., Godfrey Miller, Darlinghurst Galleries, Sydney, 1965, pl. 28 (illus.) Ogburn, J., ‘Godfrey Miller, Artist’, The Telegraph, Sydney, 16 February 1965, p. 23 McCulloch, A., Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Hutchinson of Australia, Victoria, pp. 383, 644 (inverted) RELATED WORK Crucifixion, 1963, oil and pen and ink on canvas mounted on backing board, 45.5 x 61.0 cm, The Holmes à Court Collection, Perth, illus. in Edwards, D., Godfrey Miller 1893 – 1964, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1996, pl. 71, p. 86 Golgotha, 1960 – 64, oil and pen and ink on canvas, 67.3 x 100 cm, private collection, illus. in Edwards, D., Godfrey Miller 1893 – 1964, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1996, pl. 65, p. 75 estimate :

$60,000 – 80,000

Godfrey Miller was by all accounts an eccentric man, but also a distinguished and fastidious artist. With what Paul Haefliger, the Sydney Morning Herald art critic, once called a ‘tortuous technique’,1 Miller created complex and deeply cerebral artworks that vibrate with musicality and the intensity of the artist’s personal communion with each of them. His artistic execution, though laborious, was crystallised and refined over many years – each painting going through a gradual process of accretion and removal of lines and colours. They passed through years of successive stages: from monochrome lattices, to the addition of colour and finally the modelling, or what Miller would call the ‘science of drawing’. 2 This process endowed his artworks, drawings and paintings alike, with what became his trademark web of intricate cross-hatching, running throughout the composition, and inscribing his compositions in three dimensions. For these reasons, many of Miller’s works are dated with wide tranches, and the artist was said to have considered about 40 of his paintings ‘completed’. 3 Crucifixion, c.1962, although not the only painting bearing this title, is the only one that was signed, attesting to the fact that Miller considered this example complete and resolved. Still fixed to its original preparatory backing board, Crucifixion, displays the complex structure of Miller’s mature work, the ruled vectors running beyond the tacking margins of his pinned canvas and seeping into the grain of the plywood. This labyrinth of filaments supports the harmonious geometry of the composition, featuring at least three cruciform shapes, held together by an expansive open circle form or divine orb. The circular form would become a leitmotif in Miller’s later religious works. A preparatory sketch of the composition of Crucifixion can be found illustrated next to the reproduction of this painting in Godfrey Miller, 1965, edited by John Henshaw, who retained this painting in his personal collection until his death in 2006. Miller was absorbed by the epic, universal aspect of religious thought and found its manifestation in the unity of form: ‘Unity is a non material supersensible thing, it is dynamic, it breathes. Reality is made of cadences, rhythms, intervals, chords, qualities – all that science ignores’.4 All of his apparent abstract mathematical exactitude was supported by a deep symbolic and modernist spirituality rooted in anthroposophical mysticism. 5 Miller created multiple versions of his most successful compositions (such as Nude and The Moon, Madonna, Summer, Unity in Blue). Crucifixion, is no exception, belonging to a late series of works, including Golgotha, 1960 – 64 illustrating in semi-abstract terms episodes of Christ’s crucifixion. He reduced visual perception to separate units which could be synthesised and rearranged into facetted semiabstract prisms. The density of his grid varies, the filaments relaxing in breathy expanses only to concertina in tight clusters elsewhere. Miller uses this variation to create tonal differences that work in tandem with his painted hues of ultramarine, sulfur, vermillion and viridian. The paint is found in the interstices of his weave, laid and confined in lozenges and triangular facets, and shining through like stained glass, supporting the religious foundations of his composition. Miller presents the figure of Christ as a flickering central light, vertically bisecting this composition, his bowed head suggested by a series of delicate arcs to the right of the central cross. Subdued pearly light is filtered through the canvas, an eloquent evocation of divine mystery. 1. Haefliger, P., ‘Sydney Group Show is exciting’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 30 July 1952, p. 2 2. Edwards, D., Godfrey Miller 1893 – 1964, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1996, p. 56 3. ibid. 4. The artist, quoted in ibid., p. 104 5. Miller joined the Sydney Anthroposophical Society in 1940 and found a particular affinity with the teachings of German esoteric Rudolf Steiner, who sanctified the role of the artist as ‘bringer of the Divine to Earth’

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

YVONNE AUDETTE 6 born 1930 CONVERSATION BETWEEN THE STARS, 1964 oil on composition board 93.5 x 130.0 cm signed and dated lower right: Audette 64 signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Audette / 1964 / conversation between the stars estimate :

$70,000 – 90,000

PROVENANCE Collection of the artist, Melbourne Michael Whitworth, Sydney Private collection, Queensland, acquired from the above in 2008 EXHIBITED Yvonne Audette, Galleria Schneider, Rome, 22 April – 10 May 1965, cat. 5 Yvonne Audette: Different Directions 1954 – 1966, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 13 September 2007 – 17 February 2008 (lent by Michael Whitworth) (label attached verso) LITERATURE Heathcote, C., Adams, B., Vaughan, G., & Grant, K., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, pl.100, pp. 134 – 135 (illus.) Grant, K., Yvonne Audette : Different Directions 1954 – 1966, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2008 (unpaginated)

Following studies at the Julian Ashton Art School, East Sydney Technical College and independent classes with Desiderius Orban and Godfrey Miller, Yvonne Audette left Australia in September 1952. Like so many young Australian artists she wanted to see the great art of the world, but unusually for the time she sailed to New York rather than London or Paris. Influenced by her American-born parents’ agreement to provide financial support if she went there rather than to Europe, this decision proved to be fortuitous, bringing her face to face with the burgeoning New York School of Abstract Expressionist painting. Audette’s first-hand exposure to the work of major exponents of the movement, including Willem de Kooning (whose studio she visited in 1953), Robert Motherwell and Mark Tobey, had a profound effect on her artistic development and while her training had been in the academic figurative mode, she began to move confidently towards abstraction. Notes in sketchbooks from the time document her thinking, ‘Let go of all figuration … Calligraphic work with free gesture has endless possibilities’ and the gentle exhortation, ‘Don’t get too sophisticated’.1

Leaving New York in mid-1955, Audette travelled in Europe before establishing a studio in Florence. 2 Welcomed into a community of successful professional artists including Arnaldo Pomodoro and Lucio Fontana, and stimulated by both their example and the rich culture and history of her new surroundings, she worked hard, developing a mature style characterised by the textural layering of line and abstract form, dextrous mark-making and a lyrical use of colour. Painted in 1964, Conversation Between the Stars reflects the unique amalgam of influences that contributed to Audette’s visual language, from the bluntended lines applied with a palette knife of American painter Bradley Walker Tomlin, to the graffiti-like marks found on ancient Italian walls and echoing the spontaneous gesture of Cy Twombly (who she met in Rome in 1958). Audette’s paintings are often likened to a palimpsest, ‘an accretion of written shapes … stirring with the ghosts of earlier writings vanquished by time, or by deliberate … erasure’, 3 in which layers of paint are progressively built up before being repeatedly scraped back and scratched into to create the shimmering translucency and chromatic energy of works such as this. While Audette’s work was rarely seen in Australia during her expatriate years, it was shown in various European cities (Florence, Milan, Paris, Rome and London) and Conversation between the stars was included in her solo exhibition at Galleria Schneider in Rome in 1965, the year before she returned home permanently. A rare female member of the generation of artists born in Australia between the wars who, through focussed ambition and in her case, fortuitous coincidence, established and maintained a long and successful career, Audette has since been recognised for her important contribution to the history of twentieth century art in this country. Acquisitions by major public galleries were followed by a series of institutional exhibitions – Queensland Art Gallery (1999), Heide Museum of Modern Art (2000), National Gallery of Victoria (2008), Ian Potter Museum of Art (2009) and the Art Gallery of Ballarat (2016) – and the publication of a major monograph in 2003. 1. The artist quoted in Grant, K., Yvonne Audette: Different Directions 1954 – 1966, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2008, unpaginated 2. Audette lived in Florence until 1963 when she relocated to Milan before returning to Australia permanently in 1966. 3. Gleeson, J., review of Audette’s 1968 Sydney exhibition at Bonython Gallery, quoted in James, B., ‘Yvonne Audette: The Later Years’, Heathcote, C., et. al., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, p. 157

KIRSTY GRANT

DALE FRANK 7 born 1959 JEREMY HUGENOT, 2000 varnish on synthetic polymer paint on canvas 200.0 x 200.0 cm estimate :

$25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne

Epic in both scale and intent, Dale Frank’s sumptuously coloured, glossy canvases such as Jeremy Hugenot, 2000 offer a continually evolving dialogue upon the individual’s relationship to the immersive universe. Engaging with science, poetics, spatialisation and time, his ‘performances’ not only complicate the customary roles of artist as creator and audience as passive observer, but highlight the problems inherent in the very act of painting itself. Typically featuring glistening, marbled flows and ponderous slides, slow-creeping bleeds and animated squiggles, these huge plasma-like abstractions possess a remarkable ability to completely absorb the viewer’s consciousness and thus provoke powerful emotional responses akin to the medium of film. Yet despite their inordinately specific titles and the swirling tides of tinted varnish which seem to convey the forces of nature in a manner reminiscent of Romantic painting, Frank deliberately eschews any reference to the literal – his works are neither real nor imagined. Rather, each abstraction ‘creates itself’, evolving over time through the movement and chemical reactions between layers of strident, pulsating varnish in its molten liquid form (‘a living entity’). Indeed, for Frank, the blank white canvas is never a pristine ground that must be filled, but ‘a black space’ where the final outcome is ‘forced upon the Painting by the vagaries of its own Nature and makeup: its environment and ‘material’ personality determine its image, its future, its relations within the world’.1

If Frank’s technique appears ostensibly random or unpredictable however, such spontaneity belies a painstaking process of ‘endurance and isolation’. As the luminous pools of pigmented varnish are poured onto the horizontal canvas and immediately begin to resist and coalesce, the artist must remain continuously attentive to the passing of time, the variations of climate, and the actions required by him at every stage – adding more varnish or changing the angle of support as necessary. As Frank reveals, ‘It is a totally hands on and cerebral way of painting ... The process can take up to twenty-four hours where I have to be permanently standing over the painting, constantly considering every minute aspect’. 2 With his visionary eloquence and technical ingenuity, Frank occupies an esteemed position at the forefront of Australian contemporary art practice. Awarded the prestigious Red Cross Art Award by John Olsen at the tender age of 16, his was a precocious talent and within only five years, he had achieved international recognition with solo exhibitions across Australia, Europe and America. Significantly, in 1983, his work was selected for display alongside Thomas Lawson and Anselm Kiefer at the Museo Palazzo Lanfranchi in Pisa, Italy, and in 1984, he was included in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale. In 2000, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney mounted the touring survey exhibition of his work Ecstasy: 20 years of painting; in 2005, Frank won the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize at the Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria and in 2007, his achievements were documented in the magnificent monograph So Far: the Art of Dale Frank 2005-1980. Today, his paintings are held in every major public collection across Australia, as well as numerous private and corporate collections around the world. 1. Frank, D., cited in Chapman, C., ‘Dale Frank: Performance into Painting’, in Frank, D., So Far: the Art of Dale Frank 2005 – 1980, Schwartz City Publishing, Melbourne, 2008, p. 134 2. Frank, D., cited in Crawford, A., ‘Dale Frank’, Art & Australia, Art & Australia Pty Ltd, Sydney, vol. 42, no. 2, 2004, p. 214

VERONICA ANGELATOS

JULIAN OPIE 8 born 1958, British PAISLEY DRESS AND RED GOWN, 2015 silkscreen on painted wooden board 100.5 x 72.5 cm signed verso: Julian Opie estimate :

$45,000 – 55,000

PROVENANCE Gerhardsen Gerner, Berlin Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2015 EXHIBITED Gerhardsen Gerner at Art Basel, Hong Kong, 15 – 17 March 2015 LITERATURE Julian Opie (online catalogue raisonné) [https://www.julianopie.com/painting/2015/ paisley-dress-and-red-gown] (accessed 14/03/19)

With slick surfaces and a distinctive, ultra-legible pictorial style, Julian Opie creates images that are uniquely reactive to and reflective of our contemporary society. One of Britain’s most renowned and influential contemporary artists, a late bloomer of the YBA generation, Opie has produced art that seeks to find the essential elements required for visual understanding. Taking technical cues from the economical means of commercial design and Pop Art, Opie combines flat planes of solid colour with modulated thick black outlines of his figures to produce bright and stylised urban tableaux. Paisley Dress and Red Gown, 2015, features two glamorous women from an affluent Western society, caught mid-stride walking in opposing directions, oblivious to both each other and to the viewer. These ladies are modelled on real people, shoppers exiting High Street retailers with their spoils, passers-by who happened to become the artist’s objects of observation. Opie used photographs of these women to create drawings which then informed, in turn, paintings, prints and animations. Cleanly rendering the silhouettes of these figures, their outlines remain static, frozen in their directionless and eternal parade. Suspended thus in time and space, the source of these striding forms can be found in the early photographic studies of Eadweard Muybridge, whose work revealed the true physiological progression of movement in both animals and people. By drastically reducing the identifying features of his models, Opie creates a strong tension between the meditative personal action of walking and the collective urban pursuit of commuting. Moving without narrative or spatial context, these figures are no longer Baudelairean flâneurs. They do not calmly observe their surroundings and wander the streets – they are contemporary beings, absent-mindedly going through the motions of to-and-froing, absorbed by their handheld screens, plugged into their ear phones and sipping drinks through plastic straws. Through these closely observed behaviours, Opie creates bridges through which the public can identify with his figures, transcending the apparent simplicity of his design. Paisley Dress and Red Gown belongs to a series of Opie’s works that has spanned many forms since 2003, all featuring his schematic people ambulating in a shallow and featureless pictorial space – some walking across plasma screens, others whose forms have been laser-cut into stand-alone sculptures and many more who are grouped on canvases like ancient processional friezes, only distinguishable from one another by virtue of their corpulence, gait, clothing and assorted accoutrements. In the catalogue of his current survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Opie explains ‘There is a beauty and energy in a striding figure. Each person wrapped in their own purpose, dressed in their own way, combining with strangers to create a constantly changing, random dance’.1 1. The artist quoted in Julian Opie, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2018, p. 219

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

MAJOR AUSTRALIAN WORKS OF ART FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION, UNITED KINGDOM • LOTS 9 – 20

CHARLES BLACKMAN 9 (1928 – 2018) ALICE ON THE TABLE, 1956 tempera and oil on composition board 120.5 x 111.5 cm signed upper right: BLACKMAN estimate :

$1,500,000 – 2,000,000

PROVENANCE Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane Alan Waldron, Brisbane, acquired from the above in 1957 Private collection, Brisbane, acquired from the above in March 1964 Christie’s, Melbourne, 1 August 1995, lot 44 Private collection, United Kingdom EXHIBITED probably: Paintings from Alice in Wonderland, Gallery of Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 12 – 22 February 1957 Charles Blackman, Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 19 June – 1 July 1957, cat. 6 (as ‘Alice in Wonderland’) The Alan Waldron Collection, Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 9 – 17 June 1964, cat. 5 ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Charles Blackman, Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 4 – 21 September 1966, cat. 20 ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Charles Blackman, South Yarra Gallery, Melbourne, 21 – 30 March 1967, cat. 6 Charles Blackman: ‘Alice in Wonderland’, David Jones’ Art Gallery, Sydney, 14 – 26 October 1968, cat. 6 Charles Blackman: Alice in Wonderland, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 11 August – 15 October 2006, cat. 18 LITERATURE Mathew, R., Charles Blackman, Georgian House, Melbourne, 1965, p. 14 (as ‘Alice sitting on the table’) Shapcott, T., The Art of Charles Blackman, Andre Deutsch, London, 1989, cat. 64, pp. 132 (illus.), 252 Stewart, K., ‘What’s On’, The Age, Melbourne, 30 July 1995, p. 42 (illus.) Overington, C., ‘Whiteley Nude May Set Record Price’, The Age, Melbourne, 31 July 1995, p. 7 Maslen, G., ‘Misconceptions about Death and the Painter’, The Age, Melbourne, 14 August 1995, p. 24 Malsen, G., ‘Big Spenders Return to the Auctions’, The Age, Melbourne, 25 August 1995, p. 16 Smith, G., and Moore, F. St. J., Charles Blackman: Alice in Wonderland, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006, pp. 27, 28, 74, 75 (illus.), 136

CHARLES BLACKMAN Alice, 1956 tempera and oil on composition board 133.0 × 90.0 cm courtesy of Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne © Charles Blackman/Copyright Agency, 2019

Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? ‘I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?’ she said aloud. ‘I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think’ … ‘I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among people that walk with their heads downwards! The Antipathies, I think’ – she was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn’t sound at all the right word – ‘but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma’am, is this New Zealand or Australia?’1 In 1956, when Charles Blackman first encountered Lewis Carroll’s beloved children’s book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), he was not a child but rather, a couple of years shy of his thirtieth birthday, a grown, married man who was soon to become a father. Blackman’s introduction to Carroll’s absurdist tale of fantasy and adventure – which begins with Alice following the White Rabbit down the rabbit-hole – was through a talking book which his wife, Barbara, who was legally blind, had borrowed from the library. Blackman had grown up in a house devoid of books and while he had heard of the famous story, he had never read it. 2 Nor, significantly, had he seen illustrations of it, either by John Tenniel, the English artist whose drawings accompanied the first publication of the book, or any of those published subsequently. Blackman listened to the story repeatedly and later recalled: ‘I was absolutely thrilled to bits with it … and it seemed to sum up for me at that particular moment my feelings towards

surrealism, and that anything could happen. The cup could lift off the table by itself, the teapot would … pour its own tea … The world is a magical and very possible place for all one’s dreams and feelings. One is completely outside of reality … This was sparked completely off by Barbara’s influence on my life.’ 3 Blackman attended evening classes at the East Sydney Technical School while working as a copy boy at the Sydney Sun during the early 1940s and later, promoted to art cadet, undertook a handful of painting classes with Hayward Veal at the Meldrum School of Painting which constituted his only formal art training. From 1946-47 he participated in life drawing classes at the Society of Realist Art and it was at this time that Blackman met Lois Hunter, an avant-garde poet from New Zealand who introduced him to modern art and literature.4 Blackman followed Hunter to Brisbane in 1948 and with his mind opened to the possibilities of the creative life, befriended local artists and writers, including Barbara (née Patterson) and Barrett Reid, both members of the local Barjai group of poets. Blackman and Barbara moved to Melbourne, attracted to the city’s community of like-minded painters, writers and thinkers, and were married in 1951. Blackman conceded that ‘it wasn’t until Barbara and I were actually living together that I really started painting pictures’ 5 and during the following twenty years of marriage their relationship provided a solid and nurturing foundation for family, friendship and sustained creativity. Their life together was an ongoing collaboration, Barbara’s literary focus merging with and inspiring Charles’s visual creations, and Charles’ vision providing Barbara with a window onto the world: as Cynthia Nolan described them, ‘not so much two people as the two halves of a double person’.6

CHARLES BLACKMAN Feet Beneath The Table, 1956 tempera and oil on composition board 106.5 x 122.0 cm courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne © Charles Blackman/Copyright Agency, 2019

Barbara’s pension for the sight-impaired and work as a life model allowed Blackman the freedom to paint full time, but this was curtailed by her first pregnancy in 1956, prompting him to find employment as a cook at the Eastbourne Café (better known in its later incarnation as Balzac restaurant) in Wellington Parade, East Melbourne. The café was run by his friend, Georges Mora, who had bought it earlier that year in anticipation of the crowds that the Olympic Games, centred at the nearby Melbourne Cricket Ground, would bring.7 A European émigré who had arrived from Paris five years earlier, Mora and his beautiful young wife Mirka, soon became what Barbara later described as the ‘vortex of our marvellous lives’, their apartment in Grosvenor Chambers at the ‘Paris End’ of Collins Street being a ‘centre of gravity (and much levity), the place of exhibitions, meetings, parties, dramatic moments, tableaux vivants, plots, confrontations, improvisations, last suppers, diagnoses and prognostications, exhibition after exhibition’. 8 The café was busy and according to Blackman his efforts, ‘used to be referred to as the kitchen ballet. I used to leap from fridge to plate … my record was serving a hundred and four meals, three courses, absolutely fully served, of – not haute cuisine, but not bad food – in under two hours’.9 It was while he was working here that Blackman began to draw the images that formed the basis of his Alice in Wonderland series, the chairs, tables, teapots and crockery that surrounded him in the café becoming key motifs in the paintings. As he recalled, ‘I went to work … at 5pm … and … finished at 12 and then came home and my head was full of spinning plates and teacups and Barbara would say I brought the rabbit into the restaurant at night and it would help me do the work, and next day I would paint it all. The restaurant came into the paintings’.10

There were other influences at work too. In late June 1956 Sidney Nolan exhibited his now iconic series of paintings about the infamous nineteenth-century bushranger, Ned Kelly, and Blackman attended the opening at the new Gallery of Contemporary Art in Tavistock Place, Melbourne. Barrett Reid had first introduced Nolan to Blackman in Brisbane in 1947 and they connected again in Melbourne through John and Sunday Reed whose home, Heide, was a cultural refuge for many of the most avant-garde artists, writers and thinkers of the day. Blackman had been impressed by Nolan’s art, identifying with his ability to ‘[trap] inner feeling in the paint’ and they also shared a mutual passion for the French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. While Blackman had already begun the Alice paintings, seeing Nolan’s Kelly exhibition inspired him to develop them into a major series. The image of Ned Kelly and, in particular, his stylised black mask, became a touchstone within Nolan’s oeuvre (as well as a symbol of personal significance) and he returned to the subject repeatedly throughout his career. In a similar way, the White Rabbit – mischievous, masculine and playful, an anthropomorphised representation of the artist himself – became a recurring motif in Blackman’s later work.11 Nolan also incorporated references to his own life into the Kelly paintings and this, in particular, struck a chord with Blackman. Eloquently describing Alice as ‘moving enquiringly, questioningly, trustfully, bemusedly, changefully, into a new and strange world, trying with good sense and honesty to get her bearings in it, however often she seemed to change body shape and whereabouts’12, Barbara might just as well have been writing about her own experience of pregnancy, adapting to

CHARLES BLACKMAN Goodbye Feet, 1956 tempera and oil on composition board 116.0 x 122.0 cm courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne © Charles Blackman/Copyright Agency, 2019

a new and ever-changing physical form. It was this miraculous process of transformation that Blackman related to Alice’s fantastic experiences, as well as Barbara’s increasing blindness and the spatial disorientation this caused. In addition to these very personal connections, as Felicity St John Moore has documented, the series also incorporates symbolic references to Nolan and the Reeds, the Boyd home at Open Country, Murrumbeena, as well as pictorial allusions to contemporary artworld politics, including Max Meldrum’s tonalist doctrine and the battles that were being played out within the Contemporary Art Society at the time.13 Add to this the couple’s interest in Surrealism and appreciation of the absurd and irrational, combined with various everyday items that Blackman appropriated for his compositions – such as a blue and white chequered tablecloth received as a wedding present that became the chess board in The Game of Chess, 1956 (private collection) – and all of the ingredients for what would become one of the most renowned series of paintings in modern Australian art were in place. Blackman credited the vibrant colour of the Alice in Wonderland paintings to the experience of painting outdoors with his friend, the artist John Perceval. Working in tempera (often made using eggs from the chickens at Heide) and oil paint, he also acknowledged the influence of Perceval in his approach to making these works, describing them as ‘probably the freest pictures that I’ve painted … I’m not talking about the images, I’m talking about the actual way of painting. He was a wonderfully ecstatic painter, John Perceval, very free and very beautiful … I would have the experience of watching John and … It’s as if I adopted part of his nature, and this helped … by making the form reflect my inner feelings’.14

Blackman continued painting Alice pictures into early 1957 and they were launched at his exhibition, Paintings from Alice in Wonderland, which opened at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in mid-February. At the end of the brief ten-day showing, five paintings had been sold – three to John and Sunday Reed (now all in the collection of Heide Museum of Modern Art), one to art critic Clive Turnbull and another to artist and friend, Rosemary Ryan. The exhibition was far from a commercial success and while it did attract considerable comment in the newspapers, Arnold Shore was the most enthusiastic, writing that ‘Salient incidents … are freely interpreted and the artist’s purpose is to suggest the magical topsy-turvy world which the heroine met in her journey through wonderland. Thus teapots pour of their own volition and bottles of ink fly through the air as the artist seeks to convey the humour of the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Although the humour is not as subtle and delicate as in the printed version, it is certainly amusing in a boisterous, but lyrical, way’.15 Later, in June that year, a solo exhibition of Blackman’s work was mounted at the Johnstone Gallery in Brisbane which included three paintings from the Alice in Wonderland series, all of which sold to local collectors.16 This trio included The Blue Alice, 1956, eventually acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery in 2000, and Alice on the Table, 1956, priced at 50 guineas, which was bought by Alan Waldron. A luminous picture that glows in its striking emphasis on the interplay of yellow, blue and white, Alice on the Table contains all the hallmarks of a quintessential Alice painting. Wearing a blue dress with white collar and black trim, a golden-haired Alice is centrally placed and seated on a table. Depicted in a reflective pose, her head resting on her hand, she is seemingly unaware of the White Rabbit, ears erect and dark eyes staring, half visible beside her and adopting

CHARLES BLACKMAN Rabbit Tea Party, 1956 - 57 synthetic polymer enamel paint on hardboard 120.0 x 136.0 cm courtesy of National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Charles Blackman/Copyright Agency, 2019

an identical sideways lean. This physical mirroring of the rabbit and Alice symbolises the intimate relationship between Charles and Barbara, the rabbit’s watchful curiosity a reflection perhaps, of the husband’s fascination with his wife’s gestational metamorphosis. Alice’s figure has evidently shrunk and she is dwarfed by the vivid yellow chair and green teapot on the left and the large blue vase of mixed flowers to the right. The lyrical depiction of these flowers recalls John Perceval’s expressive application of paint, and Blackman’s pure delight in their varied form, texture and colour is on clear display. It is impossible not to relate the flowers, bursting with life and possibility, to the impending birth of the Blackmans’ first child and to think of the paintings of female faces with flowers that emerged soon after. Possibility and promise are also suggested by the open door at the far left of the image which beckons Alice from her indoor world. With examples now represented in major private and public collections across the country, including the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art and Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Alice in Wonderland series represented a significant turning point in Blackman’s career. Alice was a subject that, in his words, ‘allowed me to paint in a totally different style. [To believe] that anything is allowable’.17 As his own life flourished, so did his art and his imaginative depiction of Barbara as Alice ‘[released] in Blackman the artist the imaginative capacity to explore freely, without the worry of strict realism or logic, that world of experience, of feeling, which exists in all of us’18 , a capacity which would ultimately see him hailed as ‘the outstanding artist of the feminine psyche’.

1. Carroll, L., Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Illustrated by Charles Blackman, (ed.) Amadio, N., A. H. & A. W. Reed, Sydney, 1982, p. 14 2. St John Moore, F., ‘Conception to Birth: The Alice in Wonderland Series’ in St John Moore, F. & Smith, G., Charles Blackman: Alice in Wonderland (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006, p. 10 3. The artist interviewed by Robert Peach, Sunday Night Radio Two, ABC Radio, 9 September 1973 quoted in ibid. 4. For detailed biographical information see St John Moore, Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls and Angels (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, pp. 15 – 29 5. The artist quoted in Shapcott, T., Focus on Charles Blackman, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1967, p. 13 6. St John Moore, 2006, op. cit., p. 13 7. See Harding, L. & Morgan, K., Modern Love: The Lives of John & Sunday Reed, The Miegunyah Press, Carlton, 2015, p. 252 8. Blackman, B., Glass After Glass: Autobiographical Reflections, Penguin, Melbourne, 1997, p. 172 9. St John Moore, 2006, op. cit., p. 11 10. The artist quoted in Shapcott, T., The Art of Charles Blackman, Andre Deutsch, London, 1989, p. 23 11. ibid., p. 26. In addition to illustrating a 1982 publication of Lewis Carroll’s story with a selection of the Alice paintings and some new watercolours and drawings (see footnote 1), Blackman was commissioned to design the program and sets for Alice in Wonderland, a ballet performed in Perth in 1984. 12. Blackman, B. quoted in St John Moore, 1993, op. cit., p. 4 13. See St John Moore, 2006, op. cit., p. 16 14. The artist quoted in Shapcott, 1989, op. cit., pp. 23 – 24 15. Shore, A., ‘Painter in Alice’s Wonderland’, Age, Melbourne, 12 February 1957, p. 2 16. No conclusive documentation of the Melbourne exhibition remains, however it is likely that Alice on the Table, 1956 was included. See Smith, G., ‘Which Way, Which Way? The Production and Reception of Alice in Wonderland’ in St John Moore, F. & Smith, G., op. cit., p. 27 17. Amadio, N., Charles Blackman: The Lost Domains, A. H. & A. W. Reed, Sydney, 1980, p. 25 18. Shapcott, 1967, op. cit., p. 30

KIRSTY GRANT

CHARLES AND CHRISTABEL BLACKMAN at Charles Blackman: Alice In Wonderland, David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney, 14 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 26 October 1968 photographer unknown courtesy of Charles Blackman papers

PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG CHARLES BLACKMAN c.1958 photograph by Mary Nolan

INSTALLATION VIEW OF THE CHARLES BLACKMAN EXHIBITION Alice In Wonderland, Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 4-21 September 1966 photograph by Arthur Davenport courtesy of James Hardie Library of Australian Fine Arts, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane

CHARLES BLACKMAN IN HIS STUDIO c.1962

CHARLES BLACKMAN IN LONDON, 1981 photograph by Laurence Hope courtesy of Felicity St John Moore

MAJOR AUSTRALIAN WORKS OF ART FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION, UNITED KINGDOM • LOTS 9 – 20

JUSTIN O’BRIEN 10 (1917 – 1996) TWO FIGURES IN A ROOM, c.1990 – 93 oil on canvas 98.5 x 70.5 cm signed upper left: O’BRIEN estimate :

$150,000 – 250,000

PROVENANCE Australian Galleries, Sydney Art Galleries Schubert, Queensland Private collection, United Kingdom, acquired from the above c.1998 EXHIBITED Paintings by Justin O’Brien, Australian Galleries, Sydney, 26 – 31 July 1993; Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 9 August – 4 September 1993, cat. 1 (illus. on exhibition invitation) LITERATURE Heathcote, C., ‘Arts’, The Age, Melbourne, 20 August 1993, p. 16 (illus.)

For an artist who had resided in Italy for over thirty years, Justin O’Brien continued to be remarkably well loved and respected by the members of the Sydney art world. In July 1993, the artist, recently awarded with an Order of Australia (AM), returned to Sydney briefly to attend a special one-week sell out exhibition of his paintings at Australian Galleries. Months earlier, the gallery’s director had announced somewhat prematurely to the press the closure of its Sydney branch.1 The first exhibition of paintings by O’Brien to be held Sydney in three years was received as a de facto swansong for the long-standing gallery with a luncheon held in the artist’s honour, with art world elites, collectors and artists alike, in attendance. 2 The whole event was even televised for the nightly 7.30 report on ABC television. 3 This beguiling interior was the largest painting in the exhibition, catalogue number one of twenty-four oils, and the culmination of decades of artistic investigations in the genre of still life, and rich interiors populated by languorous women and poised children. The gallery director boasted at the time this particular painting was so sought after, he could have sold it ‘four times’ over. 4 This ornate and richly decorated interior, perfumed and bearing the heavy stillness of a humid summer’s day, can be identified as the living room of Sydney painter Margaret Olley’s home in Duxford St, Paddington. Several of O’Brien’s later paintings (including An Italian Family Visits Margaret Olley, 1991 and Interior No. 5, 1989 – 90) appropriate features of this room, the fruit of a long and

artistically fertile friendship between the two painters that dated back to their days residing together in the Merioola residence in Woollahra during the late 1940s. Delighting in the filtered light flooding through the French windows and sensory riches of Olley’s home, O’Brien exclaimed ‘everywhere you look, there is another still life just waiting to be painted’.5 A floral arrangement of cornflowers on the table in this painting perhaps a clin d’oeil to the magnanimous owner of the house. The warm palette of this interior is suffused with late afternoon light, raking across the patterned cushions and horizontal surfaces laden with arrangements of fruit and flowers. It is a composite image created with familiar motifs of Justin O’Brien’s visual lexicon – such as a verdant view through a window which featured many times including in The Window, No. 2, 1978, and the standing figure, which appears again in the aforementioned painting An Italian Family Visits Margaret Olley. The partially nude seated figure in the foreground, however, is reminiscent of an earlier painting from the late 1980s (offered by Deutscher and Hackett in May 2016), modelled by a young Daniela Scardamaglia. 6 Anchoring the composition of this interior around the contrasting forms of a reclining nude and a clothed female figure in the background, O’Brien pays clear homage to two masterpieces of Western Art, Titian’s Venus of Urbino, 1538 and Edouard Manet’s Olympia, 1863. 1. Owens, S., ‘High Jackings go on display’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 25 July 1993, p. 150 2. Pearce, B. and Wilson, N., Justin O’Brien. The Sacred Music of Colour, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2010, p. 170 3. ‘Sydney art community gathers for latest exhibition of artist Justin O’Brien’, The 7.30 Report, segment, 5:52 min, broadcast 26 July 1993, ABC-TARA #216870 4. Dwyer, C., ‘O’Brien’s Bonanza’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 4 August 1993, p. 26 5. The artist to Heather Rusden, 1989, in France, C., Justin O’Brien: image and Icon, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1997, p. 36 6. Egidio and Daniela Scardamaglia, a young Roman couple were close friends of the artist during his expatriate years, and both modelled frequently for the painter.

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

MAJOR AUSTRALIAN WORKS OF ART FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION, UNITED KINGDOM • LOTS 9 – 20

ARTHUR BOYD 11 (1920 – 1999) THE OLD MINE, c.1951 oil and tempera on composition board 91.0 x 121.0 cm signed lower right: Arthur Boyd estimate :

$350,000 – 500,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 30 April 1995, lot 118 Private collection, United Kingdom

into the car for the long journey. Somewhat wisely, Arthur followed soon after having taken time to ‘garner necessary art supplies. He puttered up, separately and quietly, a day or so later in the increasingly decrepit Dodge, its doors now tied up with wool-baling twine’. 2

LITERATURE ‘Record Price Paid for McCubbin’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 1 May 1995, p. 3 Malsen, G., ‘The Return of the Collectors’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 2 May 1995, p. 15

Boyd had already started experimenting with the centuries-old technique of tempera, a mixture of egg yolk, oil, water and pigment, which results in a matt, smooth surface. Extremely quick-drying, ‘the egg tempera … gave a new translucency to (Boyd’s) paintings of the late 1940s’, 3 and by the time of the Wimmera trip, he was well versed in its use, and was able to harness tempera’s unique qualities for the resultant paintings, capturing in particular the baleful white light of the sky, the spiked thistles, stunted trees and the sharp stubble of the wheat. In The Old Mine, for example, the ramshackle machinery which originally scarred the gully has now become part of the landscape it inhabits, precariously perched on the edge of a dry and eroded creek bed. It seems destined to tumble into its own quarried hole, a cycle of bust and renewal that the environmentalist Boyd would no doubt have been happy to convey.

RELATED WORK Old mining country (near Bendigo), 1951, oil, tempera on composition board, 81.5 x 108.5 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, in Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993, p. 85 (illus.)

The Old Mine, c.1951, belongs to the revelatory extended sequence of paintings by Arthur Boyd inspired by a month’s residency in Victoria’s Wimmera region in the autumn of 1950. Stilled and haunting, set beneath a vast and glaring sky, these images stand in stark contrast to the red-hot paintings of Australia’s interior created earlier by Russell Drysdale, and Boyd’s future brother-in-law Sidney Nolan. Rather, the Wimmera was close enough to Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra for its particular sense of country to be part of the lived sensibility of these otherwise metropolitan populations; and through them, Boyd ‘was showing Australians where they lived, mapping it, writing it home with his brush’.1 Born into a family of artists, Arthur Boyd became a master in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, printmaking, ceramics and ceramic sculpture. Although his imagery was populated by all forms of humanity and beasts – often imagined – Boyd’s great and enduring fascination was with landscape dating from his earliest years painting in Rosebud alongside his artist grandfather. Widely read and deeply thoughtful, Boyd was a seemingly quiet man who nonetheless displayed a steely resolve when it came to his art. On a visit to Melbourne in the autumn of 1950, Betty Bennett, a friend of Boyd’s wife Yvonne, invited the family to stay at her house in Horsham with her husband, the schoolteacher and poet Jack Stevenson. Yvonne immediately accepted, and piled the children

As the weeks in Horsham progressed, he set a steady routine of painting by day, bringing works back for critique by Yvonne and the others each evening. Subsequent to his return home, Boyd exhibited the ‘Wimmera’ paintings singly and in groups in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide where, as one critic wrote, ‘the artist’s parched landscapes echo the spirit of the countryside’.4 Ultimately, the paintings of this period established Arthur Boyd as one of the most important painters of his generation and led directly to his selection to represent Australia in the country’s inaugural presentation at the Venice Biennale of 1958, at which he showed a group of Wimmera paintings alongside works by the late Arthur Streeton. Such imagery would have been a revelation to European audiences, their first painterly encounter with these ‘more intimate aspects of the Australian landscape’. 5 1. Bungey, D., Arthur Boyd: a life, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2007, p. 248 2. op cit., p. 243 3. Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd: retrospective, Beagle Press, Sydney, 1993, p. 19 4. “The Age” Art Critic, ‘New Approach by Arthur Boyd’, Age, Melbourne, 18 September 1951, p. 2 5. Campbell, R., ‘Arthur Boyd (1920 - )’, Australia: Paintings by Arthur Streeton and Arthur Boyd, XXIX Biennale, Venice, 1958, unpaginated

ANDREW GAYNOR

MAJOR AUSTRALIAN WORKS OF ART FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION, UNITED KINGDOM • LOTS 9 – 20

TIM STORRIER 12 born 1949 STARLIGHT OVER THE PLAIN (NIGHT COALS), 2008 synthetic polymer paint on linen 152.0 x 305.0 cm signed lower right: Storrier signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: ‘Starlight over the Plain’ / (Night Coals) / Storrier / 2008 estimate :

$200,000 – 300,000

PROVENANCE Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane (label attached verso) Private collection, Queensland Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 24 April 2013, lot 25 Savill Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso, as ‘Starlight on the plains (Night Coals)’) Private collection, United Kingdom EXHIBITED A Connoisseur’s Collection, Savill Galleries, Sydney, 15 November – 10 December 2014, cat. 7 (as ‘Starlight on the Plains (Night Coals)’) LITERATURE Capon, E., Wright, W., Zimmer, J. and McGregor, K., Tim Storrier: Moments, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2009, pp. 11, 14–15 (illus. as ‘Starlight on the Plains (Night Coals)’) Gripper, A., ‘Artist’s Pad’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 18 January 2014 (illus.) Artonview, National Gallery of Australia, no. 81, Autumn 2015, p. 61 (illus.)

‘My affinity for the Australian landscape has to do with a sense of place, which is both physical and emotional, and the fact that l always know where I am’.1 Paradoxically one of the country’s most popular yet simultaneously elusive artists, Tim Storrier first captured the imagination of the art world during the eighties with his signature images of burning ropes set against expansive parched desert plains and vast skies powerfully evoking the essence of the Australian landscape. Drawing inspiration from the great Romantic painters of the nineteenth century such as JMW Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, his landscapes not only contemplated the insignificance of humankind when compared with the awesome magnitude of the natural world, but inevitably encouraged darker, more pessimistic readings with his abandoned campsites and smouldering embers suggesting themes of displacement, isolation and decay. While continuing this interest in the four elements and the power of life which they embody, Starlight Over the Plain (Night Coals), 2008 nevertheless reveals a significant shift in the artist’s vision during the opening decade of the new millennium. Where previously his interpretations had been literal and direct, now his treatment is more subdued, reflective and abstract, with fire (the burning logs positioned lower left) occupying an almost secondary role to the dazzling celestial sky and billowing, voluminous clouds that cast long shadows upon the expansive plain below. Elegant and minimalist, indeed the nocturnal scene offers an arguably more sophisticated exploration of the emotive, melancholic mood that has always pervaded Storrier’s oeuvre, drawing upon the symbolism of the fading light of day as a metaphor for change or the fin de siècle, end of an era. Similarly, the juxtaposition of fire with an entirely different great vastness here (infinite celestial skies and untraversed bodies of water), no doubt suggests further allusions to evolution, the passing of time and the grandeur of decay in the same vein as the traditional vanitas still life. As Storrier himself muses, ‘... there is a relationship between fecundity and mortality, between something that is wet and something that is burning. These are primal poetic qualities that do not change in terms of the human spirit’. 2 Like the finest of Storrier’s achievements, Starlight Over the Plain (Night Coals) encompasses the subtlety of nature’s fugitive diurnal moods, its mysterious silently unfolding rituals and vast droning presence. Long-contemplated narratives inspired by the artist’s own experience of the landscape, such works feature among the most recognisable images in contemporary art today – evoking a sense of place that is inextricably Australian. As Edmund Capon, a former director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales writes, ‘…they could not I believe have come from any country other than Australia’. 3 1. Storrier quote in Van Nunen, L., Point to Point: The Art of Tim Storrier, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1987 2. Storrier cited in Tim Storrier: The Burning Gifts, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 1989, p. 11 3. Capon, E., cited in Lumby, C., Tim Storrier: The Art of the Outsider, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, p. 8

VERONICA ANGELATOS

MAJOR AUSTRALIAN WORKS OF ART FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION, UNITED KINGDOM • LOTS 9 – 20

WILLIAM STRUTT 13 (1825 – 1915) SLACK TIMES, 1883 oil on canvas 79.0 x 92.0 cm signed lower right: W. Strutt. senr bears inscription on frame verso: Slack Times by W. Strutt / Exhibited 1884 / … London Society [including pencil study FIRST SKETCH FROM NATURE, STUDY FOR SLACK TIMES, 1883 pencil on paper 14.0 x 20.5 cm inscribed with title lower centre: First Sketch from nature] PROVENANCE Private collection Louise Whitford Galleries, London Kozminsky Galleries, Melbourne, 1977 Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, September 1982 Private collection, Melbourne Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 20 April 1998, lot 19 Private collection, United Kingdom EXHIBITED William Strutt, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, February – March 1981, cat. 18 (label attached verso) Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 1 – 14 September 1982, cat. 13 (illus.) LITERATURE Curnow, H., The Life and Art of William Strutt 1825 – 1915, Martinborough, New Zealand, 1980, cat. 91, pl. 39, p. 160 (illus.) Curnow, H., William Strutt, Australian Gallery Directors Council in conjunction with Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1980, cat. 18, p. 73 (illus.) estimate :

$200,000 – 350,000 (2)

Among the several towering figures of late colonial art including his friend Eugène von Guérard, William Strutt is best remembered for his grand canvases recording epic events and celebrating heroic figures from the pages of Australian history of which he was such a brilliant witness. Black Thursday, February 6th. 1851, 1864 (La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne), the most memorable of his history paintings, presents a dramatic panorama of that fateful day in February 1851 when bushfires engulfed Victoria. Bushrangers, Victoria, Australia, 1852, 1887 (The University of Melbourne Art Collection, Russell Grimwade Bequest) was another to capture the public imagination. As subjects much celebrated in later Australian art, Strutt also recorded life on the Ballarat goldfields, the Burke and Wills inland exploring expedition, and such pioneering hardships as children lost in the bush. His mastery of realism, rendered with meticulous detail, appealed to the sensibilities of his time and continues today to provide enriching insights and visual pleasure for the historian and connoisseur alike. Another important dimension of Strutt’s work is his extraordinary feeling for and depiction of animals. Even his striking 1862 Portrait of Robert O’Hara Burke (private collection) includes an engaging camel; and the magnificent watercolour, The Haunt of the Kangaroos, 1885 (Rex Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia, Canberra) offers unparalleled images of one of the icons of this country. Curiously, Strutt painted them from studies made at the London Zoo after his return to England.1 Of all, his horses are the finest. In Black Thursday, February 6th. 1851, the avalanche of fleeing creatures centres on the white steed, the noblest of figures. And heartfelt compassion is captured in the watercolour Martyrs of the Road, 1851 (Victoria the Golden, Victorian Parliamentary Library, Melbourne). Of horses seen on the rush to the goldfields of Ballarat, Strutt wrote: ‘the poor beasts of burden willingly pulled at their heavy loads till, when utterly exhausted they could pull no longer, just sunk down and died on the road…’. 2 Numerous animals inhabit Strutt’s oeuvre, their different kinds matched by his range of subjects. Patriotic lions populate the allegorical Sentinels of Empire, 1901 (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart). And goats, pigs, dogs (especially puppies), enliven genre paintings and those drawn from seventeenth and eighteenth-century subjects. They are invariably spiced with satire and a wry humour, as in Spring Cleaning, 1892 (sold by Deutscher and Hackett, 13 September 2016, lot 46). In Slack Times, 1883, servile co-workers enjoy a break. The donkey, however, has little respite from his role of beast of burden, patiently bearing the sleeping boy with a look of open-eyed forbearance. Stoicism (an ancient virtue in keeping with the donkey’s long history of servitude) is touched with humour. Heather Curnow, in her classic study of Strutt, tells us that in early 1882 the artist hired two donkeys from a gypsy for two weeks. In addition to Slack Times, she suggests that studies featuring these animals could have been made for other paintings – After Bank Holiday, 1882, ‘a painting of two donkeys with a circus caravan in the background…; and Let Brotherly Love Continue, which showed two donkeys with a jester, exhibited at Liverpool in 1882’. 3 Donkeys accompanied by a jester continue that relationship found in Slack Times, with images further linked by the clever play of light and colour. Again, superb textures enrich the painting’s visual appeal. 1. Curnow, H., The Life and Art of William Strutt 1825 – 1915, Martinborough, 1980, p. 162 2. Autobiography of William Strutt, 1850 – 1862, National Library of Australia, Canberra, quoted in Curnow, op. cit., p. 94 3. Curnow, H., op. cit., p. 160

DAVID THOMAS

MAJOR AUSTRALIAN WORKS OF ART FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION, UNITED KINGDOM • LOTS 9 – 20

HANS HEYSEN 14 (1877 – 1968) THE RED GUM, 1926 oil on canvas 71.0 x 86.5 cm signed and dated lower left: HANS HEYSEN 1926 PROVENANCE Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 20 April 1972, lot 16 (as ‘The Old Red Gum’) Private collection Sotheby’s, Sydney, 22 October 1986, lot 52 Private collection Bonython Meadmore Gallery, Adelaide Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 4 April 1995, lot 44 Private collection, United Kingdom EXHIBITED Society of Artists’ Annual Exhibition, Education Department Art Gallery, Sydney, September 1926 Hans Heysen’s Recent Watercolours including paintings of the Flinders Ranges, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 14 – 30 June 1928, cat. 18 Hans Heysen Watercolours and Drawings, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 23 September – 23 October 1988, cat. 85 On loan to The Hahndorf Academy, Hahndorf, South Australia, 3 January – 31 March 1990 LITERATURE ‘Artists. Annual Exhibition. An Admirable Standard.’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 9 September 1926, p. 12 Heysen’s Gum Trees, A Sydney Morning Herald Publication (RNB Graphic Arts Series), Sydney, 1937 (illus.) Thiele, C., Historic Hahndorf: To Honour the Occasion of His 90th Birthday and the Opening of the Hahndorf Academy, exhibition catalogue, Hahndorf Academy, South Australia, 1967 (illus. cover) Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 25, no. 3, Autumn 1988, p. 307 (illus. in advertisement for Bonython Meadmore Gallery) estimate :

$180,000 – 240,000

The noble gum and brilliance of the Australian light held Hans Heysen in their thrall, seen in The Red Gum, 1926 and related works from his golden years. While many come to mind, the best oils featuring gum trees and cattle include A Lord of the Bush, 1908 (Felton Bequest, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), Red Gold, 1913 (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide) and The Three Gums, 1914 – 21 (Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria). The year of our painting was particularly auspicious. The March number of Art in Australia was devoted entirely to Heysen, significantly including a colour illustration of The Red Gum, a watercolour version of our painting.1 He held his first solo exhibition in Sydney in May to much critical acclaim and sales of £3,800. Later, in Melbourne, the art critic for The Age heralded his show as ‘probably the highest artistic level he has yet reached’. 2 Then, in December he was awarded the 1926 Wynne Prize with Farmyard, Frosty Morning, (originally purchased by Sir James Fairfax), a variation on the theme of cattle resting beneath trees. 3 The previous November, Heysen had made his first visit to the Flinders Ranges. Later visits inspired such masterpieces of watercolour as Red Gums of the Far North, 1931 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) and Guardian of the Brachina Gorge, 1937 (National Gallery of Victoria). In his 1968 biography of Heysen, Colin Thiele quotes his perceptive understanding of gum trees: The subtlety of the tree combined with the beauty; the bulk, the solidity of the tree, and the character of its growth. And the movement, that’s something we mustn’t forget. It’s just wonderful to watch the combination of characters; sometimes you get a group of gums and you see how they combine, grow into interesting shapes, and suggest various things … I had my special trees, and they altered their appearance – the time of the year and the angle of the sun made all the difference. You could paint a tree one day and get all its various facets. And the next day it would be a different tree …4 The mid-1920s saw a burgeoning of subjects devoted to cattle sheltering beneath majestic red gums. They are crowned by our handsome oil painting and its almost identical watercolour. 5 The appeal of the subject to Heysen is seen in the selection of this watercolour as one of only six chosen for colour illustration in the previously mentioned 1926 special ‘Heysen Number’ of Art in Australia. This was reconfirmed years later when Heysen chose the oil painting The Red Gum to feature in colour on the catalogue cover of the 1967 exhibition Historic Hahndorf. The exhibition was held at the Hahndorf Academy in honour of Heysen’s 90th birthday. Different from European trees, Heysen believed that the distinctive ‘design’ of the gum was ‘expressed in the flow of its trunk and limbs …’.6 He shows this very clearly in The Red Gum where the mighty weight and shadow of the central eucalypt portrays the individuality of trunk and branches. This is given added emphasis by their striking contrast, almost silhouetted against the sun-filled light and bright blue of the cloud-decked sky. Even the atmosphere feels heavy, the enveloping stillness redolent with the lethargy of a hot summer’s day, extended through other shadows and bovine lassitude. 1. ‘Heysen Number’, Art in Australia, Sydney, 3rd Series, March 1926, no. 15, colour plate 3, unpaginated 2. ‘Art Notes’, The Age, Melbourne, 16 November 1926, p. 13 3. ‘Wynne Art Prize. Awarded to Hans Heysen’, The Argus, Melbourne, 22 December 1926, p. 22. Between 1904 and 1932 Heysen won the Wynne Prize nine times. 4. Thiele, C., Heysen of Hahndorf, David Heysen Productions, Adelaide, 2001, p. 147 5. Another particularly fine work is the charcoal, chalk and wash drawing, The Red Gum of 1924, illustrated in Dridan, D., The Art of Hans Heysen, Rigby Ltd., Adelaide 1966, pl. 49 6. Moore, W., The Story of Australian Art, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1934, vol. 1, p. 87

DAVID THOMAS

MAJOR AUSTRALIAN WORKS OF ART FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION, UNITED KINGDOM • LOTS 9 – 20

HANS HEYSEN 15 (1877 – 1968) END OF A SUMMER’S DAY, 1925 watercolour on paper 29.5 x 39.5 cm signed and dated lower left: HANS HEYSEN. 1925 estimate :

$15,000 – 25,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Christie’s, Sydney, 18 August 1993, lot 832 Private collection, United Kingdom

MAJOR AUSTRALIAN WORKS OF ART FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION, UNITED KINGDOM • LOTS 9 – 20

RUSSELL DRYSDALE 16 (1912 – 1981) THE YOUNG WAITRESS pen, ink and watercolour on paper 23.0 x 17.0 cm (image) signed lower left: Russell Drysdale inscribed with title lower right: The Young Waitress inscribed on label attached verso: To Geoff and Dahl / Those two good chaps / From Tassy estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

PROVENANCE Geoff and Dahl Collings, Sydney, a gift from the artist Christie’s, Melbourne, 21 September 1996, lot 200 Art Galleries Schubert, Queensland (label attached verso, as ‘girl in blue’) Private collection, United Kingdom, acquired from the above c.2001

MAJOR AUSTRALIAN WORKS OF ART FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION, UNITED KINGDOM • LOTS 9 – 20

CHARLES BLACKMAN 17 (1928 – 2018) THREE GRACES, c.1962 oil on canvas 152.0 x 135.0 cm signed lower right: BLACKMAN estimate :

$100,000 – 150,000

PROVENANCE Lister Gallery, Perth Private collection, United Kingdom, acquired from the above c.1994

Following a sell-out exhibition in Brisbane and his win of the Helena Rubenstein travelling scholarship award, Charles Blackman relocated his family to London for an extended stay from January 1961. A further reason for this decision was his inclusion in the high profile exhibition Recent Australian Painting held at the Whitechapel Gallery in June that year. The gallery’s director Bryan Robertson had been highly impressed by Blackman’s work which he’d seen on a research journey to Australia in 1960 and later provided the essay for the artist’s first solo show in London (at the Matthiessen Gallery), proclaiming ‘(t)hese are some of the strongest, most urgent and forceful paintings by a young artist that I have seen in the past ten years’.1 High praise indeed, and Three Graces, c.1962, is a fine example of Blackman’s work from that period. During their first eighteen months abroad, the Blackmans travelled extensively through France, Switzerland and Italy before renting ‘a large damp basement studio under a health food shop in Archway Road (North London)’. 2 Subsequently visiting Amsterdam with Arthur and Yvonne Boyd (who were also now resident in London), the family finally found a more permanent home in Highgate, renting a four-storey Georgian terrace house, where the artist established his studio on the first floor. Described by Barbara Blackman as ‘a proper house, as read about in books, with solid walls, carpets and indoor lavatory – indeed two of them’, it also boasted ‘a view on a clear day to the dome of St Paul’s’. 3 The house soon became the epicentre for the large group of expatriates currently living in London – including the Boyd and Perceval families – and they socialised in bars frequented by many of the equally dynamic British artists, such as Peter Blake, Pauline Boty, Robyn Denny, and David Hockney. In spite of the heady atmosphere, ‘Charles was in his studio painting by 6am. His painting discipline was ferocious and his success grew’.4 His graphic skills also developed and increasingly became a defining aspect to his paintings, as seen in the crisp, blue-line delineation of the figures in Three Graces.

The original ‘Graces’ were the daughters of Zeus, symbols of charity in Greek mythology, representing youth, mirth and elegance. Blackman was already renowned for his depictions of the inherent vulnerability and mystery entwined within the lives of young girls and women, and in Three Graces he fuses both the classical past and the 1960s present. Mirroring the nascent Pop-art movement, the girls explode with faceted colour as they twirl within a vivid orange ground. All three avoid direct eye-contact which reinforces the sense of an interior world as if they are individually isolated even as they participate in their mutual dance, one where ‘the precise relationships of warmth, possessiveness, need, or just the being one in a group, as security, are subtly and lyrically defined and made real to us’. 5 Following the success of his exhibition at Mathieson Galleries, many more paintings by Blackman entered prominent English and Australian collections. He also attained regal attention, being introduced to Queen Elizabeth II soon after. 1. Robertson, B., ‘Preface’, Paintings and Drawings: Charles Blackman, Matthiessen Gallery, London, 3 – 25 November 1961 2. Moore, F. St. J., Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls and Angels, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, p. 21 3. Blackman, B., Glass after glass: autobiographical reflections, Viking, Victoria, 1997, p. 231 4. Hawley, J., ‘Charles Blackman’, Artists in Conversation, Slattery Media, Melbourne, 2012, p. 280 5. Shapcott, T., Focus on Charles Blackman, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1967, p. 58

ANDREW GAYNOR

MAJOR AUSTRALIAN WORKS OF ART FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION, UNITED KINGDOM • LOTS 9 – 20

CHARLES BLACKMAN 18 (1928 – 2018) RAINFOREST: GUARDIAN OF THE FALLS I, 1984 oil on paper on board 174.5 x 114.5 cm signed lower right: CHARLES BLACKMAN estimate :

$30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE The Christensen Fund, Perth Christie’s, Melbourne, 29 April 1996, lot 107 Art Galleries Schubert, Queensland Private collection, United Kingdom, acquired from the above, c.2000 LITERATURE Alvarez, A., Rainforest: Charles Blackman, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1988, cat. CC6164, no. 15, pp. 37 (illus.), 108

The sunshine state of Queensland provided Charles Blackman with a haven and a muchneeded connection to the natural world. Having been nurtured throughout his long career by connections with Queenslanders, particularly Marjorie and Brian Johnstone of the Johnstone Gallery, the painter Jon Molvig and the modernist architect James Birrell, the influence of Queensland on his artworks was such that in 2015, an exhibition was staged at the Queensland Art Gallery under the title Lure of The Sun. And a lure it certainly was ‘Brisbane beckoned us … painter mates in the city … and poet friends on their mountain’, wrote Barbara Blackman in her memoirs.1 Blackman’s rekindling of a friendship with Birrell in Maroochydore in 1979 provided the impetus for his relocation to Buderim in the early 1980s: ‘I loved the area and its climate and I loved meeting my friend James, who lived in an old wooden house right by the Maroochy River’, the artist wrote in 1988. 2 The magical and atmospheric paintings that would flow from this new environment were created in a sustained burst of activity, and all described the ‘the lightness of [Queensland’s] colour and its friendly spirit’. 3 Chief amongst them is Rainforest: Guardian of the Falls I, 1984. Painting the waterfall behind his new home, Blackman imagined the watery source of the ‘living museums’ of its surrounding ancient rainforests, in its ideal state, ‘how it used to be’.4 His inspiration thence drawn away from brooding psychodramas, Blackman painted the dense earthly pleasures of his new verdant landscape. A page in his Buderim Mt Sketchbook: Civilization versus Eden, 1984, in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art Research Library, includes a preparatory sketch for this painting, and others within the Waterfall series. A sketch titled, Waterfall descending a Staircase, makes reference to Marcel Duchamp’s famous painting of 1912, Nude Descending a Staircase in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Blackman, in seeing clearly the architectural qualities of the rainforest (other paintings bore titles such as Cathedral, Staircase, Buttress, Door and Citadel), sought to incorporate a Cubist approach to painting organic movement. The mossy rocks surrounding this waterfall are fragmented and fractured. In the absence of bright sunlight, the gleaming white waterfall could well be illuminated by the light of the moon, its brilliant power presented as a pure, coursing body of water whose blue ripples remain trapped at the top of the chute. The dark density of the unknowable rainforest is presented here as a mythical entity, personified into a schematic and peaceful face, the guardian spirit partially obscured in the glassy rocks borne of the volcanic soil of Mount Buderim. 1. Blackman, B., Glass After Glass: Autobiographical Reflections, Viking, Penguin Books Australia, Victoria, 1997, p. 230 2. Blackman, C., and Alvarez, A., Rainforest, The Christensen Fund, MacMillan, Melbourne, 1988, p. 4 3. The artist, 1965, quoted in Hawker, M., Lure of the Sun: Charles Blackman in Queensland, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2015, p. 16 op. cit., p. 6 4. The artist, 1987, quoted in Blackman, C., and Alvarez, A., op cit, p. 6

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

MAJOR AUSTRALIAN WORKS OF ART FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION, UNITED KINGDOM • LOTS 9 – 20

SIDNEY NOLAN 19 (1917 – 1992) WIMMERA LANDSCAPE, c.1965 oil on composition board 121.5 x 150.0 cm bears inscription verso: 20. estimate :

$40,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 24 November 1992, lot 359 (as ‘Landscape’) Private collection, United Kingdom RELATED WORK Wimmera, 1966, 121.0 x 153.0 cm, oil on board, exhibited in Sidney Nolan: gemälde und druckgraphik, Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany, 15 May – 27 June 1971, cat. 36

Sidney Nolan’s first significant body of work was painted whilst stationed in the Wimmera region of Victoria’s north-west where he (reluctantly) served time in the army in 1942. His appreciation for sun-drenched, harsh landscapes stayed with him and became even more pronounced in his ‘central Australia’ series of 1949 – 1950, the ‘drought’ works from 1953, the second ‘Kelly’ series of the mid-1950s, and on to his African paintings from 1963. This innate understanding also extended to the bleak conditions he encountered in the Antarctic in 1964 and continued to resurface intermittently through his career. Wimmera Landscape, c.1965 is an excellent example of the incorporation of all these influences into one grand vision of a sparse and heated land. Nolan and his wife Cynthia moved permanently to Europe in 1953 with London as their base, and his career and travels increased exponentially as a result. The mid-1960s was a further period of grand ambition and personal transition for the artist, and a partial overview of his travel itinerary gives some indication: Antarctica, Australia, England in 1964; Australia (again), New Guinea, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China and New York in 1965.1 It was a whirlwind life, punctuated by periods of intense studio activity where Nolan created serial imagery based on sketches, photographs and his own fulsome imagination. His painting techniques also varied, from squeegee marks applied to pigment mixed with alkyd resins; oil paint loaded with juicy, thick medium; or washed backgrounds of thin colour rubbed into the board with rags, then scraped back with his fingers. The masterworks from these years are many, and include the multi-panelled epics Riverbend I, 1964 – 65 (Australian National University, Canberra); Riverbend II, 1965 – 66 (News Limited, New York); and Glenrowan, 1966 (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh). Whilst all were based on specific locales, such as Victoria’s Goulburn River for the Riverbend paintings, each was also sufficiently removed from reality to create a singular illusory landscape suited to the particular mood of the story Nolan wished to convey. Wimmera Landscape is a stand-alone image, but was probably painted amidst the creative process of these multi-panelled works. It too is a composite landscape, one which absorbs stylistic notes from the Wimmera, central Australia and even the Serengeti of Africa. There is an almost minimalist quality which stands in stark contrast to the tangled, thick paint which dominates Riverbend I and II. Instead, pigment-loaded squeegee-sweeps in the foreground suggest the banks of an eroded river, and the mirage-like stand of trees across the centre – mere stripes and daubs – hover over the baleful background glow of a desert sky rendered translucent with haze. Although the title of this painting has not been firmly established, Nolan exhibited a work of similar scale (painted in 1966) in Germany in 1971 under the title of Wimmera. It is plausible that this painting originally shared a similar title, as Nolan recognised something of his original Victorian landscape inspiration during his subsequent contemplation of the otherwise intuitive, finished result. 1. See Clarke, J., Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 23

ANDREW GAYNOR

MAJOR AUSTRALIAN WORKS OF ART FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION, UNITED KINGDOM • LOTS 9 – 20

WILLIAM ROBINSON 20 born 1936 FEEDING THE CHOOKS, 1994 hand painted ceramic vase 58.0 cm height signed and dated lower centre: William Robinson 94 inscribed on base: ERROL BARNES estimate :

PROVENANCE Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney Deutsche Bank collection, Sydney Deutscher~Menzies, Brisbane, 22 February 2006, lot 2 Private collection, Queensland Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 24 August 2009, lot 81 Private collection, United Kingdom

$35,000 – 65,000

In around 1990, Ray Hughes conceived the idea for a large ceramics exhibition in partnership with the Queensland potter, Errol Barnes. Artists from the gallery stable were dispatched to work with Barnes in his idyllic bush studio tucked away in the Gold Coast hinterland, where they could work in quiet isolation removed from the distractions of everyday life to create works later presented in a massive exhibition at Hughes’ gallery in Surry Hills. The idea for the exhibition was a response to the economic mood of the time; with spending slowing due to the looming Keating recession Hughes felt that the exercise, albeit an expensive one for the artists, would be a fun way to break the gloom of the times and jolt gallery visitors into ’sticking their hand in their pocket’. Numerous ceramics exhibitions came and went with varying degrees of success, but the real legacy of the partnership was the body of ceramic works that William (Bill) Robinson created then and continued to produce in the years that followed. Of all the artists who participated in the Ray Hughes ceramics projects, it was Robinson who achieved the most substantial results. For some of the artists involved, making ceramics was very much like a square peg in a round hole within their existing creative practice, but conceptually, the spherical nature of pots, plates and vases suited Robinson’s work perfectly. In every way, working on a physical sphere amplified what Robinson was attempting to do in his rolling, topsy turvy landscape images, and painting directly onto pots enabled him the freedom to literally paint in the round. The imagery from his earlier farmyard works, which provided the basis of his boldest innovations, was again deployed in the pottery as the artist continued to pursue experiments into distorting the picture plane. For Robinson the ceramics project was a ‘eureka moment’, which continued in the years that followed to inform the grand visions of the Queensland landscape for which he is best known. The farmyard subjects remain amongst Robinson’s most whimsical and charming works and the humour of the imagery belies the important innovations developed within the series. Feeding the Chooks, 1994, displays the full repertoire of his farmyard characters, the chooks, ducks, geese and goats are all there. And so are Bill and Shirley, as the Adam and Eve of Birkdale hobby farmers, cavorting amongst the family pets, with Robinson’s mantle as one of Australia’s most important painters subverted amongst the farmyard shenanigans. HENRY MULHOLLAND

PROPERTY OF VARIOUS VENDORS

JEFFREY SMART 21

(1921 – 2013) ST KILDA, 1959 oil on canvas on board 51.0 x 60.5 cm signed lower left: JEFFREY SMART bears inscription verso: S.T. Green bears inscription on frame verso: 24/4/93 / … TB GREEN / PAITER [sic] JEFFREY SMART / ST GREEN / … estimate :

$80,000 – 100,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Sydney, acquired directly from the artist, April 1959 Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above April 1993 Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 21 August 1995, lot 13 Private collection, Melbourne LITERATURE Quartermaine, P., Jeffrey Smart, Gryphon Books, Melbourne, 1983, cat. 350, p. 106 We are grateful to Stephen Rogers, Archivist for the Estate of Jeffrey Smart, for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

St Kilda, 1959 is the only known image of a Melbourne subject by Jeffrey Smart painted before he moved permanently to Europe in 1963. It comes from a particularly fertile period for the artist as he negotiated his busy life as a much-loved art educator with the ABC with the burgeoning fame that his art had been attracting over much of the previous decade. His imagery already stood in stark contrast to much of contemporaneous Australian art with its exceptional precision and masterly technique, combined with a stark clarity to its vision, where characters seem frozen into ‘separateness’ having stumbled onto a stage set and been momentarily caught in the act. Smart always acknowledged that his art was anchored around an intimate understanding of classical technique, citing artists as diverse as Piero della Francesca, Tintoretto, Braque and Cézanne as significant influences. At the heart of his compositions is a precise geometry aligned around the Golden Mean, first introduced to him by the pioneer Modernist Dorrit Black, his teacher at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts. Smart furthered his education with an extended journey through the United States and Europe from 1948, studying for six months with the French artist Fernand Léger the following year. On his return, he moved to Sydney in July and in December 1950, at the

recommendation of Bernard Smith, was offered the role as art educator for the ABC Radio children’s programme The Argonauts. In a nod to the creator of the Golden Mean, he chose the name Phidias and spent the next decade as an extremely influential character in the cultural life of Australia, including television appearances after its introduction in 1956. This also meant interstate travel and it is assumed that the original inspiration for St Kilda came from one such journey, probably in 1958. With the twin domes of the St Kilda Baths forming the central focal point, a political rally marches down the elevated roadway of Jacka Boulevard. To the right, next to the wall of the old footbridge, a young woman seems more interested in the artist than she is in the strident clamor of drums and marchers. It is presumably an incident witnessed during the state election held in Victoria in 1958 though the name beginning ‘Dasbor…’ is an apparent fiction for no delegate with a similar name contested the event.1 Smart has also tinkered with the view as this particular angle of sight does not exist, but his manipulation magnifies the intensity of the drama, structured as ever on the underlying Golden Mean. Interpretation also remains open, a deliberate strategy by the artist who rebutted any attempts to ‘explain’ his paintings. As his friend, the novelist David Malouf, explained: ‘The figures in his paintings puzzle us so much, because they don’t have any real relationship with the landscapes. They are like ghosts who’ve wandered in, from another time. He paints them as if there is some story, some anecdote, and yet there is none. People are teased by this, and search for one’. 2 St Kilda is an important precursor for a suite of notable paintings which feature solitary figures in urban settings surmounted by glimpses of the upper levels of distant buildings, such as On the roof, 1961; Trumper Park, 1961; and Coopers Park, 1962. The culmination of the series, Cahill Expressway, 1962, is Smart’s most famous image with its enigmatic one-armed man who likewise stares back at the viewer as an elevated roadway sweeps off to the left. St Kilda was never publicly exhibited, having been sold directly from the studio to Smart’s stockbroker in April 1959, and is now offered for sale for the first time since its last appearance on the market in 1995. 1. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidates_of_the_1958_Victorian_state_election 2. Hawley, J., ‘Jeffrey Smart’, Encounters with Australian Artists, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1993, p. 108

ANDREW GAYNOR

SIDNEY NOLAN 22 (1917 – 1992) THE QUESTIONING, 1954 oil on composition board 60.0 x 80.0 cm signed with initial lower right: N signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: The QUESTIONING / (KELLY SERIES) / NOLAN. / 10/2/54 / N estimate :

$120,000 – 180,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 14 March 1972, lot 78 Alan and Nola Geddes, Sydney Estate of Nola Geddes, Sydney EXHIBITED Autumn Exhibition 1970, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 2 – 23 March 1970, cat. 25 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) LITERATURE Hughes, R., The Art of Australia, Penguin Books, Melbourne, revised edition 1970, p. 166 RELATED WORK The Questioning, 1947, enamel on composition board, 90.7 x 121.1 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, gift of Sunday Reed 1977, illus. in Rosenthal, T.G., Sidney Nolan, Thames and Hudson, London, 2002, p. 77

Sidney Nolan was fascinated by the story of Ned Kelly, the infamous nineteenth-century bushranger, and over the course of his long career it was an enduring theme to which he returned repeatedly. Speaking to Elwyn Lynn about the significance of the subject within his oeuvre, Nolan imagined that it would continue until the end of his life, stating ‘I paint Kelly as part of Australia’s culture and mine … I’d like to think that the day before I died I’d paint a good Ned Kelly painting’.1 The first Kelly series was famously painted on the dining table at Heide, 2 the home of John and Sunday Reed, between March 1946 and July 1947. It emerged after a period of intense research during which Nolan travelled to Glenrowan, the site of the Kelly gang’s last stand, as well as reading everything he could find on the subject, from first-hand accounts to contemporary newspaper coverage and the Royal Commission Report on the pursuit of the outlaws. This was characteristic of Nolan’s approach to any new subject and such was his fascination with Kelly at the time that his friend, the artist Albert Tucker, nicknamed him ‘Ned’. 3 Now on permanent display at the National Gallery of Australia, these paintings were about more than true-crime drama however and, as John Reed so eloquently wrote, captured ‘both the landscape and man in relation to

the landscape … [depicting a] profound harmony between symbol, legend and visual impact.’4 Nolan embarked on a second major series of Kelly paintings in the mid1950s, by which time he had settled in England. The theme had lost none of its power during the preceding decade and Nolan produced an inspired body of work that showed him as a confident and accomplished artist. Painted in February 1954, The Questioning (Kelly Series), 1954 describes the same event as the 1947 version – when mounted troopers calling at a homestead during their search for the Kelly gang are directed to ask a figure bathing in a nearby dam – but Nolan has made various subtle changes which shift the emphasis of this painting and imbue it with a quiet intensity. The horizon line has been raised so that it is the landscape of scrubby growth and distant low hills that dominates the composition. The ominous grey sky reflected in the dam establishes the prevailing mood and the country between is described in a restrained palette of earthy colours deftly applied to the board with lively strokes of the brush. The bright yellow Ripolin which draws attention to the bathing figure and the mounted troopers in the earlier version is nowhere to be seen and rather than the human drama being the key focus, it is the relationship between the figures and their environment that emerges as most significant. While this painting was not included in Nolan’s exhibition at London’s Redfern Gallery in May 1955, the critical response to the second Kelly series was unanimously positive. Institutional recognition soon followed with the purchase of After Glenrowan Siege, 1955 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and two years later, the Tate, London, acquired Glenrowan, 1956 – 57 from Nolan’s first large-scale survey exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. Paintings from the second series are also represented in numerous important public and private collections in Australia including: Kelly Crossing the Bridge, 1955 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), Ned Kelly, 1955 and Kelly, 1956 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney), Kelly with Horse, 1955 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) and After Glenrowan Siege no. 2, 1956 (TarraWarra Museum of Art Collection, Victoria). 1. Lynn, E. and Semler, B., Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1985, p. 11 2. Of the 27 paintings that comprise the first Kelly series, the exception to this is First-class Marksman 1946 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) that was painted at Stonygrad, the Warrandyte home of Danila Vassilieff. See Pearce, op. cit., p. 35. Sunday Reed gifted the paintings made at Heide to the Australian National Gallery, Canberra (now National Gallery of Australia) in 1977. 3. Reeder, W., ‘Nolan at Heide’, Reeder, W. (ed.), The Ned Kelly Paintings: Nolan at Heide 1946–47, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne, 1997, p. 11 4. Reed, J., ‘Statement’, Reeder, op. cit., p. 16

KIRSTY GRANT

IAN FAIRWEATHER 23 (1891 – 1974) BARBECUE, 1963 synthetic polymer paint and gouache on cardboard on composition board (4 sheets) 134.0 x 181.5 cm signed lower left: Ian Fairweather bears inscription verso: BARBECUE estimate :

$800,000 – 1,200,000

PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Victor Macallister, Sydney Thence by descent Ellen Macallister, Sydney Leonard French, Heathcote, Victoria, acquired from the above between 1966 and 1973 The Estate of Leonard French, Heathcote, Victoria EXHIBITED Ian Fairweather, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 31 July – 12 August 1963, cat. 7 Fairweather: a Retrospective Exhibition: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 3 June – 4 July 1965; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 21 July – 22 August 1965; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 9 September – 10 October 1965; National Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 26 October – 21 November 1965; Western Australian Art Gallery, Perth, 9 December 1965 – 16 January 1966; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 10 February – 13 March 1966, cat. 60 (lent by Victor Macallister) (label attached verso) Fairweather, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1 October – 27 November 1994; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne,17 December 1994 – 19 February 1995; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 22 March – 7 May 1995, cat. 47 (lent by Leonard French) (label attached verso)

LITERATURE Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney and London, 1981, pl. 100, pp. 189, 191 (illus.) Bail, M., Fairweather, Art and Australia Books in association with the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1995, pl. 49, p. 121 (illus.) Bail, M., Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Sydney, revised edition 2009, pp. 194,196 MacDonald, R., The Boy from Brunswick: Leonard French, a Biography, Australian Scholarly Press, Melbourne, 2018, p. 245

IAN FAIRWEATHER 23 (1891 – 1974) BARBECUE, 1963

Ian Fairweather has been described as ‘the least parochial of Australian painters, an artist of exceptional force and originality’ 1 and he is undeniably one of the most singular artists to have worked in Australia during the twentieth century. Although he is claimed as an Australian and spent many years living here, he had a restless spirit and the story of his life reads like something borrowed from the pages of an adventure book. Born in Scotland, Fairweather undertook his formal art education at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, studying under the formidable Henry Tonks and in 1922, being awarded second prize for figure drawing. As a prisoner of war in Germany during the First World War he had access to books about Japanese and Chinese art, and later, studied these languages at night. In 1929 he sailed to Shanghai where he lived for several years, the country’s unique art, culture and philosophy having a lasting influence. Peripatetic by nature, or perhaps reluctant to establish roots and commit to ongoing relationships, Fairweather travelled extensively – from London, to Canada, China, Bali, Australia, the Philippines, India and beyond – ‘always the outsider, the nostalgic nomad with a dreamlike memory of distant places and experience’. 2 The most dramatic chapter of Fairweather’s life was the extraordinary attempt he made in early 1952 to sail from Darwin to Timor on a raft which, according to the Times correspondent, ‘he built … with three old aircraft fuel tanks which he found in a dump, and the minute sail was fashioned from three panels of old parachute canopy. The raft was stocked with some tinned food, eight gallons of water, a blanket, and a change of clothing, and he set out on a trade wind’. 3 Fairweather had researched the journey and studied the tides and, inspired in part by Thor Heyerdahl’s legendary Kon-Tiki expedition, calculated that he would reach his destination within ten days.4 Sixteen days later however, ‘after hallucinating, and being given up for dead, wearing only one shoe, he collapsed on the sand in the moonlight … at Roti, the last dot on the map west of Indonesian Timor’5 before the vast Indian Ocean and certain drowning. Interrogated in Indonesia, he made it to Timor briefly before being sent to Bali, deported to Singapore and then (as a British citizen) shipped back to London where his passport was confiscated until he repaid the cost of his fare. Fairweather said that Timor ‘(was) the next best thing to Bali where I had done the best painting of my life’ 6 but his motivation to leave Australia was also driven by a protracted period of unhappiness largely fuelled by his own anxiety and paranoia.

IAN FAIRWEATHER ON BRIBIE ISLAND, c.1966 photograph by Robert Walker courtesy of Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney © Robert Walker / Copyright Agency, 2019

In mid-1953 Fairweather returned to Australia and later that year settled on Bribie Island, off the coast of Queensland, where, for the rest of his life, he famously lived in a pair of huts built with materials salvaged from the surrounding bush. The conditions were primitive – no running water, sewerage or electricity – and Fairweather’s handmade bed and chairs were reportedly upholstered with fern fronds.7 Despite the rudimentary nature of his surrounds however – or perhaps because of it – the next two decades witnessed the production of many of Fairweather’s finest paintings and the 1960s saw his art acknowledged in significant ways, with works being included in the landmark exhibition Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (1961), the European tour

IAN FAIRWEATHER (FROM ‘TRACK’ SERIES), 1966 gelatin silver photograph 40.4 x 30.0 cm courtesy of Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane photograph by Robert Walker © Robert Walker / Copyright Agency, 2019

Pierre Ryckmans has explained Fairweather’s apparent disdain for material comforts and regular human interaction as the consequence of a need that was both innate and profound: ‘he needed to paint like one needs to breathe; had he dropped his brush, he would have suffocated’. 8 Arguing that his passion was based in the activity of painting rather than in the finished works themselves, he also provides a compelling explanation for why Fairweather was so notoriously haphazard about the materials and techniques he used, and the careless indifference with which he stored and transported them – put simply, the process was more important than the result. Black and white photographs of the studio hut show tables covered cheek by jowl with tins of paint, many open with brushes in them, ready and waiting to be used. Surfaces are covered with random spatters and dribbles of paint, colours layered one on top of the other creating a visual trace of the pictures produced there. Beyond his basic requirements Fairweather was also largely disinterested in the commercial rewards of making art and when, in the late 1950s, Macquarie Galleries suggested an increase to the cheques they regularly sent, he replied, ‘No I am not anxious to draw money in larger amounts – paintings materialise so uncertainly and slowly that the chief consideration is to endure – long enough to finish something’.9

IAN FAIRWEATHER IN HIS STUDIO, BRIBIE ISLAND, c.1965 photographer unknown

of Australian Painting Today (1964 – 65) and in 1965, a major travelling retrospective of his work – which included the painting on offer here – was mounted by the Queensland Art Gallery.

The end of 1956 saw the construction of a second, larger hut which heralded the production of paintings on a bigger scale such as Roi Soleil, 1956 – 57, and its purchase by the Art Gallery of New South Wales the following year was encouraging. Soon after, Fairweather began to use the new synthetic polymer paint (often in combination with gouache) which dried quickly and, unlike oil paint and other less stable media, suited his way of working. Returning to pictures again and again over an extended period of time, he developed complex, layered images which vibrate and shimmer with movement.10 Fairweather himself recognised a distinctive shift in the work produced following the move to Bribie, dismissing what had come earlier as ‘nothing new’ and, although his self-assessment was unduly harsh, the major works of the late 1950s and 60s are powerful expressions of an artist in full flight.

IAN FAIRWEATHERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S HUT ON BRIBIE ISLAND photographer unknown

IAN FAIRWEATHER (FROM ‘HUT’ SERIES), 1966 gelatin silver photograph 40.0 x 30.0 cm courtesy of Lismore Regional Gallery photograph by Robert Walker © Robert Walker / Copyright Agency, 2019

This group includes Hallelujah, 1958, Monastery, 1961, Monsoon, 1961 – 62 and Shalimar, c.1962, all of which hang on the walls of Australia’s state and national galleries,11 and, in Murray Bail’s words ‘stand apart in a solitary sort of grandeur from other modern Australian paintings … there is nothing quite like them anywhere. They are so distinctive, of such depth, they don’t fit national boundaries or ‘schools’’.12 Despite Fairweather’s isolation from the art world, he often sent work to Sydney where it was shown at Macquarie Galleries. In 1963, the year he represented Australia in the São Paulo Biennial, his solo exhibition included fifteen paintings, the two major statements – each priced at 750 guineas – being Marriage at Cana, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, and Barbecue. Writing in The Bulletin, art critic John Henshaw described the exhibition as ‘capable of quickening the pulse’ and noted that ‘the bigger (paintings have) … greater mastery, as if the wider challenge elicited the deepest response. The mystique here is committed to basic humanism, the technique to an involved fusion of Eastern and Western attitude’.13 Both works are painted on four sheets of cardboard laid down onto a hardboard support just under two metres wide – they are grand in scale and monumental in vision. Where Marriage at Cana uses a refined series of abstract lines against a clean background to symbolise its miraculous biblical theme, the very secular, everyday subject of Barbecue is depicted with a more figurative approach. In its bold outlining of forms – heads, torsos and legs lined up across the surface – and free application of paint, Barbecue recalls the French artist Jean Dubuffet, whose work was known and admired by Fairweather. The overall tonal brilliance of the picture conjures up the light that is so distinctive and characteristic of an Australian summer and Fairweather’s palette reflects the environment he knew so well, from the sun-drenched yellow of the sand, glimpses of the ocean’s various shades of blue and pale skin becoming tanned. Colour, line and form reverberate against each other in this image, pulsating with a palpable energy that speaks directly and yet eloquently of Fairweather’s process and his creative passion. It should come as no surprise that this work was owned for many years by Leonard French, a significant Australian artist whose individuality and commitment to his art mirrored that of Fairweather. In the decade since he had settled on Bribie Island, its pristine beaches and untouched landscape had become increasingly popular as a destination for holiday-makers and their presence continued to encroach on Fairweather’s solitude. They also provided him with unexpected inspiration and this scene was probably witnessed at a public barbecue on a beach looking out across the ocean, or Pumicestone Passage on the mainland side, an often-frequented picnic area not far from his hut.

IAN FAIRWEATHER Marriage at Cana, 1963 synthetic polymer paint and tempera on cardboard mounted on composition board 137.7 x 195.5 cm courtesy of National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © The Estate of Ian Fairweather/Copyright Agency, 2019

1. Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, p. 220 2. Bail, M., ‘The Nostalgic Nomad’, Hemisphere, Canberra, vol. 27, no. 1, 1982, p. 54 3. ‘Timor Sea Crossed on Raft – Scottish Artist’s Feat’, The Times, 9 August 1952, reproduced in Bail, M., Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Millers Point, 2000 4. Abbott-Smith, N., Ian Fairweather: Profile of an Artist, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1978p. 104 5. Bail, M., 2000, op. cit., p. 103 6. Bail, M., 1981, op. cit., p. 115 7. Bail, M., 2000, op. cit., p. 103 8. Ryckmans, P., ‘An Amateur Artist’ in Bail, M., Fairweather, Art and Australia Books in association with the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1995, p. 18 9. The artist to Terry Smith, around April 1957, quoted in Bail, 1981, p. 128 10. Eagle, M., ‘The Painter and the Raft’ in Bail, M., 1995, op. cit., p. 22 11. These paintings are in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia and Queensland Art Gallery respectively. 12. Bail, M., 1995, op. cit., p. 11 13. Henshaw, J., ‘Fairweather’, The Bulletin, vol. 85, no. 4358, 31 August 1963, p. 38

KIRSTY GRANT

FRED WILLIAMS 24 (1927 – 1982) LYSTERFIELD, c.1968 gouache on paper 57.0 x 75.5 cm signed lower right: Fred Williams estimate :

$45,000 – 65,000

PROVENANCE Clifford Last, Melbourne, acquired directly from the artist Gallery 460 and Sculpture Park, New South Wales Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Great Australian Artists of the Twentieth Century, Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, New South Wales, July 1992 We are grateful to Lyn Williams for her assistance with this catalogue entry.

From 1967 onwards, Fred Williams returned to the source of his minimal landscape paintings, increasing the frequency of his outdoor sketching trips, particularly to Ferntree Gully and Lysterfield, at the foot of the Dandenong Ranges. The gouache sketches completed during these trips provided source material, and a passage between a literal impression of the landscape dotted with eucalypts and its further translation into the iconic Williams reductive script, usually in oil paint on canvas. From this crucible of formal innovation comes Lysterfield, c.1968. Like many other gouaches and oils from this period, it has a tripartite division, concentrating much of his gestural information in a central band across the paper – the rolling crest of a hill with a crown of trees protruding from the horizon. The puncture marks in each corner, where the artist tacked his paper onto boards taken in to the bush attest to the immediacy of Williams’ view. Softly billowing clouds suspended in the pale blue sky further inscribe this sketch in time and space, this Lysterfield was an investigation into space and colour executed in real-time, in situ and en plein air. Although the landscape is sparse, Williams creates a view with delicate tension. While the horizon line plunges steeply towards the left, another knoll protrudes in the centre, its opposing angle lending texture to the topography. Like an elite athlete trimming excess resistance to increase efficiency, Williams’ mark-making process was centred around an

economy of means. He is famous for reducing the vegetation of the Australian bush to minute gestures, daubs and swift brushstrokes. These marks are smattered across a thin wash, here in a velvety mauve colour (not dissimilar to the ground of Australian Landscape, 1969, lot 25), their intensity and colours allowing the forms to advance and recede across the shallow picture plane, to quote James Gleeson, a ‘flickering constellation of little shadows and glittering highlights’.1 The purposeful irregularity of Williams’ brushstrokes is at the heart of his formal invention, allowing the artists to express a range of forms, both tangible and ephemeral – from a thicket of vegetation, to a passing shadow or plunging crevasse. This masterly touch and careful placement nevertheless respects the viewers’ visual understanding and autonomy. Visual literacy here is earned, not spoon-fed. To support his limited visual vocabulary, often devoid of overt focal points and narrative structure, light emanates from within his medium. Delicate movement is described through startling nuances of electric colour, the ambiguity of their tonal contrasts making the features of this landscape vacillate in and out of focus. Working in gouache, these radical colour choices preceded Williams’ brief adoption of synthetic polymer paints (encouraged by Albert Tucker), demonstrating the artist’s long-standing pre-occupations with colour and its relative intensity over time, from fresh application in the field to dried and affected by bright sunlight. Lysterfield, c.1968, was first given by the artist as a gift to the English born sculptor Clifford Last. In 1972, both Last and Williams sat together on the Acquisitions Committee of the Australian National Gallery, and some time around then, a good, old-fashioned ‘artist swap’ was arranged between the two. Last acquired this gouache, while Williams chose a sculpture – one that still remains in the collection of Lyn Williams, the artist’s widow. 2 1. Gleeson, J., 1963 cited in AGNSW, [https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/ OA6.1965/] 2. Conversation between Chris Deutscher and Lyn Williams, 5th March 2019

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

FRED WILLIAMS 25 (1927 – 1982) AUSTRALIAN LANDSCAPE, 1969 oil on canvas 122.0 x 152.5 cm signed lower left: Fred Williams. signed on stretcher verso: Fred Williams. estimate :

$500,000 – 650,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne, acquired directly from the artist, June 1980 Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 22 April 1996, lot 59 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Blue Chip XIII: The Collectors’ Exhibition, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 8 March – 2 April 2011, cat. 5 (stock no. 13910V, label attached verso) My Favourite Things, Liverpool St Gallery, Sydney, June 2018 We are grateful to Lyn Williams for her assistance with this catalogue entry.

What a magnificent painter Fred Williams is! There is every chance he will go down in history as Australia’s greatest landscape artist … Williams clarifies our vision, develops our understanding, defines our land.1 Written less than a decade after Fred Williams decided to focus on the landscape as the primary subject of his art, these prophetic words accurately anticipated the contribution he would make to the tradition of landscape painting in Australia. Williams’ unique vision of the natural environment – from scrubby bush on the edges of suburbia, to pristine coastal views and the vast dry inland country – captured its essence, creating archetypal images that have since become part of our collective visual memory and in turn, shape the way we view our country. During the late 1960s Williams produced a strikingly minimal series of paintings which he titled simply the Australian Landscapes. His deep engagement with the landscape and close observation of its diversity – from the saplings of Sherbrooke Forest, to the country around Lysterfield and the nearby Upwey regenerating after bushfires, and the rocky granite hills of the You Yangs – had prompted Williams to consider the continuity that existed beneath the ‘skin’ of the land, despite the obvious visible variations. Following a visit to the outback in 1967 he wrote in his diary, ‘The trip has been fascinating – it rather convinces me that there is something very similar running through the Aust[ralian] Landscape (any landscape) so much so that I may drop the regional titles from all paintings’. 2

Masterful works followed, including Landscape ’69 triptych, 1969 – 70 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), where a few deftly painted trees and fallen branches dance lightly across a grey ground, as Williams pared back pictorial and painterly detail. Patrick McCaughey has noted that until 1968 Williams was intent on developing his own visual language, but with strong foundations of formal invention and solid craftsmanship, as well as professional acknowledgement and some commercial success, by this time he had the confidence to experiment and absorb elements of contemporary painting into his own practice. 3 The influence of Minimalism and late 1960s abstraction, styles of art that focussed on the conceptual and aesthetic rather than recognisable subject matter, is clearly evident in the paintings of these years. As the current Australian Landscape, 1969 shows, the works that came next were even more refined – open fields of virtually unmodulated colour (typically cool greys or various shades of ochre), sometimes divided, as we see here, by one or two fine vertical lines of exposed canvas, with a series of delicately painted marks like personal hieroglyphics, which suggest various landscape forms. Serenely minimal from a distance, this work defies such easy categorisation upon close inspection as colour shimmers across the surface, finely variegated brushstrokes defining the gentle outline of a hill and creating a sense of three-dimensional space. While Williams removed many of the traditional elements of the genre from his Australian Landscape images, they nevertheless retain a strong feeling of their subject, so much so that the experience of being in the landscape often mirrors that of viewing his paintings: ‘in the bush, where the peering eyes move from the veins of a leaf to the colour of a pebble, to the curl of a fern, to the discreet glint of a modest flower – so in Williams’ paintings does the eye probe among the touches and discover its lode of visual treasures’.4 1. Thornton, W., quoted in Grant, K., & Phipps, J., Fred Williams: The Pilbara Series, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2002, p. 17 2. Williams, F., diary entry, 9 November 1967, quoted in Hart, D., Fred Williams: Infinite Horizons, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2011, p. 101 3. McCaughey, P., Fred Williams 1927 – 1982, Murdoch Books, Sydney, 1996, pp. 210 & 217 4. Gleeson, J., quoted in Mollison, J., A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams, Australian National Gallery & Oxford University Press, Canberra, 1989, p. 141

KIRSTY GRANT

JOHN BRACK 26 (1920 – 1999) FOUR PAIRS AND A SINGLE, 1971 oil on canvas 96.5 x 130.5 cm signed and dated lower right: John Brack 71 signed and inscribed with title on stretcher bar verso: “FOUR PAIRS AND A SINGLE” / JOHN BRACK estimate :

$550,000 – 750,000

PROVENANCE Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 1971 Private collection, Melbourne

as well as notions of vulnerability and precariousness. As Brack said, in these paintings ‘the idea … is related to balancing and falling, but not absolutely collapsing … it is stumbling, but not the abyss’. 2

EXHIBITED Travelodge Art Prize, Travelodge, Melbourne, 29 October 1971 Travelodge Painting Prize: Travelodge Art Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 4 – 28 November 1971 (partial label attached verso)

The composition of paintings in the series varies in complexity, from the single pairs in Two Figures, The Low Bench and Back to Back (all private collections), to Three pairs, 1971 (Benalla Art Gallery), which depicts six young boys dressed in the exercise garb of the day, each working with a partner to stretch and limber up. One of the liveliest compositions within the series, Four Pairs and a Single, 1971 was entered with Three Pairs into the Travelodge Art Prize that year at the National Gallery of Victoria, the latter being awarded the $7,500 acquisitive prize. Writing in the Age, art critic Patrick McCaughey noted that ‘[Brack] transfixes his youthful gymnasts to the picture plane so that they neither float nor wilt but remain scrawnily human and gawkily agile’. 3 The figures in Four Pairs and a Single read like angular calligraphic forms, the pale cream of their clothes and golden glow of their limbs set in contrast to the vast field of dark floorboards. While their lithe physicality is prominent, the prevailing element is the connection between the ‘four pairs’ of exercising youths and the almost overwhelming sense that, should their trusting collaboration falter, they will all fall down. This portentous tone is emphasised by the vertiginous tilt of the floorboards which threatens to tip the gymnasts off at any moment, as well as creating a decidedly ambiguous pictorial space. This perspectival distortion became a characteristic feature of Brack’s later work and, as he explained, was ‘part of the metaphorical system … [where] things are intended to operate on numerous levels of meaning … both balanced and unbalanced … moving and … still … In other words, these are premeditated ambiguities which are, as it were, the visual metaphor’.4 Within the visual metaphor of this picture it is ironic but surely symbolic that the ‘single’ figure working alone in the background is the one who appears most balanced and stable.

LITERATURE Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. II, cat. o196, pp. 26, 146 (illus.)

At the end of 1968 John Brack resigned from his position as head of the Melbourne National Gallery School where, for six years, he had maintained a painting studio behind his office. While he undertook a handful of commissions during these years and was represented in exhibitions including Australian Painting at London’s Tate Gallery (1963) and Australian Painters 1964-66: The Harold Mertz Collection at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC (1967), the responsibilities of his role prevented Brack from producing any major new series. The impetus to leave his job was a deal struck with Rudy Komon, the bon vivant of Sydney art dealers, which saw him receive a monthly stipend offset against annual sales. For the first time in his life Brack was free to paint full-time and after constructing a purpose-built studio at home, he embarked on his most ambitious series to date on the theme of ballroom dancing – all gloss and artifice in vivid pinks and red. While the colour, movement and fantasy of competitive ballroom dancing offered rich visual inspiration for Brack’s picture-making, it was the way in which this activity reflected aspects of human behaviour and relationships that he found especially compelling. As an artist who was primarily interested in understanding and illuminating the human condition,1 Brack found his subject matter in the people and places around him, depicting what he saw in a way that communicated both the physical reality as well as the underlying psychological motivations. While the Gymnast series of 1971 – 72 that followed was partly based on observations of his own children, it continued the themes of performance and partnership that he had explored in the ballroom dancing pictures,

1. See Grant, K., ‘Human Nature: The Art of John Brack’ in Grant, K., et. al., John Brack, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009, p. 87 2. Brack, J., quoted in ‘John Brack on John Brack’, Fine Art Programme (lecture), Australian National University, Canberra, 19 September 1977, transcript, p. 7 3. McCaughey, P., ‘Richest award to John Brack’, The Age, Melbourne, 30 October 1971, p. 2 4. Brack, J. interviewed in Australian Contemporary Art Archive, no. 1, Deakin University Media Production, 1980, transcript, p. 5

KIRSTY GRANT

John Brack at the opening of the Travelodge Painting Prize: Travelodge Art Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 4 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 28 November 1971 courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

JUSTIN O’BRIEN 27 (1917 – 1996) THE VISITATION, c.1990 – 93 oil on canvas 48.0 x 39.0 cm signed upper right: O’BRIEN estimate :

$45,000 – 65,000

PROVENANCE Australian Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1993 EXHIBITED Paintings by Justin O’Brien, Australian Galleries, Sydney, 26 – 31 July 1993; Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 9 August – 4 September 1993, cat. 7 LITERATURE Pearce, B., and Wilson, N., Justin O’Brien: The Sacred Music of Colour, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2010, pp. 144 (illus.), 145 (illus. detail with the artist)

Displaying the intimate connection Justin O’Brien saw between the spiritual and the secular, The Visitation, c.1990 – 93 is a depiction of the most earthly of episodes within the devotional cycle of the Virgin Mary. In a narrative episode only recounted in the Gospel of Luke, Mary travels to Judea to visit her pregnant cousin Elizabeth, to bring her news of her own divine pregnancy. While artistic depictions of this meeting reached their peak in the mid-renaissance, at the height of Marian devotion, they remained less common than images of the Adoration or the Annunciation. O’Brien himself painted this scene several times, particularly in the 1950s and 60s, although often choosing to focus on the landscape, usually Greek or Italian, rather than the intimate exchange between the two female figures held amongst the foreshadowing mountains. Despite suffering through a profound crisis of faith, O’Brien continued to paint religious subjects, seeing within their narrative structures ‘more scope to open up the composition’.1 The Visitation, is a moment of quiet grace and shared personal joy. Painted in an urban setting, the meeting occurring at the doorstep of Elizabeth and Zacharias’ house, assuming O’Brien was literal in his reading of scripture. Mary, dressed in symbolic blue and red garments,

appears concerned and afraid, bowing in deference to her older cousin, who gestures to welcome her into her home. O’Brien had an astounding depth of knowledge in art history, particularly in the Flemish and Italian Renaissance, and used his understanding to aliment his compositions. This Visitation bears strong stylistic similarities to Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut of the same scene, from which O’Brien appropriated Zacharias’ figure in the doorway (here at the windowsill) and what is believed to be Dürer’s own dog in the foreground. O’Brien was able to temper his appetite for hagiography and biblical narrative scenes by integrating his tableaux within larger landscapes and meticulously rendered interiors and still lives. This painting was inspired by a trip to the medieval city of Ronciglione in the Cimini Mountains in Italy, not far from Rome, where O’Brien had lived since 1972. 2 Informed by the notebook of sketches he had brought with him on his travels, the Visitation is played out in this atemporal setting, the details of architectural texture faithfully and fastidiously recorded by the artist. O’Brien once spoke of the love he felt within Italian medieval architecture, 3 and here a sense of peace and stillness is enforced by his considered recording of these surfaces. The artist sought to achieve a calm permanence in his paintings, presenting them as an antidote to the abrasive freneticism of contemporary life. What sets O’Brien apart in his academicism, however, was his strength as a colourist. Jewel tones pervade the canvas, shining through the brickwork, the wooden panels of the doorframe, Elizabeth’s shadow – imbuing this quiet scene with divine richness. 1. France, C., ‘Tribute. Justin O’Brien’, Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 33, no. 4, 1996, p. 483 2. Pearce, B., and Wilson, N., Justin O’Brien The Sacred Music of Colour, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2010, p. 144 3. Justin O’Brien in conversation with James Gleeson, 21 September 1978, Canberra, James Gleeson Oral History Collection, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

DAVID BOYD 28 (1924 – 2011) TRUGANINI – THE DROWNING OF HER BETROTHED, 1959 oil on composition board 120.0 x 173.0 cm signed lower left: David Boyd PROVENANCE Victorian Artists’ Society, Melbourne Paul Morawetz, Victoria Frederick William Olver, Melbourne Thence by descent Keith Frederick Olver, Melbourne Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne

EXHIBITED Antipodeans, Victorian Artists’ Society, Melbourne, 4 – 15 August 1959, cat. 21 David Boyd: A Retrospective, The Commonwealth Institute Art Gallery, London, 18 April – 11 May 1969; touring to Commonwealth Institute Art Gallery, Scotland, 22 May – 7 June 1969; and City Art Gallery, Sheffield, 19 July – 17 August 1969, cat. 13 (as ‘Her betrothed drowned’) (label attached verso) The Antipodeans: Another Chapter, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 17 October – 4 November 1988; Nolan Gallery, Lanyon, Australian Capital Territory, 12 November 1988 – 8 January 1989; S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 21 January – 26 February 1989 (as ‘Her Betrothed Drowning’) (label attached verso) LITERATURE Blackman, B., ‘The Antipodean Affair’, Art and Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 5, no. 4, March 1968, p. 613 (illus. as ‘The drowning of her betrothed’) Daily Telegraph, London, 31 May 1968, unpaginated (illus.) David Boyd: A Retrospective, The Commonwealth Institute Art Gallery, London, 1969, cat. 13 (illus. as ‘Her betrothed drowned’) Benko, N., The Art of David Boyd, Lidums, Adelaide, 1973, pp. 32, 35 (illus. as ‘Her betrothed drowned’) RELATED WORK Truganini – Dream of Childhood, 1958 – 59, oil on composition board, 181.5 x 119.5 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

In 1959, a group of seven Australian artists and one historian joined under the collective name of ‘Antipodeans’. Although they only held one exhibition together, it was an outstanding financial success, but it also attracted its fair share of hostility, not least for the inclusion of David Boyd’s raw, uncompromising paintings which confronted the atrocities committed by settlers against the indigenous Tasmanians. One of these was Truganini – The Drowning of her Betrothed, 1959, an integral example from the five-painting cycle based around the brutal humiliations suffered by the young Truganini (Lalla Rookh). With hindsight, these are now recognised as historically important images, marking the first time an Australian artist dared to depict this dark chapter of Australian history and show it specifically to non-Indigenous eyes.1 David Boyd was born into an illustrious artistic family whose members were raised to be ethical and committed humanists. After the Second World War, Boyd studied at the National Gallery School, and held exhibitions of his paintings with fellow student John Yule in 1945 and 1946. With his wife Hermia, he moved to London in 1951 where the couple’s ceramic work soon attracted positive attention, which continued after their return to Melbourne in 1954. Boyd reengaged with painting in the late 1950s producing a blunt suite of paintings based on Australian explorers, men usually depicted by artists as tragic heroes. In Boyd’s hands, they were otherwise exposed for their guile, ignorance and blatant racism. Through discussions with his colleague Clifton Pugh and later, the art historian Bernard Smith, Boyd started gathering a group together who were all interested in pursuing figurative art over abstraction. 2 Called the ‘Antipodeans’, their ideals covered a wide spectrum of topics including ‘political issues such as Aboriginal rights and the abolition of the White Australia policy … (believing) the artist’s role was to ask questions about the society in which he lived’. 3 Held at the Victorian Artists’ Society in Melbourne, the exhibition witnessed ‘a mighty impressive opening. The gallery had never seen such crowds’.4 Unfortunately, the younger Boyd received negative commentary from ill-informed critics convinced he was simply grabbing onto the shirttails of his more prominent brother Arthur. In fact, David had been singularly appalled by all he’d read on the plight of Tasmania’s Aboriginal people; in Truganini – The Drowning of her Betrothed, for example, the young girl witnesses the mutilation and drowning of her fiancé by timbergetters as she is dragged off into sexual slavery. Above the sculptural cast of the faces, a small butterfly hovers, a spirit form of her ancestors. It is one small ray of hope amongst the madness. Returning to London on a Travelling Scholarship in 1960, Boyd subsequently enjoyed a successful decade as a painter culminating in a prestigious retrospective held at the Commonwealth Institute of Art. Here, the tables were turned with critics falling over each other to praise uncompromising works such as Truganini – The Drowning of her Betrothed, with the Sunday Telegraph proclaiming that the artist was ‘among the very best painters at work in this country, and certainly the most powerful image maker’. 5 For David Boyd, this must have been sweet vindication. 1. There is one precedent, a solitary painting by Sidney Nolan (Aboriginal hunt, 1947) which is conversely dreamlike in its depiction of a person being forced off a cliff. 2. Also included were John Brack, Robert Dickerson, Charles Blackman, John Perceval and Arthur Boyd. 3. Haycroft, D., ‘The Making of a Manifesto’, Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 26, no. 2, Summer 1988, p. 285 4. David Boyd, quoted in Blackman, B., ‘The Antipodean Affair’, Art and Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 5, no. 4, March 1968, p. 611 5. Mullins, E., ‘Vuillard under the lamp’, Sunday Telegraph, London, 4 May 1969

estimate :

$70,000 – 90,000

ANDREW GAYNOR

JOHN PERCEVAL 29 (1923 – 2000) THE OLD BOAT AT PORT MELBOURNE oil on canvas 91.5 x 122.0 cm signed lower left: Perceval signed and inscribed with title verso: The Old Boat / at / Port Melbourne / Perceval estimate :

$45,000 – 65,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 23 August 1995, lot 154 Private collection, Sydney RELATED WORK The Beautiful Seagulls at Port Melbourne, c.1985, oil on canvas, 59.5 x 75.0 cm, private collection

John Perceval was the youngest member of the celebrated ‘Angry Penguins’, a group of artists centred around patrons John and Sunday Reed in the 1940s. Through their combined efforts, Australian art underwent a revolution and the various members are rightly recognised as some of this country’s most significant creators. Perceval’s influence was also critical, with his ground-breaking ceramics known collectively as ‘The Angels’ – ‘one of the most important one-man shows held in Australia since the war’1 – and his extended series of paintings based around Melbourne’s working port at Williamstown. The Old Boat at Port Melbourne is from late in the artist’s career when Perceval emerged from years of troubled isolation with a renewed sense of purpose, creating paintings full of exuberant energy and joyous, juicy paint. Perceval was a child prodigy who developed his nascent skills whilst stricken with polio as a schoolboy. His meeting with Arthur Boyd in 1940 is recognised as one of the pivotal moments in the history of Australian art and the two companions were inseparable over the next decades as they encouraged each other’s skills and training, eventually opening a pottery business together in 1944. Whereas Boyd used his art as a vehicle to interrogate his personal demons, Perceval developed his own distinctive style of impasto paint marks, often applied alla prima (weton-wet), peopled with bustling characters inspired by the paintings of Flemish artists such as the Brueghel family. In the early 1950s, he and Charles Blackman started exploring Williamstown, a still-functioning but run-down port, home to worn out tugs, rust buckets, leaking fuel and birdlife. It was these battered relics that captured Perceval’s eye and in 1956, his paintings of the location became the inaugural exhibition for the newly opened Australian Galleries. He revisited the location for subsequent series in 1959, and again in 1967 – 68, but by the early 1970s, the artist’s heavy reliance of alcohol and good living took its toll, leading to his self-admission into the Larundel psychiatric hostel in 1977.

Following a revelatory exhibition of new drawings in 1981 and a well-received Retrospective at Heide in 1983, Perceval’s confidence slowly returned and, with the help of assistants, started to re-engage with painting, and with his beloved waterfront. The Old Boat at Port Melbourne features one of his favorite motifs from the late 1980s and early 1990s, a disheveled ancient tug-boat moored close to the shore. It is a painting about weather as much as it is about the vessel, with scattered clouds buffeting through a windy sky, kicking up waves in their wake; and the salty tang is palpable. Audiences were dazzled by the result of Perceval’s revitalized spirit with old colleague Albert Tucker commenting that the paintings were ‘a marvellous assertion of his identity, a principle of affirmation against the destructive forces in life’. 2 More accolades followed including his award of an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1990 and shortly before his death, the sale of one of his second-series Williamstown paintings from the famed Mertz Collection set the record for a living Australian artist. 3 1. Smith, B., ‘The Antipodean Artists’, The Critic as Advocate: selected essays 1948 – 1988, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p. 146 2. Tucker, A., 1988, cited in John Perceval, exhibition catalogue, BMG Fine Art, Sydney, 1989 3. Scudding Swans, 1959, Christie’s, Melbourne, 28 June 2000

ANDREW GAYNOR

ROBERT DICKERSON 30 (1924 – 2015) TWO MEN IN SUBWAY, 1963 oil on composition board 152.5 x 137.0 cm signed twice and dated lower right: DICKERSON / 6/8/63 / DICKERSON dated and inscribed with title verso: ‘TWO MEN IN SUBWAY’ / … / DATE 8/6/63 estimate :

$40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Rushton Fine Arts, Sydney, 17 November 1987, lot 182 Private collection Sotheby’s, Sydney, 29 November 1993, lot 194 Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne

Robert Dickerson proudly hailed from the school of hard knocks. Raised in conditions of extreme poverty, his natural empathies lay with life’s battlers whose passage through an uncaring urban world he captured in distinctively blunt and angular paintings. His keen eye captured the slightest gesture or attitude between people, moments which served as the basis for images that spoke of wider concerns. Through the simple glance portrayed in Two Men in Subway, 1963, a whole language is established, one which speaks volumes about society’s attitudes and beliefs towards the down-and-out. The son of a tinsmith, Dickerson left school at 14 having already suffered through three bouts of pneumonia. He took up boxing for his health – a paradox if ever there was one – turning professional at 16, and toured country towns until he was able to sign up at the age of 18. He joined the RAAF and was sent to New Guinea and Indonesia. Once de-mobbed, he found himself stranded for a time on the island of Morotai, and at the urging of friends, started drawing the local children ‘in anything available – charcoal, plywood, whitewash, boot polish’.1 On his return to Australia, Dickerson undertook gruelling factory jobs but such was his commitment to his art that ‘(s)ome of my best early paintings were done in a caravan or shed, and finished in the small hours of the morning, before I left for work’. 2 In 1952, Barrett Reid, an associate of the Melbourne Heide circle, met Dickerson in Sydney and enthused by his work, encouraged the artist to visit him in Melbourne, which he did the following year. John and Sunday Reed were also excited by his paintings and invited him to mount a solo exhibition at their newly formed Gallery of Contemporary Art in Melbourne in 1956. By the end of the decade, his paintings were in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Not bad for a self-trained artist. Two Men in Subway was painted soon after his short-lived association with ‘The Antipodean’ group of artists and whilst his paintings from the earlier 1950s were somewhat muted (soft greys, caramels and yellows), the works from 1959 onwards are marked by a richer intensity of colour and feature large expanses of agitated brushwork. Here, the orange and green subterranean wall sweeps in from the left to enclose the two figures, with the upper line aligning to the hostile stare the businessman is casting back at the humbled old man, newspaper clutched behind his back, shoulders slumped in submission. Such encounters are sadly common but only Dickerson was moved enough to capture and paint this casual encounter on such a large scale, a form of protest at people’s self-centered disdain, emphasised further by the caustic application of his signature at the lower right, like an angry graffiti scrawl. Two Men in Subway is a vivid testimony to the often harsh realities of contemporary urban life painted by an artist who never forgot that his own heritage was embedded in similar impoverished conditions. 1. Ivanyi, A., Robert Dickerson: survey 1947 – 1992, exhibition catalogue, Caulfield Arts Complex, Victoria, 1993, unpaginated 2. ibid.

ANDREW GAYNOR

WORKS FROM THE KERRY HILL AO COLLECTION, SINGAPORE KERRY HILL (1943 – 2018) LOTS 31 – 35

practice also lent on ‘a willingness to allow his work to be enriched by understanding and embracing the architectural traditions of the East’, with a personal friendship with Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa shaping his early work. In his 2006 AS Hook address, delivered in Sydney after being awarded the Gold Medal, Hill said that in preparing for the speech he had revisited those given by the 20 Gold Medallists that preceded him. ‘I am reminded of an old Chinese proverb, he said. “The future is only the past again – entered through another gate”’. In addition to the Gold Medal, Hill’s other accolades included the prestigious international Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2001, the inaugural Kenneth F. Brown Asia Pacific Culture and Architecture Design Award in 1995 and the President’s Design Award in Singapore in 2010. Among his Australian works, the Ogilvie House at Sunshine Beach was a joint winner of the 2003 Robin Boyd Award for Residential Buildings, and the Ooi House at Margaret River in Western Australia won a RAIA National Commendation for Residential Buildings in 1998.

Kerry Hill was a multi-award-winning Singapore-based architect who received the Australian Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal (2006), the Singapore President’s Design Award (2010) and, in 2012, was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO). After graduating from the University of Western Australia in 1968, Kerry Hill’s first position in architecture was at Howlett and Bailey in Perth. He then held a role at Palmer and Turner in Hong Kong that marked the beginning of a decades-long career in architecture across Asia and Australia that included work in India, Bhutan, Japan, China, Croatia, Jordan and Spain and countries across the Middle East and South East Asia.

One of Kerry Hill’s more recent works, the Amanemu resort in Shima, Japan, was awarded the 2017 Jørn Utzon Award for International Architecture by the Australian Institute of Architects, and 2017 Building of the Year by the Singapore Institute of Architects. In 2012, Hill was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for ‘distinguished service to architecture, particularly as an ambassador for Australian design in South East Asia, and as an educator and mentor’. PATRICK HUNN This article has been republished with permission from ArchitectureAU.com.

Hill founded his practice, Kerry Hill Architects, in 1979, which is headquartered in Singapore with an office in Perth. The practice has completed projects across a number of types, but has been recognized particularly for its work in resort and hotel design. Hill’s work was roundly fêted during his lifetime. In 2006, the ABC’s Asia Pacific Focus described him as ‘the Australian architect behind some of Asia’s most innovative buildings’. In an essay for Architecture Australia, Geoffrey London said that Hill’s ‘rigorously ordered’ work was built on lessons learnt from a number of modernist architects, including Louis Khan, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. His architectural style and

Amanemu by Kerry Kill Architects. Image: Nacasa and Partners

WORKS FROM THE KERRY HILL AO COLLECTION, SINGAPORE • LOTS 31 – 35

DONALD FRIEND 31 (1915 – 1989) BALINESE WITH CAGE BIRDS, c.1975 ink, watercolour, gouache and gold leaf on paper on board 62.5 x 47.5 cm signed and inscribed with title upper right: Balinese with cage / Birds / Donald / Friend estimate :

$20,000 – 30,000

PROVENANCE Acquired directly from the artist, Estate of Kerry Hill AO, Singapore

WORKS FROM THE KERRY HILL AO COLLECTION, SINGAPORE • LOTS 31 – 35

IAN FAIRWEATHER 32 (1891 – 1974) SEA ANEMONES, 1957 gouache on cardboard 95.0 x 71.5 cm signed with monogram and dated lower right: IF 57 bears inscription on frame verso: ER CUPPAIDGE estimate :

$200,000 – 250,000

PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Russell Cuppaidge, Brisbane, acquired from the above May 1957 Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 10 April 1993, lot 230 Estate of Kerry Hill AO, Singapore EXHIBITED A View of Brisbane Collections, Queensland Art Gallery Society, Brisbane, 9 – 25 March 1979 (lent by Russell Cuppaidge) (label attached verso) Ian Fairweather Tenth Anniversary Exhibition, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, 19 May – 14 June 1984, cat. 58 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) (label attached verso)

The singular vision of Ian Fairweather was the result of a varied series of influences and complex personal psychology. Born in Scotland and raised by aunts until the age of ten, he studied at London’s Slade School of Fine Art during the early 1920s, taking classes in Japanese and Chinese language at night. With a restless spirit, he travelled to Canada in 1928 to work as a farm labourer and the following year, sailed to Shanghai, spending several years in China, a country whose culture and history had a profound effect on the development of his art. In Melbourne in 1934 he met Jock Frater and George Bell, and exhibited his work at Cynthia Reed’s gallery in Little Collins Street, soon leaving again for the Philippines, then China and various destinations in SouthEast Asia in quick succession. Following his notorious attempt to sail to Timor on a raft made of old aircraft fuel tanks, Fairweather returned to Australia in mid-1953 and later that year, settled on Bribie Island off the coast of southern Queensland. Fairweather had first visited Bribie Island in 1945 (drifting there by accident in a recently acquired lifeboat) and here, found a place where he could work consistently and relatively undisturbed for the rest of his life. Living in a pair of thatched huts that he had built using materials found in the nearby bush, and painting by the light of a hurricane lamp, his surrounds were primitive, but offered everything that Fairweather needed. While he relished the isolation of the Island and preferred not to engage with the art world in person, Fairweather exhibited regularly at

Macquarie Galleries in Sydney – gallery directors Treania Smith and Lucy Swanton sending paper and other materials, as well as typically assigning titles to the paintings he shipped to them1 – and his work was both seen and admired by curators, critics, collectors and fellow artists alike. Murray Bail has writ ten that the ‘Post-Impressionist calm’ of Fairweather’s paintings from the 1930s and 40s belied the ‘economic and psychological hell’ he experienced during those decades. 2 The relative tranquil stability of the late 1950s appears, counterintuitively, to have introduced a notable complexity to his work so that ‘it is the images which become tangled and fragmented; surfaces are unstable; a meditative virtue is made out of chaos’. 3 Painted in 1957, Sea Anemones reflects this dynamism in its dense layering of painted lines and solid areas of colour. Numerous female figures stand side by side, searching for sea anemones, the lines describing their heads, limbs, breasts and hair, repeated and overlapped so that the fragmented elements – like the flickering lines of an early animation – combine in our imagination, forming a complete and fully resolved image. Areas of gouache in familiar tones of blue and brown have been applied with a broad brush and contribute to both the graphic and textural richness of the painting; patches of cream and strokes of vivid white allow linework below to show through. There is a strong visual and thematic link between this work and the majestic triptych, Anak Bayan, also dated 1957, which recalls Fairweather’s time in the Philippines and is one of the highlights of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ collection of his paintings. With his distinctive monogram in the lower right corner, Sea Anemones exemplifies the confidence that distinguished Fairweather’s art during these years, as well as reflecting the tension between representation and the drive towards abstraction that was a constant within his oeuvre: ‘I don’t feel I am a complete abstractionist – I still like – perhaps mistakenly in this age of collectivism – to retain some relic of subjective reality’.4 1. Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, p. 118 Murray Bail confirms however that this title was given by the artist rather than his gallery. 2. ibid., p. 128 3. ibid. 4. The artist quoted in ibid., p. 140

KIRSTY GRANT

WORKS FROM THE KERRY HILL AO COLLECTION, SINGAPORE • LOTS 31 – 35

DONALD FRIEND 33 (1915 – 1989) THE HEALTH AND HOBBIES FITNESS CAMP, c.1963 watercolour, gouache and gold leaf on paper on board 63.0 x 48.0 cm signed and inscribed with title lower right: THE HEALTH and Hobbies / Fitness CAMP. / DONALD FRIEND bears inscription verso: 1963 estimate :

$30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE Acquired directly from the artist, Estate of Kerry Hill AO, Singapore

The Health and Hobbies Fitness Camp, c.1963 belongs to a long-running series of paintings by Donald Friend which incorporate the sumptuous finish of gold-leaf. Whilst the genesis of such works may be found in his fascination with religious scenes from the Byzantine era and the early Renaissance, witnessed through repeat visits to Italy, he was further inspired by his study of the art of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) where he lived in the late 1950s. Evident throughout the series are key flourishes of Friend’s oeuvre – fastidious finish, masterly graphic skills and, above all, a caustic wit which casts a mordant eye over the follies of humanity. Friend journeyed to Ceylon in 1957, staying at ‘Brief’, the renowned garden estate south of Colombo which belonged to the planter Bevis Bawa. The artist already had experience of living amongst ‘exotic’ peoples, such as his experiences in Africa in his early twenties, and living with Indigenous families in far-North Queensland and on islands in the Torres Strait. In Africa, much of his time was devoted to sketching traditional artworks – in particular, Yoruba (Nigerian) artefacts – a practice he continued in Ceylon. Friend’s incredibly detailed diaries list site after site he visited in order to capture carvings and paintings before they were ruined by nature or, more likely, human intervention. In Italy in 1952, he had followed an allied strategy of making his own ‘Byzantine and early Renaissance-style paintings (including) decorative ‘autobiographical ikons’ … on prepared gilded panels’.1 Friend’s diaries from Ceylon contain multiple entries commenting on his progress with the gold-leaf paintings, culminating in the significant commission executed for the McKinnon Mackenzie shipping company, City of Galle, 1961, which comprises one large, central painting – almost four metres wide – surrounded by numerous small-scale ‘predellas’.

Following his return to Australia in 1962, Friend exhibited the gold-leaf works in Sydney and before that, in Perth where the show was opened by the actress Vivien Leigh. 2 Unsettled and depressed after leaving Ceylon, Friend began painting humourous works in his Sydney home in an effort elevate his spirits. Commissions soon followed, including the majestic mural cycle for Sir James Fairfax at ‘Retford Park’, his country property in Bowral; and ‘a series of small [parodic] decorative panels depicting such scenes from Australian history as the arrival of the first rabbit in New South Wales, or Bennelong entertaining Governor Phillip with an obbligato on the didgeridoo’. 3 The Health and Hobbies Fitness Camp belongs to these latter painting cycles and features a fantasy meeting of athletes and aesthetes, mingling whilst a circus strongman, with traditional mustache and tights, hovers on a parachute. Intriguingly, it also contains elements from much of Friend’s previous interests and experience, with the setting akin to the grottoes found in paintings by the proto-Renaissance artist Giotto, and the tents being a recollection of his time as an official war artist. In the middle stands a handsome youth of African heritage, and to the side, an Asian chef which is a masterly study in itself, an almost melancholy presence to counter-balance the light-hearted atmosphere of his fellows. 1. Pearce, B., Donald Friend 1915 – 1989: Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1990, p. 81 2. Leigh had famously conducted her affair with Peter Finch at Bevis Bawa’s ‘Brief’ estate in 1953 whilst filming Elephant Walk. 3. Hughes, R., Donald Friend, Edwards and Shaw, Sydney, 1965, p. 74

ANDREW GAYNOR

WORKS FROM THE KERRY HILL AO COLLECTION, SINGAPORE • LOTS 31 – 35

ROBERT KLIPPEL 34 (1920 – 2001) COLLAGE, 1993 pastel, synthetic polymer paint and collage on paper 110.0 x 145.5 cm signed and dated lower right: Robert Klippel - 1993 PROVENANCE Watters Gallery, Sydney Estate of Kerry Hill AO, Perth estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

EXHIBITED Robert Klippel – Collages, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 19 October – 3 November 1994, cat. 1 (illus. front cover) Robert Klippel: Large Wood Sculptures and Collages, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 22 June – 13 August 1995 LITERATURE Edwards, D., Robert Klippel: Large Wood Sculptures and Collages, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1995, pp. 28 (illus.), 46

WORKS FROM THE KERRY HILL AO COLLECTION, SINGAPORE • LOTS 31 – 35

ROBERT KLIPPEL 35 (1920 – 2001) NO. 459, PAINTED WOOD CONSTRUCTION, 1985 wood assemblage 150.0 cm height PROVENANCE Private collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Brisbane 143 Works from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 21 June 1992, lot 110 Estate of Kerry Hill AO, Singapore

EXHIBITED Australian Sculpture Now: Second Australian Sculpture Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 6 November 1984 – 28 January 1985, cat. 29 Painters and Sculptors – Diversity in Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 23 June – 23 August 1987 then travelling to Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan, 9 October – 16 December 1987, cat. 68 (illus. in Museum of Modern Art exhibition catalogue, p. 52) LITERATURE Sturgeon, G., Australian Sculpture Now: Second Australian Sculpture Triennial, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1984, pp. 28 (illus.), 121 (illus.) Palmer, M., ‘Australian Sculpture Now: The Second Australian Sculpture Triennial’, Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 23, no. 1, Spring 1985, p. 83 (illus.) Hogan, J. (ed), Painters and Sculptors – Diversity in Contemporary Art, exhibition catalogue, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1987, p. 31 (illus.) Edwards, D., Robert Klippel: Catalogue Raisonné of Sculptures, (CD-ROM) Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002, No. 459 (illus. another view) estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

PROPERTY OF VARIOUS VENDORS

HENRY JAMES JOHNSTONE 36 (1835 – 1907) WOOED AND WON, 1874 (ALSO KNOWN AS ‘A BUSH ROMANCE’) oil on canvas 54.0 x 42.0 cm signed and dated lower left: H. J. Johnstone 1874 signed and inscribed verso: H. J. Johnstone / No. 2 estimate :

$25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 23 July 1986, lot 96 (as ‘A Bush Romance’) Christopher Day Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Fourth Exhibition, Victorian Academy of Arts, Melbourne, 1874, cat. 38 An Australian Perspective: An Important Collection of Fine Colonial Works and Early 20th Century Paintings 1820 – 1952, Christopher Day Gallery, Sydney, September 1988, cat. 17 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, as ‘A Bush Romance’) LITERATURE ‘The Victorian Academy of Arts Third Notice’, The Argus, Melbourne, 15 August 1874, p. 5 ‘Victorian Artists In London’, The Age, Melbourne, 7 November 1891, p. 14 (as ‘A Pressing Question’) RELATED WORK A Pressing Question, 1874, colour wood engraving, 42.2 × 32.2 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

The depiction of love in the nineteenth-century took a variety of forms, the eager, sentimental and moralistic included. In Wooed and Won, 1874, Henry James Johnstone chose the genre of the bush romance, a slice of contemporary life engaging the anecdotal to the naturalism of figures and landscape. Bathed in the sunny light of Australian optimism, the country gallant woos his maiden fair. Bending ever so slightly, his earnest endeavour is profiled with intent. Right hands link in hope. His left grips a whip, with his still saddled, earlier love, relegated to the background. Rich in metaphors, only one slip rail remains to separate the couple. To the right, branches of two young trees entwine. When shown in the annual exhibition of Victorian Academy of Arts, Melbourne, in October 1874, the reviewer for The Argus declared it: ‘noteworthy on account of the Flemish finish of the drapery, and the ability with which the artist has contrived to make both the persons who figure in this rustic idyll tell the story’.1 Most of the exhibited works were of the Australian landscape. The very occasional subject picture included Impudence by Henry Rielly and His First Model by George Sutherland, an amusing domestic scene of a young boy busily drawing the doll proudly held by his sister. Significantly, it was one of only three works selected by The Illustrated Australian News to illustrate the accompanying review, which observed: ‘it would give greater interest to the exhibition if a few more of our artists would devote themselves to figure subjects’. 2 Johnstone continued his theme of love in the landscape the following year in The Dipping Place, Dandenong Creek. 3 Enticed by gold to Australia in 1853, the flamboyant Johnstone returned to Melbourne, soon rising in prominence as both a photographer and painter. Exhibiting with the Victorian Academy of Arts from 1872, by 1875 he was singled out as ‘decidedly a rising artist, and if it be considered how comparatively short is the time since he first began to exhibit, it must be conceded that he made great progress. Mr. Johnstone combines delicacy of touch with a true eye for colour, and it is very felicitous in reproducing the characteristics of the Australian scenery’.4 Johnstone, together with Eugène von Guérard, Louis Buvelot, S. T. Gill and others was represented in the collection of the great benefactor of the National Gallery of Victoria, Alfred Felton. Johnstone’s extraordinarily popular oil painting, Evening Shadows, Backwater of the Murray, South Australia, 1880, was the first work acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia. 1. ‘The Victorian Academy of Arts. Third Notice’, The Argus, Melbourne, 15 August 1874, p. 5 2. ‘Victorian Academy of Arts Exhibition’, The Illustrated News for Home Readers, Melbourne, 7 September 1874, pp. 152 (illus.), 154 3. The Fifth Exhibition of the Victorian Academy of Arts, Melbourne, 1875, cat. 29 4. Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition 1875, Preparatory to the Philadelphia Exhibition 1876, Official Catalogue of Exhibits, Melbourne, September 1875, ‘Fine Arts’, pp. 208 – 9

DAVID THOMAS

EMANUEL PHILLIPS FOX 37 (1865 – 1915) AUTUMN HILLSIDE, HEIDELBERG, c.1900 oil on canvas 51.0 x 40.5 cm signed lower right: E. Phillips Fox estimate :

$30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney

Atmospheric landscapes and notable portraits covered the walls of the Old Court Studio in Melbourne’s Swanston Street for Emanuel Phillips Fox’s solo exhibition of October 1900. Chief among the latter was Portrait of My Cousin, 1893 – 94, which was awarded a gold medal in Paris at the 1894 Salon de la Société des Artistes Français. (The painting was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, through the Felton Bequest many years later). There were also many other highlights among the landscapes in the Melbourne exhibition. Autumn Showers, 1900 (purchased the same year for the Art Gallery of New South Wales), was described by The Age art critic as: ‘a landscape conspicuous for the vigor and dexterity of the execution’.1 Autumn Moonrise, 1900 was the original version from which he painted Moonrise, Heidelberg, 1900 (National Gallery of Victoria). Of the others, Moonrise Summer Evening, 1900 is now in the collection of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart and The Pines, 1900 is in The Australian Club, Melbourne. The Age reported that most of the portraits and landscapes were recent: ‘Nearly all’ being ‘shown for the first time’, adding: ‘Color in the 30 odd works that hang on the four studio walls is so opulent, so vibrating, so exquisitely delicate and fresh, that it would stir the perceptions of those least sensitive to its charm’. 2 The scenes were chiefly of Heidelberg, especially Charterisville, of land and unkempt garden rising above the Yarra River. Fox had favoured autumnal visits there since 1894.

The title of our painting has been lost in the past. And while titles of other landscapes listed in the 1900 exhibition catalogue – particularly Autumn Morning, Fallen Leaves and Dying Autumn – tempt, they elude identification with our painting. The given name ‘Autumn Hillside, Heidelberg’, c.1900 is therefore descriptive, the painting’s style and subject being very much in keeping with Fox’s plein air works of Charterisville from the turn of the century. Full of Impressionist and seasonal verve, trees outlined against the rising hillside recall The Pines and particularly the larger painting, The Spring, 1900 (private collection). 3 The lively, broken brushwork, characteristic of Fox’s landscape paintings of this time, creates an appealing picture surface, the rich textures and patterns of light adding to its atmospheric freshness. The dominance of green that the Fox scholar Ruth Zubans noted in his Charterisville palette is now challenged by the striking contrast of orange-gold against blue, continued across the foreground wilderness in the luxury of soft grass and engagingly seductive touches of pink.4 The muted colour range of gentle twilight panoramas is blown away by the sparkle of sunlight, dash of brushstrokes and burst of painterly energy married to colour. It is all the more effective by being seen close up, intimate yet lively. Life is in the fullness of its ‘mellow fruitfulness’, that shortness of shadow cast by the main tree indicating a closeness to midday. Yet, all is enveloped in the maturing, changing atmosphere of autumn. 1. ‘Art Notes’, The Age, Melbourne, 17 October 1900, p. 5 2. ibid. 3. Zubans, R., E. Phillips Fox: His Life and Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1995, cat. 97 and 102 4. ibid., p. 125

DAVID THOMAS

ETHEL CARRICK FOX 38 (1872 – 1952) FLOWER MARKET, NICE c.1926 oil on board 24.0 x 32.5 cm signed lower left: CARRICK FOX bears inscription on old label verso: Flower Market estimate :

$25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne, acquired directly from the artist Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne RELATED WORK In the Nice Flower Market, c.1926, oil on canvas, 59.2 x 80.9 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, illus. in Goddard, A., Art, Love and Life: Ethel Carrick and E Phillips Fox, Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2011, p. 77

Colour, light and movement characterize the art of Ethel Carrick Fox, distinguished from her husband, Emanuel Phillips Fox’s work by its greater boldness and freedom of execution. The vivacity of her brushwork and more dynamic composition is readily apparent in a comparison of their paintings of the same motif, Carrick’s Sur La Plage, 1910 (Deutscher and Hackett, 18 April 1918, lot 29) and Fox’s (On The Sand), c.1910 (in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra). Also, Fox was more inclined towards the finished composition, Carrick exhibiting works overflowing with all the atmosphere and immediacy of the sketch. Hers is the art of the sunlit passing moment, of women and children relaxing and at play. The Luxembourg Gardens in Paris inspired many moments of belle époque splendour, extended to the fashionable beach resorts of Trouville and Royan. Yet, flower markets remained a favourite offering the ideal opportunity to paint cavalcades of colour peopled with activity over a longer period of time. Notable among these are Flower Market (France), c.1910 (McClelland Gallery + Sculpture Park, Victoria) and two major works more related to our painting on offer, In the Nice Flower Market, c.1926, (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) and Flower Vendors, Nice, c.1930, (Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth). Another, Le Marché aux Fleurs, c.1928, is in the collection Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen. As elegance and the fashionable promenade gave way to bargaining and busy squares, Carrick used the arcaded grandeur of the Nice market to introduce an important element of pictorial stability, a solid backdrop to the theatre of life at play. Sunlight is also at play to focus attention on bursts of colour, contrasted with the shade of tree and umbrella to shelter the shopper, and extend the mood of the moment engendered by the dash of paint. In Flower Market, Nice, c.1926, while umbrellas remain unchanged, fashion, in the length of the ladies’ dresses, suggests a date in the twenties. Colour harmonies of reds and mauves are subtle, highlighted against the pale cream of the fine, arched background. A number of French flower market paintings were shown in Carrick’s Sydney exhibition of 1913. One major work, Flower Market, was proudly catalogued as exhibited in the ‘Salon, Paris 1910’.1 Carrick exhibited in all the major Paris salons, especially the modernist Salon d’Automne of which she was a sociétaire. A few years before, Paris art critic Henry Breuil praised her work in the Salon d’Automne with the apt comparison: ‘Mlle Ethel Carrick fires the enthusiasm of art lovers. One might compare her paintings to bouquets of flowers’. 2 1. Exhibition of Pictures by Mrs. E. Phillips Fox (Ethel Carrick), Anthony Hordern’s Fine Art Gallery, Sydney, 6 – 22 November 1913, cat. 6 2. Breuil, H., ‘Promenade travers les Salons de Salon d’Automne’, Les Tendances Nouvelles, Paris, vol. 30, no. 39, December 1908, quoted in Goddard, A., Art, Love and Life: Ethel Carrick and E. Phillips Fox, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2011, p. 24

DAVID THOMAS

JOHN PETER RUSSELL 39 (1858 – 1930) ROCHER AU CHIEN, CLOS MARION, BELLE– ÎLE, 1897 oil on canvas 63.5 x 81.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed lower left: TO – FRIEND – LTC – J.P. RUSSELL – ’97 estimate :

$300,000 – 500,000

PROVENANCE Lionel T. Crawshaw, gift from the artist Thence by descent Harold Crawshaw, Estoril, Portugal Artarmon Galleries, New South Wales (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne RELATED WORK Auchien rocks, Clos Marion, Belle-Ile, oil on canvas, 52.0 x 61.5 cm, Nock Art Foundation, Hong Kong, illus. in Tunnicliffe, W. (ed), John Russell: Australia’s French Impressionist, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2018, p. 90

From a three-month visit in 1886 with Marianna to purchasing land and building a large house there the following year, John Russell’s response to the wild beauty of Belle-Île was passionate. The pounding seas and rugged, rocky coastlines of this island off the coast of Brittany captured his imagination resulting in Rocher au Chien, Clos Marion, Belle-Île, 1897 and many other masterly paintings of both storm and calm. It was a passion shared with others. Claude Monet (1840 – 1926), shortly after meeting Russell on Belle-Île, wrote to Gustave Caillebotte: ‘I am in a superbly wild country, a heap of terrible rocks and an improbable sea of colours’.1 Monet canvases of Belle-Île numbered nearly forty. Most were of the sea and coast, a memorable example being Storm off the Coast of Belle-Île, 1886 in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Russell’s own series of these lively seas and majestic rocks, mostly undated, peak in the late nineties through the turn of the century, highlighted in the visually exciting Rough Sea, Belle-Île, 1900 (Joseph Brown Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). In Russell’s watercolours, of which he was a master, the aqueous feel is even greater as he pictures seas rough, as in Storm, Belle-Île, 1905, or peaceful, as in Belle-Île, 1905. Both are in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Added to this is the brilliance of his palette, highlighted in an explosion of primary colours in Red Sail, Port Goulphar, c.1900, (Musée d’Orsay), dominant red sails, yellow gorse and sparkling blue sea enveloped in summer light. Russell’s works of Belle-Île and elsewhere reflect the typical interests of the Impressionist – especially the seasons and other changing moods of nature – embracing painting en plein air to capture the transient effects of light and movement.

100

Our painting, Rocher au Chien, Clos Marion, Belle-Île is possibly the largest of the series involving this particular engagement of rocks and seas. Ann Galbally illustrates another in her earlier book on Russell. 2 A third, Auchien Rocks, Clos Marion, Belle- Île, belongs to the Nock Art Foundation, Hong Kong. Light modifies colour as morning changes to twilight then darker skies. Series paintings were in vogue. The 1890s is also the time of Monet’s paintings of poplars, haystacks and Rouen Cathedral. And in 1903-05 Claude Debussy composed his great impressionistic orchestral work La Mer. 3 In our group of paintings, Russell’s admiration of the music of Richard Wagner resounds in the clash of titanic forces, turbulent seas and immovable rocks. An absence of human presence adds to the mood of natural grandeur, powerful, windswept forces conjured up through the virtuosity and spontaneity of his brushstrokes. To see the sound of wind and feel the crash of stormy seas, salt laden in your face, speaks of Symbolism and tells of yachtsman Russell’s love of the sea. A painting given by one artist to another is always special, as is the case with this work. Here it speaks of the close friendship between the British-born artist, Lionel Townsend Crawshaw (1864 – 1949), the Russells and their families. Crawshaw arrived on Belle-Île in the mid 1890s with an introduction to Russell. Contracting typhoid, a closeness developed through the nursing he received from the Russells. The gift is dated 1897. Russell’s son Lionel Oliver Brian was born the day after Christmas 1898. Later, Russell also made further gifts to Crawshaw. 1. Claude Monet letter to Gustave Caillebotte, Belle-Île, 11 October 1886, quoted in Tunnicliffe, W. (ed), John Russell: Australia’s French Impressionist, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2018, p. 31 2. Galbally, A., The Art of John Peter Russell, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1977, p. 104, cat. 110, pl. xxvii, Rocher au Chien, Clos Marion, Belle-Île, oil on canvas, 50.1 x 60.5 cm 3. Tunnicliffe, op. cit., p. 87 DAVID THOMAS

CLAUDE MONET Rocks at Port-Coton, the Lion Rock, Belle-Île, 1886 oil on canvas 65.0 x 81.0 cm collection of The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge

101

HILDA RIX NICHOLAS 40 (1884 – 1961) SPRING AFTERNOON, KNOCKALONG, 1933 oil on canvas 80.5 x 99.0 cm signed lower left: E.H. Rix Nicholas bears inscription on Macquarie Galleries label verso: ...34. SPRING AFTERNOON KNOCKALONG / 1933 (MRS. CAVANAGH AND RIX)... estimate :

$100,000 – 140,000

PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Dr J. P. Rasmussen OAM, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1978 Thence by descent The Rasmussen Family collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Hilda Rix Nicholas, 1884 – 1961, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 30 August – 18 September 1978, cat. 34 (illus. exhibition catalogue cover) Paris to Monaro: Pleasures from the studio of Hilda Rix Nicholas, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 31 May – 11 August 2013, p. 185 (illus.) LITERATURE Pigot, J., Hilda Rix Nicholas: Her Life and Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2000, pl. 43, pp. 62, 63 (illus.) Engledow, S., Paris to Monaro: Pleasures from the studio of Hilda Rix Nicholas, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 2013, p. 185 (illus.)

Spring Afternoon, Knockalong, 1933 is a ‘pendant portrait’ to the Shepherd of Knockalong, 1933. These works were painted within days of each other. Young Rix is sporting the same clothing. His shirt and socks have been changed but otherwise he is wearing identical outfits. While the Shepherd of Knockalong has Hilda Rix Nicholas’s son represented on the property, under the watchful care of his father, Spring Afternoon, Knockalong, shows Rix playing with a small model sailing boat on one of the ponds found at Knockalong, under the watchful eye of his Governess, Mrs Cavanagh. She sits nearby, embroidering what appears to be a tablecloth. In this painting, the pastel palette, so often favoured by the artist, has been used to stunning effect. Mrs Cavanagh’s costume, a rather formal dress for station-wear, is a wellcut frock made of a rose-coloured linen that is reflected in the blossoms of the fruit trees that line the pond. These hues resonate in the pastures further in the distance, in the rolling hills that surround them and in the clouds that float across the landscape. The painting is one of domestic tranquillity in the outdoors as Mrs Cavanagh is engaged in the feminine task of needlework and childcare, while Rix occupies himself with keeping an eye on the sailing boat, which idly makes its way over the pond. Neither disturbs the other, there is harmony and peace in this rural Australian landscape in which the fruit trees of the garden, harmonise and co-exist peacefully with the Eucalypts that line the rolling pasture. The foreground of the picture, the enclosure that included the house and the garden, were Hilda’s domain, while the pastures belonged to Edgar. She was boss of one, and he the other. In an exhibition of her work that was part of a group show at the New South Wales Education Department held in September 1934 she referred to her dual role as mother and artist. The writer of the review noted of the artist ‘Mrs Nicholas said she gave up her chosen work to rear her son, and enjoyed it. But now he is independent of her continued care, she has decided to take up painting once more’.1 Hilda had not expected to be a mother and when at 43 she fell pregnant, she could not contain her delight. She was nevertheless, excited to be able to return to painting. The exhibition included the work of over 120 female artists. Both pictures are Australian icons that celebrate a way of life that now has faded. They are works that present Hilda Rix Nicholas’s facility for the genre in which she excelled, that of the figure in the landscape. Here she represents the beauty and abundance of life in pastoral Australia that is redolent of the Australia created by the Europeans in the years between the wars and through the talent of a painter who is now recognised as among the nation’s most original and best. When the Sun reviewed her solo exhibition in 1936 the critic noted ‘We have in our Australian life a great many clever woman painters but this work goes beyond mere cleverness…It’s power is more than feminine though we see in it a womanly love of dress material and flowers and the things of the home, of children and animals and the more gracious things of life’. 2 1. ‘Big Display by Women Artists of Australia’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 21 July 1934, p. 21 2. ‘Fine Exhibition by Woman Painter: Mrs Rix Nicholas’, The Sun, Sydney, 16 June 1936, quoted in Pigot, J., Hilda Rix Nicholas: Her Life and Art, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2000, p. 64

JEANETTE HOORN AUTHOR OF HILDA RIX NICHOLAS AND ELSIE RIX’S MOROCCAN IDYLL: ART AND ORIENTALISM, MIEGUNYAH PRESS, 2012

102

103

ELIOTH GRUNER 41 (1882 – 1939) THE PATH TO THE TOWN, CANBERRA, 1937 oil on canvas 41.0 x 51.0 cm signed and dated lower right: GRUNER / 1937 bears inscription verso: PATH TO THE TOWN, CANBERRA estimate :

$25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Mr W.G. Buckle, Sydney Private collection, Sydney Christie’s, Melbourne, 27 April 1999, lot 10 Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Australian Academy of Art: First Exhibition, Education Department’s Gallery, Sydney, 8 – 29 April 1938, cat. 88 (as ‘Path to the Town, Canberra’) (lent by Mr W.G. Buckle) Elioth Gruner Memorial Loan Exhibition, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 17 April – 31 May 1940, cat. 141 (lent by Mr W.G. Buckle) (label attached verso) LITERATURE McKinnon, F., ‘Australia’s New Academy Holds Its First Exhibition’, Courier-Mail, Brisbane, 28 May 1938, p. 10 ‘First Exhibition of Australian Academy of Art’, Art in Australia, Sydney, 3rd series, no. 71, 16 May 1938, p. 17 (illus.) ‘Art in Australia’, The Examiner, Launceston, 11 June 1938, p. 3 Buckle, W. G., ‘Elioth Gruner’, Art in Australia, Sydney, 3rd series, no. 77, 15 November 1939, p. 35 (illus. with artist) Morris, M. and Ure Smith, S. (ed.), Australian Landscape, John Sands, Sydney, 1944 (illus., unpaginated, as ‘Canberra Summer’)

The popularity of The Path to the Town, Canberra, however, had already been confirmed by its purchase. Its owner for many years was William Buckle (1894 – 1947), noted Sydney amateur photographer, art collector and long time friend of the artist. 3 A number of Buckle’s photographs of Gruner working en plein air during a painting trip to Canberra in 1937 were included in a memorial article Buckle wrote for Art in Australia in late 1939.4 The one of A Domestic Scene in Camp shows The Path to the Town, Canberra hanging in the background. Buckle’s collection of Australian art included works by Tom Roberts, Hans Heysen and numerous paintings by Gruner, including After the Rain, 1917, Dream Morning, 1923 and Bellingen Pastoral, 1937. In 1940 the Felton Bequest purchased the latter work from Buckle for presentation to the National Gallery of Victoria. Gruner’s mastery as a painter of the Australian landscape was readily recognised in his own day, being awarded the Wynne Prize seven times, the last in 1937 with the painting Weetangera, Canberra, (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney). It also won the Society of Artists Award for that same year. Gruner was at his peak. Fellow artist Robert Campbell later wrote: ‘The pictures done around 1937 are quite perfect. The Bellingen series have luminosity, sparkling colour, and, at the same time, carefully considered composition and delicately rendered form. They must always take their place among the fine things of Australian landscape painting’. 5

The Path to the Town, Canberra, 1937 had a special appeal for Elioth Gruner. It was one of four paintings (two landscapes and two flower subjects) with which he chose to represent himself in the inaugural exhibition of the Australian Academy of Art shown in Sydney in April 1938. And it was his single work selected for illustration in the May 1938 issue of Art in Australia devoted to the Academy show.1 The following extract from the accompanying article gives insight into how enthusiastically his works were seen by his contemporaries:

In The Path to the Town, Canberra, Gruner turned his eye from the broad sweep of the panoramic Australian countryside to a closer, more settled view, characteristically intimate in feeling. The silhouetted pattern of trees and winding pathways adds to the flatness of the picture plane, creating a strong sense of design, the path inviting the eye to travel up the rise expectantly towards Canberra beyond. The subtle and sophisticated play between lyricism and the sensuous makes this a painting for the connoisseur.

The two landscapes are characteristic. There is the first appeal of the general pattern and colour harmony. Nothing of the “snapshot” is seen in his work, though he catches the mood of the moment. Throughout there is evidence of mature consideration, a quiet thoughtfulness that searches into the spirit of his subject. Surface appearances are used to express the feelings which have been stirred by them, and are painted with great refinement. There is always something in reserve. 2

1. ‘First Exhibition of Australian Academy of Art’, Art in Australia, Sydney, third series, no. 71, 16 May 1938, p. 17, being one of only seven colour plates of works by different artists. 2.

ibid, p. 22

3. William Buckle is represented in the photographic collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Obituary, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 March 1947, p. 5 4. Buckle, W., ‘Elioth Gruner’, Art in Australia, Sydney, third series, no. 77, 15 November 1939, pp. 34 – 5 5. Campbell, R., ‘The Art of Gruner’, Art in Australia, Sydney, third series, no. 79, 23 May 1940, p. 32

DAVID THOMAS

104

Elioth Gruner with The Path to the Town, Canberra hanging on the wall photographer unknown

105

HANS HEYSEN 42 (1877 – 1968) AUTUMN FLOWERS AND FRUIT, 1927 (ALSO KNOWN AS ‘SOUVENIR’) oil on canvas 68.5 x 81.0 cm signed and dated lower left: Hans Heysen 1927 signed, dated and inscribed on backing board verso: “Autumn Flowers and Fruit” / Hans Heysen / Ambleside / 1927 – 1929 inscribed on backing board verso: No 1263 / AUTUMN FLOWERS + FRUIT / HANS HEYSEN estimate :

$65,000 – 85,000

PROVENANCE Commissioned by Madame Anna Pavlova, London The artist, Ambleside, South Australia Private collection, Sydney Sir Reginald Marcus Clarke KBE, Sydney Savill Galleries, Sydney Private collection, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1988 EXHIBITED A Century of Australian Painting, 1888 –1988, Savill Galleries, Sydney, 21 April – 21 May 1988, cat. 21 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) LITERATURE Art in Australia, Sydney, Ure Smith, Sydney, 3rd series, vol. 21, September 1927 (illus. frontispiece, as ‘Souvenir’) McNally, J.M., ‘The Love of Form and Colour’, The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 30 April 1927, p. 40 ‘Books in Brief’, The West Australian, Perth, 15 October 1927, p. 7 (as ‘Souvenir’) ‘The Library Table’, The Register, Adelaide, 22 October 1927, p. 6 (as ‘Souvenir’) RELATED WORK Zinnias and Autumn Fruit, 1923, oil on canvas, 60.0 x 71.0 cm, in the collection of the Hans Heysen Foundation, Hahndorf, South Australia, illus. in Thiele, C., Heysen of Hahndorf, Ridby Ltd., Adelaide, 1968, p. 97 (as ‘Autumn Flowers and Fruit’)

106

107

HANS HEYSEN 42 (1877 – 1968) AUTUMN FLOWERS AND FRUIT, 1927 (ALSO KNOWN AS ‘SOUVENIR’)

This is a brilliant thing – a riot of colour in orange, scarlet, purple, and blue of nasturtiums, zinnias, petunias, delphiniums, and other flowers, while beneath is a mass of rich toned fruit, the grapes wonderfully given, and through the whole shimmering piece of daring colour there runs an impression of the character of Pavlova herself. 5 While M. J. MacNally described it as ‘magnificent’, he added a further insight into Heysen: This tribute to the genius of the beautiful Russian is by no means the first Heysen has made. Some time ago, after attending a recital by a famous violinist, he dashed home to Ambleside, painted a water-color of the bush, letting loose in it the emotion he felt at the artistry of the visitor. It was a proud and delighted musician who received the precious gift.6

When Hans Heysen painted this grand affair of flowers and fruits for Anna Pavlova, he titled it ‘Souvenir’, no doubt in recollection of the prima donna’s visit to his home. Pavlova, then hailed as the world’s greatest dancer, first brought her dance company to Australia in 1926, performing to full houses of captivated audiences. In Adelaide, she appeared at the Theatre Royal in late June and late July into August. It would have been during this time Pavlova visited the Heysen home, The Cedars, near Ambleside, (today’s Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills). Here she was so enraptured by the painting Zinnias and Autumn Fruits, 1923 that ‘she wrote out a blank cheque and told the painter to name his price’.1 As Heysen had given it to his wife as a birthday present, he declined, offering to paint another, like work. (Heysen placed a strong attachment on his flower paintings, choosing them as special gifts. Still Life with Heath, 1918, for example, was a gift to his parents for their Golden Wedding Anniversary). 2 The result was Souvenir, 1927 despatched to Pavlova in London the following year. Described today by Allan Campbell, Collections Curator at The Cedars as ‘one of his finest still-life paintings’, the forthright Pavlova ‘sent it back and said no, she’d wait until he relented’. 3 The painting that so caught Pavlova’s eye, still hangs in The Cedars to this day.4 While to Pavlova her first love was irreplaceable, Souvenir was applauded. Earlier previewed through its colour illustration in the September 1927 issue of Art In Australia, where one writer described it as ‘a brilliant study of still-life’, another enthused:

Pavlova and Heysen shared a deep love of natural beauty. Autumn Leaves, set to music by Chopin and choreographed by herself was one of the pieces frequently in her repertoire. She also collected plants from Australia for her London greenhouse. One can only imagine the engagement between artist and dancer during her visit to The Cedars, Heysen biographer Colin Thiele, remarking ‘her vitality shaking the quiet seclusion of the place’.7 The theatrical flair and colour fullness of Souvenir, reflects the Baroque splendour, which Pavlova would have admired in her longed for Zinnias and Autumn Fruits, 1923. It also characterises other grand still life paintings of the twenties, especially his Flowers and Fruit, 1926, (in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) and Autumn Fruits, 1928 (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide). Each has an opulence and grandeur one might associate with the heroic moments of opera. Pavlova’s loss of Souvenir was certainly Sir Reginald Marcus Clarke’s gain, his collection of Australian and European pictures once being among the finest in the land. 8 1. Allan Campbell, Collections Curator, The Cedars, quoted in Stephens, A., ‘The other Heysen’, The Age, Spectrum, Melbourne, 2 March 2019, p. 8 2. North, I., Hans Heysen Centenary Retrospective 1877 – 1977, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1977, p. 45 3. Campbell, op. cit. 4. Thiele, C., Heysen of Hahndorf, David Heysen Productions, 2001, p. 97 as Autumn Flowers and Fruit, 1923, colour illus. 5. ‘Books in Brief’, The West Australian, Perth, 15 October 1927, p. 7; and ‘The Library Table. Art in Australia’, The Register, Adelaide, 22 October 1927, p. 6 6. MacNally, M.J., ‘The Love of Form and Color. From Artist To Artist’, The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 30 April 1927, p. 40 7. Thiele, op. cit., p. 217 8. Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Water Colors from the Collection of Mr. R. M. Clark, Marcus Clark showrooms, Sydney, 6 August 1923, touring to Tasmania in 1926

DAVID THOMAS

108

Anna Pavlova in costume, c.1927 photographer unknown courtesy of National Library of Australia, Canberra

Anna Pavlova Australian tour, 1926 photographer unknown courtesy of State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

109

CLARICE BECKETT 43 (1887 – 1935) THE YARRA, SUNSET, c.1930 oil on board 30.5 x 35.5 cm signed lower right: C Beckett inscribed with title verso: The Yarra, Sunset estimate :

$40,000 – 50,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 7 December 2005, lot 16 Private collection, Melbourne RELATED WORK Across the Yarra, c.1931, oil on cardboard, 32.5 x 46.0 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

‘When we look back at the 20th century from a vantage point in the next, certain Australian artists stand out, not just for the aesthetic quality of their work, but also for their significant contribution to our understanding of what constitutes the Australian identity. Clarice Beckett is one such artist. Her works capture the essence of Australian city life, in particular that of Melbourne and more specifically that of the bayside suburbs, at a time between the World Wars when the advent of the modern age was signified by the motor car and the ubiquitous telegraph pole’.1 Although enjoying universal admiration and acclaim today, Clarice Beckett’s highly evocative works that celebrated modernity and the quiet beauty of suburbia were nevertheless challenging for her time. Not only was the momentous task of expressing Australian values in landscape painting a distinctly male prerogative, with flower pieces and indoor scenes the only subject matter deemed suitable for women artists. Moreover, the ridicule and critical denigration she frequently encountered in reviews of her paintings was the direct result of her association with her teacher, tonal realist painter Max Meldrum – a ferociously argumentative man whose theory and teaching of art as a science based upon exact optical analysis upset conservative art circles and undermined the strict academic approach endorsed by the National Gallery School. Indeed, that Beckett never compromised her unique vision, continuing to paint ‘against all odds’ – and that today her legacy endures despite near obscurity at the time of her death in 1935 and the vast destruction of her works subsequently – poignantly highlights the compelling and inspirational nature of her achievements.

110

Recalling Whistler’s lyrical nocturnes, The Yarra, Sunset, c.1930 offers one of the most exquisite elaborations of the artist’s signature motif – the city enveloped in a rosy toned, transparent veil of luminosity evoking the last moments of twilight. Painted on the Richmond side of the Yarra River, from a position near the Chapel Street bridge, the composition features the railway bridge still present today (although altered in appearance) that carries busy suburban trains to and from the city, with the tall gothic spires of the city churches, Scots and the Independent, just perceptible in the palest silhouette of the background. Although conveying a very definite sense of time and place – Melbourne of the 1930s – paradoxically the work also bears an unmistakable sense of the universal, of silence within its stillness. Rich in lyricism and beauty, it encapsulates the artist’s preference for early evening subjects which, importantly, was not simply to enhance poetic effect. Rather, Beckett delighted in the technical challenge of capturing the essence of her subject within the fleeting moment – of observing the transient, atmospheric effects of light to develop delicate tonal nuances that blurred the boundaries between reality and illusion. As the artist herself aptly elucidated in the catalogue accompanying the sixth annual exhibition of the Twenty Melbourne painters in 1924, her artistic aim was always ‘To give a sincere and truthful representation of a portion of the beauty of Nature, and to show the charm of light and shade, which I try to give forth in correct tones so as to give as nearly as possible an exact illusion of reality’. 2 1. Lindsay, F., ‘Foreword’ in Hollinrake, R., Clarice Beckett: Politically Incorrect, exhibition catalogue, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 1999, p. 3 2. Beckett, C., Twenty Melbourne Painters 6th Annual Exhibition Catalogue, 1924, quoted in Hollinrake, ibid., p. 19

VERONICA ANGELATOS

111

CLARICE BECKETT 44 (1887 – 1935) RICKETTS POINT, BEAUMARIS, c.1920 oil on canvas 36.0 x 45.5 cm signed lower left: C. Beckett bears inscription verso: Beckett / … estimate :

$30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 27 April 1999, lot 3 (as ‘Ricketts Point’) Private collection, Melbourne RELATED WORK Beaumaris Foreshore, c.1926, oil on canvas, 45.5 x 51.0 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

‘… She saw in soft focus and there were no edges in her work. She was concerned with achieving an harmonic atmospheric unity and the fairly consistent lack of brushstrokes makes the paint appear to float on the surface of the canvas … While many paintings were completed in situ, many others were worked upon indoors, taken from colour notations, sketches and memory with later imaginative touches’.1 Upon moving with her family to the Melbourne bayside suburb of Beaumaris in 1919, Clarice Beckett was irresistibly drawn to the sea in all its myriad moods and seasons – thus discovering a rich and endless source of inspiration for her painting in the surrounding coastal landscapes of Ricketts Point, Black Rock, Sandringham and Brighton. As the unmarried dutiful daughter however, responsibility for the care of her failing parents fell solely to her and accordingly, Beckett’s artistic endeavours were restricted to before and after her domestic duties. Indeed, it is testament to Beckett’s passion to paint and unwavering determination to succeed as a professional artist that not only did she continue to paint almost every day, spreading her practice over six hours early each morning and again, late into the evening. Moreover, when her father refused her a dedicated studio claiming ‘the kitchen table would do’, Beckett responded by constructing a small cart to wheel her painting materials around the cliffs and streets of Beaumaris and the neighboring suburbs. 2 Her first solo exhibition was held at the Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne in 1923 and, in another measure of her drive and commitment, she continued to exhibit there annually throughout the next decade before her premature death in 1935 from pneumonia.

112

Yet despite such limitations that seem unbearable from a contemporary perspective, Beckett herself did not seem to feel constrained in terms of her art – to the contrary, as Drusilla Modjeska suggests, she embraced such ‘edges’ as her own. ‘Why would I wish to go somewhere else strange …’, she is reported to have exclaimed when asked why she didn’t travel overseas, ‘I’ve only just got the hang of painting Beaumaris’. 3 With its soft-focus realism, disarming simplicity and insubstantial, almost ethereal quality, Rickett’s Point, Beaumaris, c.1920 demonstrates eloquently Beckett’s mastery of such seaside landscapes. Employing very little paint confidently placed, thus Beckett here exploits to the full the lyrical potential of colour, light, rhythm and tone to imbue the immediate surrounds of her Beaumaris home with a beauty and sensibility that is unmistakably reminiscent of the music harmonies she so admired; as Beckett mused, ‘My pictures, like music, should speak for themselves’.4 Whether capturing the sparkling sunlight on bayside sands, the majesty of stormy seas, or pedestrian bathing boxes, Beckett possessed the remarkable ability to gently transform the most insignificant, fleeting of impressions into monumental visions’ 5, the prosaic into the poetic. Engaging with the ambiguity of ‘exact illusion’, thus Ricketts Point, Beaumaris offers a stunning example of Beckett’s meditations upon the beauty of the transient moment in a modern world. Elegant and lyrical, the work transcends the mundane reality of her subject to present a profoundly moving visual statement derived rather from ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ 6 – as Wordsworth so famously wrote of his own poetry. 1. Hollinrake, R., Clarice Beckett: Politically Incorrect, exhibition catalogue, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 1999, p. 17 2. ibid., pp. 14 – 15 3. Beckett quoted in Modjeska, D., ‘Clarice Beckett: At the Edge’ in Clarice Beckett, exhibition catalogue, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 2014, p. 2 4. Beckett quoted in Hollinrake, op. cit., p. 19 5. Hollinrake, ibid., p. 18 6. Wordsworth, W., Lyrical Ballads, 1802

VERONICA ANGELATOS

113

FERNANDO CUETO AMORSOLO 45 (1892 – 1972, Filipino) GATHERING MANGOES, 1965 oil on canvas 61.0 x 86.5 cm signed and dated lower right: F AMORSOLO 1965 estimate :

PROVENANCE Private collection, Canberra, acquired in Manila, c.1965 Thence by descent Private collection, Canberra

$40,000 – 60,000

Four days after his death in 1972, Fernando Amorsolo was honoured with the title ‘The First National Artist in Painting’, by the then President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos. The honour was in recognition of his enormous contribution to the cultural fabric of his country and reflected the esteem in which he was held by his countrymen. Born into an artistic family in 1892, Amorsolo’s earliest efforts – postcards of local scenes sold to tourists – exhibited a flair for nationalistic pride, as well as a sense for commercial potential. Art school, art prizes and accolades followed as the hardworking Amorsolo gained wider recognition. Patronage also followed and, on a scholarship to Madrid, he encountered firsthand the work of artists such as Goya, Velázquez, Manet and Renoir. When not studying the masters in the Museo del Prado he documented local street life and these encounters had a profound and lasting influence on his work. Through the 1920s and 30s, now back in the Philippines, the artist’s prodigious output and the popularity of his bucolic and idyllic local subject matter ensured that his reputation continued to grow. Amorsolo’s painting also became extremely popular with visiting diplomats and dignitaries and many of his works have found their way to all corners of the globe. This image of a peaceful Eden was shattered with the onset of World War Two and the subsequent Japanese occupation of the Philippines. Amorsolo’s observations of his occupied homeland provided a bold, new, but dark subject, the works he created casting him as a heroic and patriotic artist. His images of Filipino men defending the honour of local, peasant women against the Japanese, struck a fiercely defiant chord in the hearts and minds of his countrymen, and further cemented his reputation. Following the war, Amorsolo returned to the subject which would occupy him for the rest of life; languid rural scenes depicting workers farming the rich soil and celebrating the fruits their land delivers. Our current example, Gathering Mangoes, 1965, is typical of Amorsolo’s most popular works in which depictions of summer’s mellow fruitfulness combine with the artist’s warm colour harmonies to deliver a lush celebration of local life and nature. HENRY MULHOLLAND

114

115

A PAIR OF RAINFOREST SWORD CLUBS 46 NORTH EAST QUEENSLAND, late 19th – early 20th century carved and shaped hardwood, each with leaf like form tapering to a handle encrusted with black resin on the grip 150.0 and 140.0 cm length PROVENANCE Private collection, New South Wales, acquired c.1930s Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney Private collection, Melbourne estimate :

116

$6,000 – 8,000 (2)

A RAINFOREST SHIELD 47 NORTH EAST QUEENSLAND, late 19th – early 20th century carved from the buttress root of a tropical fig tree, the front with raised boss and decorated with traditional designs in red, yellow, white and black pigments 81.0 cm length PROVENANCE Private collection, New South Wales, acquired c.1930s Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney Private collection, Melbourne estimate :

$35,000 – 45,000

117

PADDY NYUNKUNY BEDFORD 48 (c.1922 – 2007) MAD GAP, 2004 ochres and pigments with acrylic binder on composition board 80.0 x 100.0 cm signed with initials verso: PB bears inscription verso: Jirrawun Arts cat. PB CB 6-2004-31 and WM 2005 estimate :

PROVENANCE Jirrawun Arts, Kununurra William Mora Galleries, Melbourne (stamped verso) Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Paddy Bedford: Heart of Blackness, William Mora Galleries, Melbourne, 25 May – 18 June 2005 LITERATURE Storer, R., Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, p. 162 (illus.)

$45,000 – 65,000

The art of Paddy Bedford is a convergence of what Marcia Langton calls the ‘beautiful and the brutal’.1 His paintings evoke the recent, often dark, history of the East Kimberley following white settlement, yet remain strikingly beautiful in their painterly rendering of country with a sublime encrusted surface, where washes of pink and grey create a unique translucent quality, a consequence of the artist’s wet on wet painting technique. Gooweriny or Mad Gap (The place of the Cypress Pine) is found in the southern part of the artist’s Mother’s country in the remote east Kimberley region of Western Australia. Located about 50 kilometres south of Bedford Downs Station, Gooweriny (also known as Jarlaloon) is situated beside a seasonal river with permanent water-holes and is surrounded by big hills where caves, utilised by local people as shelter before the arrival of Europeans, are found. Whilst renderings of the Mad Gap site by other artists from Bedford’s generation are mostly concerned with Gija myths, by means of a compositional structure that ‘stems from the memory of sites and features of the landscape corresponding with stories of the ngarranggarni, which form an evolving repertoire of designs or motifs,’ 2; Bedford challenges this interpretation in his representation. Locations integral to memories of the artist’s everyday stock-camp life, and the surrounding country he visited whilst mustering cattle, feature strongly in the composition of Mad Gap, 2004. Roads, rivers and landscape becoming recurring motifs in his work. Insightful in its renewal of memory from the killing times and station times, Bedford conveys the history, recent and past, within the geography of the region. In relation to Bedford’s art, Michael Dolk notes that it is ‘no longer sustained by the social relations that once defined the practice and meaning of painting in its ceremonial context, Bedford’s painting reveals an introspective dimension, a process of reflection and dialogue with different social and cultural dimensions of the Gardiya (whitefella) world’. 3 1. Langton, M., ‘Goowoomji’s World’ in Michael, L., Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, p. 51 2. Dolk, M., ‘Are We Strangers in this Place?’ in Michael, L., Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2006, p. 40 3. ibid., p. 17

CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE

118

119

ROVER THOMAS (JOOLAMA) 49 (c.1926 – 1998) UNTITLED, c.1993 – 94 natural earth pigments and synthetic binders on canvas 80.5 x 100.5 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size, and Waringarri Arts cat. AP3730 and S.3973 estimate :

PROVENANCE Waringarri Arts, Kununurra Utopia Art Sydney, Sydney Private collection Mossgreen, Melbourne, 28 October 2014, lot 90 Company collection, Sydney

$20,000 – 30,000

Idiosyncratic in style, the paintings of Rover Thomas established a new typology and visual language distinct to the east Kimberley region of Western Australia. Uniting both planar and aerial views of land in his compositions, Thomas articulated a highly personal way of telling the stories and establishing connection to the land and its related ceremonies. The past and the present converge in Thomas’s enigmatic paintings. They map tracts of country whilst exploring the regional history and the ancestral tales of these same locations. Thomas’s compositions carefully balance the landscape and the narrative in natural harmony, his canvases executed in earth pigments and natural resins are characterised by the interaction between large expanses and bold forms. Painted for Waringarri Arts in Kununurra in the mid-1990s, Untitled, c.1993 – 94, is typical of Rover’s paintings where layers of natural pigments affixed with a synthetic binder are outlined by a tracery of white dots painted with huntite, a white chalky pigment used in ceremony and rock art. The work shows a planar view of landscape where a large black expanse narrows between two imposing irregular forms infilled with yellow and red pigments that recall the rocky outcrops of the Kimberley plateau, while at the same time evoking ancestral paths and delineating areas of country. During his lifetime, Rover Thomas was widely acclaimed as a major Australian artist. In 1990 he was selected as one of the first two Aboriginal artists (together with Trevor Nickolls), to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale and in 1994 was the beneficiary of a retrospective exhibition, Roads Cross, The Paintings of Rover Thomas, held at National Gallery of Australia, Canberra between February and June 1994. In his tribute to Rover Thomas after the artist’s death, Kim Akerman noted that, ‘as an artist he took the experiences of a rich and varied life and, drawing on the cosmological and historical references that so vividly underpin the lives of Aboriginal peoples throughout Australia, presented us all with a new and profound view of the land we occupy’.1 1. Akerman, K., ‘Rover Thomas; A Tribute’, ARTLINK, issue 20:1, March 2000, p. 22 – 23

CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE

120

121

JOHN MAWURNDJUL 50 born 1952 MILMILNGKAN, 2007 natural earth pigments on eucalyptus bark 112.5 x 47.0 cm (irregular) PROVENANCE Maningrida Arts and Culture, Maningrida, Northern Territory (label attached verso, cat. 1874-07) Private collection, New South Wales estimate :

122

$10,000 – 15,000

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Maningrida Arts and Culture, Maningrida which the artist states in part: ‘This is the site at Milmilngkan and these represent water, you can see here the water comes out (the little round dots are water/springs) They are springs. The water comes out at Milmilngkan and there are springs there surrounded by water pandanus (pandanus aquaticus) where the water comes out of the ground. This may be caused by the rainbow serpents that live under the ground there. This is all cross-hatched here. The cross-hatching represents the country there …. I’ve recently seen water coming up out of the ground there.’

JOHN MAWURNDJUL 52 born 1952 BULUWANA SPIRIT FIGURE, 2002 natural earth pigments on carved hardwood 201.0 cm height PROVENANCE Maningrida Arts and Culture, Maningrida, Northern Territory (cat. 6964-02) Private collection, Perth Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 5 October 2004, lot 107 The Harland Collection, New South Wales EXHIBITED John Mawurndjul: I am the old and the new, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 6 July – 23 September 2018; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 26 October 2018 – 28 January 2019 LITERATURE Altman, J., et al., John Mawurndjul: I am the old and the new, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2018, pp. 266 – 67 (illus.), 379 estimate :

JOHN MAWURNDJUL 51 born 1952 BULUWANA, 1984 – 85 natural earth pigments and natural binders on eucalyptus bark 117.0 x 22.0 cm (irregular) bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Maningrida Arts cat. K657 (80) estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

$5,000 – 7,000

PROVENANCE Maningrida Arts and Culture, Maningrida, Northern Territory Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in 1985 RELATED WORK Namarrkon Ngal-daluk, the Female Lightning Spirit, 1983, earth pigments on Stringybark, 136.9 x 40.4 cm, in the collection of National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

123

FRANK HINDER 53 (1906 – 1992) FORMS, 1938 tempera on paper 21.5 x 15.0 cm signed and dated lower right: F C Hinder 38 signed and dated upper left (inverted): F C Hinder 38 PROVENANCE Bloomfield Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney LITERATURE Frank Hinder Online Catalogue Raisonné [https://www.frankhinder.com.au/artwork. php?id=10529] (accessed 20/02/19) estimate :

$5,000 – 7,000

GODFREY MILLER 54 (1893 – 1964) UNTITLED (FOREST SERIES), c.1961 oil, pen, ink and pencil on canvas 68.0 x 101.0 cm Artarmon Galleries label attached verso signed by J. Henshaw, executor of the artist’s estate PROVENANCE Estate of the artist, Sydney William S Ellenden Pty Ltd, Sydney, 15 September 1981, lot 95 Private collection Estate of Kerry Hill AO, Perth estimate :

124

$6,000 – 9,000

YVONNE AUDETTE 55 born 1930 COMPOSIZIONE, 1956 oil on linen 84.5 x 67.5 cm signed and dated lower right: Audette / 56 artist’s stamp verso bears inscription on frame verso: 5044 on Galleria Schettini stamp estimate :

$18,000 – 25,000

PROVENANCE Galleria Schettini, Milan, Italy (label attached verso, stock no. F.S. 7515) Galleria Michelangelo, Bergamo, Italy (label attached verso) Private collection Sotheby’s, Sydney, 21 March 2005, lot 60 Company collection, Sydney

125

TONY TUCKSON 56 (1921 – 1973) SEATED NUDE NO 2 (TD 472), c.1955 oil wash and charcoal on paper on card 101.5 x 76.5 cm PROVENANCE Watters Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2005 estimate :

126

$4,000 – 6,000

EXHIBITED Tony Tuckson – Woman, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 15 February – 12 March 2005, cat. 10 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) LITERATURE Thomas, D., Free, R. and Legge, G., Tony Tuckson, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1989, fig. 51, pp. 149 (illus.), 187 (dated as ‘1952 – 56?’)

IAN FAIRWEATHER 57 (1891 – 1974) MOTHER AND CHILD, CAIRNS, 1949 gouache on paper 21.0 x 17.0 cm signed lower right: ‘if’ in Chinese PROVENANCE Len Annois, Melbourne Thence by descent Mavis Martha Annois, Melbourne Kath and Jim Morgan, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney estimate :

$20,000 – 30,000

EXHIBITED The Drawings of Ian Fairweather, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 21 June – 24 August 1997; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 17 October – 7 December 1997; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 7 February– 29 March 1998 (label attached verso) LITERATURE Fisher, T., The Drawings of Ian Fairweather, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997, pp. 40 (illus.), 63

127

RICHARD LARTER 58 (1929 – 2014) PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN, 1961 enamel on composition board 50.5 x 42.0 cm signed with initials and dated lower right: RL 61 signed and dated verso: R. Larter / … / April 1961 PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne estimate :

$3,000 – 5,000

PETER POWDITCH 59 born 1942 SUN-TORSO 100, 1971 enamel on board 137.0 x 91.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: “SUN-TORSO, 100” 1971 / … / POWDITCH … PROVENANCE Utopia Art Sydney, Sydney The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy ChambersGrundy Collection, acquired from the above in 1989 (stamped and labels attached verso) Bonhams, Sydney, 26 June 2013, lot 74 Private collection, Sydney LITERATURE Peter Powditch Coast – A Retrospective, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 2017, pp. 65, 107 (illus. with the artist) estimate :

128

$6,000 – 8,000

STANISLAUS RAPOTEC 60 (1913 – 1997) COMPOSITION, 1962 oil on composition board 92.0 x 122.0 cm signed and dated lower right: 62 Rapotec signed and inscribed with title on stretcher verso: COMPOSITION By / stanislaus / RAPOTEC inscribed on frame verso: No 752 . MS155 estimate :

$15,000 – 20,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 1 May 2000, lot 444 Eva Breuer Art Dealer, Sydney (label attached verso, stock no. 53585) Goldman Sachs J B Were Collection, Sydney Sotheby’s, Sydney, 28 June 2005, lot 329 Eva Breuer Art Dealer, Sydney (label attached verso, stock no. 57636) Private collection, Sydney

129

JUSTIN O’BRIEN 61 (1917 – 1996) YOUNG GIRL ARRANGING FLOWERS, 1995 oil on paper 56.0 x 42.0 cm signed upper right: O’BRIEN inscribed with title verso: GIRL ARRANGING FLOWERS No 6 5 [‘5’ in different pen] estimate :

130

$15,000 – 25,000

PROVENANCE Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane (partial label attached verso) Art Galleries Schubert, Queensland (label attached verso) Agnes Tatay, Queensland Thence by descent Private collection, Queensland EXHIBITED Justin O’Brien, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, 21 July – August 1995, cat. 7 (illus. on cover of exhibition catalogue) LITERATURE France, C., Justin O’Brien: Image and Icon, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1997, pl. 44, p. 129 (illus.)

MARGARET OLLEY 62 (1923 – 2011) PINK DATURAS I, 1963 oil on composition board 76.0 x 61.0 cm signed and dated lower right: Olley 1963 bears inscription on frame verso: Margaret Olley / … / Daturas estimate :

$20,000 – 30,000

PROVENANCE Australian Galleries, Melbourne Private collection Christie’s, Sydney, 26 August 2003, lot 12 (as ‘Floral Still Life – Tiger Lilies’) Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Margaret Olley, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 10 – 20 March 1964, cat. 2 LITERATURE The Olley Project [https://ehive.com/collections/5439/ objects/467596/pink-daturas-i] (accessed 26/02/2019)

131

MORTIMER MENPES 63 (1855 – 1938) ARCHER, c.1897 watercolour and gouache on paper on wood panel 29.5 x 22.5 cm signed lower right: Mortimer Menpes artist’s gilt fluted frame with floral motif corners PROVENANCE probably: Dowdeswell Galleries, London Private collection, London Bonhams, London, 25 June 2014, lot 54 (as ‘The Archer’) Private collection, Adelaide estimate :

132

$15,000 – 20,000

EXHIBITED probably: Mortimer Menpes: Paintings and Drawings of Japan, Dowdeswell Galleries, London, May – June 1897 RELATED WORK Archers, illus. in Menpes, D., Japan: A Record In Colour, Adam and Charles Black, London, 1901, pl. 35, p. 69

CHARLES CONDER 64 (1868 – 1909) THE BLUE SOFA, c.1905 oil on canvas 86.0 x 112.0 cm signed lower right: CONDER

PROVENANCE C. Patterson Knight Esq. The Leger Galleries, London, 1965 (label attached verso) Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Society, Victoria Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 22 November 1999, lot 62 Private collection, Melbourne estimate :

$25,000 – 40,000

EXHIBITED Charles Conder, Leicester Galleries, London, 1905 Charles Conder, Leicester Galleries, London, 1906 Charles Conder, Leicester Galleries, London, January 1913, cat. 67 International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, London, 1907 (partial label attached verso) Anthony Horden Galleries, Sydney, 1927, cat. 16 The Leger Galleries, London, 1965 LITERATURE Gibson, F., Charles Conder, His Life and Works, The Bodley Head, London, 1914, pl. LXXXVII (illus.), pp. 49, 101 – 102 Foster, G., ‘A Quest for a Conder’, Art Bulletin of Victoria, Melbourne, 1968 – 9, pp. 39 – 40 Hoff, U., Charles Conder, Lansdowne, Melbourne, 1972, cat. C110 (incorrectly described as signed lower left), no. 35, p. 87 (illus.) Richardson, D., Art in Australia, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1988, fig. 3.10, pp. 20 (illus.), 21 (collection of Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Society, Victoria)

133

BERTRAM MACKENNAL 65 (1863 – 1931) SALOMÉ, c.1895 bronze 28.5 cm height signed at base: B. MACKENNAL inscribed at base: LONDON / SALOME estimate :

$15,000 – 20,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, France EXHIBITED Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London, May 1897, cat. 2053 (another example) Bertram Mackennal sculpture from the Stawell Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, February 1901 (another example) Bertram Mackennal Retrospective Exhibition, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 17 August – 4 November 2007; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 30 November 2007 – 24 February 2008 (another example, lent by the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth) LITERATURE Edwards, D., Bertram Mackennal: The Fifth Balnaves Foundation Sculpture Project, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, pp. 5, 115 (illus., another example) RELATED WORK Other examples of this work are held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth

134

135

DAVID DAVIES 66 (1864 – 1939) ST IVES, c.1900 oil on canvas 28.5 x 61.5 cm signed and inscribed with title lower left: D.DAVIES. ST IVES estimate :

$16,000 – 20,000

SYDNEY LONG 67 (1871 – 1955) CORN GROWING IN THE HAWKESBURY, c.1895 oil on wood panel 23.5 x 24.5 cm signed lower right: S Long PROVENANCE Private collection, Sydney, acquired c.1895 Thence by descent G.R. Packer Christie’s, Melbourne, 20 November 1995, lot 60 Dr J. P. Rasmussen OAM, Sydney Thence by descent The Rasmussen Family collection, Sydney estimate :

136

$7,000 – 10,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 29 March 1995, lot 255 (as ‘Evening, St Ives’) Private collection, Melbourne Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 16 June 2004, lot 86 Estate of Roger Langsworth, Sydney

FREDERICK McCUBBIN 68 (1855 – 1917) TI TREE AT MENTONE, 1901 oil on wood panel 25.5 x 35.5 cm signed and dated lower left: F McCubbin / 1901 estimate :

$25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 8 November 1989, lot 3 Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 4 April 2000, lot 199 Bensons Collection, Melbourne Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 16 June 2004, lot 49 Estate of Roger Langsworth, Sydney EXHIBITED Australian Art: McCubbin to Whiteley, Bundoora Homestead Federation Centre for the Arts, Victoria, 11 April – 1 June 2003

137

ALBERT NAMATJIRA 69 (1902 – 1959) GHOST GUMS, MACDONNELL RANGE, c.1947 watercolour on paper 36.5 x 26.5 cm signed lower right: ALBERT NAMATJIRA estimate :

$20,000 – 30,000

PROVENANCE Mary Corkery Artists’ Agent, Brisbane (receipt attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1947 Thence by descent Private collection, Toronto EXHIBITED Albert Namatjira: Watercolours of Central Australia, Commercial Bank Chambers, Brisbane, 4 – 8 November 1947, cat. 23 RELATED WORK Ghost Gum, Central Australia, c.1945 in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, illus. in French, A., Seeing the Centre: The Art of Albert Namatjira, 1902–1959, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, p. 117 Ghost Gum, c.1948, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, illus. in French, A., Seeing the Centre: The Art of Albert Namatjira, 1902–1959, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, pp. 116, 124

‘He was definitely the beginning of a recognition of Aboriginal people by white Australia’.1 Albert Namatjira was already an accomplished craftsman producing pokerwork decorated woomeras, boomerangs and wooden plaques when Victorian artists Rex Battarbee and John Gardner held an exhibition of watercolour paintings at the Hermannsburg Mission in 1934. Namatjira’s immediate interest in the medium and his skilful implementing of the techniques and materials of western landscape painting set off an artistic career that spanned a quarter of a century and elevated Namatjira to a household name across Australia.

Namatjira’s painting of the central Australian landscape was both innovative and personal. However, contained within the cover of the western artform, the artist also made claim to his country, plural meanings can be seen to have existed within his paintings. A landscape sight can also be read as memory of an ancestral site and through the reiteration of subject, a claim of ownership could be made. Gum trees and mountains feature prominently in Namatjira’s work and Ghost Gums, Macdonnell Range, c.1947 is a prominent example of both a familiar subject to the viewer and a statement of belonging by the artist. As with many of Namatjira’s paintings, the towering ghost gum dominating the foreground is clearly the subject of this work. The white gum of two or three trunks to the left of the picture, provides the key to the pictorial organization, playing a pivotal role as both a device for opening and framing the picture plane. The distant mountain range contained within the trunk and branches of the tree is viewed past the sloping hill in the middle ground, each chronicled in harmonious red and purple tones and separated by small valleys populated with olive foliaged trees with black trunks. The distant view is a stark contrast to the whiteness and solid strength of the Ghost Gum which is both the paintings focus and the pointer to a far off landscape. An incredibly hardy species, the Ghost Gum (Eucalyptus papuana), known as ilwempe to the Western Arrernte, grows in extraordinary inhospitable conditions. It features in Aboriginal creation stories where individual trees can be considered to represent ancestral beings. 2 The art of Albert Namatjira can be seen to have inspired his own and subsequent generations of Aboriginal people and artists across Australia. Brenda Croft argues that the Artist’s gift to indigenous and non-indigenous people is ‘more than the sum parts of watercolour paints on paper. It is an essence that resides in the strength of Namatjira’s work – his courage, his sorrow, his spirituality… where the enduring influence of this one man upon the entire indigenous arts and culture industry continues to be felt’. 3 1. Charles Perkins, quoted on the 7.30 Report: McLaughlin, M., ‘A Report on the Life of Albert Namatjira’, 7.30 Report, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), broadcast 3 July 2002 2. French, A., Seeing the Centre: The Art of Albert Namatjira, 1902 – 1959, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, p. 121 3. Croft, B., ‘Albert’s Gift’ in French, A., Seeing the Centre: The Art of Albert Namatjira, 1902 – 1959, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, p. 148

CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE

138

139

PAUL PARTOS 70 (1943 – 2002) CALENDAR PAINTING, 1988 oil on canvas 197.0 x 172.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Paul Partos 1988 / Calendar painting estimate :

140

$15,000 – 20,000

PROVENANCE Realities Gallery, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED probably: Paul Partos, Calendar Day Paintings, Realities Gallery, Melbourne October – November 1988

AIDA TOMESCU 71 born 1955 ALBASTRU, 2000 oil on canvas 183.0 x 153.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Aida Tomescu / ‘ALBASTRU’ – 2000 / … bears inscription on stretcher bar verso: M.B estimate :

$20,000 – 30,000

PROVENANCE Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2003 Christie’s, Sydney, 24 May 2005, lot 62 Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Aida Tomescu – New Paintings, Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney, 15 November – 17 December 2000, cat. 2 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

141

KEN UNSWORTH 72 born 1931 STONES AGAINST THE SKY, 1983 river stones and wood 50.0 x 62.0 x 62.0 cm estimate :

142

$8,000 – 12,000

PROVENANCE Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney (label attached at base) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2003 EXHIBITED The Art of Flowers, survey 1973 – 2003, drawings, scale models, sculptures, Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney, 30 April – 31 May 2003 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 28)

LIONEL BAWDEN 73 born 1974 SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP, 2016 lead and coloured Staedtler pencils, epoxy, incralac, metal 76.5 x 58.0 x 6.0 cm estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, New South Wales EXHIBITED Lionel Bawden: Dawn Chorus, Karen Woodbury Fine Art, Melbourne, 9 March – 9 April 2016

143

RICK AMOR 74 born 1948 RUNNING WOMAN, 1988 oil on canvas 46.0 x 55.5 cm signed and dated lower left: RICK AMOR 88 signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: RICK AMOR/ JAN 88 / RUNNING WOMAN estimate :

144

$15,000 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 20,000

PROVENANCE Niagara Galleries, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1988

BEN QUILTY 75 born 1973 THE DEAD PIRATE, 2005 oil on canvas 21.0 x 21.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed verso: ‘The Dead Pirate’ / Oil on canvas / Ben Quilty / 2005 / [skull & crossbones] further dedicated to Adam Cullen verso: AC, here’s to plunder, rape and pillage...and ten thousand more cracking works / Happy fuckin Birthday estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

PROVENANCE Adam Cullen, Sydney, a gift from the artist on his 40th birthday Estate of Adam Cullen, Sydney Private collection, Sydney

145

NINGURA NAPURRULA 76 (c.1938 – 2013) SITE OF WIRRULNGA, 2005 synthetic polymer paint on linen 152.0 x 122.0 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Papunya Tula Artists cat. NN0510226 estimate :

146

$10,000 – 15,000

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 26 July 2010, lot 164 Company collection, Sydney

RONNIE TJAMPITJINPA 77 born c.1943 OLD WOMAN AND HER TWO CHILDREN (THUNDER AND LIGHTNING), 1993 synthetic polymer paint on linen 152.5 x 122.0 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size, and Papunya Tula Artists cat. RT931224 estimate :

$15,000 – 20,000

PROVENANCE Painted at Kintore, Northern Territory, in March 1993 Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs Private collection, Sydney Company collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2004

147

ROBERT CAMPBELL JUNIOR 78 (1944 – 1993) ABO CAMP SITE, 1987 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 101.0 x 124.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed lower right: ROBERT CAMPBELL / JR / 6.6.1987/ NGAKU inscribed on label verso: 32 estimate :

148

$8,000 – 12,000

PROVENANCE Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Canberra EXHIBITED Robert Campbell Jnr, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 23 March – 9 April 1988, cat. 32

MIRDIDINGKINGATHI JUWARNDA 79 SALLY GABORI (c.1924 – 2015) DIBIRDIBI COUNTRY, 2012 synthetic polymer paint on linen 101.0 x 196.0 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, title, medium and Mornington Island Arts and Crafts cat. 7700-L-SG-0512 estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

PROVENANCE Mornington Island Arts and Crafts, Queensland Private collection, Sydney Menzies, Sydney, 23 June 2016, lot 219 Private collection, Melbourne

149

JASON BENJAMIN 80 born 1971 SHE ACHES FOR HIM, 2003 oil on canvas 122.0 x 122.0 cm signed and dated and inscribed with title verso: She aches / for him / August ’03 / Benjamin estimate :

150

$12,000 – 18,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne Christie’s, Melbourne, 25 November 2003, lot 5 Private collection, Melbourne Sotheby’s, Sydney, 21 March 2005, lot 2 Company collection, Sydney

PROVENANCE John Williams, Sydney Private collection, New South Wales

CRESSIDA CAMPBELL 81 born 1960 THE VERANDAH, 1987 screenprint in 30 colours 94.0 x 58.5 cm AP aside from an edition of 99 signed, dated and inscribed with title below image estimate :

$6,000 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 9,000

LITERATURE Crayford, P., (ed.), The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures, Sydney, cat. S8701, p. 355 RELATED WORK The Verandah, 1985, woodblock print, 95.0 x 59.0 cm, illus. in The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures, Sydney, p. 195

151

MARGARET PRESTON 82 (1875 – 1963) RED BOW, 1925 hand-coloured woodcut 24.5 x 18.5 cm edition: 2/50 signed with initials in image lower left: MP signed, dated, numbered, and inscribed below image: Native Flowers / 2nd proof – 1925 / Margaret Preston estimate :

$18,000 – 24,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, New South Wales Thence by descent Private collection, New South Wales EXHIBITED Thea Proctor and Margaret Preston Exhibition, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 18 November – 2 December 1925, cat. 16 (another example) Exhibition of Woodcuts by Margaret Preston, Dunster Galleries, Adelaide, September 1926, cat. 47 (another example) Exhibition of Prints, European, Australian and Japanese, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, December 1927 (another example, as ‘The Red Bow’) Forty-Fourth Annual Exhibition of the Art Society of Tasmania, Hobart Town Hall, 14 – 23 February 1928, cat. 138 (another example) The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 23 May – 22 July 1980, and touring, cat. P17 (another example, dated as c.1927) Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 29 July – 23 October 2005 and touring in 2006 to, Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (another example) LITERATURE Art in Australia, Margaret Preston Number, Sydney Ure Smith, Sydney, 3rd series, no. 22, December 1927 (illus. cover, and pl. 37, another example, as ‘The Red Bow’) North, I., The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980, p. 54 (illus., another example) Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1987, cat. 104, p. 120 (illus., another example) Edwards, D., Peel, R. and Mimmocchi, D., Margaret Preston Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, pp. 77 (illus. another example), 80, 82, 114, 285 RELATED WORK Another example of this print is held in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

152

153

MARGARET PRESTON 83 (1875 – 1963) MOSMAN BRIDGE, c.1927 hand-coloured woodcut 25.0 x 18.5 cm signed with initials in image lower right: MP signed and dated below image: Margaret Preston 1929 [sic] estimate :

$20,000 – 30,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, U.S.A. Private collection, Washington, U.S.A., acquired from the above in 1984 EXHIBITED A Survey of Australian Relief Prints, Deutscher Galleries, Melbourne, 13 April – 5 May 1978, cat. 28 (another example, dated as c.1926) The Alan Renshaw Bequest, S.H. Ervin Museum and Art Gallery, Sydney, 9 January – 25 February 1979, cat. 47 (another example, illus. on exhibition catalogue cover) The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980 and touring, cat. 13 (another example, dated as c.1925) Margaret Preston: the art of constant rearrangement, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 December 1985 – 9 February 1986, cat. 14 (another example) The Prints of Margaret Preston, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 8 August – 18 October 1987, cat. 36 (another example) Margaret Preston in Mosman, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney, 7 September – 13 October 2002 (another example, illus. in exhibition catalogue) Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 29 July – 23 October 2005 and touring in 2006 to, Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (another example)

154

LITERATURE Draffin, N., Australian Woodcuts and Linocuts of the 1920s and 1930s, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1976, p. 35 (illus. another example, as ‘Mosman Bridge (large) N.S.W., c.1926) Deutscher, C., and Butler, R., A Survey of Australian Relief Prints, Deutscher Galleries, Melbourne, 1978, cat. 28, p. 21 (illus., another example, dated as c.1926) North, I. (ed.), The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980 and touring, cat. P.13, pp. 36 (illus. another example, dated as c.1925), 53 Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National Gallery, Canberra and Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987, cat. 113, p. 127 (illus., another example) Edwards, D., Peel, R. and Mimmocchi, D., Margaret Preston, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, pp. 82 (illus., another example), 286 RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

155

ELIOTH GRUNER 84 (1882 – 1939) STILL MORNING, 1926 oil on plywood 24.5 x 29.5 cm signed and dated lower right: GRUNER 1926 inscribed with title verso: 8 / Still Morning PROVENANCE probably: Macquarie Galleries, Sydney John Willoughby Kenny, Melbourne Private collection, Victoria, gift from the above estimate :

156

$15,000 – 20,000

EXHIBITED probably: Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Elioth Gruner, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 10 – 21 August 1926, cat. 8 probably: Society of Artists’ Annual Exhibition, Education Department’s Art Gallery, Sydney, 8 September – 5 October 1928, cat. 164 We are grateful to Steven Miller, Head of the Art Gallery of New South Wales Research Library and Archive, for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

GRACE COSSINGTON SMITH 85

(1892 – 1984) SUSSEX COUNTRY, 1950 oil on canvas board 34.0 x 26.5 cm signed and dated lower left: G. Cossington Smith 50 signed, dated and inscribed with title on artist’s label verso: Sussex Country / 1950. / Grace Cossington Smith estimate :

$14,000 – 18,000

PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 2 May 2002, lot 186 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Grace Cossington Smith, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 21 June – 10 July 1972, cat. 34

157

LLOYD REES 86 (1895 – 1988) AUTUMN AFTERNOON, 1935 pencil on paper 19.5 x 26.5 cm signed and dated lower right: L. REES 1935 PROVENANCE Society of Artists, Sydney possibly: Leonard Joel, 1977 Private collection, Victoria, acquired c.1977 EXHIBITED Society of Artists Annual Exhibition 1935, The Education Department’s Art Gallery, Sydney, 6 September – 4 October 1935, cat. 57 RELATED WORK The Church on the Hill, 1935, pencil on paper, 19.1 x 26.1 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

LLOYD REES 87 (1895 – 1988) TUSCANY, 1966 pencil, pen and ink on paper 43.0 x 57.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title lower right: L REES / TUSCANY / 1966 PROVENANCE possibly: Artarmon Galleries, Sydney, late 1960s Private collection, Victoria estimate :

158

$8,000 – 12,000

HANS HEYSEN 88 (1877 – 1968) ENCOUNTER BAY, 1929 watercolour on paper 33.0 x 40.0 cm signed and dated lower left: HANS HEYSEN. 1929. estimate :

$12,000 – 18,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, South Australia RELATED WORK The South Coast, 1926, oil on canvas, 71.1 x 91.4 cm, formerly in The Foster’s Collection of Australian Art, illus. in North, I., Heysen, Macmillan, Sydney in conjunction with the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1979, cat. 48, p. 57

159

DONALD FRIEND 89 (1915 – 1989) RESTING FIGURE, BORNEO, 1945 ink and gouache on paper on card 32.0 x 41.0 cm signed and dated upper right: Donald ‘45 estimate :

160

$3,000 – 4,000

PROVENANCE Estate of Tony Woods, Melbourne

HAROLD FREEDMAN 90 (1915 – 1999) LANCASTER IN FLIGHT, 1942 oil on canvas on board 71.0 x 57.5 cm signed lower right: HAROLD FREEDMAN bears inscription verso: PAGE 48 RAAF LOG / AWM / 27681 / LANCASTER IN FLIGHT / by H FREEDMAN estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

PROVENANCE Estate of the artist, Victoria Thence by descent Private collection, Victoria LITERATURE RAAF log, Royal Australian Air Force, Canberra, 1943, p. 48 (illus.) Fry, G., Freedman, D., and Jack, D., Harold Freedman: The Big Picture, Melbourne Mural Studio, Melbourne, 2017, p. 24 (illus.)

161

CLIFTON PUGH 91 (1924 – 1990) DUNMOOCHIN LANDSCAPE, 1970 oil on composition board 91.0 x 121.5 cm signed and dated lower right: Clifton / ‘70 bears inscription verso: CLIFTON PUGH PROPERTY OF JOSEPH BROWN estimate :

162

$6,000 – 9,000

PROVENANCE Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne

CLIFTON PUGH 92 (1924 – 1990) DEAD WOOD, 1959 oil on composition board 68.5 x 91.0 cm signed and dated lower right: Clifton / APR ‘59 inscribed with title verso: DEAD WOOD bears inscription on label verso: DEAD WOOD / CLIFTON PUGH estimate :

$12,000 – 18,000

PROVENANCE Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1964

163

HUGH SAWREY 93 (1923 – 1999) THE FIGHT (FROM ‘THE CHEAT’ SERIES) oil on canvas 76.0 x 101.5 cm signed lower right: SAWREY bears inscription on stretcher bar verso: (THE “CHEAT” EXPOSED) “THE FIGHT” (IN THE PARLOUR OF THE / KOGAN CREEK HOTEL S.W. QLD) / HUGH SAWREY. (OF “THE CHEAT” SERIES) estimate :

164

$15,000 – 20,000

PROVENANCE Art Galleries Schubert, Queensland Private collection, United Kingdom, acquired from the above, c.2000

GUY BOYD 94 (1923 – 1988) LOVERS CHANGING INTO A TREE, c.1969 bronze 76.0 cm height signed at base: GUY BOYD inscribed verso: SCULPTORS CAST PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne RELATED WORK Lovers Changing into a Tree, 1969, bronze, 38.1 cm height, illus. in Von Bertouch, A., Guy Boyd: The Sculptor, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1976, p. 83 estimate :

$5,000 – 7,000

RAY CROOKE 95 (1922 – 2015) GLASS HOUSE MOUNTAINS, c.1962 oil on composition board 51.0 x 61.0 cm signed lower left: R Crooke PROVENANCE Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane (label attached verso) Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in April 1962 estimate :

$8,000 – 12,000

165

SIDNEY NOLAN 96 (1917 – 1992) MAN BATHING, CENTRAL AUSTRALIA LANDSCAPE, c.1972 wax crayon and fabric dye on paper 52.0 x 76.0 cm signed lower right: Nolan PROVENANCE John Brock, London and Victoria, acquired directly from the artist late 1970s Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above late 1980s estimate :

$8,000 – 12,000

SIDNEY NOLAN 97 (1917 – 1992) MAN IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIA LANDSCAPE, c.1972 wax crayon and fabric dye on paper 52.0 x 76.0 cm signed lower right: Nolan PROVENANCE John Brock, London and Victoria, acquired directly from the artist late 1970s Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above late 1980s estimate :

166

$8,000 – 12,000

SIDNEY NOLAN 98 (1917 – 1992) BURKE AND CAMEL WITH MOTHER AND CHILD, 1967 wax crayon and fabric dye on paper on board 51.5 x 75.5 cm signed and dated lower right: Nolan. / 1967 PROVENANCE Blue Boy Art Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

SIDNEY NOLAN 99 (1917 – 1992) FLOATING FIGURES IN MOUNTAINOUS LANDSCAPE, 1962 wax crayon and fabric dye on paper on board 52.0 x 75.5 cm signed twice and dated lower right: Nolan. / 1962 / Nolan PROVENANCE Blue Boy Art Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne estimate :

$6,000 – 8,000

167

ELLIS ROWAN 100 (1848 – 1922) FLOWERING DOGWOOD (CÓRNUS FLÒRIDA) watercolour and gouache on paper 51.0 x 35.0 cm (sight) signed and inscribed lower left: Ellis Rowan / 251 PROVENANCE M.H. de Young, San Francisco, USA California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, USA, a gift from the above Bonhams & Goodman, Melbourne, 24 November 2009, lot 17 Company collection, Sydney estimate :

$5,000 – 10,000

ELLIS ROWAN 101 (1848 – 1922) TEASEL (DIPSACUS FULLONUM) watercolour and gouache on paper 52.5 x 36.0 cm (sight) signed lower left: Ellis Rowan inscribed lower centre: 242 PROVENANCE M.H. de Young, San Francisco, USA California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, USA, a gift from the above Bonhams & Goodman, Melbourne, 24 November 2009, lot 13 Company collection, Sydney estimate :

$5,000 – 10,000

ELLIS ROWAN 102 (1848 – 1922) CLAMMY LOCUST (ROBINIA VISCÒSA) watercolour and gouache on paper 52.5 x 36.0 cm (sight) signed lower right: Ellis Rowan inscribed with title lower right: 218. Robinia Viscosa PROVENANCE M.H. de Young, San Francisco, USA California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, USA, a gift from the above Bonhams & Goodman, Melbourne, 24 November 2009, lot 14 Company collection, Sydney estimate :

168

$5,000 – 10,000

ELLIS ROWAN 103 (1848 – 1922) FLOWERING FARADAYA SPLENDIDA WITH BUTTERFLY, 1889 watercolour and gouache on paper 73.5 x 53.5 cm (sight) signed lower left: Ellis Rowan dated and inscribed verso: 2nd trip 89 PROVENANCE M.H. de Young, San Francisco, USA California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, USA, a gift from the above Bonhams & Goodman, Melbourne, 24 November 2009, lot 4 (as ‘Untitled’) Company collection, Sydney estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

ELLIS ROWAN 104 (1848 – 1922) SYZYGIUM SP. watercolour and gouache on paper 74.0 x 54.0 cm (sight) signed lower left: Ellis Rowan inscribed verso: Plaque 2 PROVENANCE M.H. de Young, San Francisco, USA California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, USA, a gift from the above Bonhams & Goodman, Melbourne, 24 November 2009, lot 5 (as ‘Untitled’) Company collection, Sydney estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

169

RUPERT BUNNY 105 (1864 – 1947) SPRING LANDSCAPE, SOUTH OF FRANCE oil on board 14.5 x 23.0 cm certificate of authenticity label signed by Sir Daryl Lindsay, attached verso PROVENANCE Private collection, Sydney Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney estimate :

$3,000 – 5,000

RUBERY BENNETT 106 (1893 – 1987) CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN LANDSCAPE oil on composition board 37.0 x 45.0 cm signed lower left: RUBERY BENNETT PROVENANCE Savill Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 13 March 2007, lot 236 Estate of Roger Langsworth, Sydney estimate :

170

$2,000 – 3,000

WILLIAM STRUTT 107 (1825 – 1915) A COLLECTION OF NINE STUDIES pencil and watercolour on paper various sizes each inscribed below image, two signed and three dated (two illustrated)

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne estimate :

$4,000 – 6,000 (9)

171

ROBERT DICKERSON 108 (1924 – 2015) MAN WITH HAT, 2000 pastel on paper 76.0 x 56.0 cm signed lower right: DICKERSON PROVENANCE Art Galleries Schubert, Queensland (label attached verso) Company collection, Sydney estimate :

$5,000 – 7,000

ROBERT DICKERSON 109 (1924 – 2015) NIDA STUDENT pastel on paper 27.5 x 18.0 cm signed lower right: DICKERSON PROVENANCE Company collection, Sydney estimate :

$3,000 – 4,000

ROBERT DICKERSON 110 (1924 – 2015) SERIOUS GIRL pastel on paper 27.5 x 18.0 cm signed lower right: DICKERSON PROVENANCE Company collection, Sydney estimate :

172

$3,000 – 4,000

REX DUPAIN 111 born 1954 BIG BREAKER, 1998 silver gelatin photograph 108.0 x 98.0 cm (image) edition: 4/35 signed, dated and numbered below image estimate :

$2,500 – 3,500

PROVENANCE Private collection Sotheby’s, Sydney, 21 March 2005, lot 156 Company collection, Sydney LITERATURE Dupain, R., Rex Dupain, Australian Images, New Holland, Sydney, 2002, p. 69 (illus. another example) Dupain, R., Inside Sydney: photographs by Max and Rex Dupain, New Holland, Sydney, 2004, p. 145 (illus. another example)

end of sale 173

1. PRIOR TO AUCTION CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTIONS Catalogues can be obtained at Deutscher and Hackett offices or by subscription (see the Catalogue Subscription Form at the back of this catalogue or online for more information). PRE-SALE ESTIMATES The price range estimated against each lot reflects the opinion of our art specialists as to the hammer price expected for the lot at auction and is informed by realised prices for comparable works as well as the particularities of each lot including condition, quality, provenance and rarity. While presale estimates are intended as a guide for prospective buyers, lots can be sold outside of these ranges. Pre-sale estimates include GST (if any) on a lot but do not include the buyer’s premium or other charges where applicable.

prospective buyers and sellers guide ALL PARTIES ARE STRONGLY URGED TO READ THE CONDITIONS OF AUCTION AND SALE INCLUDED IN THIS CATALOGUE

RESERVES The reserve is the minimum price including GST (if any) that the vendor will accept for a lot and below which the lot will not normally be sold. PRE-AUCTION VIEWINGS In both Sydney and Melbourne pre-auction viewings are scheduled for several days in advance of each auction. Deutscher and Hackett specialists are available to give obligation free advice at viewings or by appointment and prospective buyers are strongly encouraged to thoroughly examine and request condition reports for potential purchases. Pre-auction viewings are open to the public and are free to attend. SYMBOL KEY ▲ Unless ownership is clearly stated in the provenance, this symbol is used where a lot is offered which Deutscher and Hackett owns in whole or in part. In these instances, Deutscher and Hackett has a direct financial interest in the property or means that Deutscher and Hackett has guaranteed a minimum price. ● Used to indicate lots for sale without a reserve. EXPLANATION OF CATALOGUING PRACTICE AND TERMS All information published in Deutscher and Hackett catalogues represent statements of opinion and should not be relied upon as fact. All dimensions are listed in centimetres, height before width and are approximate. All prices are in Australian dollars. ARTIST’S NAMES All reference to artists make use of common and not full names in accordance with the standards outlined in the National Gallery of Australia reference publication Australian Art: Artist’s working names authority list. For instance, John Brack rather than Cecil John Brack; Roy de Maistre rather than Leroy Leveson Laurent De Maistre; Rosalie Gascoigne rather than Rosalie Norah Gascoigne. Terms used in this catalogue have the meanings ascribed to them below: a. NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work by the artist. b. Attributed to NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, probably a work by the artist, in whole or in part. c. Circle of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work showing the influence and style of the artist and of the artist’s period. d. Studio/Workshop of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work possibly executed under the supervision of the artist. e. School of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work by a follower or student of the artist. f. Manner of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work created in the style, but not necessarily in the period, of the artist. g. After NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a copy of a work by the artist. h. “signed” / “dated” in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, the work has been signed/dated by the artist. i. “bears signature” / “bears date” in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, the work has possibly been signed/dated by someone other than the artist.

174

PROVENANCE Where appropriate, Deutscher and Hackett will include the known provenance, or history of ownership of lots. Non disclosure may indicate that prior owners are unknown or that the seller wishes to maintain confidentiality. 2. THE AUCTION Auctions are open to the public and are free to attend. Deutscher and Hackett may exclude any person at any time in its discretion. REGISTRATION Bidders must register to bid prior to the commencement of an auction. Deutscher and Hackett may impose other obligations on the registration of bidders in its discretion. CONDUCT OF AUCTION Lots are offered for sale on a consecutive basis. Deutscher and Hackett will determine the conduct of the auction in its absolute discretion, including the regulation of bidding. Consecutive or responsive bids may be placed by the auctioneer on behalf of the vendor up to the reserve. ABSENTEE OR COMMISSION BIDS AND TELEPHONE BIDS As a courtesy service, Deutscher and Hackett will make reasonable efforts to place bids for prospective buyers in absentia provided written or verbal instructions (as indicated on absentee bid forms included at the back of this catalogue or online) are received 24 hours prior to auction. Where successful, lots will be purchased at the lowest possible bid and in the event of identical absentee bids, the bid received earliest will take precedence. Deutscher and Hackett accepts no responsibility for errors and omissions in relation to this courtesy service and reserves the right to record telephone bids. RESERVE Unless indicated otherwise, all lots are subject to a confidential reserve price determined by the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett or the auctioneer may place any number of bids on behalf of the vendor below the reserve price and is not obliged to identify that the bids are being placed on behalf of the vendor. BIDDING INCREMENTS Bidding usually opens below the listed pre-sale estimate and proceeds in the following increments (the auctioneer may vary the bidding increments at his or her discretion): $500 – 1,000 by $50 $1,000 – 2,000 by $100 $2,000 – 3,000 by $200 $3,000 – 5,000 by $200 / $500 / $800 $5,000 – 10,000 by $500 $10,000 – 20,000 by $1,000 $20,000 – 30,000 by $2,000 $30,000 – 50,000 by $2,000 / $5,000 / $8,000 $50,000 – 100,000 by $5,000 $100,000 – 200,000 by $10,000 $200,000 – 300,000 by $20,000 $300,000 – 500,000 by $20,000 / $50,000 / $80,000 $500,000 – 1,000,000 by $50,000 $1,000,000+ by $100,000 SUCCESSFUL BIDS The fall of the auctioneer’s hammer indicates the final bid and the buyer assumes full responsibility for the lot from this time. UNSOLD LOTS Where a lot is unsold, the auctioneer will announce that the lot is “bought in”, “passed”, “withdrawn” or “returned to owner”.

3. AFTER THE AUCTION PAYMENTS Payment must be made within seven days of the date of sale in Australian dollars by cash, cheque, direct deposit, approved credit cards or electronic funds transfer. If payment is made by credit card the price will increase by any merchant fees payable by Deutscher and Hackett (1.15% (including GST) for Visa and Mastercard and 1.65% (including GST) for American Express). In certain circumstances, extension of payment may be granted at the discretion of Deutscher and Hackett. Cleared funds will be held in an interest bearing trust account by Deutscher and Hackett until remitted to the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett will be entitled to retain any interest earned during this period. Payment by the vendor of any charge to Deutscher and Hackett is to be made within fourteen days of invoice. PURCHASE PRICE AND BUYER’S PREMIUM The purchase price will be the sum of the final bid price (including any GST) plus a buyer’s premium set at 22% (plus GST) of the final bid price. Buyers may be liable for other charges reasonably incurred once ownership has passed. GOODS AND SERVICES TAX Buyers are required to pay a 10% G.S.T which sum is: a. included in the final bid prices where buying from a GST registered vendor; and b. included in any additional fees charged by Deutscher and Hackett; and c. added to the buyer’s premium. Where GST applies to some lots the final bid price will be inclusive of the applicable GST. A list of those lots is set out in the catalogue on page 196. If a buyer is classified as a “non-resident” for the purpose of GST, the buyer may be able to recover GST paid on the final purchase price if certain conditions are met. COLLECTION Lots paid for in full may be collected from Deutscher and Hackett premises the day after the auction occurs but lots paid for by cheque may not be collected until all funds have cleared. Proof of identification is required upon collection and lots not collected within seven days of the sale may incur costs associated with external storage and freight. LOSS OR DAMAGE Risk in the lot, including risk of loss or damage, will pass to the buyer on either the date payment is due, whether or not it has been made, or on collection by the buyer, whichever is earlier. The buyer is therefore encouraged to make arrangements to ensure comprehensive cover is maintained from the payment due date. TRANSPORT AND SHIPPING Deutscher and Hackett directly offers services including storage, hanging and display, appraisals and valuations, collection management and research and in all instances will endeavour to coordinate or advise upon shipping and handling, insurance, transport, framing and conservation at the request and expense of the client. Deutscher and Hackett does not accept liability for the acts or omissions of contracted third parties. EXPORT Prospective bidders are advised to enquire about export licences — including endangered species licences and cultural heritage permits, where relevant — prior to bidding at auction. Telephone the Cultural Property and Gifts Section, Museums Section, Ministry for the Arts, on 1800 819 461 for further information. The delay or denial of such a licence will not be grounds for a rescission of sale. COPYRIGHT The copyright in the images and illustrations contained in this catalogue may be owned by third parties and used under licence by Deutscher and Hackett. As between Deutscher and Hackett and the buyer, Deutscher and Hackett retains all rights in the images and illustrations. Deutscher and Hackett retains copyright in the text contained in this catalogue. The buyer must not reproduce or otherwise use the images, illustrations or text without prior written consent.

175

The terms and conditions of business set forth below are subject to amendment by verbal or written notice prior to and during the auction and sale. They constitute the entire contractual agreement with the buyer in respect to any lot offered at auction. By bidding at auction in any manner compliant with bidding procedures, the buyer and all bidders agree to be bound by these terms and conditions and the terms of the prospective buyers and sellers guide contained in this catalogue, as amended. To the extent that an agent acts on behalf of the buyer, liability for obligations arising from these conditions of business will pass to the buyer. Multiple buyers are jointly and severally liable for obligations arising from this agreement. DEFINITIONS 1.

conditions of auction and sale ALL PARTIES ARE STRONGLY URGED TO READ THE CONDITIONS OF AUCTION AND SALE INCLUDED IN THIS CATALOGUE

Definition of terms: a. The ‘buyer’ refers to the party with the highest accepted bid for any lot at auction and/or such party’s principal where bidding as agent. b. The ‘vendor’ refers to the party consigning property for sale and/or such party’s principal where acting as agent. c. ‘Deutscher and Hackett’ refers to Deutscher and Hackett Pty Ltd ACN 123 119 022, its subsidiaries, officers, employees and agents. d. The ‘hammer price’ refers to the final bid price (including any GST) accepted by the auctioneer, or in the case of a post-auction sale, the agreed sale price (including any GST). e. The ‘buyer’s premium’ refers to the 22% charge (plus GST) payable by the buyer calculated as a percentage of the hammer price. f. ‘GST’ refers to the goods and services tax imposed by the A New Tax System (Goods and Services) Act 1999 as amended. g. The ‘lot’ refers to the item(s) described against any lot number in the catalogue. h. The ‘reserve’ refers to the minimum price (including any GST) the consignor will accept for a lot.

PRELIMINARY CONDITIONS AND DISCLAIMER 2. Agency: Deutscher and Hackett acts as agent for the vendor and the contract of sale for the lot will be between the buyer and the vendor. 3.

Property is sold ‘as is’: To the extent permitted by law: a. no guarantees, warranties or representations are made (express or implied) by Deutscher and Hackett or the vendor in relation to the nature and condition of any lot; and b. Deutscher and Hackett disclaims liability for any misrepresentations, errors or omissions, whether verbal or in writing, in the catalogue or any supplemental material. All factual information provided by the vendor is merely passed on by Deutscher and Hackett from the vendor or other source. Deutscher and Hackett has made no attempt to verify this information. All additional statements of opinion represent the specialist opinions of Deutscher and Hackett employees and should not be relied upon as statements of fact. 4. Responsibility to inspect: Responsibility remains with the buyer to satisfy its, his or her self by inspection and evaluation prior to purchase as to the nature and condition of any property. CONDITIONS AT AUCTION 5. Registration: Bidders must register to bid and obtain a bidder’s paddle prior to the commencement of the auction. Registration requires that bidders provide proof of identity and Deutscher and Hackett may impose other obligations on the registration of bidders in its discretion. 6. Auctioneer’s discretion: Deutscher and Hackett reserves the right to absolute discretion over the conduct of the auction including the regulation of bidding and its increments. This discretion extends to the challenge or rejection of any bid, the right to withdraw any lot and the right to determine the successful bidder or reoffer a lot in the event of a dispute. The prospective buyers and sellers guide details an indicative process for the conduct of auctions. All parties are strongly urged to read the prospective buyers and sellers guide included in this catalogue.

176

7. Bidding: Deutscher and Hackett may sell each lot to the highest bidder at auction provided the reserve price has been met or where the net amount accounted to the vendor is at least equivalent to the net amount that would have been achieved for a sale at the reserve price. The fall of the auctioneer’s hammer marks the acceptance of the highest bid and the conclusion of a contract for sale between the vendor and the buyer. Unless otherwise agreed in writing with Deutscher and Hackett, the individual physically present at the auction who signals the bid accepts personal liability to pay the purchase price, including the buyer’s premium and all additional fees, taxes and charges. GOODS AND SERVICES TAX 8. Amounts inclusive of GST: Unless otherwise specified, all amounts specified in this section as payable by the buyer, or otherwise used to calculate payment to Deutscher and Hackett, are inclusive of any GST component. Deutscher and Hackett will provide buyers with a tax invoice that meets the requirements of the Australian Taxation Office. 9. Application of GST to buyers: Buyers are required to pay a 10% GST which sum is: a. included in the final bid prices where buying from a GST registered vendor (a list of lots consigned by GST Registered Entities is set out on page 196 of the catalogue); and b. included in any additional fees charged by Deutscher and Hackett; and c. added to the buyer’s premium. If a buyer is classified as a “non-resident” for the purpose of GST, the buyer may be able to recover GST paid on the final purchase price if certain conditions are met. POST-SALE CONDITONS 10. Post auction private sale: Should the lot fail to sell at auction, Deutscher and Hackett is authorised to sell the lot privately for a period of seven days in which event this agreement shall apply to the relevant buyer to the full extent of its provisions. 11. Payment: The buyer will not acquire title until payment has cleared in full. Interest at a rate of 17.5% p.a. will be charged over outstanding accounts where no extension of terms has been granted. Interest will be payable from the payment due date. With respect to each lot purchased, the buyer agrees to make the following payments within seven days from the date of sale: a. The hammer price. b. In exchange for ser vices rendered by Deutscher and Hacket t, a buyer’s premium calculated at 22% (plus GST) of the hammer price. c. Post sale packing, handling, shipping and storage where applicable. d. If payment is made via Visa, Mastercard or American Express, any merchant fees payable by Deutscher and Hackett on the transaction as indicated in the prospective buyers and sellers guide. Payment must be made within seven days of the date of sale in Australian dollars by cash, cheque, direct deposit, approved credit cards or electronic funds transfer using the form and/or trust account details provided at the back of this catalogue. In certain circumstances, extension of payment may be granted at the discretion of Deutscher and Hackett. Once funds have cleared, the proceeds of the sale less the buyer’s Premium, GST and any commission or costs charged as agreed will be remitted to the vendor within thirty-five days of the date of sale provided payment has been received in full. Funds will be held in an interest bearing account by Deutscher and Hackett until remitted to the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett will be entitled to any interest earned during this period. Application for a cultural heritage export licence or any other licence in no way affects the buyer’s obligation to make payment or collection within the periods specified in sections 10 and 13a. 12. Risk and Title: Risk in the lot, including risk of loss or damage, will pass to the buyer on the earlier of: a. the date payment is due, whether or not it has been made; and b. collection by the buyer. The buyer assumes risk for the property in all respects from this date and neither Deutscher and Hackett nor the vendor will be liable for loss or damage occurring after the payment due date. The buyer is encouraged to make arrangements to ensure comprehensive cover is maintained from this date. Title in the lot does not pass to the buyer, even if the lot is released to the buyer, until the buyer has paid all sums owing to Deutscher and Hackett. If a buyer makes a claim against Deutscher and Hackett for damage or loss after sale, the buyer’s premium and the final bid price shall be payable notwithstanding.

13. Freight: a. The buyer may only remove a lot from the Deutscher and Hackett premises once payment has been cleared in full and must be removed no later than seven days after the date of sale. Should items not be removed by this time, storage and insurance costs may be charged to the buyer. If a lot has not been collected within 30 days after the date of sale and alternative arrangements have not been with Deutscher and Hackett, the lot may be re-sold by Deutscher and Hackett without reserve at the next auction and Deutscher and Hackett may set off any amounts owed for storage and insurance costs and its standard commission before remitting the proceeds to the buyer. b. Buyers are required to make their own arrangements for packing, handling, shipping and transit insurance for their property. Deutscher and Hackett does not accept responsibility or liability for the acts or omissions of any third party, such as a shipping agent, whether or not such a party has been recommended or suggested by Deutscher and Hackett. 14. Limited Warranty of Authorship: If a buyer is able to establish that a lot is a forgery in accordance with these conditions for sale within five years of the date of sale, the buyer shall be entitled to rescind the sale and obtain a refund of the hammer price from the vendor. The buyer must return the lot in the state in which it was sold within fourteen days of notifying Deutscher and Hackett of the forgery allegations. For a lot to be established as a forgery, the following conditions must be satisfied: a. the buyer must supply two independent expert testimonies attesting to the forgery. Deutscher and Hackett is entitled to request further expert evidence where it deems the evidence provided to be unsatisfactory; b. there must be no conflict of opinion among accepted experts in the field; and c. the forgery must be able to be proven through means that at the time of publication of the catalogue were commonly employed and that will not damage or otherwise put the lot in jeopardy. The limited warranty and the right to rescind the sale is not assignable and the buyer must have retained title to the lot without disposing of any interest in it up until the buyer notifies Deutscher and Hackett of the forgery allegations. The buyer acknowledges that it has no rights directly against Deutscher and Hackett if a lot is established to be a forgery. 15. Termination, Breach and Legalities: a. Deutscher and Hackett breach: To the extent permitted by law, the sole and maximum remedy to a buyer for breach of warranty is a refund of original purchase price, including buyer’s premium. In such an event the sale contract shall be rescinded and all costs associated with returning the property (in the state in which it was sold) to the premises of Deutscher and Hackett are to be borne by the buyer. Deutscher and Hackett is not liable for any indirect or consequential loss or damage for any matter arising directly or indirectly as a result of the sale. b. Buyer breach: Deutscher and Hackett may, in addition to other remedies available by law, exercise one or more of the following rights or remedies for breach: i. Cancel the sale and retain any payment or property in Deutscher and Hackett custody as collateral or liquidated damages. ii. Charge the buyer interest at the rate of 2% above the rate fixed under section 2 of the Penalty Interest Rates Act 1984 (Vic). iii. Resell the property without reserve at the next auction or privately on five days notice. Any disparity between sale and resale prices, including associated costs such as, but not limited to, legal, storage and sale expenses, will be to the account of the defaulting buyer. iv. Apply any part payment received from the buyer in respect of any lots at its discretion. v. Retain any of the buyer’s property held by Deutscher and Hackett until the buyer has satisfied its obligations to Deutscher and Hackett. vi. Take any other action Deutscher and Hackett deems necessary or appropriate. vii. Refuse to permit the buyer to participate in future auctions. viii. Provide the vendor with the buyer’s details to permit the vendor to take action against the buyer to recover the money. 16. Governing law and jurisdiction: These terms and conditions and any matters concerned with the foregoing fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of the state in which the auction is held. 17. Severability: In the event that any provisions of this agreement should be found unenforceable in a court of law, that part shall be discounted and the remaining conditions shall continue in full force and effect to the extent permitted by law.

177

COOL CLIMATE ART IN A BOTTLE. With its dramatic, cool climate, the breathtaking Tasmanian landscape is an artist’s dream and a sparkling winemaker’s paradise. This is Méthode Tasmanoise.

kwp!JAN10153

CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTION FORM ❑ ❑ ❑ ❑

Fine Art (Single issue) $45* Aboriginal Art single issue (Single issue) $45* Annual Fine Art Auctions (3 issues) $120* Annual Fine Art & Aboriginal Art Auctions (4 issues) $160*

❑ Tax invoice required

* Price includes G.S.T. postage and handling. Additional $10 per catalogue for international orders

SALE CODE: ALICE SALE NO.: 057 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART SYDNEY AUCTION 10 APRIL, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 111 CELL BLOCK THEATRE NATIONAL ART SCHOOL, SYDNEY FORBES STREET DARLINGHURST NSW 2010

please email, post or fax this completed form to: DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 16 GOODHOPE STREET PADDINGTON NSW 2021

tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

Business name

Address

City

Telephone/Home

State

Business/Mobile

Post Code

Fax

Subscription Payment by:

❑ Visa ❑ AMEX ❑ Mastercard

Name on card

Card number

Signature

Expiry date

Date

info@deutscherandhackett.com

179

ATTENDEE PRE-REGISTRATION FORM SALE CODE: ALICE SALE NO.: 057 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

Business name

Address

City

Telephone/Mobile

State

Post Code

SYDNEY AUCTION 10 APRIL, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; 111 CELL BLOCK THEATRE NATIONAL ART SCHOOL, SYDNEY FORBES STREET DARLINGHURST NSW 2010

please email, post or fax this completed form to: DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 16 GOODHOPE STREET PADDINGTON NSW 2021

tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611 info@deutscherandhackett.com

180

TELEPHONE BID FORM SALE CODE: ALICE SALE NO.: 057 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART SYDNEY AUCTION 10 APRIL, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 111 CELL BLOCK THEATRE NATIONAL ART SCHOOL, SYDNEY FORBES STREET DARLINGHURST NSW 2010

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

Billing address (PO Box insufficient)

Address

City

State

Post Code

1. 2. Telephone numbers for auction date in order of preference

Facsimile

Signature (required)

please email, post or fax this completed form to:

LOT NO.

Date

ARTIST/TITLE

COVER BID*

DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 16 GOODHOPE STREET PADDINGTON NSW 2021

tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611

info@deutscherandhackett.com

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. *Not including buyer’s premium or GST (where applicable). Bids are made in Australian dollars INTERNAL USE ONLY RECEIVED BY

DATE

TIME

Please refer to the Guidelines for Potential Purchasers and Buyer’s Conditions in this catalogue for information regarding sales. By completing this form, I authorise DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT to contact me by telephone on the contact number(s) nominated. I understand it is my responsibility to enquire whether any Sale-Room Notices relate to any lot on which I intend to bid. I also understand that should my bid(s) be successful, a buyer’s premium of 22% (plus GST), as described in the Guide to Potential Purchasers and Buyer’s Conditions printed in this catalogue, will be added to the final hammer price. I accept that DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT provides this complimentary service as a courtesy to its clients, that there are inherent risks to telephone bidding, and I will not hold DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT responsible for any error.

181

ABSENTEE BID FORM SALE CODE: ALICE SALE NO.: 057 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

Billing address (PO Box insufficient)

Address

City

State

Telephone

Facsimile

Business/Mobile

Signature (required)

LOT NO.

Post Code

SYDNEY AUCTION 10 APRIL, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 111 CELL BLOCK THEATRE NATIONAL ART SCHOOL, SYDNEY FORBES STREET DARLINGHURST NSW 2010

Date

ARTIST/TITLE

MAXIMUM BID*

1. 2. 3.

please email, post or fax this completed form to: DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 16 GOODHOPE STREET PADDINGTON NSW 2021

tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611

info@deutscherandhackett.com

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. *Not including buyer’s premium or GST (where applicable). Bids are made in Australian dollars

INTERNAL USE ONLY

Absentee bids must be received a minimum of twenty-four hours prior to auction. All absentee bids received will be confirmed by phone or fax. In the event that confirmation is not received, please resubmit or contact our office.

RECEIVED BY

Please refer to the Guidelines for Potential Purchasers and Buyer’s Conditions in this catalogue for information regarding sales. By completing this form, absentee bidders request and authorise DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT to place the following bids acting as agent on their behalf up to and including the maximum bid specified. Lots will be bought at the lowest possible bid authorised by a bidder in absentia.

DATE

Should the bid be successful, the buyer will be obliged to pay the final bid price plus buyer’s premium of 22% (plus GST) of the final bid price. DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT provides this complimentary service as a courtesy to clients and does not accept liability for errors and omissions in the execution of absentee bids.

182

TIME

NOW CONSIGNING

FOR 2019 AUCTIONS important australian + international fine art sydney • 02 9287 0600 melbourne • 03 9865 6333

info@deutscherandhackett.com www.deutscherandhackett.com

ITâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S NOT ALWAYS NECESSARY TO DIE TO BECOME AN ANGEL

You can become an art angel in your own lifetime by making a bequest to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. You might be surprised just how many have already made this gesture, contributing to the wealth of art available to all. Why do they insist on such angelic acts? Because they believe in the long term effects art has on our culture and wider community to inform, enrich, nourish and feed. The wonderful collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales could not exist without the loyalty and generosity of our many donors and benefactors. Their bequests, both large and small, benefit the Gallery in a myriad of ways, and can be comprised of money, art or other property or assets. Bequests of art can also display acknowledgement and are exempt from capital gains tax. Why not contact us for further information or to discuss your bequest in confidence, by phoning Jane Wynter, the Head of philanthropy on 02 9225 1818 or email jane.wynter@ag.nsw.gov.au

Jacopo Amigoni Bacchus and Ariadne c1740-2 oil on canvas Gift of James Fairfax 1993

HANS AND NORA HEYSEN: TWO GENERATIONS OF AUSTRALIAN ART 8 MAR – 28 JUL THE IAN POTTER CENTRE: NGV AUSTRALIA, FED SQUARE NGV.MELBOURNE

Hans Heysen Droving into the light 1914–21 (detail). Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Gift of Mr W H Vincent, 1922. © C Heysen

1 April â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 14 July 2019 McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery 390 McClelland Drive, Langwarrin www.mcclellandgallery.com

THE

HI S TOR IC A L EX PR E S S ION OF

CALLIGRAPHY AND PAINTING FROM THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CHINA

中国艺术的历史表达来自中国国家博物馆的书法与绘画

On show 5 April – 28 July 2019 National Museum of Australia Canberra

FREE ENTRY

This exhibition is part of a cultural exchange with the National Museum of China. Images (l-r): 蓦然回首 Glimpse 1995 (detail); 野战 A Battle in the Wild 1995 (detail); both by Xiao Lang. National Museum of China

INDIGENOUS ART

artgallery.wa.gov.au

PORTRAITS OF THE KIMBERLEY 9 FEB – 27 MAY 2019 | FREE Project Partner

Government Funding Partners

Presented in association with

This project is supported by the State Government through the Royalties for Regions program and the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Annual Sponsors

– Principal Partner and Perth Festival Visual Arts Partner 303 MullenLowe, Singapore Airlines, Alex Hotel, Kennedy, Juniper Estate, Gage Roads Brewing Co.

Mrs Taylor Aru 2018 (detail). Ochre pigments on paper, 57.5 x 76 cm. Courtesy the artist’s family and Kira Kiro Art Centre.

Experience A STAY A LITTLE extraordinary Grab life by the horns at The Cullen and leave inspired. Perfectly positioned opposite Deutscher and Hackett at 164 Commercial Road, Prahran. Enquire now at 1800 278 468 or thecullen.com.au

VILL A MAWAR A BALINESE PRIVATE OASIS Canggu and Echo Beach district 6 luxurious villas accommodating 12 2 pools ¬ chef ¬ butler ¬ driver ¬ massage www.villamawar.com

COPYRIGHT CREDITS Lot 1 Lot 3 Lot 6 Lot 7 Lot 8 Lot 9 Lot 11 Lot 12 Lot 14 Lot 15 Lot 17 Lot 18 Lot 19 Lot 21 Lot 22 Lot 23 Lot 24 Lot 25 Lot 26 Lot 28 Lot 29 Lot 30 Lot 31

© Cressida Campbell/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Yvonne Audette/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Dale Frank © Julian Opie/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Charles Blackman/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency, 2019 © courtesy of the artist © Hans Heysen/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Hans Heysen/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Charles Blackman/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Charles Blackman/Copyright Agency, 2019 © The Nolan Trust / Bridgeman Images © courtesy of The Estate of Jeffrey Smart © The Nolan Trust / Bridgeman Images © The Estate of Ian Fairweather/ Copyright Agency, 2019 © Estate of Fred Williams/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Estate of Fred Williams/Copyright Agency, 2019 © courtesy of Helen Brack © David Boyd/Copyright Agency, 2019 © John de Burgh Perceval/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Jennifer Dickerson/Licensed by Copyright Agency, 2019 © Donald Friend/Copyright Agency, 2019

Lot 32 Lot 33 Lot 34

Lot 35

Lot 42 Lot 48 Lot 49 Lot 50 Lot 51 Lot 52 Lot 55 Lot 56 Lot 57 Lot 58 Lot 60 Lot 62 Lot 69 Lot 70 Lot 71

© The Estate of Ian Fairweather/ Copyright Agency, 2019 © Donald Friend/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Andrew Klippel. Courtesy of The Robert Klippel Estate, represented by Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich./Licensed by Copyright Agency, 2019 © Andrew Klippel. Courtesy of The Robert Klippel Estate, represented by Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich./Licensed by Copyright Agency, 2019 © Hans Heysen/Copyright Agency, 2019 © courtesy of The Estate of Paddy Bedford © Rover Thomas/Copyright Agency, 2019 © John Mawurndjul/Copyright Agency, 2019 © John Mawurndjul/Copyright Agency, 2019 © John Mawurndjul/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Yvonne Audette/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Tony Tuckson/Copyright Agency, 2019 © The Estate of Ian Fairweather/ Copyright Agency, 2019 © Richard Larter/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Stanislaus Rapotec/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Margaret Olley Trust and The Olley Project © Namatjira Legacy Trust/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Paul Partos/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Aida Tomescu/Copyright Agency, 2019

LOTS CONSIGNED BY GST REGISTERED ENTITIES Lot 41 Lot 43 Lot 44 Lot 49 Lot 55 Lot 62 Lot 71 Lot 75 Lot 76 Lot 77

Elioth Gruner Clarice Beckett Clarice Beckett Rover Thomas Yvonne Audette Margaret Olley Aida Tomescu Ben Quilty Ningura Napurrula Ronnie Tjampitjinpa

RESALE ROYALTY Some lots consigned for this sale may be subject to the Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Act 2009 (Cth). Any payments due under the obligations of the Act will be paid by the vendor.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Photography: Graham Baring Design: Sevenpoint Design © Published by Deutscher and Hackett Pty Ltd 2019 978-0-6483839-2-5

196

Lot 80 Lot 100 Lot 101 Lot 102 Lot 103 Lot 104 Lot 108 Lot 109 Lot 110 Lot 111

Jason Benjamin Ellis Rowan Ellis Rowan Ellis Rowan Ellis Rowan Ellis Rowan Robert Dickerson Robert Dickerson Robert Dickerson Rex Dupain

Lot 74 Lot 75 Lot 76 Lot 77 Lot 79

© Rick Amor/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Ben Quilty © Ningura Napurrula/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Ronnie Tjampitjinpa/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori/Copyright Agency, 2019 Lot 81 © Cressida Campbell/Copyright Agency, 2019 Lot 82 © Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency, 2019 Lot 83 © Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency, 2019 Lot 86 © Lloyd Rees/Copyright Agency, 2019 Lot 87 © Lloyd Rees/Copyright Agency, 2019 Lot 88 © Hans Heysen/Copyright Agency, 2019 Lot 89 © Donald Friend/Copyright Agency, 2019 Lot 95 © Ray Crooke/Copyright Agency, 2019 Lot 96 © The Nolan Trust / Bridgeman Images Lot 97 © The Nolan Trust / Bridgeman Images Lot 98 © The Nolan Trust / Bridgeman Images Lot 99 © The Nolan Trust / Bridgeman Images Lot 108 © Jennifer Dickerson/Licensed by Copyright Agency, 2019 Lot 109 © Jennifer Dickerson/Licensed by Copyright Agency, 2019 Lot 110 © Jennifer Dickerson/Licensed by Copyright Agency, 2019

index A

AMOR, R.

AMORSOLO, F.

ARTIST UNKOWN AUDETTE, Y.

46, 47 6, 55

B BALSON, R.

BAWDEN, L.

BECKETT, C.

43, 44

BEDFORD, PADDY NYUNKUNY

BENJAMIN, J.

BENNETT, R.

106

BLACKMAN, C.

9, 17, 18

BOYD, A.

BOYD, D.

GABORI, MIRDIDINGKINGATHI JUWARNDA SALLY GASCOIGNE, R. GRUNER, E.

P 79

3 41, 84

H HEYSEN, H. HINDER, F.

14, 15, 42, 88 53

POWDITCH, P.

PRESTON, M.

82, 83

PUGH, C.

91, 92

Q QUILTY, B.

RAPOTEC, S. REES, L. ROBINSON, W.

K KLIPPEL, R.

PERCEVAL, J.

34, 35

ROWAN, E. RUSSELL, J. P.

BOYD, G.

BRACK, J.

LARTER, R.

BUNNY, R.

105

LONG, S.

SAWREY, H.

C CAMPBELL, C.

1, 81

CAMPBELL JUNIOR, ROBERT

CONDER, C. CROOKE, R.

DICKERSON, R. DRYSDALE, R. DUPAIN, R.

MAWURNDJUL, JOHN

MENPES, M.

MILLER, G.

66 30, 108, 109, 110 16 111

23, 32, 57

FOX, E. P.

FOX, E. C.

FREEDMAN, H. FRIEND, D.

5, 54

7 90 31, 33, 89

60 86, 87 20 100, 101, 102, 103, 104 39

SMART, J.

SMITH, G. C.

STORRIER, T.

STRUTT, W.

13, 107

T THOMAS (JOOLAMA), ROVER

TJAMPITJINPA, RONNIE

NAMATJIRA, ALBERT

TOMESCU, A.

NAPURRULA, NINGURA

TUCKSON, T.

NICHOLAS, H. R.

FRANK, D.

50, 51, 52 68

NOLAN, S.

FAIRWEATHER, I.

McCUBBIN, F.

D DAVIES, D.

MACKENNAL, B.

J JOHNSTONE, H. J.

PARTOS, P.

19, 22, 96, 97, 98, 99

O Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;BRIEN, J.

10, 27, 61

OLIVER, B.

OLLEY, M.

OPIE, J.

UNSWORTH, K.

WILLIAMS, F.

24, 25

197

198