lots 1 – 82

(1888 – 1961) SKATING, 1929 colour linocut 12.0 x 15.5 cm (image) 16.0 x 18.0 cm (sheet) edition: 9/50 signed lower right: EW Syme. inscribed with title and edition lower left: Skating.9/50 bears inscription lower right edge of sheet: SKATING

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

PROVENANCE

Isabel Hunter Tweddle, Melbourne Thence by descent Bill McKay, Melbourne

EXHIBITED

Water Colours and Lino-Cuts by E. W. Syme, Everyman’s Lending Library, Melbourne, 18 August – 1 September 1931, cat. 24 (another example) British Lino-Cuts 1931 (Third Exhibition of British Lino–Cuts), Redfern Gallery, London, August 1931, cat. 22 (another example) Exhibition of Progressive Art, Modern Art Centre, Sydney, March 1932, cat. 38 (another example) Linocuts and Wood Engravings by E.W. Syme, Arts and Crafts Society’s Gallery, Melbourne, 5 – 16 May 1936, cat. 10 (another example) Survey of Australian Relief Prints 1900 – 1950, Deutscher Galleries, Melbourne, 13 April – 5 May 1978, cat. 175 (another example) Claude Flight and His Followers. The Colour Linocut Movement between the Wars, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 18 April – 12 July 1992, and touring, cat. 93 (another example) Colour, Rhythm, Design – wood & lino cuts of the 20s & 30s, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 12 March – 11 July 2010 (another example illus. in exhibition catalogue, p.15) Modern impressions: Australian prints from the collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2 September 2016 – January 2017 (another example) Intrepid Woman: Australian Women Artists in Paris 1900 – 1950, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 6 January – 25 March 2018 (another example) Becoming Modern: Australian Women Artists 1920 – 1950, Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria, 18 May – 4 August 2019 (another example) Spowers and Syme, Canberra Museum and Art Gallery in association with the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 13 August 2021 – 12 February 2022 (another example)

LITERATURE

Dobson, M., Block–Cutting and Print–Making by Hand, Sir Issac Pitman & Sons Ltd, London, 1930, p. 51 (illus., another example) Streeton, A., ‘Art Exhibitions’, Argus, Melbourne, 18 August 1931, p. 8 (another example) Bell, G., ‘20 Prints by Miss Syme’, Sun–News Pictorial, Melbourne, 5 May 1936, p. 15 (another example) Butler, R., and Deutscher, C., A Survey of Australian Relief Prints 1900/1950, Deutscher Galleries, Melbourne, 1978, cat. 175, p. 89 (illus., another example) Butler, R., Melbourne: Woodcuts and Linocuts of the 1920’s and 1930’s, Gardner Printing & Publishing, Victoria, 1981 (illus., another example) Lebovic, J., Australian Women Printmakers, Sydney, 1988, cat. 108, pp. 2, 14 (illus., another example) Coppel, S., Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School, Scholar Press, Aldershot, England, in association with the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1995, cat. ESy 4, pp. 68, 180 (illus., another example) Topliss, H., Modernism and Feminism Australian Women Artists 1900 – 1940, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1996, pl. 78, pp. 149 (illus., another example), 152, 196 Hylton, J., Modern Australian women: paintings & prints 1925 – 1945, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2000, pp. 52 (illus., another example), 56, 126 Butler, R., Printed images by Australian artists 1885 – 1955, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2007, p. 200 (illus., another example) Samuel, G. (ed.), Cutting Edge. Modernist British Printmaking, Bloomsbury, London, 2019, pp. 72, 73 (illus., another example) McLaren, J., and Tegart, L., Becoming Modern: Australian Women Artists 1920 – 1950, Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria, 2019, pp. 94 (illus., another example), 174 Noordhuis – Fairfax, S. (ed.), Spowers and Syme, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2021, pp. 8 (illus., another example), 9, 93

RELATED WORK

Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of Ballarat Victoria; and the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, Perth

(1875 – 1963) PINK JUG (ANEMONE), 1925 hand–coloured woodcut 38.5 x 36.5 cm (image) 45.5 x 41.5 cm (sheet) edition: 20th proof signed with initials in image, lower right: M.P. signed, numbered and inscribed with title below image: 20th proof Anemone Margaret Preston

ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE

Mr Alan Greenway, Australia and USA Thence by descent Private collection, California, USA

EXHIBITED

Thea Proctor and Margaret Preston, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 18 November – 2 December 1925, cat. 1 (another example) Exhibition of Woodcuts by Margaret Preston, Dunster Galleries, Adelaide, September 1926, cat. 56 (another example, as ‘Anemones’) The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980 and touring (another example, as ‘Anemones’) Margaret Preston: The Art of Constant Rearrangement, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 December 1985 – 9 February 1986 (another example, as ‘Anemones’) Australian Paintings 1848 – 1967, Christopher Day Gallery, Sydney, 15 November – 18 December 1988, cat. 11 (illus., another example) Margaret Preston in Mosman, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney, 7 September – 13 October 2002 (another example) Margaret Preston retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 29 July – 23 October 2005; and touring (another example) Sydney Moderns, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 6 July – 7 October 2013 (another example) O’Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 12 October 2016 – 19 February 2018; Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 11 March – 11 June 2017; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 1 July – 2 October 2017 (another example, as ‘Anemones’)

LITERATURE

Ure Smith, S., Art in Australia, Sydney, 3rd Series, no. 22, December 1927, pl. 30 (illus.) (another example, as ‘Anemones’) Women’s World, vol. 8, no. 12, December 1928 (illus., cover) & vol. 9, no. 1, February 1929, p. 108 (illus., another example, as Chinese Vase’) North, I., The art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, 1980, cat. P.9, p. 53 (illus., another example) Butel, M., Margaret Preston: The Art of Constant Rearrangement, Penguin Books & Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1985, cat. P.6, pp. 32 (illus.), 87 (another example, as ‘Anemones’) Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonne, Australian National Gallery & Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2005, cat. 108, p. 134 (illus., another example) Edwards, D., Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, pp. 60 (illus), 82, 105, 285 (another example) Mimmocchi, D., Sydney moderns: art for a new world, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2013, pp. 203 (illus., another example), 314, 323 Harding, L., and Mimmocchi, D., O’Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2016, cat. 34, pp. 126 (illus., another example), 194 (illus.)

(1894 – 1968) THE PINES, 1921 oil on cardboard 29.0 x 27.0 cm signed and dated lower left: R. de Mestre / 1921

ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE

Mrs Ronnie Dangar, Sydney (bears inscription verso) Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney Christie’s, Sydney, 3 – 4 October 1972, lot 266 Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Mr Alan Greenway, Australia and USA, acquired from the above Thence by descent Private collection, California, USA

In August 1919, Roy de Maistre (then known as Roi de Mestre) and his colleague Roland Wakelin held Australia’s first modernist exhibition at Gayfield Shaw’s Art Salon in Sydney. It was a show full of vibrant colour matched to a musical scale of the artists’ devising. Of the fourteen works shown, eleven were Cubist-informed scenes of the harbour’s foreshores and boatsheds, but the remainder were non-objective abstractions, a genre never seen before in this country. Titled Colour in Art, the event still generates fascination and comment over a century later but it needs to be emphasised that this was only a starting point for both artists, and their subsequent careers took many divergent paths as the years progressed. Indeed, within a year Wakelin and de Maistre began studying the controversial ‘tonalist’ theories presented by the Scottish-born artist Max Meldrum, an approach in apparent opposition to the ideas proposed through Colour in Art.

In December 1919, Meldrum’s student Colin Colahan published a book entitled Max Meldrum: his art and views, centred around a key lecture from 1917 which argued that ‘tone and proportion gives us what is generally called ‘a perfect work of art’, without any relation to the actual amount of time which the Artist has bestowed upon his picture.’1 Meldrum believed that the careful perception and analysis of tone and tonal relationships would produce an exact appearance of the thing seen. The gallerist and framer John Young purchased several copies of the book which he gave to his artist-friends, including de Maistre, who subsequently attended a lecture when Meldrum visited Sydney for six weeks in 1921. Such was his powers of persuasion that other Sydney artists were also intrigued by his theories, including Wakelin, Grace Cossington Smith, Elioth Gruner, and Lloyd Rees. The Pines, 1921, is one of a small number of Meldrum-esque works painted by de Maistre and it most likely depicts a scene near his family home in Sutton Forest in the southern highlands of New South Wales. It is a testament to his strong self-belief that de Maistre’s does not completely abandon colour, as evidenced by the deep green of the two pines counterbalanced by patches of soft violet within the shadows and the surface of the road, strategies which give greater intensity to the more muted tonal phrasing championed by Meldrum.

Related paintings that fall within this sequence depict Government House in Sydney, other views of Sutton Forest and floral bunches of which Still life (also known as White Roses), 1922 in the Art Gallery of New South Wales became his winning entry into the Society of Artists’ Travelling Scholarship, allowing for his first overseas journey in 1923. Despite its assured touch and pleasing subject, it appears that The Pines was never exhibited by de Maistre and only came to light when the famed dealer, Joseph Brown, was given access to the artist’s Estate after his death in London in 1968. Subsequently sold at auction in 1972, the painting has not been seen publicly during the interceding five decades and represents an exciting re-appearance for the artist’s catalogue.

1. Meldrum, M., ‘The invariable truths of depictive art’, 1917, in Colahan, C. (ed.), Max Meldrum: his art and views, McCubbin, Melbourne, 1919, p. 43

ANDREW GAYNOR

(1887 – 1935) THE RED BUS oil on canvas on compressed card 37.5 x 45.5 cm bears inscriptions verso: Athenaeum / A / 45/ 75 bears inscriptions verso on backing paper: 5. “THE RED BUS” / Exhibited Solo Exhibition / David Sumner Gallery, Adelaide, 1973 bears label verso with statement of authenticity signed by the artist’s sister Mrs Hilda Mangan

ESTIMATE: $90,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE

Rosalind Humphries Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection Peter Walker Fine Art, Adelaide Sandra Powell and Andrew King, Melbourne Mossgreen, Melbourne, 19 March 2014, lot 1 Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2015

EXHIBITED

Probably: Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne, cat. 45 Homage to Clarice Beckett (1887 – 1935): Idylls of Melbourne and Beaumaris, Rosalind Humphries Galleries, Melbourne, 12 November – 1 December 1972, cat. 14 Homage to Clarice Beckett (1887 – 1935): Idylls of Melbourne and Beaumaris, David Sumner Gallery, Adelaide, 25 July – 19 August 1973, cat. 5 Australian Women Artists Between the Wars, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 3 March – 30 April 2015 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

We are grateful to Olivia Abbay, Sandringham and District Historical Society, for her assistance with this catalogue entry.

On an invitingly sunny day, a red bus trundles through a quiet bayside street south of Melbourne whilst stray pedestrians walk the other way. It is a simple moment from a simpler time, but one made manifest – and therefore significant – through the unparalleled aesthetic eye of Clarice Beckett. She is best known for her paintings of Beaumaris and the city, each infused with her trademark ‘blur and haze’, suggestive of an alternate world informed by Theosophy and allied spiritual philosophies. Beckett was deeply interested in such views and actively attended seminars and socialised with other advocates, including the family of Colquhoun artists. In line with Theosophic and Buddhist principles, Beckett saw each painting as ‘a self-renewing act’ akin to that of devotion.1 She was also a prodigious reader, with the famed modernist Gino Nibbi, owner of the Leonardo Bookshop in Little Collins Street, once proclaiming her ‘the best read woman in Melbourne.’2 Whilst the painterly technique Beckett developed was informed strongly by the ‘tonalist’ theories of Max Meldrum, it was also built upon her own nascent talent and her training between 1914 and 1916 under Frederick McCubbin at the National Gallery Art School. Indeed, Beckett only studied under Meldrum for nine months after she had attended one of his lectures in 1917, but ultimately transcended all these influences to become the distinctive artist whose work is so treasured today.

A distracting part of the reason for this eminence is the tragic elements of her story including her premature death at forty-eight and the disastrous loss of so many of her paintings due to exposure to the elements, but such perspectives undermine the strength of her achievements. One of her best known statements reinforces her belief that ‘[my aim is] 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 and set forth in correct tones so as to give nearly as possible an exact illusion of reality.’3 In paintings such as The Red Bus, this ambition is evident through a marvellous interplay of colour, design, armature and technique. The white vertical dashes, indicative of telegraph poles or trees, provide a balanced counterpoint to the visual weight of the bus’ red, and leads the eye effortlessly to the pedestrians. The juxtaposition of the forward-facing vehicle and the retreating figures creates a duality of force that emphasises the snap-shot immediacy of the scene, whilst the feathered edges increase the sense of ephemerality. The bus itself is hard to identify specifically as a number of services operated in the area from as early as 1912, with ‘Mr Boyd’s service’ to Black Rock, and many used vehicles with a similar front cowling to Beckett’s. However, it is her inclusion of the bus as a central motif, as with cars, telegraph poles and motor bikes in related paintings, that marks Beckett for all time as a painterly herald for modernism in life as well as art.

1. Hollinrake, R., ‘Behind the scenes’ in Clarice Beckett biography, unpublished, cited in Lock, T., Clarice Beckett: The present moment, Art Gallery of South Australia,

Adelaide, 2021, p. 32, fn. 5 2. Hollinrake, R., Clarice Beckett: politically incorrect, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of

Melbourne, Melbourne, 1999, p. 12, fn. 6 3. Clarice Beckett, (catalogue entry), Twenty Melbourne painters: 6th annual exhibition,

Atheneum Gallery, Melbourne, 1924

ANDREW GAYNOR

(1887 - 1935) THE SOLITARY BATHING BOX, c.1932 oil on canvas on board 38.5 x 45.5 cm signed lower left: C Beckett bears inscription verso: “THE SOLITARY BATHING BOX” / BY CLARICE BECKETT. 10 guineas – / THE MELDRUM GALLERY / (J. H. MINOGUE) / 127 QUEEN ST / MELBOURNE

ESTIMATE: $150,000 – 200,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Melbourne L.J. Cook & Company Pty Ltd., Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above on 30 June 1998

EXHIBITED

Probably: Exhibition of Paintings by Clarice Beckett, The Meldrum Gallery, Melbourne, 28 November – 9 December 1933 Clarice Beckett: Politically Incorrect, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne; SH Ervin Gallery (National Trust of Australia), Sydney; Orange Regional Gallery, New South Wales; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; Burnie Regional Art Gallery, Tasmania, 5 February 1999 – 22 May 2000 (label attached verso)

LITERATURE

Hollinrake, R., Clarice Beckett: Politically Incorrect, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1999, cat. 65, p. 76

We are grateful to Rosalind Hollinrake for her assistance with this catalogue entry.

For nearly four decades, the paintings of Clarice Beckett vanished from public view and it was not until the gallerist, Ros Hollinrake, mounted a series of ground-breaking exhibitions from 1971 that this omission began to change. An early visitor to the first show was the painter Fred Williams, who then encouraged the National Gallery of Australia’s inaugural director James Mollison to follow suit. Equally impressed by what he saw, Mollison purchased eight paintings for the national collection, and Beckett’s fame has since increased to such an extent that almost every one of the country’s major institutions now owns examples of her work. She was, in the words of Germaine Greer, ‘the first artist to paint the suburbs of Australia… Australia as it really is, as we know it’;1 whilst the artist Sir William Dargie considered her to be ‘a pure and perfect artist in her own way, one of the finest ever to work in Australia.’2 Beckett famously studied for a short period under the theorist Max Meldrum who expounded his theory of the ‘Science of Appearances’, but hers was a talent which would not be shackled to such rigid rules. She read widely and was a committed attendee to lectures regarding Theosophy and Buddhism. On top of her prior training at the National Gallery School under Fred McCubbin, Beckett’s combined talents saw her transcend the work of Meldrum who, for example, abhorred too much colour, an opinion in stark contrast to the radiant hues in paintings by Beckett such as The Solitary Bathing Box, c.1932. She was a prolific artist who used flat brushwork and thin paint that was smoothed into the canvas, a technique Hollinrake once described as being ‘really healthy. It’s paint you want to touch… They have that glow.’3 Others recognised a moody haze akin to Whistler, whilst Beckett herself talked of the ‘musicality’ her works projected. In all her paintings – undeniably – is an enveloping atmosphere of tranquillity that underscores an equal sense of spontaneity, of a snapshot quickly taken before the subject is even aware.

Although she travelled much within Victoria, Beckett’s home base was Beaumaris on Port Phillip Bay and she painted the region ceaselessly. Resisting her colleague’s suggestions that she should travel abroad, she argued that ‘I have only just got the hang of painting Beaumaris after all these years, why should I go somewhere else strange to paint?’4 Numbers of these bathing huts were clustered on the foreshore during Beckett’s lifetime, but many were destroyed through a series of tremendous storms starting at the end of 1934. As such, it is hard to exactly situate the subject of The Solitary Bathing Box but its outlook on the long expanse of the Mentone cliffs with the hint of a headland to the left suggests that it may have been sited at her local beach on Watkin’s Bay. The hazy summer sky and jaunty red bathing suit of the striding figure indicates a hot, sunny day – the colours of which radiate through the waters to the right of the hut, painted by Beckett in striking bands of violet, blue and soft ochre.

1. Germaine Greer, quoted in Smee, S., ‘Painter put her soul into suburbia’, Sydney Morning

Herald, 24 April 1999, p. 5 2. Dargie, Sir W., ‘Introduction’ in Homage to Clarice Beckett (1887-1935): idylls of Melbourne and Beaumaris, Rosalind Humphries Galleries, Melbourne, 1971 3. Rosalind Hollinrake, quoted in Smee, S., ibid. 4. Clarice Beckett, quoted in Hollinrake, R., Clarice Beckett: the artist and her circle, Macmillan,

Melbourne, 1979, p.21

ANDREW GAYNOR

(1916 – 1981) BUNKER BAY, 1958 oil on canvas 52.0 x 67.0 cm signed and dated lower right: G Grey Smith/58 inscribed with title on stretcher bar verso: ‘BUNKER BAY’

ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE

Gallery 52, Perth Private collection, Perth, acquired from the above on 16 March 1982 Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney

Bunker Bay is a favourite and secluded destination for holiday makers in Western Australia. Located 260 kilometres south of Perth, it is the last beach before Cape Naturaliste, at the western edge of Geographe Bay. Now braced by resorts and expensive homes, it was a pristine experience in the 1950s when Guy Grey-Smith painted this scene of the iridescent waters lapping the sands, anchored at either end by jagged rocks. It is possible that the artist visited the area for holidays with his own parents in the 1920s and 1930s, but he was now accompanied by his own family, and it is likely that the picnic group on the shore includes his wife and children. Distinctively, Grey-Smith has chosen to paint the scene from a small boat off-shore, a viewpoint which emphasises the quietude of the scene.

Bunker Bay, 1958, is one of a number of his paintings of the locale and sits at the mid-point of his development from a post-impressionist technique to his mature ‘slab form’ paintings from 1960 onwards. GreySmith first studied art as a convalescent former-prisoner of war at a sanitorium in southern England where he was treated for tuberculosis in 1944. He then trained for two years at the Chelsea School of Arts before returning to Western Australia in late 1947, visiting the forests of Fontainebleau en route in homage to his hero Cézanne. In 1952, he painted his first view of Bunker Bay (untraced) and the following year, he and his artist-wife Helen returned to London where he studied fresco techniques. Whilst there, he was mesmerised by an exhibition of the high-colour works of the French Fauves and his subsequent paintings exhibit his attempts to unite these disparate influences. For Bunker Bay, Winter, 1956 (private collection), Grey-Smith stood at the eastern edge and fills the scene with radiant colour – jarring in its contrast – contained within bold outlines, set against solid patches of pigment, indicative of similar results achieved consecutively in his frescos. For the painting on offer here, a similar approach is present but there is also greater fragmentation as he allows his brush to dictate the passage. His treatment of the tree canopies as self-contained entities is distinctly his own and can be seen in works as early as Dongara Flats, 1950 (Edith Cowan University) and Jarrahs, 1953 (Art Gallery of Western Australia). The contrasting cadmium yellow of the boulders in this lot illuminates the foreground and gives the sense of a sun-drenched whole, indicating that it was the summer school holidays when the journey was undertaken.

Although this painting was not exhibited during the artist’s lifetime, it was painted in a pivotal period for the artist, with his major work Gascoigne River Country purchased that year by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Bunker Bay was intended to be included in Grey-Smith’s first posthumous exhibition at Perth’s Gallery 52.

ANDREW GAYNOR

(1893 – 1977) GONDOLAS, 1958 oil on composition board 61.0 x 78.5 cm signed and dated lower right: Raokin 58 signed and inscribed with title verso: WEAVER HAWKINS / ‘GONDOLAS’

ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Sydney Scheding Berry Fine Art, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above on 23 August 1986

EXHIBITED

H.F. Weaver–Hawkins (Raokin) 1893 – 1977, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 5 – 24 April 1978, cat. 37 (illus. on exhibition invitation)

LITERATURE

H.F. Weaver-Hawkins (Raokin) 1893 – 1977, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney 1978, exhibition invitation, colour illustration inside cover McIntyre, A., ‘Weaver Hawkins – a tribute to a pioneer’, The Australian, Sydney, 15 April 1978

Australia has produced a small number of artists whose technique is undeniably their own, including individuals such as Brett Whiteley and John Olsen. A further name is Weaver Hawkins whose bold colours and rhythmic pictorial compositions built on his early training in England at a time of great artistic revolt, fanned spectacularly by the Vorticists, whose Cubist-inspired ideas left a lasting legacy within Hawkins’ work. He was also drawn to ‘compositional theories as Dynamic Symmetry, Platonic Solids, Magic Squares and the Modular’;1 which resulted in him becoming ‘one of the finest and most original mid-century painters working in Sydney (painting and exhibiting) for forty years.’2 In Gondalas, 1958, Hawkins’ love of vorticist design turns the otherwise touristy motif of gondolas into a charged mandala of pattern within pattern which speaks directly to the lively movement of the gondoliers and their craft.

Underscoring Hawkins’ meticulous work is the devastating knowledge of his physical disabilities. A soldier during World War One, he was severely maimed by shrapnel and shot several times before enduring a two-day crawl back to safety. More than twenty operations were then undertaken on his arms – both elbow joints were removed – leaving him with a withered right and a barely functional left. A natural righthander, he trained himself to use his left, supported by the right, first by mastering drawing and then, unbelievably, etching with beautifully and sensitively drawn results. His poignant Self portrait, 1920 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) is an exquisite early example. He held his first solo exhibition in 1923, but due to press notices which emphasised his disability, he adopted the art-name ‘Raokin’ to divert attention. After some years living the expatriate life in Europe, Hawkins migrated to Australia with his young family in 1935, moving to Mona Vale, one of Sydney’s northern beach suburbs. Their precinct became known as the ‘mad half mile’ for its high concentration of artists, theatre directors and writers, including Rah Fizelle and Arthur Murch, who lived next door.

He loved Mona Vale so much that his wife Rene had to force Hawkins to travel back overseas for an eleven-month journey through Europe over 1956 – 57 where he sketched the inspiration for Gondolas en route. Due to his arms, each painting was a slow process, supported by ‘a number of quick sketches… followed by a more detailed ink and wash sketch, then a full watercolour study... he also sometimes painted a small oil sketch before beginning the final work.’3 One such study of Gondolas was included in his posthumous 1978 exhibition at Macquarie Galleries and in a review of this exhibition, the painting (this lot) was singled out by one newspaper critic who was impressed by Hawkins’ ‘dominating concern for areas of flat bright colour with hard edged shapes (where) spiralling linear patterns carry the eye in, out and around the compositions.’4 The Art Gallery of New South Wales owns another work from the European journey, In Lisbon, 1958, which features a birds-eye view of a descending staircase. In a similar manner, Hawkins’ pronounced use of directional lines in Gondolas draws the eye ceaselessly through the interlocking patterns and design anchored at their centre by the pair of bold, red-striped poles.

1. Thomas, D., ‘Weaver Hawkins’, Project 11: Weaver Hawkins, Art Gallery of New South Wales,

Sydney, 7 February – 14 March 1976 2. Radford, R., ‘Foreword note’, Weaver Hawkins 1893-1977: Memorial retrospective exhibition 1977 – 1979, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria, 1977 (n.p.) 3. Chanin, E. & Miller, S., The art and life of Weaver Hawkins, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 59 4. McIntyre, A., ‘Weaver Hawkins – a tribute to a pioneer’, The Australian, Sydney, 15 – 16 April 1978

ANDREW GAYNOR

(1921 –1973) FAMILY GROUP, 1952 – 54 oil on canvas 85.0 x 101.0 cm

ESTIMATE: $35,000 – 45,000

PROVENANCE

Margaret Tuckson, Sydney Watters Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above on 11 November 1986

EXHIBITED

Tony Tuckson: Twenty Paintings on Canvas 1947 – 1957, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 1 – 18 October 1986, cat. 17 (as ‘(Family Group, 1952 – 54?)’)

LITERATURE

McGrath, S., ‘Tony Tuckson’, Art and Australia, Sydney, vol. 12, no. 2, October – December 1974, p. 159 (illus.) Thomas, D., Tony Tuckson 1921 – 1973, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1976, cat. 12, pp. 26, 34 (illus., as (Family Group, 1954?)) [not exhibited] Thomas, D., Free, R. and Legge, G., Tony Tuckson, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1989, pl. 50, pp. 66 (illus.), 180

While the story of Tony Tuckson’s ‘secret’ life as a painter while he worked at the Art Gallery of New South Wales as Assistant to the Director (1950 – 57) and then, Deputy Director (1957 – 1973) is now something of art world lore, the vitality of the works he produced over the course of his life continue to astound. Prior to his premature death at the age of 52, Tuckson had held only two exhibitions – in 1970 and 1973. As a result, it was not until the memorial exhibition of his work – curated by Daniel Thomas at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1976 – that both the art world and broader viewing public came to comprehend the scope and calibre of his life’s work. Since then, Tuckson has been rightly regarded as one of this country’s most significant artists and foremost abstractionists. Tuckson’s oeuvre charts a journey towards abstraction, and to a level of confidence and freedom that enabled him to produce his masterful abstract works of the early 1970s.

At the time that Family Group, 1952 – 54 was created, Tuckson was absorbing a multitude of artistic influences, heightened in 1953 by first-hand experience of the touring exhibition French Painting Today, which included work by artists ranging from Léger and Picasso to Matisse, Mirò and Soulages. Works from the early to mid-1950s often feature figure groups and scenes from domestic life – subjects that were close to hand as Tuckson painted in the limited time available to him beyond the demands of his role at the Gallery. As Terence Maloon has noted (firmly tongue-in-cheek), the artist’s wife Margaret served as a model for many paintings and drawings:

‘…He half seriously assigned her the role of muse, of archetypal Woman, and she half-jokingly complied. There began a self-conscious and faintly comic series of travesties in which Margaret’s image was tossed between Tuckson’s various influences. For many years she was forced into cousinship with Picasso’s women – case as an angular Dora-Margaret or a curvaceous Margaret-Thérèse Walter. Intermittently she was incarnated as a Matisse odalisque, and during a few frustrated weeks in 1952 she almost became a Modigliani. By the time Tuckson fell under the sway of Dubuffet’s art brut in the mid 1950s, he no longer worked directly from the model – which, I suppose, was just as well for his wife’s morale.’1

The shadow of Picasso certainly looms large in the assured brushstrokes and blocky shapes of Family Group, with the work’s high-keyed palette of yellow, red, blue and black transforming a warm domestic scene into a study of pattern and colour that begins to dissolve the outline of the work’s three figures.

1. Maloon, T., Tony Tuckson: Themes and Variations, Heide Park and Art Gallery, Melbourne, 1989, p. 4

KELLY GELLATLY

(1920 – 1999) KNIVES AND FORKS, 1958 oil on canvas 43.5 x 99.0 cm signed and dated lower left: John Brack 58 inscribed with name and title on gallery label verso: KNIVES AND FORKS

ESTIMATE: $400,000 – 600,000

PROVENANCE

Australian Galleries, Melbourne S.D. Hillas Pty Ltd, Melbourne, acquired from the above Geoffrey Hillas, Melbourne Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above on 27 April 1992

EXHIBITED

Second Anniversary Exhibition, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, June 1958, cat. 14 (label attached verso) Helena Rubenstein Travelling Art Scholarship, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 5 August 1958 Australian Painting: Colonial, Impressionist, Contemporary, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 17 – 31 March 1962; Tate, London, 24 January - 3 March 1963; National Gallery, Ottawa, April - May 1963 John Brack: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 10 December 1987 – 31 January 1988, cat. 39 A Selection of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Australian Art, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 8 –24 October 1992, cat. 70 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) John Brack Selected Paintings 1950s to 1990s, Geelong Art Gallery, Victoria, 15 June – 14 July 1996, cat. 5 John Brack Retrospective, The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, 24 April – 9 August 2009 and touring to The Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 October 2009 – 31 January 2010 (label attached verso)

LITERATURE

The Art Critic, ‘Striking Exhibition of Powerful Works’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 5 August 1958, p. 2 Turnbull, C., Young, E., Thomas, D., Australian Painting: Colonial Impressionist Contemporary, Griffin Press, Victoria, 1962, p. 41 Hoff, U., ‘John Brack’, Art and Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 2, no. 4, March 1965, p. 279 (as ‘Knives and Forks, 1957’) Miller, R., John Brack, Lansdowne Australian Art Library, Melbourne, 1971, Illus. 2, pp. 9, 20, 22 (illus.), 107 Catalano, G., ‘Local subjects bear universal concerns’, The Age, Melbourne, 16 December 1987, p. 14 Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. I, pl. 12, pp. 70, 71 (illus.); vol. II, cat. o79, pp. 188 - 89, 192

JOHN BRACK

(1920 – 1999) KNIVES AND FORKS, 1958

John Brack The Breakfast Table, 1958 oil on canvas 122.2 x 68.7 cm Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney © Helen Brack

Interviewed by Robert Hughes in 1959, John Brack declared, ‘National style is a thing of the past… I couldn’t care less about Australian Myths and Legends. I suppose bushrangers are very beautiful, but they bore me’.1 Emphasising his perspective on the type of subject matter that was relevant to a local, contemporary audience, Brack continued, ‘there’s only one true sort of Australian painting… and it consists of truthfully reflecting the life we see about us.’2

As a painter of modern life, Brack found the subjects of his art in his immediate surroundings, the suburbs and the city of Melbourne. His best-known paintings of 1950s Australia, such as The New House, 1953 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) and the iconic Collins St, 5p.m., 1955 (National Gallery of Victoria), are full of acute observations of contemporary living, seemingly humorous and ironic – and from an early twenty-first century perspective, definitely also nostalgic. Such images were primarily motivated however, by Brack’s intense interest in people and the human condition. His early resolution to produce an essentially humanist art that engaged directly with the present was supported by his reading of authors including Rainer Maria Rilke, who advised to ‘seek those [themes] which your own everyday life offers you’ and Henry James, who found inspiration for his stories in random events and snippets of overheard conversations.3 As Brack explained, ‘I believed … that you had to decide whether you were going to… take no notice of events or whether you were going to be engaged. Temperamentally, it was obvious I had to be the latter.’4

Brack’s practice of identifying subject matter that was close at hand inevitably resulted in images with a distinctly local flavour – recognisable to anyone who grew up in mid-twentieth century Australia, and especially in Melbourne – and unavoidable elements of autobiography appear throughout his oeuvre. The artist’s family inevitably features, his wife Helen was the model for The Sewing Machine, 1955 (Art Gallery of Ballarat) for example, and their daughters provided both the visual and thematic inspiration for paintings like The Chase, 1959 (private collection). Similarly, The Bar, 1954 (National Gallery of Victoria) – an homage of sorts, which transposes the Parisian setting of Edouard Manet’s famous painting, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882, to austere 1950s Melbourne – was based on Brack’s experience of the six o’clock swill in city pubs on his way home from work.

Alongside such references to significant historical works of art, Brack also worked within traditional categories of Western art including portraiture, the nude and still-life. During the late 1950s, he addressed the still-life genre, depicting cut flowers in vases – carnations, gerberas and solandra, just as you might find them in a mid-century suburban home – as well as focussing on other everyday domestic items, which he isolated and described in his characteristically cool and analytical style. If The hairbrush, 1955 (private collection) represents the ritualised, daily activities of the bathroom, the kitchen and the busy family life that revolves around it is symbolised by a small group of stilllife paintings from 1958 which focus on cutlery and crockery.5 In The

John Brack Breakfast Still Life, 1958 oil on composition board 59.0 x 72.5 cm private collection © Helen Brack

Breakfast Table, 1958 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) for example, we see the remnants of a family’s morning meal, an arrangement – seemingly haphazard, although knowing Brack, anything but – of plates sprinkled with toast crumbs, an egg cup, jars of jam, bottles, glasses and mugs. A series of knives adds to the rhythmic pattern of the image, their varied angles echoing the rotating hands of a clock and, alongside the deep shadows cast across the table by the rising sun, reminding us of the passing of time and the human activity which preceded this scene.

The closely related painting offered here, Knives and forks, 1958 depicts knives of various kinds, forks and spoons laid out randomly across a flat surface. In the absence of pictorial detail to provide context, it appears as if the contents of a cutlery drawer have been emptied on to a table and one can imagine Brack gathering props from the kitchen and doing just that, or at least recreating an artful simulation of that. The horizontal format of the picture encourages a left to right reading, the dense conglomeration of cutlery on the left-hand side opening up into a more regular arrangement interspersed with bone-handled knives and concluding on the far right with a large carving knife. The background comprises brushstrokes of pale green and lilac – classic colours of 1950s domestic interiors – while the cutlery creates muted grey shadows which contribute to the delicacy and visual complexity of the image. This painting fits neatly into Brack’s work of the time, however it also points to the shop window paintings of the early 1960s, such as Still life with self-portrait (Art Gallery of South Australia) and The scissors shop (private collection), both 1963, where the display of multiple implements, the patterns they create and the meanings they imply, comes into focus. Knives and forks is an even more direct precursor however, to the ‘Unstill Life Series’ of the mid-1970s which heralded a major shift in Brack’s imagery and approach. Eschewing the figure and the social commentary this subject enabled in favour of familiar, everyday subjects – cutlery, postcards, playing cards, umbrellas and pencils, for example – Brack shifted his view from the local to the universal, now seeking to present ‘a new visual metaphor that would permit him to express the whole complexity of social interconnections’.6 As Patrick McCaughey astutely observed, ‘The still life enables him to ruminate and reflect on ideas and arguments beyond the scope of observed experience. Brack becomes a ‘modern history painter’, able to take on the largest speculations pictorially through the humble genre of the studio still life.’7

1. Brack quoted in Hughes, R., ‘Brack: Anti-Romantic Gad-Fly’ in The Observer, 21 March 1959, p. 182 2. Ibid. 3. See Grant, K., ‘Human Nature: The Art of John Brack’ in Grant, K., John Brack, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009, p. 92 4. Brack, J., ‘Brack on Brack’, Council of Adult Education, Discussion Group Art Notes,

Melbourne, ref. no. A401, 1957, p. 1 5. Also relevant here is Breakfast still life, 1958, oil on composition board, approx. 63.4 x 73.6 cm (private collection) 6. Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, vol. 1, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, p. 140 7. McCaughey, P., ‘The Complexity of John Brack’ in Lindsay, R., John Brack: A Retrospective

Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 9

KIRSTY GRANT

(New Zealand, 1908 – 1970) HAWKE’S BAY LANDSCAPE, c.1955 oil on board 55.5 x 75.5 cm signed lower right: Rita Angus

ESTIMATE: $350,000 – 450,000

PROVENANCE

Mrs N. E Bowater, Christchurch, acquired in the 1950s Private collection, Christchurch, acquired from the above c.1960 Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne

EXHIBITED

Possibly: The Group Show, The Art Gallery, Durham Street, Christchurch, 12 – 27 October 1957, cat. 43 (as ‘Main Route’)

Rita Angus painting Self-portrait, 1936-1937 Photographer: Jean Bertram Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington © The Estate of Rita Angus A road cuts through farmland, with neatly fenced paddocks giving way to rolling hills and distant mountains. No people are visible, but the human presence is implied by a shed, a church, and an array of exotic trees, bursting into flower. A hoarding on the right, devoid of text or image, recalls an abstract painting. But it is the road itself which captures our attention – a vertical axis placed just off-centre, sprouting strange, tentacle-like arms that disappear into rural valleys. It is awkward and almost naïve in treatment, and it gives the painting an eerie, otherworldly quality.

Such disruption is typical of Rita Angus’s art. She was never afraid to experiment with scale, imagery and perspective, and the results could be startling. Here, the road evokes an ancient creature embedded in the land, suggesting the turbulent forces buried in its depth. Angus’s family had experienced the 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake, which devastated the city of Napier, and she had sketched among its ruins in the following year. She knew the power and unpredictability of this landscape. She also had a strong sense of the interconnectedness of all things – human beings, birds and animals, and the land itself – and a mystical intensity pervades her work.

Rita Angus is one of the most important figures in 20th century New Zealand art, and is beginning to achieve wider recognition. In September 2020, she was scheduled to have a major exhibition at the Royal Academy in London – a project unfortunately cancelled, just months before it was due to open, as a consequence of the global pandemic. That exhibition, Rita Angus: A New Zealand Modernist – He Ringatoi Hou o Aotearoa, was recently shown at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Rita Angus Fog, Hawke’s Bay, 1966 – 68 oil on board 77.7 x 107.2 cm Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tãmaki, Auckland © The Estate of Rita Angus

In his essay for the exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy curator, Adrian Locke, described Angus as ‘a notable maverick in a male-dominated cultural sector’: an artist who pioneered a new visual language in the 1930s, reflecting the values of young, liberal, intellectual New Zealanders.1 While a previous generation had looked to England and Europe, studying abroad and even becoming expatriates, Angus and her contemporaries, such as Colin McCahon, had a keen sense of themselves as New Zealand artists, committed to the cultural development of their country.

Born in Hastings in Hawke’s Bay in 1908, Angus studied at Canterbury College School of Art in Christchurch, where she was part of a lively generation of students who challenged the precepts of their conservative training. Her friend Louise Henderson described her as ‘a very bright young woman, very sure of herself … very interested in the modern movement in painting.’2 Her art flourished during the 1930s, when she painted friends and family, and a series of playful, inventive selfportraits, including an image of herself as Cleopatra. In landscape, she developed a regionalist style, adopting some of the tenets of modern art, such as bold design, simplified form and decorative colour to revitalise the local tradition. Cass (1936), voted New Zealand’s greatest painting by viewers of a popular television show in 2006, epitomises this phase of her work.3

During the 1940s, devastated by the horrors of the Second World War, and recovering from an unhappy love affair with the composer Douglas Lilburn, Angus developed a distinctive, visionary style to express her feminist and pacificist convictions. Living alone in a cottage near Christchurch, and deeply invested in her art, she became increasingly reclusive, working for years to bring her major oils to completion. For most of the decade she refused to sell her work, preferring to live frugally on a small allowance from her parents. She wrote of the ‘single belief’ that sustained her: ‘that artists have significance and depth of meaning in the world. To me, especially in New Zealand. Thus, I have been able to devote my energies to what I really am, a woman painter. It is my life.’4

After recovering from a breakdown in 1949, Angus returned to painting with a greater focus on landscape. She began to sell her work, mainly in group exhibitions, but there was little market for New Zealand art and her earnings were negligible. In 1955 she settled in the capital city, Wellington, and began to make regular bus trips to Napier in Hawke’s Bay to visit her parents. She loved the landscape of the Hawke’s Bay hinterland – a glowing patchwork of fertile farmland, giving way to majestic tawny hills, often snow-tipped in winter. On the bus, she preferred to sit at the front, across from the driver, where she could watch the ever-changing panorama of the landscape. Never without a sketchbook, she made quick sketches of anything that took her eye – farm buildings, a stand of trees, sheep grazing in a paddock. Back in her Wellington studio, these sketches were the starting point for a series of oils which present a highly distinctive view of the Hawke’s Bay landscape.

Rita Angus Flood, Hawke’s Bay, c.1955 – 56 oil on canvas 41.3 x 35.0 cm The James Wallace Arts Trust, New Zealand © The Estate of Rita Angus

Angus completed her first oils of the region in the mid-1950s – two small, lively images of flooded paddocks, each featuring farm buildings and a carefully positioned church.5 This landscape is more tranquil, and considerably larger; at 555 x 755 mm it appears to be her biggest oil of the decade. Ten years later Angus would revisit this subject – the view from the bus – in paintings such as Fog, Hawke’s Bay (1966 – 68), which reflect her interest in a modified cubism.

While this work is clearly a Hawke’s Bay subject, its title is undocumented. According to the current owner, it was originally purchased from The Group, an independent Christchurch exhibition society, by a Mrs N.E. Bowater in the 1950s. Angus exhibited only a handful of oils at The Group during that decade, and a review of the exhibition catalogues suggests that this painting is most likely to be Main Route, exhibited in 1957 for what was then her top price of 15 guineas. However, no documentation has been found to confirm this, either in the partial records of The Group or Angus’s own papers.6

When Angus died of cancer in January 1970, aged 62, most of her paintings were still in her possession. Some 620 works were deposited on long-term loan at the National Art Gallery (now the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa), where they soon began to attract scholarly attention, leading to the first major exhibition of her work in 1982. Today, it is only rarely that a new painting comes to light – one which has never been published. In that respect, this Hawke’s Bay landscape is a significant discovery – a luminous, beguiling image, and a fascinating example of the artist’s work.

1. Adrian Locke, ‘The other side of the easel: Rita Angus and other women artists on the edge,’ in Lizzie Bisley (ed), Rita Angus: New Zealand modernist/He ringatoi hou o Aotearoa, Te Papa

Press, 2021, p. 62. 2. Quoted in Kaleidoscope, Television New Zealand, 1983. 3. Frontseat, Television New Zealand, 2006. 4. Letter to Douglas Lilburn, 29 December 1945. Alexander Turnbull Library, MS-

Papers-7623-59. 5. Flood, Hawke’s Bay (1955), oil on canvas, 452 x 485 mm, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa

Tongarewa; Flood, Hawke’s Bay (c.1955-56), oil on canvas, 413 x 350 mm, Wallace Arts Trust. 6. The archive of The Group is held at Christchurch Art Gallery (https://christchurchartgallery. org.nz/media/uploads/2010_07/The_Group.pdf), but the records for 1957 are minimal.

Angus’s papers at the Alexander Turnbull Library contain some receipts (see MS-Papers 1399-3/5; 3/7; 2/3/1-4; and 2/3/5-10), but again the documentation is incomplete.

JILL TREVELYAN

Jill Trevelyan is a Wellington art historian and curator. She is the author of the highly acclaimed biography, Rita Angus: An Artist’s Life (Te Papa Press, Wellington, 2008), which won the Non-Fiction Award at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2009, and was reprinted in the context of the recent Rita Angus exhibition held at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington. She also contributed to the catalogue accompanying that exhibition, Rita Angus: A New Zealand Modernist – He Ringatoi Hou o Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, Wellington, 2021), and is the co-author of Rita Angus: Live to Paint & Paint to Live (Random House, Wellington, 2001).

born 1930 WRITINGS OF OLD, 1965 oil on board 99.5 x 85.5 cm signed and dated lower right: Audette 65 signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: 16 / Audette 1965 / writings of old / 2

ESTIMATE: $45,000 – 65,000

PROVENANCE

Holdsworth Galleries, Sydney Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

Yvonne Audette, Holdsworth Galleries, Sydney, 10 – 28 November 1970, cat. 2

When Writings of Old was painted in 1965, Yvonne Audette had been living out of Australia for thirteen years, having moved to the United States in 1952 at the age of twenty-two. Living first in New York, where she studied at the Arts Student League of New York, she experienced the flowering of Abstract Expressionism firsthand, absorbing the diverse influence of artists such as Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Mark Tobey, Bradley Walker Tomlin and Willem de Kooning. In 1954, Audette made her first abstract works, which were particularly influenced by Kline’s monumental black and white gestural paintings, and after seeing one of de Kooning’s Woman series in progress when she visited the artist in his studio. Like several contemporary artists at the time, she also enrolled in Zen calligraphy classes with a Japanese master. However, while Audette has always been honest about the sources of her practice – as she has said, ‘art has got five thousand legs’1 – she was nevertheless determined, from the outset, to find her own unique voice.

After a period of travel in Spain, France and Germany in 1955, Audette settled in Florence, Italy. She later established a studio in Milan, which saw her commuting between the two cities to make work. After giving up her studio in Florence in 1963, Audette moved permanently to Milan, where she was based until her return to Australia for good in 1966. Audette’s circle of artist friends and colleagues in Italy included Renato Birolli, Lucia Fontana, Giuseppe Santomaso and Emilio Vedova (who, Fontana aside, were all creating expressionist works of a decidedly European inflection), but it was the work of Rome-based American artist, Cy Twombly, that was to have the greatest impact on her practice at this time.2 As the title of Audette’s painting and its soft palette suggests, the artist drew as much inspiration from the history of the city around her, and the patina and marks upon its walls and tablets, as from Twombly’s characteristic scratchy signs and hieroglyphics. Yet within Writings of Old Audette transforms these sources into her own confident iconography – a masterful combination of graffiti-like scrawls and carefully considered marks, set against and amidst transparent layers that are applied, scraped back and then applied again over an extended period. Carefully constructed while seemingly ‘automatic’ in its creation, the work is a study in space and depth, and a kind of slow, mesmerising movement. As the artist has explained:

‘Transparency was always important in trying to build up the structure of the painting – every stroke and mark had a meaning. The calligraphy – that’s why I like the transparency because you could see underneath it every form, structure, mark that had been put down before – nothing was ever lost. It is like the inside of a human being, everything is there, what you say and do is always there in human experience. I want to do this in my painting; to build up layer, upon layer – put on top. Everything underneath is important.3

1. Yvonne Audette, in an interview with Bruce James, 14 November 1998, cited in Ewington, J.,

Yvonne Audette: Abstract Paintings 1950s & 1960s, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, p. 11 2. Yvonne Audette met Cy Twombly through Italian artist Gastone Novelli in either 1958 or 1959.

Yvonne Audette, artist’s notes, 1965, cited in Adams, B., ‘Yvonne Audette: The Later Years’,

Heathcote, C. et al., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2003, Macmillan Art

Publishing, Melbourne, 2003, p. 151 3. Durie Saines, D., The Will to Paint: Three Sydney Women Artists of the 1950s, Joy Ewart, Nancy

Borlase, Yvonne Audette, Masters thesis, Power Institute of Fine Art, University of Sydney, 1992, p. 100

KELLY GELLATLY

(1860 – 1940) THE CHRISTMAS CAMP oil on canvas 25.5 x 41.0 cm signed lower right: C. Southern inscribed with title on stretcher bar verso: The Christmas Camp. bears inscription verso: By Clara Southern / C Southern bears inscription on frame verso: Mr G P Cooper / … / 6 Waltham St. / Richmond

ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 50,000

PROVENANCE

Mr George Page Cooper, Melbourne (bears inscription verso) Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 4 November 1987, lot 65 Earl Gallery, Victoria Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in November 1987

EXHIBITED

Exhibition of Australian Paintings, Earl Gallery, Victoria, nd, cat. 6 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

We are grateful to Brenda Martin Thomas, wife of the late David Thomas AM, for kindly allowing us to reproduce David’s research and writing in this catalogue entry.

Clara Southern is widely regarded as one of the leading women artists of Australian Impressionism. During this Golden Age of Australian art, she and her colleagues Jane Sutherland and Jane Price were considered to be the three leading female figures. While Sutherland is usually given prime position, many would agree with arts writer and historian John McDonald who stated that ‘...one could make a credible case for Clara Southern... as the most significant woman artist of the era.’1 Perhaps this is an honour that will be achieved when her achievements, such as The Christmas Camp, become wider known.

Southern studied under Madame Mouchette at the National Gallery School, and under Walter Withers at his home in Heidelberg. Her fellow students at the Gallery included Arthur Streeton, Sutherland and Emanuel Phillips Fox. Although she worked in the open air directly from the motif, and made weekend painting trips to Eaglemont artists’ camp, her view of the landscape is as if seen through women’s eyes. In her more lyrical approach to the Australian scene, she reflected the beneficial influence of her teachers Frederick McCubbin and Withers, avoiding the heat and blinding light of the noonday sun for quieter moods of nature. Like her fellow women artists, she preferred a more domesticated bush to one populated by male heroics. Moreover, her settled countryside is often peopled with women as in An Old Bee Farm, c.1900, acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, through the Felton Bequest in 1942. An Old Bee Farm and other major works were included in her exhibition at the Athenaeum Hall in 1914. The exhibition confirmed that her best landscapes were painted at Warrandyte. Following her marriage to John Flinn in 1905, they moved to Blythebank at Warrandyte. She lived and painted there for the remainder of her long life. Here Southern became a central figure in a growing community of artists who at times included Louis McCubbin, Penleigh Boyd, and Harold Herbert. Clearly a leader of her time, she exhibited with the Victorian Artists’ Society from 1889 – 1917 and was not only the first female member of the Australian Art Association but the first to serve on its committee. Memberships included the Lyceum Club and the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors.

Southern’s love of the Warrandyte countryside is readily apparent in The Christmas Camp through its soft, magical blues, mauves, fresh greens, and the relaxed charm of the artist’s camp nestled within the landscape. Enveloped in an atmosphere that is palpable, the work encapsulates her close identification with the scene, passionately embraced on first sight and maintained throughout her life; as elucidated by one contemporary critic at the time of the Athenaeum exhibition in 1914,

‘Miss Clara Southern (Mrs J. Flinn) is a sweet and original singer of the Australian bush in colour, which, by the most skilful use of her pigments, she realises in all its beauty and charm, its majestic silences, its harmonies, and those mysterious distances we all know and feel when in its midst. We can almost hear the wind sighing and sobbing through her trees and that furtive movement of life beneath the beautiful undergrowth that trembles in her foregrounds. Her landscapes are truly poems, full of sentiment and feeling, and that artistic reticence so seldom met with, which never allows nature to be for one moment oppressed or overstepped, or the note forced under any pretence.’2

1. McDonald, J., Art of Australia, Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited, Sydney, 2008, vol. 1, p. 606 2. ‘A Lyrical Painter’, Kyneton Guardian, Victoria, 14 March 1914

(1856 – 1931) PORTRAIT OF FLORENCE GREAVES, 1898 pastel on paper on compressed card 89.0 x 53.5 cm signed and dated lower left: Tom Roberts / 1898 .

ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection Dalia Stanley & Co., Sydney, 3 December 1995, lot 25 Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne Private collection, New South Wales

EXHIBITED

Tom Roberts: Retrospective, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 4 October – 17 November 1996; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 29 November 1996 – 27 January 1997; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 11 February – 6 April 1997; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 18 April – 1 June 1997; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 11 June – 27 July 1997, cat. 63 (label attached verso)

LITERATURE

Radford, R., Tom Roberts: Retrospective, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1996, p. 210 (illus., as ‘Portrait of a standing woman’) Cotter, J., Tom Roberts & The Art of Portraiture, Thames and Hudson, Melbourne, 2015, fig. 6.5, pp. 278, 280 (illus., as ‘Portrait of a Standing Woman’)

RELATED WORKS

Miss Florence Greaves, 1898, pastel on paper, 41.0 x 34.5 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Portrait of Florence, c.1898, oil on canvas on paperboard, 66.6 x 38.7 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Tom Roberts Portrait of Florence, c.1898 oil on canvas on paperboard 66.6 x 38.7 cm Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Hailed as the father of Australian landscape painting, Tom Roberts holds an important place in the history of Australian art, particularly renowned for great nationalistic pictures painted in the years leading up to Federation, including Shearing the Rams, 1888 – 90 (National Gallery of Victoria) and A Break Away!, 1891 (Art Gallery of South Australia). Signifiers of national identity centred on nineteenth century rural life and activity, these paintings still resonate with contemporary audiences and remain on permanent display in the public galleries that house them

The fact that portraiture makes up around a third of Roberts’ painted oeuvre comes as something of a surprise, but he was a skilled painter of people, able to capture the mood and character of his subjects in addition to accurately describing their physical likeness. His motivation was often practical – as he once explained to a friend, ‘Portraits pay, … my boy’1 – with commissions of politicians and other public figures easier to secure than patronage for large and time-consuming subject and history pictures.2 Roberts’ was also attuned to the potential historical significance of portraiture however, and in 1896 he embarked on a series of small paintings on timber panels titled ‘Familiar Faces and Figures’ – depicting fellow artists, musicians, journalists and public officials, among others – which he hoped would be kept together for posterity.3

Roberts particularly excelled in the depiction of female subjects and, as Helen Topliss has noted, portraits such as Madame Pfund, c.1887 (National Gallery of Victoria) and Eileen, 1892 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), reveal his love of female personalities and companionship, as well as his aesthetic response to the decorative elements of women’s dress.4 This full-length pastel of Florence Greaves (1873 – 1959) exemplifies this aspect of his work, making a feature of the flowers on her hat, the delicately-speckled veil and ruffled white petticoats glimpsed beneath the hem of her skirt – highlighting ornamental details in what is otherwise a plain, although very stylish outfit. Depicting his subject in profile, Roberts emphasises her fine features, as well as creating a strong sense of diagonal movement through the composition, leading the eye from her jawbone through to the tip of the umbrella. He adopted a similar view in two other portraits of Greaves made around the same time, a pastel head study dated 1898 and the beautiful bust in oil, Florence Greaves, c.1898, both of which she bequeathed to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Greaves was an early student at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School, also studying at London’s Slade School in the late 1920s, and it is likely that it was Ashton who introduced her to Roberts.5 In 1894, Roberts visited the Greaves’ family cattle station, Newbold, located on the Clarence River in northern New South Wales. Returning three years later, he began work on A Mountain Muster, 1897 – 1920s (National Gallery of Victoria) there, painting the portraits of Florence the year after, and another of her mother in 1899.6

1. Roberts quoted in Taylor, G., Those Were the Days, Sydney, 1918, p. 100 quoted in Topliss, H.,

Tom Roberts 1856 - 1931, A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, p. 20 2. See Topliss, ibid. 3. See Topliss, ibid., pp. 21 - 22 4. Topliss, H., ‘Portraiture and Nationalism’ in Radford, R., Tom Roberts, Art Gallery of South

Australia, Adelaide, 1996, p. 154 5. Kolenberg, H., Ryan, A. and James, P., 19th century Australian Watercolours, Drawings &

Pastels from the Gallery’s Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, p. 120 6. Mrs W. A. B Greaves, 1899, oil on canvas, 77.5 x 60.0 cm (oval), Art Gallery of

New South Wales

KIRSTY GRANT

Tom Roberts, c.1895 photographer: Talma Studio, Melbourne State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

(1872 – 1952) BY THE SEA, c.1912 oil on panel 26.0 x 33.5 cm signed lower right: CARRICK

ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 11 May 1977, lot 25 (as ‘Mother and Child on Beach’) Private collection, Melbourne

EXHIBITED

Possibly: Paintings by Mrs E Phillips Fox, The Guildhall, Melbourne, 11 – 26 July 1913, cat. 83 E. Phillips Fox & Ethel Carrick, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 13 November – 6 December 1997, cat. 44 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 48)

Marrying in 1905, Ethel Carrick and Emanuel Phillips Fox shared a rich, creative life, supporting each other in their respective artistic endeavours and ambitions. Before meeting at the artists’ colony of St Ives in Cornwall, both had undertaken formal artistic training – Fox at Melbourne’s National Gallery School, alongside Rupert Bunny and Fred McCubbin, and Carrick, at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. As newlyweds they moved to Paris, living in a studio apartment at the Cité Fleurie in Montparnasse, described by Carrick as ‘quite a cosmopolitan little colony of hard-working artists… thirty different nationalities being represented.’1

As well as being a mecca for artists, Paris was well-positioned as a launching place for the couple’s frequent travels. Like many of their peers, the Foxes ‘travelled to paint and painted to travel’, and their works read like a visual itinerary, ‘in the summer… to artist colonies, such as… St Ives, or Pont Aven and Étaples in France, and sometimes to society beaches, such as Royan and Dinard. Destinations like Venice, Spain and Morocco were scheduled in the spring and autumn months.’2 They ‘followed the light’, typically spending winters in Paris where they would work in the studio, completing paintings based on outdoor oil sketches made during their travels the previous year, in preparation for submission to the Salons.3 On occasion, the couple also travelled to Australia and it is likely that this charming work was made during one of these visits. In Sydney in 1913 and 1914, Carrick Fox painted a number of beach scenes including Manly Beach – Summer is Here, 1913 (Manly Art Gallery and Museum), which reflects the Australian enthusiasm for the beach, as well as the brilliant summer sunshine. In this painting, a woman watches two young children playing by the water’s edge. Elegantly attired in the manner of the day, she wears a long white dress and a hat adorned with colourful flowers. Presumably the children’s mother, she looks on tenderly, and the intimacy of the scene is highlighted by the younger child’s nudity. Although not surprising to a contemporary viewer, this was highly unusual in the early twentieth century when social mores decried public nakedness of any kind. Artistic precedents exist for this subject however, most significantly in this context, Emanuel Phillips Fox’s large-scale painting, Bathing Hour, 1909 (Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum).4 In this well-known painting, a mother dries her naked daughter on the sand against a backdrop of women and children on the shore and in the water, all of whom wear full-length dresses or neck-to-knee bathing costumes.

Light and the representation of its effects remained a constant preoccupation for Carrick Fox and this is evident here, in the depiction of the mother whose figure is a study of deep shadows and bright white highlights. Similarly, the ocean, which features prominently, vivid blue in the distance and paler close to the shore, is painted in a series of expressive horizontal brushstrokes emphasising the movement of the water and the play of light across its surface. As a French critic wrote, ‘Mlle Ethel Carrick fires the enthusiasm of art lover … The quiet modesty of the artist conceals real knowledge about how to see, how to place the strokes side by side and to understand’.5

1. Carrick Fox quoted in Goddard, A., ‘An Artistic Marriage’ in Art, Love & Life: Ethel Carrick and E Phillips Fox, Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2011, p. 18 2. Downey, G., ‘Cosmopolitans and Expatriates’ in Love & Life: Ethel Carrick and E Phillips

Fox, ibid., p.57 3. Ibid. 4. Fox produced two almost identical versions of this painting. The second, dated c.1909, is in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art. See Spate, V., ‘Nature and Artifice – Emanuel Phillips Fox Bathing hour’ in Seear, L., and Ewington, J., (eds.),

Brought to Light: Australian Art 1850 – 1965 from the Queensland Art Gallery Collection,

Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1998, pp. 108 – 111 5. Breuil, H., ‘Promenade travers les Salons de Salon d’Automne’ in Les Tendances Nouvelles,

Paris, vol. 30, no. 39, December 1908, quoted in Goddard, op. cit., p.24

KIRSTY GRANT

(1879 – 1965) LA ROBE BLEUE, 1911 oil on canvas 92.5 x 65.0 cm signed and dated lower left: Bessie Davidson 11 bears inscription on label verso: 191

ESTIMATE: $300,000 – 400,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection, France Beaussant – Lefèvre, Paris, 11 December 2009, lot 217 Private collection Sotheby’s, London, 13 July 2010, lot 139 Private collection, New South Wales

EXHIBITED

Salon de la Société National des Beaux Arts, Grand Palais, Paris, 16 April – 30 June 1911, cat. 372 (as ‘Dame en robe bleue’) Bessie Davidson & Sally Smart – Two artists and the Parisian avant–garde, Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, 20 March – 26 July 2020

LITERATURE

‘Australasians at Paris Salons’, The Argus, Melbourne, 17 June 1911, p. 7 (as ‘Lady in the Blue Dress’) Curtin, T., (ed.), Bessie Davidson: An Australian Impressionist in Paris, Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, 2020, p. 63

Bessie Davidson in her studio, c.1913 photographer unknown Courtesy of Sally Smart

Bessie Davidson Jeune fille au miroir (Young girl with mirror), 1914 oil on canvas 73.0 x 60.0 cm Private collection

We are grateful to Brenda Martin Thomas, wife of the late David Thomas AM, for kindly allowing us to reproduce David’s research and writing in this catalogue entry.

Davidson was born in Adelaide and studied under Margaret Preston (then Rose McPherson), first visiting Paris with her in 1904. Attending the Académie de la Grande, she exhibited in the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français and the Societe des Beaux-Arts. Although returning to Adelaide in 1906, four years later she finally settled in Paris. Her apartment on the Rue Boissonade, Montparnasse became her home and studio. Like Rupert Bunny, her countryman, she exhibited regularly in Paris, gaining much critical recognition

With ever-deepening French connections, Davidson’s life-long love is reflected in her numerous activities, associations and awards. Working as a nurse during World War I, in 1931 she was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur for art and humanity. The first Australian woman so honoured, she was also the first to be elected to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. A foundation member of the Salon des Tuileries and the Société Nationale des Indépendants, in 1930 she became Vice-President of the Société Nationale de Femmes Artistes Modernes. Although she loved France, like Bunny, she never gave up her Australian citizenship. Internationally, she is today represented in the Musée d’Art Moderne, Musée d’Orsay, and Musée du Petit Palais, Paris, as well as in collections in The Netherlands, Edinburgh, and Fife. In 1999, the Australian Embassy, Paris presented the exhibition, Bessie Davidson: Une Australienne en France, 1880 – 1965, and in 2020, the Bendigo Art Gallery staged Bessie Davidson – An Australian Impressionist in Paris, which notably included La Robe Bleue, 1911.

In her catalogue essay accompanying the recent, long-overdue survey of Bessie Davidson’s achievements at the Bendigo Art Gallery, curator Tansy Curtain suggested the artist’s ‘depictions of women at leisure are perhaps the most intriguing and revealing of all her works’1 – and certainly, the magnificent La Robe Bleue, 1911 featured here would seem no exception. As the Argus critic, reviewing the representation of Australian artists at the 1911 Paris Salon, enthusiastically exclaimed of the painting (albeit with a touch of gender-prejudice typical of the era): ‘The city of Adelaide has produced an artist of rare and dainty talent in Miss Bessie Davidson. Her two pictures possess a charm special to the best painting of her sex. Considered as the work of a woman too much praise cannot be given to Miss Davidson’s “Lady in the Blue Dress”. Refinement, grace of execution, and rare colour are among its qualities.’2

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834 - 1903) Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl, 1864 oil on canvas 76.5 x 51.1 cm Tate, London

An important work dating from her early life in Paris, La Robe Bleue captures exquisitely Davidson’s predilection for the subject of a woman alone in a domestic space, and the variety of states – loneliness, introversion, or pleasured independence – that might imply. In the present case, the figure appears in contemplation of some treasured possession (perhaps a photograph in a frame) and the mood is contented, with her elegant costume and surrounds conveying an air of genteel and cultured respectability. As with her depictions of women at leisure elsewhere, the figure is passive and does not meet our gaze; rather the viewer sneaks a furtive glimpse of her in a private moment of reflection or nostalgia.

With its delicate pastel palette, mastery of tonalism and pensive subject, the composition unmistakably betrays the influence of Americanborn, British-based post-impressionist painter, James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834 – 1903) in masterpieces such as his Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl, 1864 (Tate Gallery, London) and Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs Frances Leyland, 1871 – 74 (The Frick Collection, New York). Also discernible are striking affinities with the oeuvre of prominent American artist, Richard Miller (1875 – 1943) who was working and teaching in Paris at the same time as Davidson, and with whom she took classes at the Académie Colarossi. Described by fellow Australian female expatriate, Hilda Rix Nicholas, as causing ‘a stir in Paris’3, Miller was renowned for his distinctive, highly decorative brand of impression, famously declaring in 1912 that that ‘Art’s mission is not literary, the telling of a story, but decorative, the conveying of a pleasant optical sensation.’4 Invariably depicting stylish Parisian women at leisure in luxurious, domestic settings or sunny, brilliantly-lit gardens, he frequently used his wife as a model and, given her profile resemblance to the figure in La Robe Bleue, it may well be that she is featured here.

1. Curtin, T., ‘Bessie Davidson: Painter of domestic avant-garde’ in Bessie Davidson: An

Australian Impressionist in Paris, Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, 2020, p. 13 2. Australasians at Paris Salons’, The Argus, 17 June 1911 p. 7 (as ‘Lady in the Blue Dress’) 3. Hilda Rix Nicholas, ‘In search of beauty’, 14 May 1908, in ‘Annotated scrapbook’, Hilda Rix

Nicholas Papers, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 4. Richard Miller, quoted at https://www.nadatabase.org/2018/07/17/richard-edward-miller

VERONICA ANGELATOS

(1855 – 1917) BUSH LANDSCAPE, MACEDON, 1905 oil on canvas 40.0 x 66.5 cm signed and dated lower right: F McCubbin / 1905 framer’s label attached verso: John Thallon, Melbourne

ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in July 1979

EXHIBITED

Spring Exhibition, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 17 – 30 October 1979, cat. 39A (illus. in exhibition catalogue, as ‘Bushland’)

We are grateful to Brenda Martin Thomas, wife of the late David Thomas AM, for kindly allowing us to reproduce David’s research and writing in this catalogue entry.

When Frederick McCubbin moved to Macedon in 1901 he entered upon, as his son Alexander later wrote, ‘the most fertile and vigorous period of his life.’1 Some of his best and most popular works soon followed including his masterpiece, The Pioneer, 1904, ‘an established favourite’ within a short time of its acquisition in 1906 by the National Gallery of Victoria through the Felton Bequest.2 When Childhood Fancies, 1905 (private collection) was first exhibited, the art critic for The Age wrote enthusiastically, ‘McCubbin has never painted a more happily inspired picture.’3 And in Lost, 1907, (National Gallery of Victoria), another gem from this period, both the narrative and the early morning light filtering through the Macedon bush captured the public’s imagination. McCubbin devoted himself enthusiastically to the subjects around him – ‘The bush up our way looks more charming than ever’, McCubbin wrote to his friend Tom Roberts in 1904. ‘Pictures everywhere.’4 As the gifted interpreter of the secluded glade, he delighted in capturing the play of light in the subtlest of colours, of lyrical moments of childhood and the heroic endeavours of the early settlers of Victoria, the triptych format as much in veneration of the bush itself as of the pioneers.

Significantly, McCubbin named their family Macedon home ‘Fontainebleau’ after the forest in France, neighbouring the village of Barbizon and its school of plein air painters, and especially McCubbin’s favourite, Corot. Devoting himself to painting in the open air, he even dug a trench in the ground so that he could reach the canvas tops of The Pioneer. Now in the middle years of his art, his style became broader and vision fresher in response to painting out-of-doors directly from the motif, as readily seen here in Bush Landscape, Macedon, 1905. The smoothly painted, tight style of earlier years gave way to the freer, textured brushstroke and palette knife. These transitions are clearly visible in the comparison of Macedon landscapes such as A Bush Scene, 1903 (Art Gallery of Ballarat), and two works closely related to the painting on offer – The Hillside, Macedon 1904 (private collection, Melbourne), and Sunny Glade. 5 In these later paintings, the brushstrokes are applied with such verve that they seem to dance in spontaneous response to the scene. The focus of attention had now moved from the figure to the enchanting play of light, as in Sylvan Glade, Macedon, 1906, in the Bendigo Art Gallery. In radiant sunlight or in shade, each of these paintings captures the characteristic qualities of his beloved bush at Mount Macedon, one of his most fruitful painting grounds.

1. McCubbin, A., ‘Biographical Sketch of the Life of Frederick McCubbin’, in MacDonald, J., The

Art of Frederick McCubbin, Lothian, Melbourne, 1916, p. 65 2. ‘Mr. McCubbin’s Exhibition of Pictures’, The Age, Melbourne, 17 May 1907 3. ‘Exhibition of Arts and Crafts’, The Age, 20 November 1905, p. 5 4. Letters to Tom Roberts, vol. II, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney,

A2479, 7 November 1904 5. For The Hillside, Macedon see Clark, J., ‘A Happy Life’: Frederick McCubbin’s Small Paintings &

Oil Sketches, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1991, p. 17, p. 12 (illus.), and for Sunny

Glade, Sotheby’s, Sydney, 25 August 2002, lot 13

(1867 – 1943) OUT OF THE PURPLE MOUNTAINS IT GETS ITS WATERS, 1928 oil on canvas on composition board 50.0 x 76.0 cm signed lower left: A STREETON. bears inscription on label attached verso: ‘Out of the Purple Mountains / it gets its Waters’ / Arthur Streeton / The Property of …

ESTIMATE: $150,000 – 200,000

PROVENANCE

Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Mr Charles David Murray, Sydney Thence by descent Private collection Lawsons, Sydney, 19 June 1984, lot 104 (as ‘Out of the Purple Mountains It Gets Its Waters (Creek from Purple Hill)’) Earl Gallery, Victoria Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in July 1984

EXHIBITED

Exhibition of Recent Paintings: Arthur Streeton, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 4 – 15 April 1929 (as ‘Drawing its Water from the Purple Hill’)

LITERATURE

‘Art Exhibitions: Mr. Streeton’s Paintings’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 4 April 1929, p. 8 (as ‘Drawing its Water from the Purple Hill’) Tildesley, B., ‘Oil Paintings by Arthur Streeton’, Sydney Mail, Sydney, 10 April 1929, p. 29 (as ‘Drawing its Water from the Purple Hill’) Streeton, A., The Arthur Streeton Catalogue, Melbourne, 1935, cat. 980 (as ‘Creek, from Purple Hill’)

Arthur Streeton Golden Summer, Eaglemont, 1889 oil on canvas 81.3 x 152.6 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

‘Arthur Streeton has done for Australia what… Constable did for England, Claude for Italy, Daubigny and Corot for France. He has fixed the character of our landscape for all time... I attribute this to his mastery of the painting of light and a perfect colour sense, always faithful to the mood of the hour.’1

So proclaimed Lionel Lindsay, well-known artist and arts commentator, in the special issue of Art in Australia that was published in 1931 to celebrate the art of Arthur Streeton. That same year, Streeton – then in his sixties and widely celebrated as one of Australia’s finest painters – was honoured with a retrospective exhibition at the National Art Gallery of New South Wales, the first Australian artist to be acknowledged in this way during his lifetime. He would receive the highest honour of the day some years later when, in 1937, he was knighted for his services to art.

As a young man in the 1880s and 90s, Streeton, along with his friends, Tom Roberts, Charles Conder and Frederick McCubbin, had transformed the depiction of the Australian landscape. Discarding traditional academic techniques and rules of representation, these so-called Australian Impressionists instead emphasised the naturalistic effects of light and colour, often painting outdoors, and producing atmospheric and painterly ‘impressions’ of their subjects.2 Streeton, in particular, became associated with images which cast the rural Australian landscape in shades of blue and gold, sun-bleached paddocks and golden plains glowing beneath vast blue skies. Exhibited at the Royal Academy, London in 1891 and awarded a Mention Honorable at the Paris Salon the following year, Golden summer, Eaglemont, 1889 (National Gallery of Australia) exemplifies this aspect of his oeuvre. Long recognised as a masterpiece of Australian art, this light-filled pastoral scene is at once romantic and yet, even to contemporary eyes, somehow also entirely realistic.

The poetically titled Out of the purple mountains it gets its waters, 1928, continues this theme but brings into view a majestic mountain that separates the blue sky, a puff of white cloud on the horizon, from the grassy golden foreground. Streeton’s mastery of his medium and facility with the brush is on full display in this painting, from the lively daubs of paint that make up the purple mountains to the reedy growth in the lower right, which is convincingly described in just a few fine

Arthur Streeton Land of the Golden Fleece, 1926 oil on canvas 90.2 x 142.7 cm Private collection

brushstrokes. The composition leads the viewer through the landscape in a gentle zig-zag motion, following the contours of the mountains through the band of trees that makes up the middle ground, joining up with the stream which flows to the front of the picture plane. Displayed in Streeton’s solo exhibition at Macquarie Galleries, Sydney in 1929, this painting prompted the Sydney Mail critic to declare that ‘There is no Australian painter as yet who can surpass him in the representation of spacious landscapes… [Out of the purple mountains it gets its waters] is joyously characteristic of Streeton in the rendering of the stream winding along the sandy flats.’3

This painting shares much in common with another major work of the time, Land of the Golden Fleece (Art Gallery of New South Wales), 1926, which depicts the dramatic landscape around the Grampians in Western Victoria, an area Streeton visited in November of that year.4 While this view is more expansive and takes in a broad vista, the palette is similar, as is the overall composition, which uses the flat-topped mountain as a backdrop for its pastoral scene, complete with dense stands of trees, the ubiquitous windmill and dam, and flock of grazing sheep. Such images served another significant purpose during these years, reinforcing a proud sense of national identity and a path towards recovery for a country that had suffered many losses in the First World War. As Ian Burn wrote, ‘In the postwar period, artists returned to the theme of the Australian landscape with a changed idea of its value and meaning… the war had imbued the landscape with a new power and authority… The masculine ideals of war were used to promote and validate a particular landscape of peace, an ideal of pastoral wealth and national potential’.5

1. Lindsay, L., ‘Arthur Streeton, Art in Australia, third series, no. 40,

October 1931, p. 11 2. For an analysis of these artists’ work in relation to French Impressionism, see Vaughan, G.,

‘Some Reflections on Defining Australian Impressionism’ in Lane, T., Australian Impressionism,

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, pp. 16 – 19 3. Tildesley, B., ‘Oil Paintings by Arthur Streeton’, Sydney Mail, Sydney, 10 April 1929, p. 29 4. Streeton painted three versions of this subject. The Art Gallery of New South Wales version is illustrated here. For the other two, see Eagle, M., The Oil Paintings of Arthur Streeton in the

National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, pp. 184 – 87, and

Smith, G., Arthur Streeton 1867-1943, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 170 – 171 5. Burn, I., National Life and Landscapes: Australian Painting 1900 – 1940, Bay Books, Sydney, 1991, pp.79 – 80, quoted in Eagle, ibid., pp. 186 – 87

KIRSTY GRANT

(1856 – 1931) RIVER OMEGA, NEW SOUTH WALES, 1901 oil on wood panel 19.5 x 35.5 cm signed lower left: Tom Roberts signed and dated lower centre: Roberts [illeg.] 1901 bears inscription on label verso: RUBIN COLLECTION / Roberts Tom / River Omega

ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE

Major Harold de Vahl Rubin, Sydney Christie’s, Sydney, 4 October 1972, lot 416 Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Mr Alan Greenway, Australia and USA, acquired from the above in 1972 Thence by descent Private collection, California, USA

EXHIBITED

Spring Exhibition 1972: Recent Acquisitions, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 8 – 24 November 1972, cat. 19 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

LITERATURE

Topliss, H., Tom Roberts, 1856 – 1931: A Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, vol. I, p. 168, cat. 365, vol. II (illus.)

Tom Roberts is renowned in Australian art for his grand vistas of national life, full of the blazing light akin to his fellow Heidelberg artists. However, on closer examination, his palette is more muted than the glare so beloved by Arthur Streeton and in Robert’s smaller works, this becomes even more apparent. Paintings such as Trafalgar Square, c.1884 (Art Gallery of South Australia); Cloud study, c.1889/1901 (National Gallery of Victoria); and Saplings, 1889 (Art Gallery of South Australia) are extremely low key, even foggy, and clearly indicate why he later became so enthusiastic about Clarice Beckett’s paintings which he encountered in in the late 1920s.1 In River Omega, 1901, this delicate sensibility is pronounced in a composition dominated by soft blues and creamy ochre. It is also one of the very few landscapes painted by Roberts during these years.

The Omega Headland is a small promontory 130 kilometres south of Sydney and is near the junction of the Werri Creek where it spills into the Pacific Ocean on the traditional lands of the Dharawal people. Stretching back inland is low-lying alluvial land enriched by ancient eruptions from Saddleback Mountain which rises in the distance. The native cedar trees were rapidly logged by early European settlers who cleared much of the forest to establish dairy farms. Later residents further altered the land by blasting rocks near the headland to build a concrete channel to admit tidal waters into the creek.2 Another artist attracted to the area was Lloyd Rees who painted there from 1939 and some of his many views of the region bear a striking resemblance to Robert’s River Omega, including Omega pastoral, 1950 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), and Sea at Omega, 1957 (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery). Like Rees, Roberts stood on the sands between the creek and ocean, looking inland, a view encompassing the sinuous twists of the creek, sand banks, sparse trees and the hills beyond. The modest scale of the wooden panel concentrates the detail and indicates that River Omega was probably started en plein air before being finished in the studio.

One reason for the small number of landscapes painted by Roberts at the time was the continuing effects of the 1890s depression and his major key to survival were portrait commissions. ‘“Portraits pay, George my boy,” the dear chap would say, as he would soften the red tint on the nose of a politician.’3 River Omega is the only landscape from 1901 recorded in Helen Topliss’ catalogue raisonné, but another of a slightly smaller size – Near Ballina, 1901, oil on wood panel, 19 x 35.5 cm, owned by Norman Schurek – was also recorded in the catalogue for the artist’s retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1947. In spite of its scale, Roberts took great pride in these paintings and carried a number with him to London in 1903, where he wrote in 1909 that they ‘(hold) up with all my late stuff and they with it. A kind of touchstone and I didn’t know it.’4 For many years, River Omega was owned by the eccentric grazier, The Honourable Major Harold de Vahl, whose sprawling collection included other works by Roberts as well as examples by Picasso, Degas, Renoir, Dobell and Streeton amongst many others.

1. Robert’s Sunrise, Tasmania, c.1928 (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery) is claimed to be his direct response to seeing Beckett’s paintings. 2. See Rees, L., & Free, R., Lloyd Rees: an artist remembers, Craftsman House,

Sydney, 1987, p. 57 3. Taylor, G., Those were the days, Tyrell’s, Sydney, 1918, p. 100 4. Tom Roberts, letter to S.W. Pring, 11 February 1909, Mitchell Library, Sydney, MLMSS 1367/2

ANDREW GAYNOR

(1867 – 1943) NORTHERN VIEW, OLINDA, 1933 oil on canvas 31.0 x 91.5 cm signed lower left: A STREETON. inscribed on frame verso: Streeton framer’s label attached verso: John Thallon, Melbourne

ESTIMATE: $250,000 – 350,000

PROVENANCE

The Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne Mrs A. E. Ramsay, Victoria, acquired from the above in 1933 Thence by descent Private collection, Victoria

EXHIBITED

A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings by Arthur Streeton, The Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne, 15 – 26 August 1933, cat. 40

LITERATURE

Streeton, A., The Arthur Streeton Catalogue, Melbourne, 1935, cat. 1076

Arthur Streeton surveys a forest giant in the Dandenong Ranges, c.1930 photographer unknown

ARTHUR STREETON

(1867 – 1943) NORTHERN VIEW, OLINDA, 1933

Arthur Streeton Australia Felix, 1907 oil on canvas 89.5 x 151.0 cm Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

After living in London for more than a decade, Arthur Streeton returned to Australia with his wife and young son in 1920. The following year, he purchased five acres of land at Olinda in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, fulfilling a long-held ambition to establish what he once described as his own ‘pastoral treasury’. Following the sale of Golden Summer, Eaglemont, 1889 (National Gallery of Australia) for the extraordinary sum of 1000 guineas, he built a house there several years later and enthusiastically began to develop a garden against the backdrop of mature native blackwoods and gum trees. Writing to Tom Roberts in 1924, he enthused, ‘And the garden and the trees, what a delight it is. All through the winter I’ve put in my week-ends up there… working at the bramble and bracken… and planting no end of trees… blackwoods… Lambertiana Cypress… Acacia Elata’.1

Typically spending summers at Olinda, as well as making regular visits throughout the year, Streeton came to know the area well, and both his garden and the surrounding landscape feature in paintings produced during the 1920s and 30s. Continuing the practice established in his youth, of painting outdoors and working directly from the subject – as well as in the studio – Streeton captured the essence and the actuality of the landscape, skilfully combining fleeting atmospheric effects with recognisable geographical features. At the time, his paintings were recognised as symbols of Australian life and land, and today, Streeton is still widely acknowledged as the creator of quintessentially national images. Writing in 1931, Harold Herbert noted that, ‘His unfailing sureness is a source of wonder. His unerring vision and sense of colour and atmosphere in Australian landscape are unique. His work vibrates with realism’2. While many works of this time reflect Streeton’s familiarity with the region and his celebrated ability to capture the beauty of the landscape in paint, his strong belief in the importance of protecting the natural environment also emerged as a significant theme during these years, motivated in part by the transformation he witnessed as a result of active logging and clearing. Addressing the Forest League in 1925, he said, ‘It seems an amazing thing to me that a community which spends thousands of pounds on hospitals and homes… and which is progressive and businesslike in so many ways, should suffer hundreds and hundreds of acres of valuable timber to be destroyed to facilitate some work of the moment when so little is gained from it.’3

Arthur Streeton The valley from Olinda top, ‘Let the Rose glow intense and warm the air’ – Keats, 1925 oil on canvas 63.8 × 101.6 cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Presenting an expansive panoramic vista, Northern view, Olinda, 1933 looks from a high vantage point across to a nearby hill-top – densely treed, apart from a large central clearing – and the distant landscape beyond. Streeton places us in the landscape in this picture, and close to the sky, which is pale blue and scattered with clouds. Delicate vertical brushstrokes of purple on the right-hand side describe a rain shower in the distance, suggesting direct observation of the subject. The key to this image however, is the large felled tree in the righthand corner. It is a subtle, yet powerful inclusion, the girth of the tree trunk signalling its age and symbolising the scale of the loss it represents. The strong environmental stance Streeton adopted in these works did not discourage serious collectors, indeed, it may well have encouraged buyers who both appreciated his artistic skill and shared his progressive opinions. The first owner of A mountain side, 1935 (Westpac Banking Corporation), for example, was Sir George Coles, founder of G. J. Coles & Co. retail stores. Similarly, Alfred Nicholas, who famously produced aspirin in Australia under the name Aspro, purchased The vanishing forest, 1934 (private collection) from its first exhibition. Northern view, Olinda was purchased from Streeton’s 1933 exhibition at the Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne by Mrs Annie Ramsay (1871 -1953) and has remained in the family ever since. While her name is comparatively little known in the context of early twentieth century business figures, from 1923 – 33, she was the chairwoman of the Kiwi Polish Company, which had been founded by her husband, William (1868 – 1914). Indeed, it was her New Zealand heritage and nickname, ‘Kiwi Annie’, which inspired the name of this iconic Australian brand.4

1. Streeton to Tom Roberts, 13 August 1924, quoted in Croll, R. H., Smike to Bulldog: Letters from Sir Arthur Streeton to Tom Roberts, Ure Smith Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1946, p. 119 2. Herbert, H., ‘Art of Arthur Streeton, Sunlit Landscapes, Beautiful Flower Pieces’, Argus, 17

March 1931, p. 8 quoted in Eagle, M., The Oil Paintings of Arthur Streeton in the National

Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, p. 154 3. Reported in the Argus, 27 November 1925, p. 23, quoted in Smith, G., Arthur Streeton 18671943, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1995, p. 163 4. For more information about Annie Ramsay and the history of the Kiwi company, see Dunstan,

K., Kiwi: the Australian Brand that Brought a Shine to the World, Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest, 2017. It is significant to note that the family was also directly associated with the art world through William’s brother, the distinguished painter,

Hugh Ramsay (1877 – 1906).

KIRSTY GRANT

(1881 – 1963) KING WILLIAM STREET LOOKING SOUTH TOWARDS THE TOWN HALL, c.1914 oil on canvas 61.0 x 76.0 cm signed lower right: WILL. ASHTON

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

PROVENANCE

Earl Gallery, Victoria Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in March 1986

King William Street, Adelaide, 1910s photographer unknown Adelaide City Council, Adelaide

(1879 – 1965) TULIPS WITH WHITE POT, c.1935 oil on board 31.5 x 98.5 cm signed lower right: Bessie Davidson signed and inscribed with title on backing paper verso: Tulips with White Pot / Bessie Davidson

ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE

The artist’s studio, until 1965 The Osborne Art Gallery, Adelaide (label attached verso) Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in September 1981

EXHIBITED

Exhibition of Paintings by Bessie Davidson, The Osborne Art Gallery, Adelaide, 31 May – 13 June 1967, cat. 10 Spring Exhibition, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 10 – 24 September 1981, cat. 112 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

RELATED WORK

Still life with pot and gladioli, c.1935, oil on board, 57.0 x 105.0 cm in the collection of Kaye McKellar, South Australia

We are grateful to Brenda Martin Thomas, wife of the late David Thomas AM, for kindly allowing us to reproduce David’s research and writing in this catalogue entry.

Adelaide-born Bessie Davidson spent most of her creative life in Paris, absorbing the elegance and sophistication which we associate with the French capital and manifesting it in her art. Such qualities imbue her landscapes, and especially the interiors and still life paintings in which she excels – Tulips with White Pot, c.1935 being a fine example. Her excellence in this genre was inevitably influenced by her earlier association with Margaret Preston (then Rose McPherson), in whose studio she studied from 1899 to 1904. Together, they travelled abroad, Davidson continuing her studies at the Munich Künstlerinner Verein, and in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Although Davidson returned to Adelaide in 1906 and taught for a number of years with Preston, her home became Paris where, from 1910 onwards, she would remain for the rest of her life. Significantly while Davidson loved France, like her friend and fellow-Australian expatriate artist resident in Paris, Rupert Bunny, she never gave up her Australian citizenship. In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, Davidson joined the French Red Cross and worked voluntarily as a nurse. Afterwards, her involvement in French life and art led to her being the first Australian woman to be elected to the Salon de la Société Nationale des BeauxArts. She was also a founder-member of the Salon des Tuileries, and vice president of the Société Nationale des Femmes Artistes Modernes. Her contribution to French art and to the nation resulted in the 1931 award of Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. She exhibited regularly in Paris and London, being included in the 1938 L’Exposition du Groupe Feminin at the Petit Palais and, the following year, in the exhibition of French art that toured the U.S.A. Internationally, she is represented in the Musée d’Art Moderne, Musée d’Orsay, and Musée du Petit Palais, Paris, as well as in collections in The Netherlands, Edinburgh, and Fife. In 1999, the exhibition Bessie Davidson: Une Australienne en France, 1880 – 1965 was held at the Australian Embassy, Paris, May – July 1999 and more recently, the Bendigo Art Gallery staged the exhibition Bessie Davidson: An Australian Impressionist in Paris.

Recording the visual pleasures of the everyday with the light-filled verve of French Impressionism, Davidson later developed a more prominent sense of form and compositional structure closer aligned to Paul Cézanne and Post Impressionism. It is this ‘Cézannesque’ style – which Davidson’s biographer, Penelope Little, describes as characterising ‘her most confident and productive years’1 – that is celebrated in Tulips with White Pot. Featuring the rich textural appeal and subtle sophistication that distinguishes Davidson as an artist of outstanding ability, her brushwork here is full of variety, with both vertical and horizontal strokes creating a fascinating picture surface where the various still life objects morph into the formal elements of painting itself – composition, colour, form and texture. Moreover, the unusual horizontal format and close-range viewpoint creates an overwhelming feeling of intimacy, of having the privilege of being alone with the still life which no doubt derives from its setting – most likely having been painted in the artist’s Paris studio at Rue Boissonade, Montparnasse, where Davidson lived from 1910 until her death.

1. Little, P., A Studio in Montparnasse; Bessie Davidson: An Australian in Paris, Craftsman House,

Melbourne, 2003, p. 87

(1875 – 1963) WARATAHS AND PULTENAEA, 1955 oil on canvas 50.0 x 45.0 cm signed and dated lower right: M.PRESTON / 55

ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection, South Australia John Martin Gallery, Adelaide Private collection Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in December 1983

EXHIBITED

Exhibition of Past Australian Painters Lent From Private South Australian Collections, Adelaide Festival of Arts, John Martin & Co. Limited, Adelaide, 8 – 29 March 1974, cat. 91 (label attached verso, as ‘Pultinea [sic] and Waratah’)

For much of the twentieth century, Margaret Preston was a prominent and passionate advocate for a distinctly Australian form of modernism, one distanced from its European origins and synthesised instead through a fusion of Indigenous and Asian art. Her imagery, particularly when depicting Australian flora, has become embedded in the national consciousness with the result that her artworks are some of the most recognisable in this country. In 1953, Preston held her last solo exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney. Opened by historian Bernard Smith, it was, she proclaimed, her final one ‘before the pearly gates.’1 However, she did not cease painting and two years later, created a powerful suite of still lifes harking back to her images of the 1920s, of which Waratahs and Pultenaea, 1955, is an excellent example from the sequence.

Preston’s passion for Australian native flora was such that it is somewhat surprising how rarely the waratah appears in her work, given that it is the State emblem for New South Wales. Apart from a handful of prints, she usually used the scarlet bloom as an accent within other mixed still lifes, making Waratahs and Pultenaea, 1955, significant for its painterly focus. Here, the clutch of waratahs is balanced by a bunch of yellow Pultenaea stipularis (commonly known as handsome bush-pea), each lot in their own vase, drawn from the artist’s personal collection of ceramics (both vases also appear in other Preston paintings from that year).2 Waratahs and Pultenaea was painted at Preston’s home studio in Killarney Street, Mosman, and she sourced the native flowers ‘from florists, or was given specimens by her friend T. G. B. Osborn, Professor of Botany at Sydney University.’3 Set upon a plain timber table, the flowers have as their backdrop a bold pattern inspired by the artist’s extensive knowledge of Indigenous motifs and symbols. Executed in earth colours, this staging presents an ‘authenticity’ for the presentation as a whole. Preston had first advocated the fine art qualities of Indigenous art in an article for Art in Australia in 1925 and many more essays followed.4 She consulted with museum officials, organised exhibitions, travelled extensively to remote rock art shelters and lectured widely on the subject. Her acts of appropriation regarding the original artists and their artworks have been criticised, but Preston acted with integrity within her chosen boundaries and undeniably widened the appreciation for Indigenous art in Australia.

Of the remaining paintings from 1955, three are in public collections: Fish and Black boys, 1955 (Art Gallery of New South Wales); Native flowers of Western Australia, c.1955 (Art Gallery of Western Australia); and Banksia and native flowers, 1955 (Dunedin Public Gallery, New Zealand). A fourth, Flowers in a jug, 1955, was sold through Deutscher and Hackett in 2017 (Important Australian and International Art, 20 September 2017, lot. 4). Given that Preston was eighty years old in 1955, these late works form a powerful coda to her career and give substance to one critic’s comment from her solo show two years earlier that she was ‘obviously an artist whose brush gains in vitality, instead of losing it with the passage of time.’5

1. Margaret Preston, 1953, cited in Butler, R., The prints of Margaret Preston: a catalogue raisonné, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1987, p. 8 2. The ginger jar holding the waratahs also appears in Banksia, 1955 (Bonetti Collection) and

Banksia and native flowers, 1955 (Dunedin Public Gallery), whilst the vase with the bush peas features in Christmas Bells, 1955 (private collection). 3. Butler, R., ibid., p. 18 4. Preston, M., ‘The Indigenous art of Australia’, Art in Australia, 3rd series, no. 11,

March 1925, np. 5. The Daily Mirror, Sydney, 23 September 1953, p. 25

ANDREW GAYNOR

(1895 – 1988) RYDE LANDSCAPE, 1952 oil on canvas 45.5 x 56.0 cm signed and dated lower left: L REES 52

ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE

Dr and Mrs Norman Wettenhall, Melbourne Christie’s, Sydney, 3 – 4 October 1972, lot 110 Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Mr Alan Greenway, Australia and USA, acquired from the above Thence by descent Private collection, California, USA

EXHIBITED

Christmas Exhibition, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 10 – 23 December 1952, cat. 23 Lloyd Rees Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2 October – 2 November 1969, touring State galleries and Newcastle City Art Gallery to August 1970, cat. 48. (label attached verso)

LITERATURE

Free, R., Lloyd Rees Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1969, p. 28 Free, R., Lloyd Rees, Lansdowne Australian Art Library, Melbourne, 1972, cat. O151 (illus.)

During the years between 1947 and 1953, Lloyd Rees spent his Saturday afternoons painting with a group of fellow artists who all lived nearby. Informally known as the Northwood (aka Norwood) Group after the name of Rees’ home suburb on Sydney’s lower north shore, their number included Roland Wakelin, George Lawrence, John Santry and Marie Santry; and one of their regular destinations was North Ryde, a (then) small village some ten kilometres away, described by Rees as ‘a charming little collection of buildings set among orchards to the east and south and the rolling golf-links to the west, a church, two stores, an old hall, a school and a scattering of homes… our own little Barbizon.’1 Rapid sketches were done on the spot, built upon later in the group’s various home studios, and other examples by Rees include Evening at Nth Ryde, 1948, and Dusk at Nth Ryde, 1948 (both Art Gallery of New South Wales); and The Italian’s Cottage, North Ryde, 1952 (private collection, c/- Queensland Club). Apart from the production of a wonderfully evocative series of paintings, of which Ryde Landscape, 1952, is a fine example, Rees also benefitted greatly from ‘the great boon of companionship and the endless discussions so dear to the artist.’2 It is important to note that these were not topographically accurate views by Rees as he was more concerned with applying intellect and emotion to craft a scene which appealed on many levels. In an interview, he stated that an artist needed to be a ‘commander’ able to ‘control and mould and express (one’s) own will’ when handling paint and the depiction of a subject.3

One of Rees’ great heroes was Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, the first French artist to paint en plein air in the forests of Barbizon, but he also absorbed ideas by artists as diverse as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Arthur Streeton and Arthur Boyd. In 1947, Rees painted one of his masterpieces, the highly influential Road to Berry (Art Gallery of New South Wales) which features a set of gently rolling hills bisected by interconnecting roads. The influence of Corot echoes throughout this painting particularly with its low, even crepuscular, light, and in the sinuous lines of the roads which recall the curved trunk of a tree that Corot painted many times – one example being The bent tree (L’Arbre penché), 1855 – 1860 (National Gallery of Victoria). In a similar manner in Ryde landscape, what is now Victoria Road twists between the church (a simplified vision of St Charles Berremo, built 1857) and the large building opposite before setting a strong horizontal line that is then bisected diagonally by a short road leading to a line of fencing. What appears to be a plume of dust emphasises this area further whilst the subdued palette of soft greens and russet hark back to Rees’s own depictions of the Bathurst region from previous years. Adding interest and a touch of mystery is the artist’s delicate treatment of the hills beyond, executed in a wash of darkened blue-grey. It is a peaceful view but a forceful one, in line with the Rees’s strongly held belief that ‘once a picture has come to life, it dictates the terms of its own creation.’4

1. Rees, L., The small treasures of a lifetime: some early memories of Australian art and artists,

Collins, Sydney, 1969/1984, p. 145 2. ibid., pp. 146 – 47 3. Lloyd Rees, interview with Hazel de Berg, c.1962, cited at https://www.portrait.gov.au/words/ lloyd-rees Viewed 29.03.2022 4. Lloyd Rees, quoted in Free, R., Lloyd Rees, Lansdowne, Melbourne, 1972, p. 101

ANDREW GAYNOR

(1904 – 1984) THE RED ROCK, 1951 oil on composition board 91.5 x 61.0 cm signed and dated lower right: J. PASSMORE 51 inscribed with title and date on gallery label verso bears inscription verso: CRESSWELL

ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE

Douglas Watson, Sydney (inscribed on stretcher bar verso: LHD Watson) Philip Bacon Gallery, Brisbane Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1985

EXHIBITED

John Passmore, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, November – December 1951, cat. 5 John Passmore 1904 – 84 Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 19 December 1984 – 10 February 1985, cat. 18 (labels attached verso)

LITERATURE

Pearce, B., John Passmore 1904 – 84 Retrospective, Art Gallery New South Wales, Sydney, 1985, p. 45 (illus.)

John Passmore left Australia for Europe in 1933 and did not return for seventeen years. His years abroad were well spent gaining firsthand knowledge of the old masters and the upheavals in Western painting taking place in Europe and reverberating around the world.

When he returned to Australia in 1951, Passmore became the ‘Pied Piper’ of progressive painting through his various teaching roles, including at the National Art School in Sydney. He was a natural teacher; his wit and enthusiasm inspired his students to look beyond the academic brown Australian paintings of the day towards the innovations of Picasso, Matisse and Cézanne. A gaggle of devoted students hung on his every word and laughed along with his quick wit and humour. His passion for Tintoretto and Rembrandt was front and centre, but it was Cézanne whose influence gripped the artist very early and subsequently wove its way through his entire oeuvre. Passmore’s friendship with the British painter Keith Vaughan inspired him to look closer at the works of Picasso and Matisse. This led them to revisit some early experimental cubist drawings the pair had developed in the 1930s while working together at Lintas advertising agency. Vaughan’s star was rising and in 1948 he had an exhibition at the Reid and Lefevre Gallery in London. The constructivist works in this exhibition signalled a shift back towards those earlier, cubist sketches he and Passmore had shared. Vaughan’s work from this time had an indelible impact on Passmore. Vaughan’s method of applying equal weight and value to figure, ground and colour, and his tug of war between realism and abstraction became central to Passmore’s work from this time forward.

In The Red Rock, 1951, the push and pull of the warm and cool colours create lush, deep, space that recedes to the distant upper left and draws forward toward the lower frontal third of the work. The two figures bathe carefree in an Idyllic surround. The reflective surface of the water proves to be a helpful pictorial device, allowing the artist to further fragment the light. Daubs of colour are used to pick out the figures, just enough to reward and satisfy the viewer’s scrutiny and need of subject, but once discovered the figures again dissolve into pockets of vibrant local colour. Passmore’s works from this period are some of the most complete paintings of his career. The painted surfaces are worked and reworked until they reach a finely tuned crescendo that quiver with nuance and feel. Passmore wore his influences on his sleeve and The Red Rock, 1951, is an excellent example of John Passmore via Cézanne and Keith Vaughan. At a stretch, we could consider a cameo of Rembrandt’s A Woman Bathing in a Stream, c.1654, for these are studio works and such references are entirely appropriate and legitimate.

The Red Rock, 1951 was included in John Passmore’s one-man exhibition at the Macquarie’s Galleries in 1951, an exhibition which marked his return to Sydney and to exhibiting. Notably, Passmore rarely had solo exhibitions, preferring instead the ‘cut and thrust’ of group exhibitions where contemporary works could be compared and critiqued. After all, through the 1960s and far beyond, Passmore’s reputation as a teacher had reached guru status, so the group show would provide him and his work a context where he was most comfortable.

HENRY MULHOLLAND

(1927 – 1982) LYSTERFIELD PADDOCK NO. 1, 1973 oil on canvas 71.0 x 92.0 cm signed lower left: Fred Williams.

ESTIMATE: $200,000 – 300,000

PROVENANCE

Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, acquired from the above April 1977 Mr Alan Greenway, Australia and USA, acquired from the above Thence by descent Private collection, California, USA

RELATED WORK

Lysterfield Paddock no. 2, oil on canvas, 38.0 x 76.0 cm, private collection

The 1960s began optimistically for Fred Williams. In 1963, he was invited to join the stable of artists represented by Sydney art dealer, Rudy Komon, and the monthly retainer he received gave Williams and his wife, Lyn, the financial confidence to buy a house at Upwey in the Dandenong Ranges. That same year Williams was awarded the Helena Rubinstein Travelling Art Scholarship, spending seven months in Europe in 1964. The following year was also significant – ‘for the first time [Williams] was able to paint full-time. The concentration and energy, and the time he now brought to his art, resulted in four years of astonishing variety and contrast in his painting.’1

From the beginning of his career Williams drew on his experience of the surrounding world as the source of subject matter for his art and the landscape of Upwey naturally featured in his paintings at this time. From mid-1965, nearby Lysterfield, which was just a short drive from his home, became a regular destination for outdoor painting trips. James Mollison, the artist’s great friend who accompanied him on some of these excursions, described the area at the time as ‘sparsely settled country, with gently rolling hills and scrubby paddocks – fenced, but otherwise showing few signs of habitation’.2 It was the perfect subject for an artist who used his immediate surroundings as a jumping off point for images which distilled the landscape to its essential elements, and in the process, created archetypal images which have become part of our collective visual memory.

Painted on 29 August 1973, Lysterfield Paddock no. 1 features the broad open landscape divided into three horizontal bands. The lower half of the picture comprises a deep foreground which is painted a brilliant blue-green and enlivened by a series of darker blue-green and earth-coloured daubs representing low, irregular growth. Above it, in the middle-ground, gentle rolling hills sit below a decisive horizon line, while the top half of the picture is devoted to the depiction of the sky, big, clear and luminous, and injecting a palpable sense of light and space into the composition. The hieroglyphic-like marks that Williams used to describe the scrubby growth across the hillside, and the trees lining the horizon, are distinctively his, and typical of what Patrick McCaughey described as ‘his refined method of painting’ which was by this time, ‘as spontaneous as handwriting.’3 Less familiar are the four tall trees, which are lined up along the base of the hillside. White with touches of dark colour, and totally devoid of foliage, they are like sentinels in the landscape. Indicative of Williams’ careful observation of his environment, these trees are also an example of his occasional habit of incorporating details which identify landscape subjects – sometimes viewed during a particular season or time of the day – as specific, recognisable locales, rather than a more generalised view.

This painting was owned by Alan Greenway (1927 – 2008), who founded TraveLodge Australia in 1957, and initiated the Travelodge Art Prize.4 A national invitation prize, it was awarded to Williams’ good friend, John Brack, in 1971.

1. McCaughey, P., Fred Williams 1927 – 1982, Murdoch Books, Sydney, revised edition, 1996, p. 166 2. Mollison, J., Fred Williams: A Singular Vision, Australian National Gallery & Oxford University

Press, Canberra, 1989, p. 100 3. McCaughey, op. cit., p. 184 4. Atkinson, B. and Stephens, T., ‘Alan Greenway, Leader in Tourism 1927 – 2008’, Sydney

Morning Herald, 19 January 2009, https://www.smh.com.au/national/promoter-of-australiantourism-started-career-at-country-pub-20090118

KIRSTY GRANT

(1927 – 1982) SPINIFEX LANDSCAPE, HAMERSLEY RANGES, 1979 gouache on paper 55.0 x 75.0 cm signed lower left: Fred Williams bears inscription verso: SPINIFEX LANDSCAPE, HAMMERSLEYS [sic.] / 1979

ESTIMATE: $45,000 – 65,000

PROVENANCE

Estate of the Artist, Melbourne Mrs Lyn Williams, Melbourne Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1989

EXHIBITED

Some Aspects of the Work of Fred Williams, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 15 August – 2 September 1989, cat. 24

The lands that form the Pilbara region in north-western Australia are ancient and rich with minerals. Residing at Karratha Station in 1979, a country property fifteen kilometres from the coast, Williams was well placed to survey the rugged outline of the Hamersley Range. He studied with exhilaration the nuances of its distinctive landforms and unique flora, adapting his distinctive visual language to the particularities of this specific Antipodean landscape. Williams felt an immediate and profound engagement with this landscape, producing dozens of gouache paintings outdoors with the spinifex grass scratching his ankles.1 Spinifex Landscape, Hamersley Ranges has a high horizon line dotted with distinctive Kimberly boab trees, which reinforce the divisions of Williams’ favoured tripartite composition of horizontal strips. His horizon buckles under an enormous expanse of blue sky, his segmented landscape sparkling with mineral deposits and interspersed with scrubby native spinifex hummocks and wildflowers. Spinifex Landscape, Hamersley Ranges is characterised by touches of paint and lines laden with pigment set against bands of sweeping wash, evoking the overwhelming vastness of the artist’s vista of thi primeval landscape. Fred Williams had been invited by the chairman of the mining company CRA (now known as Rio Tinto), Sir Roderick Carnegie, to visit the Pilbara region. Carnegie, a family friend of the Williams, had been impressed by the artist’s recent aerial paintings of mining operations at Weipa in Queensland and invited him to compare this experience with the aweinspiring scale and raw elemental power of the Pilbara. Based on visual material gathered during two consecutive trips, Williams produced a remarkable body of work, twelve landscape paintings and a large number of gouaches all painted in situ. These Pilbara paintings were to become his last series – twelve months after their completion, in April 1982, the artist passed away.

Patrick McCaughey, in his monograph on Fred Williams, explained that while CRA made no formal commission for the creation of these landscape paintings, there was ‘a vague idea that he [Williams] should record the Pilbara before it was changed by the effects of mining’.2 Flying over the region in a biplane and taking hundreds of photographs, Williams desperately sought to capture the nuances of this foreign landscape, then using the fast-drying medium of gouache to faithfully and immediately transcribe its saturated minerally rich colours. Gouache enabled the creation of a wider range of textures, from thick daubs to wide washes, handled with fluidity and mature confidence.

Spinifex Landscape, Hamersley Ranges, is one of the gouaches painted either in situ or in a flurry of activity immediately upon the artist’s return to Melbourne. Williams was so impatient to fix the images onto paper that it was only in March of 1981 that he returned to the subject to execute a final series of landscapes in oil – all these paintings were eventually acquired by CRA (and subsequently donated to the NGV) along with eighteen of the gouaches, many others being purchased by the National Gallery of Australia.

1. Hart, D., Fred Williams. Infinite Horizons, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2011, p. 177 2. McCaughey, P., Fred Williams 1927 – 1982, revised edition, 1996, Murdoch Books,

Sydney, p. 321

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

(1927 – 1982) HILLSIDE LANDSCAPE, CAVAN III, 1977 gouache on paper 57.0 x 75.5 cm signed lower right: Fred Williams.

ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

PROVENANCE

The Estate of the artist, Melbourne Mrs Lyn Williams, Melbourne Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney (labels attached verso) Collection of John Piddick and Ruth Matheson Olsen Irwin, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2014

EXHIBITED

Fred Williams, Recent paintings and related etchings, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Art Sydney 06, RHI and Hordern Pavilion, Sydney, 22 – 25 June 2006 (label attached verso) Important Works from Private Collections, Olsen Irwin, Sydney, 7 – 25 May 2014

RELATED WORKS

Cavan, 1977, gouache on paper, 58.0 x 75.0 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (142.1988) Cavan, 1977, gouache on paper, 76.5 x 57.0 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (AC43–1980) We are grateful to Brenda Martin Thomas, wife of the late David Thomas AM, for kindly allowing us to reproduce David’s research and writing in this catalogue entry.

Hillside Landscape, Cavan III, 1977 is one of a series of gouaches which Fred Williams painted at Cavan during a visit he made in August of that year to the historic property owned by Rupert Murdoch. Located on the Murrumbidgee River near Yass in New South Wales, it offered Williams that characteristic monotony and hidden variety of detail in the Australian landscape which so appealed to him. While the rise of a hill or a weather-worn flat may attract the eye, the absence of focus led Williams to build it into the paint – dabs, swirls, and strokes of colour, enriched textures, broad washes nuanced with subtleties and creamy surfaces all testimony to his great gifts as a colourist. The same is found in two related gouaches of similar size – both entitled Cavan, 1977 – in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and an untitled landscape of Cavan gifted to Canberra’s National Gallery of Australia in 2005 by Alcoa World Alumina Australia. Idiosyncratically individual in their presentation of the landscape, each follows the convention of earth below and sky above, with that two-dimensional feel engineered by emphasis on the picture plane, adding to the distinct edge of the horizon and sense of something beyond. Generating a mood of expectancy, it harmonises with the abiding sense of timelessness, of a land reaching back to the primordial – powerfully present and moving. In choosing the Australian landscape above all, Williams said in the year of his Cavan paintings, ‘I must be inside looking out - not outside looking in’.1 Williams’ gouaches, through the greater informality of the medium, allow a more personally felt response to slip through. Gouache has always been an important medium for Williams, who held his first public gallery exhibition of ‘watercolours’ at the Newcastle Art Gallery in 1971. Significantly in 1977, the same year as Hillside Landscape, Cavan III was painted, Williams held a solo show of his gouaches at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

1. The artist, quoted in Hart, D., Fred Williams: Infinite Horizons, National Gallery of Australia,

Canberra, 2011, p. 157

born 1930 THE JUGGLERS, 1967 oil and collage on plywood (diptych) 153.0 x 229.0 cm signed and dated lower right: 1967 audette signed, dated and inscribed with title on right panel verso: the Jugglers 1967 / audette signed, dated and inscribed with title on left panel verso: the jugglers 1967 / Audette / oil on plywood / will collage (a few pieces) extensively inscribed with title and signed verso: Audette / A63

ESTIMATE: $120,000 – 160,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Melbourne

LITERATURE

Heathcote, C., Adams, B., Vaughan, G., & Grant, K., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, pl. 116, pp. 184 – 185 (illus.), 247

RELATED WORK

The jugglers, 1966, gouache, brush and pen and coloured inks and collage of cut newspaper, 32.6 × 43.0 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Unlike many Australian artists in the 1950s, Yvonne Audette took the unusual step, when choosing to travel abroad to further her career, of deciding on New York rather than London.1 Even when she later settled in Europe, it was Florence and later Milan, rather than Paris, that was to become her home. While these two important choices convey the young artist’s independence of mind and willingness to chart her own path, they were to also have a significant impact on the development of her practice. Audette’s introduction to Abstract Expressionism, and particularly, to its very different manifestations in the work of Willem de Kooning and Bradley Walker Tomlin, enabled her to find her own path – somewhere between the two, and to ‘balance out [her] own approach’.2 The work of the artists that Audette was exposed to over these years (including, importantly, Cy Twombly in Italy), encouraged her to loosen up and to experiment; leading to the development of her own visual language, which masterfully combined the freedom of de Kooning’s mark making, the more controlled approach of Tomlin, and Twombly’s characteristic graffiti-like style. As Audette has recalled of this time:

‘It was for me a learning experience – I was excited how images were painted out and worked over, reworked over and over – the courage to destroy in order to get something better, closer to what one wants to express. The ability to manipulate paint and seeing the energy this way of working produces in the painting. The importance given to gestural, spontaneous brushwork, acting as the very meaning of the work in itself. All this is very important to me and always will be, it is my way of working, the very act of painting being the content.’3

While Audette had returned to Australia a few times while living abroad and had maintained loose ties with the local art world, coming home to Sydney in 1966 essentially meant starting again, with the artist trying to find her place in what was, comparatively, a fledgling abstract scene. Audette held her first exhibition on home soil in 1968, showing her paintings and works on paper alongside sculptor Robert Klippel in Paddington’s Bonython Gallery (with Klippel showing upstairs and Audette in the larger ground floor space) – the same year that the National Gallery of Victoria launched its new St Kilda Road premises with The Field – a landmark exhibition heralding the arrival of a new generation of Australian abstractionists. Things were changing. However, despite the new-found prominence of Colour Field and Minimalist painting introduced by The Field, Audette continued her own form of abstraction unabated.

Like many of the artist’s works of this period, the palette of The Jugglers has undergone a dramatic transformation in response to Audette’s reintroduction to Australia’s shimmering, intense light. Gelato-coloured shapes float on the surface of the works’ two panels, bobbing to the top or receding in a meditative cycle; captivating the viewer just as a juggler does when tossing and catching three or more objects. While the calligraphic marks of earlier paintings remain, they are joined and softened here by a loose community of circles, squares and interlinked hoops that joyfully dance across the work’s light and airy surface.

The ‘jitterbug-ing union of collage and paint’ that we experience in The Jugglers also results from Audette’s use of a technique she adopted from de Kooning, where she would drop cut shapes onto a work as a way to discover new motifs.4 To this end, collage served as a liberating tool across her career, presenting unexpected imaginative and formal possibilities. As she has explained:

‘…I found paper collage flexible and well suited to my temperament – the experience of physically cutting pieces of paper, moving them around freely, fixing them, and sometimes working over and building up the actual surface in relief form, akin to some sculptural processes. Over many years, collage has allowed my imagination to take wings and free me from habit-forming patterns of the mind and spirit. A new range of visual associations could always be discovered and a new range of spatial and surface tensions experienced.’5

1. As Kirsty Grant acknowledges, Audette’s decision to travel to the United States was prompted by her American-born parents’ offer of financial support if she went to the US rather than elsewhere. Grant, K., ‘Introduction’, Yvonne Audette: Different Directions 1954 – 1966,

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, n.p. 2. ibid., n.p 3. Audette is speaking specifically of the experience of visiting de Kooning’s studio here, but it applies more broadly to the way in which she absorbed artistic influences during this period.

Grant, K. ‘Interview’, Yvonne Audette: Different Directions 1954-1966, n.p 4 Gellatly, K., Constructions in Colour: The Work of Yvonne Audette 1950s-1960s, Heide

Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2000, p. 11 5. McIntyre, A., Contemporary Australian Collage and its Origins, Craftsman House, Sydney, pp. 68-69

(1959 – 2006) CORONA, 1993 copper wire 32.0 cm diameter

ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney

LITERATURE

Fenner, F., Bronwyn Oliver Mnemonic Chords, Moet et Chandon, Epernay, France, 1995, pp. 5, 21 (illus.) Fink, H., Bronwyn Oliver: Strange Things, Piper Press, Sydney, 2017, p. 219 Murray-Cree, L., Awesome! Australian Art for Contemporary Kids, Craftsman House, Melbourne, c.2002, pp. 86 – 87 (illus.)

‘Each of Oliver’s works emits a whisper of familiarity and flickering voice of humour and optimism. At a deeper level, they strike an emotional chord in viewers hardened by the cynicism of much contemporary art practice. The poetic resonance of her deftly imaginative and delightfully quirky creations provides rare moments of reprieve from today’s didactic obsession with lobbying socio-political issues. There is no sarcastic commentary, modernist, psychoanalytical or feminist deconstruction informing Oliver’s work. Each piece is offered as a holistic entity, its layers of association emerging gradually through the process of looking.’1

One of Australia’s most innovative contemporary sculptors, Bronwyn Oliver remains celebrated for her extraordinary ability to produce meticulously articulated works of immense beauty and grace that unite timeless, organic forms of the natural world with the abstract logic of geometry. As elucidated by Hannah Fink in her introduction to the artist’s exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in July 2006, ‘...Bronwyn was modest, yet utterly sure of her vision, secure in the confidence of her originality. 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.’2

Simple yet complicated, fragile yet strong, eccentric though at the same time oddly straightforward, Corona, 1993 is a superb example of Oliver’s delicately woven copper and bronze assemblages that universally surprise and inspire – beguiling both the eye and mind through their enigmatic presence. Bearing the patinated hallmarks of her early explorations, the sculpture emanates an ethereal, almost cosmic aura – alluding perhaps, as the title suggests, to a radiant sun with the delicate, elongated strands protruding from the circular body conjuring the outermost part of its atmosphere, only visible during an eclipse. Notwithstanding such connotations with the natural world however, ultimately the piece embodies its own eternal presence or life; as Oliver herself so fervently asserted of her objectives, ‘I am trying to create life. Not in the sense of beings, or animals, or plants, or machines, but “life” in the sense of a kind of force, a presence, an energy in my objects that human beings can respond to on the level of soul or spirit.’3

With their tactility and anatomical physicality, such intricately executed forms inevitably elicit a temptation to touch, reminding us that the world is a corporeal place. Yet too often the easy, sensuous curves of Oliver’s objects belie the punishing, labour-intensive 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. Indeed, the shadows cast by her objects are so intrinsic to the formalist geometry of each piece that at times the shadow itself almost becomes more powerful... becomes the object.

As Amanda Rowell mused 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...’4

1. Fenner, F., Bronwyn Oliver: Mnemonic Chords, Moet et Chandon, Epernay, France, 1995, p. 4 2. ‘Bronwyn Oliver (1959 – 2006)’, 10 July 2006: see http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/news/ releases/2006/07/10/112/ 3. Oliver cited in Sturgeon, G., Contemporary Australian Sculpture, Craftsman House,

Sydney, 1991, p. 71 4. ‘Bronwyn Oliver 2004’, 9 September 2004: see http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/news/ releases/2004/09/08/80/

VERONICA ANGELATOS

(1917 – 1999) SUMMER STACK, 1990 sawn soft drink crates on plywood mounted on board 91.5 x 69.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: SUMMER STACK / Rosalie Gascoigne / 1990

ESTIMATE: $160,000 – 200,000

PROVENANCE

Pinacotheca Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1991 Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 16 June 2004, lot 56 Private collection, Sydney Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 26 August 2015, lot 20 Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

Rosalie Gascoigne, Pinacotheca Gallery, Melbourne, 17 April – 11 May 1991, cat. 7 Circle Line Square: Aspects of Geometry, Campbelltown City Art Gallery, New South Wales, 16 September – 21 October 1994; Newcastle Region Art Gallery, New South Wales, 16 December 1994 – 29 January 1995; Albury Regional Art Centre, New South Wales, 28 April – 28 May 1995; New England Regional Art Museum, New South Wales, 4 – 27 August 1995

LITERATURE

Zimmer, J., Circle Line Square: Aspects of Geometry, Campbelltown City Art Gallery, New South Wales, 1994, p. 18 McDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 106 McCulloch, A., McCulloch, S., & McCulloch Childs, E., The New McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Aus Art Editions, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2006, p. 453 (illus.) Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 384, pp. 95, 244 (illus.), 336, 375

Although universally regarded as one of the most significant Australian artists of the twentieth century, remarkably Rosalie Gascoigne did not hold her first exhibition until the age of 57. Immediately attracting the praise of collectors and critics alike, she was soon offered a major survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (1978) and in 1982, was selected to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale (alongside Peter Booth), being the first Australian woman to receive this honour. In more recent years, she has featured in numerous important and international exhibitions - including the prestigious solo exhibition show Material as Landscape held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and National Gallery of Australia (1997 – 98) – and today is represented in all major collections in Australia and New Zealand, as well as the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Of all Rosalie Gascoigne’s achievements, undoubtedly the most striking and widely celebrated are her assemblages such as Summer Stack, 1990 constructed from weathered wooden Schweppes soft drink crates, sliced into thin, uneven slivers with a bandsaw. Like many other compositions from this highly acclaimed series, including the monumental Monaro, 1989 (Art Gallery of Western Australia), the present draws its inspiration from her immediate surroundings, namely the spacious grazing lands of the Monaro region near Canberra. Accordingly, the rhythmic arrangement and tonal variations of the wooden slivers here allude to the crisscross patterned haystacks so characteristic of this agricultural locale – the transient shadows and play of light evoking a strong sense of place, of the timeless spirit of the landscape. Profoundly lyrical and refined yet always maintaining a close proximity to the outside world, Gascoigne’s sensibility of place is thus, paradoxically, ‘both nowhere and everywhere at once’.1

As Martin Gascoigne elucidates, ‘... her work was very much about recollected feelings or emotions, especially in relation to the landscape around Canberra. Her works touched on all aspects of that landscape, its changing look with the changing seasons, its varied topography, and the traces of its history and use. Summer Stack can be seen in this context. In the same period, she made a number of works that reflect this, including Wheat Belt, 1989 and Stooks, 1991 – 92.’2

Having eschewed the use of iconography, Gascoigne favours allusion and suggestion so that her work might ‘speak for itself’ as art, awakening ‘... associations that lie buried beneath the surface of consciousness; inviting a higher degree of sensitivity and attentiveness to the world around us.’3 Indeed, it is this higher awareness, the ability to recognise beauty in the most humble of materials that Gascoigne demands of her audience. For as the eye moves through this artful arrangement searching for information, and the mind attempts to place different rules of perspective or build upon the suggestion of the marks, ‘in time we realise that the only solution is to stop trying to navigate through the forest of symbols and enjoy the beauty of the trees.’4

1. Cameron, D., What is Contemporary Art?, exhibition catalogue, Rooseum, Malmo,

Sweden, c.1989, p. 18 2. Gascoigne, M., in correspondence with Damian Hackett, 2004 3. McDonald, J., ‘Introduction’, MacDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 7 4. Ibid.

VERONICA ANGELATOS

(1917 – 1999) JIM’S PICNIC, 1975 printed cut–out cardboard shapes (Arnott’s logos), glass bottles, dried (rye) grass, wire netting, weathered timber 44.0 x 75.0 x 22.0 cm signed with initials and dated at base: R.G. ‘76

ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE

Gallery A, Sydney James Mollison, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1976 Niagara Galleries, Melbourne The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers–Grundy Collection, acquired from the above in April 2006 (label attached verso) Bonhams, Sydney, 26 June 2013, lot 25 Gould collection, Melbourne Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 15 March 2017, lot 19 Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

Rosalie Gascoigne: Assemblage, Gallery A, Sydney, 11 September – 2 October 1976, cat. 25 Survey 2: Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 29 April – 4 June 1978, cat. 21 Blue Chip VIII: the collectors’ exhibition, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 7 March – 1 April 2006, cat. 1 (illus. in exhibition catalogue p. 5 and cover)

LITERATURE

Lindsay, R., Survey 2: Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1978, pp. 2, 5 (illus.), 6 Kirk, M., ‘Different Means to Similar Ends: Rosalie Gascoigne and Agnes Martin’, Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 23, no. 4, Winter 1986, p. 513 Edquist, H., ‘Material Matters – the Landscapes of Rosalie Gascoigne’, Binocular, Sydney, no. 3, 1993, p. 1 MacDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 106 Eagle, M., From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, Australian National University, Canberra, 2000, pp. 30 – 31 (illus.) Rosalie Gascoigne: plain air, City Gallery Wellington and Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2004, p. 22 (illus.) Fink, H., ‘The Life of Things: Rosalie Gascoigne at Gallery A Sydney’, Gallery A, Sydney, 1964 – 1983, Campbelltown Arts Centre, New South Wales, 2009, p. 163 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 084, pp. 54, 91, 95 (illus.), 106, 111, 133, 164 (illus.), 317, 320 Jim’s Picnic, 1975, like many great artworks, was born of a perfect storm of personal artistic evolution and national cultural circumstance. Newly arrived in Deakin, Rosalie Gascoigne embarked on an Ikebana course from the modern Sogetsu School. For Gascoigne, this disciplined artistic practice gave new purpose and direction to her habit of foraging for materials in the landscape.1 It also stimulated Gascoigne’s growing involvement in the Canberran art scene, introducing her to James ‘Jim’ Mollison, who had also recently arrived in the capital to assist with the development of the national art collection, under the political tutelage of Gough Whitlam.

A rare instance within Gascoigne’s oeuvre of direct inspiration from a significant life event, Jim’s Picnic is an assemblage commemorating a bucolic escapade organised by Mollison for an international artistic delegation on the 16 April 1975. The artist spoke of this artwork in a lecture at the Canberra School of Art in 1985:

‘This one is called Jim’s Picnic. It was about a picnic and it was meant to be impractical, it was a windy day on top of a mountain. The wire netting I have used is a pretty sort of netting. It gives a good visual reading; in feel, it is mountain air. I was enclosing air with those spaces. The grass stuck in the bottles is as ephemeral as you can get, and it was to show this awful – it wasn’t awful, it was a marvellous impractical picnic with the clouds coming over, the kangaroos hopping up and down. The kangaroos are the parrots, if you can bear the transition, but that was the life element in it and it was to capture the actual event.’2

Jim’s Picnic is a delicate sculpture that encapsulates several key aspects of Gascoigne’s artistic practice: the use of found objects to translate visual and cultural realities, the impetus to capture ephemeral meteorological and geographical phenomena, and the self-assured arrangement of these items into an aesthetic composition. A particularly endearing aspect of this work is Gascoigne’s flight of imagination in transposing the bounding figures of kangaroos into the iconic parrots of the Australian Arnott’s biscuits.3 Exhibited in Gascoigne’s radical first solo exhibition at Gallery A, Sydney, in 1976, Jim’s Picnic was purchased by James Mollison, for whom it was named, and remained within his personal collection throughout his tenure as Director of the Australian National Gallery.

1. Gellatly, K., ‘Rosalie Gascoigne: Making Poetry of the Commonplace’, Rosalie Gascoigne,

Council of Trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria, 2009, pp. 12 – 13 2. Rosalie Gascoigne, Illustrated lecture to students at Canberra School of Art, 21 August 1985, cited in Gascoigne, M., , ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, p. 164 3. ibid., p. 95

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

born 1930 ARCHIMEDES’ NOTEBOOK, 1968 oil on plywood panel 91.5 x 119.5 cm signed and dated lower right: 68 y. audette signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: ARCHIMEDES NOTEBOOK / y. audette / 1968 bears inscription verso: OWNER _ ROBERT KLIPPEL

ESTIMATE: $65,000 – 85,000

PROVENANCE

Robert Klippel, a gift from the artist, 1968 Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney Sotheby’s, Sydney, 26 August 2003, lot 142 Private collection, Victoria

EXHIBITED

Yvonne Audette, Bonython Gallery, Sydney, 26 February – March 1968 Yvonne Audette, Holdsworth Galleries, Sydney, 10 – 28 November 1970, cat. 28 (label attached verso)

LITERATURE

Heathcote, C., Adams, B., Vaughan, G., & Grant, K., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, pl. 123, pp. 160, 193 (illus.), 247

RELATED WORK

The Theorem, 1967, oil on plywood 91.0 x 119.0, private collection, Sydney

After first venturing to New York in late 1952 where she enjoyed firsthand exposure to the burgeoning school of Abstract Expressionism through the work of artists including Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Mark Tobey, Yvonne Audette subsequently travelled to Europe, establishing a studio in Florence in 1955. Against the backdrop of Italy’s rich culture and artistic past, she was welcomed into a community of professional artists (including Arnaldo Pomodoro and Lucio Fontana) who encouraged her and provided an aspirational example. When she eventually returned to her hometown of Sydney in 1966, not surprisingly Audette cut an unusual figure among her largely male local peers. Well-heeled, well-travelled, and well-connected with influential members of the New York Avant Garde, she had matured as a painter and was now working in a subtle and nuanced abstract style derived from the ambiguous mark-making of European Art Informel.

A compelling example of her work from the late-1960s, Archimedes’ Notebook, 1968 embodies the confidence of an artist who had reached creative maturity. Although painted in Sydney, the composition nevertheless maintains her European frame of reference through allusion and style, reflecting the multi-layered histories Audette had encountered in Europe: ‘When I went to Europe in the mid-50s… my work responded to the layering of society itself – the remnants of murals on walls, the frescoes, the whole antiquity of the civilisation.’1 While other paintings from these years bear a similar European resonance – for example Birth of Venus (private collection) offered an abstract homage to the light, colour and spirit of the Italian masters like Botticelli, while her Crossbows at the Battle of Agincourt, 1968 (private collection) featured a montage of half-remembered history paintings – Archimedes’ Notebook, however, looked to the past in a different manner. As Dr Bruce Adams elucidates in the first comprehensive monograph on the artist,

‘…with its fine scaffolds of linear graphs just visible beneath the purposeful renderings of unrecognisable objects, this painting [Archimedes’ Notebook] resembled a sheet of technical drawings extracted from some old plan cabinet full of faded blueprints for longforgotten projects – the archive as a tenuous trace of human thought and activity. Similarly, in The Theorem and The Calculation, both of 1967, the partially obliterated, quasi-mathematical inscriptions recalled ancient almanacs, charts of the stars, and other arcane sources – distant echoes of past systems of knowledge whose meanings were all but lost in the present-day world. The thin, hand-drawn lines also seemed to metamorphose into something biological, becoming as taut as the elongated sinews in an Arshile Gorky composition...

[Furthermore] …the delicate structural frameworks and hints of constructed objects in Archimedes’ Notebook gave the work a certain affinity with Klippel’s fragile metal assemblages, and it is notable that Audette presented the painting to him in gratitude for his support. Curiously, none of Sydney’s reviewers in 1968 explored the subtle parallels between these two co-exhibitors. Though they had devoted themselves to different fields of studio practice, the pair subscribed to similar beliefs about the universal, organic basis to constructed form. Temperamentally, they also had much in common, sharing a private and thoughtful disposition. In their sketchbooks and other studies, the two artists had worked separately for many years on non-figurative experiments in automatism, gesturalism and collage. Their renewed contact in Sydney was thus an opportunity to compare and exchange their respective ideas…’2

1. The artist quoted in McCulloch-Uehlin, S., ‘Abstraction’s Forgotten Generation’, The Australian, 23 April 1999, p. 9 2. Heathcote, C., Adams, B., Vaughan, G., & Grant, K., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, p. 160

VERONICA ANGELATOS

(1927 – 2022) FLAG FOR DAVID IRELAND, NO. 1, FOR THE UNKNOWN INDUSTRIAL PRISONER, 1979 oil on canvas 100.0 x 119.5 cm signed upper left: WHISSON inscribed with title on stretcher bar verso: FLAG FOR DAVID IRELAND No 1 FOR THE UNKNOWN INDUSTRIAL PRISONER bears inscription on stretcher bar verso: DAVID IRELAND LANDSCAPE

ESTIMATE: $35,000 – 45,000

PROVENANCE

Niagara Galleries, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above on 29 June 1988

RELATED WORK

Flag for David Ireland No. 2, 1979 – 80, oil on canvas, 89.0 x 119.0 cm, in the collection of the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria

This masterful work by Ken Whisson takes its title from David Ireland’s 1971 novel, The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, a dark comedy about a post WWII industrial dystopia set in an oil refinery in Sydney. The characters in the book are known only by odd nicknames such as ‘The Samurai’, ‘The Good Shepherd’, ‘The Glass Canoe’, or the local madam known as ‘The Old Lamp Lighter’. These names heighten the calamitous nature of the book, each offering insights into physical or attitudinal aspects of the characters.

Whisson’s paintings often meld figures into interiors or landscapes; thus when considered within the context of the artist’s leftist politics, the idea of Ireland’s refinery workers painted against the industrial backdrop afforded perfect material for Whisson. The book’s fractured narrative creates a sense of space akin to cubism, which also aligns well with Whisson’s working methods. The narrative is written as a series of short, fragmented episodes, and there is no real plot, but rather an unravelling sequence of events. Similarly, Whisson’s paintings are spatial with no linear narrative in the sense that each work finishes, where it ends up and vice versa.

The current work belongs to a series considered very important in Whisson’s career. Known amongst collectors and critics as his ‘Flag paintings’, they were painted in Italy in the late 1970s and represent an important transition between works created before his move to Italy and everything that followed. Typically, Whisson’s flag paintings lean towards total abstraction – their pockets of bright forms interspersed with areas of white paint create an open fractured surface, which was to become a lasting feature of Whisson’s work. Each painting in the series has a title such as Flag for a Small Lethal Army, Flag off My Disposition, or in this case, Flag for David Ireland, No 1. The word flag provides each work with a political charge, albeit of personal significance to the artist. As former MCA curator Glen Barkley wrote, ‘…Flag for The Red Brigades and the Hudson Institute, 1978, brings together the unthinkable… the Hudson Institute with its atomic annihilation scenarios… and the Red Brigade terrorist group, who had made the unthinkable a reality by pursuing a violent political trajectory that culminated in the kidnapping and murder of the Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978.’1 Recognisable forms that existed in his work until now become interwoven through shape, colour and line into the overall compositions. In pictorial terms, this worked well for Whisson and his depiction of Ireland’s industrial dystopia where workers are regarded simply as extensions of the refinery in the eyes of the company and as such, morph into the industrial landscape. Significantly Ireland’s title ‘The Unknown Industrial Prisoner’ – while clearly describing the anonymity of the workers in the plant – is also the name of a welded steel, abstract sculpture typical of the time. It was created by a manager at the plant and was said to be ‘…symbolic of the intense pressures on modern industrial man and the sense of compression and isolation in a confined space.’2

By the time Whisson had painted this work, he had settled permanently in Italy and into the rhythm of painting, and was regularly sending the paintings back to Australia for annual exhibitions, either with Ray Hughes in Brisbane, or the Watters Gallery in Sydney. Over a lifetime, Whisson quietly cemented his place in the canon of Australian painting. And until his sudden death at 94 in February this year, was painting daily with as much vigour and passion as he ever had. The consistency of his output over many decades is unmatched and his often-polarising paintings are simply unique in Australian art. His 2012 retrospective exhibition held at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Victoria, was a brilliant and up lifting testimony to his importance. Whisson was a painter dedicated to an art that is not simply fashionable, but deeply rooted in ideas and painterly possibilities.

1. Barkley, G., and Harding, L., Ken Whisson. As If, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2012, p. 23 2. Ireland, D., The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1971, p. 394

HENRY MULHOLLAND

(1921 – 2013) SECOND STUDY FOR PRUDHOE BAY LANDSCAPE, 1974 oil on canvas board 30.5 x 36.0 cm signed lower left: JEFFREY SMART

ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE

Frank Rickwood OBE, Barbados, a gift from the artist in 1974 Private collection, a gift from the above Savill Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso, as ‘Prudhole Landscape’) Private collection, Sydney, acquired in 2009

LITERATURE

Smart, J., Not Quite Straight: A Memoir, William Heinemann, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 436-440

RELATED WORKS

Prudhoe Bay Landscape, 1974, in Quartermaine, P., Jeffrey Smart, Gryphon Books, Melbourne, 1983, p 113, cat. 635, commissioned for British Petroleum International Collection, by Mr Frank Rickwood OBE First Study for Prudhoe Landscape, 1974, oil on canvas board, 41.0 x 30.5 cm, formerly in the collection of Frank Rickwood OBE, Barbados

We are grateful to Stephen Rogers, Archivist for the Estate of Jeffrey Smart, for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

Jeffrey Smart met Frank Rickwood in 1951, while the artist was living at ‘Fairlight’, a boarding house in Elizabeth Bay, with artists Michael Shannon and Justin O’Brien. At the time, Rickwood was a lecturer in Geology at the University of Sydney, soon to become an advisor for Oil Search responsible for major discoveries in New Guinea, and later in Venezuela. By 1956 he had joined BP, working in New York and England before moving to San Francisco, and from 1969 – 1980 he was President of BP Alaska, overseeing the expansion of the Prudhoe Bay project, the largest oil field in North America where the new, groundbreaking Alaskan pipeline was being developed.

After declining a previous offer from his old friend to travel to Alaska to make paintings of the major works at Prudhoe Bay, Smart reconsidered when ‘Rickwood wrote from San Francisco, upping his offer for pictures of the Alaska project, and offering to fly me to San Francisco and the North Slope, first class all the way. It was irresistible and I decided to go.’1 Smart was very impressed with the amazing facility, named ‘Dead Horse’, built to accommodate VIPs and important heads of drilling activities. It was erected upon the permafrost in conditions where the outside temperature could reach minus 40 degrees celsius. ‘It was an engineering triumph… streamlined, like a space missile so that it could survive the fantastic winds of a blizzard. It sat on pylons, and I could not understand how the enormous weight of Dead Horse did not cause the ice to melt and sink down into the permafrost.’2

Smart described entering Dead Horse like going into a submarine, through a chamber before reaching the interior with forty comfortable bedrooms with bathroom, a huge swimming pool, a theatre, gymnasium, a winter garden with (tropical) trees. His residency there resulted in two large paintings and at least three known studies, of which Second Study for Prudhoe Bay Landscape, 1974 is one. The two larger paintings became property of British Petroleum International Collection, while the studies were gifts from the artist to Frank Rickwood who, as the artist noted, ‘…I know he gave away some of the little studies as presents to friends. This ‘Prudhoe Bay’ must be one of them.’3

Smart’s fascination with the architecture of Dead Horse, became the basis of the picture on offer, as the artist evokes a space-age like scene depicting the bright red steel girders and concrete footing of the (unseen) structure elevated above. Standing upon a vast, flat landscape, the wilderness is again interrupted by the presence of three Nissen huts, in this case where the oil company workers lived, but also symbolically the sign of human occupation and development. Painted only five years on from the lunar landing in 1969, this powerful picture, featuring Jeffrey Smart’s quintessential symbolism, illustrates the artist’s continuing interest in the patterns of human interaction with our surroundings: ‘Dead Horse was a great piece of architecture, a triumph of man over his environment.’4

1. Smart, J., Not Quite Straight: A Memoir, William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne, 1996, p. 434 2. Ibid., p. 438 3. The artist in correspondence with Stephen Rogers, Archivist for the Estate of Jeffrey Smart, 16

July 1998 4. Smart, op. cit., p. 438

DAMIAN HACKETT

born 1936 SUNSHOWERS AND FLOOD GUMS, 1993 oil on canvas 137.0 x 182.5 cm signed and dated lower left: William Robinson 93 inscribed with title verso: SUNSHOWERS AND FLOOD GUMS

ESTIMATE: $250,000 – 350,000

PROVENANCE

Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney Laverty collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1994

EXHIBITED

William Robinson, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney, 3 – 28 September 1994, cat. 17

LITERATURE

Klepac, L., William Robinson, Paintings 1987 – 2000, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2001, pl. 101, pp. 100 - 101 (illus., as ‘Sunshowers and Flooded Gums’), 202

‘In relation to a sense of place, William Robinson has made a unique contribution to the Australian landscape tradition, moving beyond conventional notions to encompass a fluctuating environment; of rainforest and ocean, ground and sky, day and night, elemental forces of wind, lightning, rain and fire. His multidimensional grasp of time and space also suggests metaphors for states of mind and being, life and death, continuity and transcendence. The profound spiritual resonances in Robinson’s art remind us of the need to preserve an ancient natural world in the present; ‘to keep the faith’, as Simon Schama wrote in Landscape and Memory, ‘with a future on this tough, lovely old planet’’.1

Robinson’s treatment of the horizon and distorted perspective set him apart from his contemporaries. While many Australian landscape painters traditionally looked towards the arid interior for inspiration, he embraces the lush south- eastern Queensland mountain ranges. The dramatic features of the granite belt, with its soaring cliffs, meandering rivers, creeks and waterfalls, offer the perfect subject for Robinson to flaunt his painterly innovations. The steep ravines, high annual rainfall and proximity to the coast combine to provide dramatic weather shifts, which Robinson exploits wilfully. As the title of Sunshowers and Flood Gums, 1993 suggests, it is the ephemeral beauty of this landscape which captivates the artist. He gives equal weight to the physical grandeur of the ancient forms, as he does to the intangible elements of light, mist, mood and atmosphere.

In the act of painting there is a tipping point where the image takes over and a seamless synergy occurs between the artist, their materials and subject. The artist becomes the vehicle for the work and almost takes a backseat as the painting evolves in inspired revelation. Artists sometimes refer to a work as ‘painting itself’ when describing this shaman-like relationship between the artist and subject. Robinson arrives at this point early and you can feel the urgency his works attain as they reach toward a higher state of observation and translation. Each new painting builds on the achievements of the previous one as he pushes the boundaries of his artistic abilities and the conventions of landscape painting.

This state of oneness with his work is achieved by continuous immersion in the act of creation and Robinson typically works every day, all day – except Sundays. God rested on the Sabbath and so does Robinson, reserving this day for reflection and music in humble observance of the Maker’s achievements. The artist is a deeply spiritual man, and his paintings are to be viewed as a personal homage to the creator. The current example conveys this more than others, with the central focus of painting being towards the sun-dappled blue skies streaming through the towering Flood Gums. Like the Renaissance masters Robinson so much admires, he looks to the heavens for the essence of his inspiration.

1. Hart, D., ‘William Robinson’s artistic development: An intimate and expansive journey’ in William Robinson, A Transfigured Landscape, Queensland University of Technology and

Piper Press, Brisbane, 2011, p. 38

HENRY MULHOLLAND

(1942 – 2013) ART GALAXY, 1991 synthetic polymer paint on plexiglass 152.0 x 152.0 cm signed lower centre: SHARP

ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

PROVENANCE

Julie Clarke and the late Richard Neville, New South Wales, acquired directly from the artist in 1992

RELATED WORK

Art Galaxy, 1991, colour screenprint on ivory wove paper, 81.8 x 82.0 cm (image), edition of 100, an example in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Art Galaxy, 1993, acrylic on paper, 82.0 × 82.0 cm, private collection, illus. (cover) The Everlasting World of Martin Sharp: Paintings from 1948 to today, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, 2006

We are grateful to Julie Clarke Neville for her kind assistance with the preparation of this catalogue entry.

Martin Sharp had no need to engage with the conventional art market. He sold his work to friends and admirers when he reluctantly sensed they were complete, which is how Art Galaxy, 1991 was acquired in 1992. Sometimes the same paintings would sit on easels for years; invariably there would be a radical change in direction after fresh inspiration or an intense bout of work, then it might be left to simmer again. Rather than leading to stagnation it was this luxury of time that allowed for the gestation of his most powerful and unique images.

Art Galaxy features Sharp’s own gallery of artworks that represent ideas of high culture and low culture, both local and European. Each element has been considered for years since the first version of the work emerged twenty years earlier in 1971. Here the art gallery has red walls, reminiscent of Matisse, with glimpsed fragments of three large paintings hanging on them, brass plates are attached with the names of the respective artists engraved, as in traditional art galleries. Due to the layout, the names are partly obscured, creating a mini art exam for the viewer.

The first of the paintings depicted is an illustration of a landscape from Saint-Exupery’s celebrated children’s book, The Little Prince, showing two simple hillsides with one cartoon star hanging above them. Described in the story as ‘the most beautiful and the saddest landscape in the world’, this image was a favourite of Sharp’s and he incorporated it in many works. Beside this empty landscape which evokes the innocence of childhood, Sharp hangs Hokusai’s iconic Great Wave, which spills out of the frame to cover the floor of the gallery in symmetrically scalloped blue waves. Heavy with symbolism, the great wave crashes and unfurls in a freeze-frame moment of beauty and terror. Human life is at the mercy of nature and fate, while far in the distance, Mount Fuji signifies eternity.

The final painting appropriated for Sharp’s eccentric gallery collection, is the sky detail from Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, with the intense whirl of stars here analysed and simplified into geometric shapes. Van Gogh was Sharp’s greatest inspiration, a passion which began early when he was given a book on the painter by his art teacher at Cranbrook School, Justin O’Brien. He experimented visually with many Van Gogh images, but the starry night appears even more constantly than the sunflowers in his paintings. In another layer of reality, superimposed and unrelated to the swirling starry night, or the childish star from The Little Prince, hang the stars of the Southern Cross painted in white, derived directly from the Australian flag and implying all the officialdom of the state. This indicates that the location of Sharps’ art gallery is in Australia – his birthplace, and a country about which he felt complex emotions.

On the floor of the gallery, two human figures face one another. One is ‘Boofhead’, the comic book character created by R.J. Clark and published in Australian newspapers from 1941 to 1970. Martin adored this popular comic strip and used Boofhead in many works, pondering the question: Is he really as stupid as he is represented? Or an idiot savant? Standing before Rodin’s masterpiece, The Thinker – here depicted in a vivid turquoise blue and represented, despite his gravitas, as a cartoon character himself. Representative of Australia, Boofhead looks confused as the European Thinker hands him one of Van Gogh’s stars, as if to say: “Here you are Boofhead… there’s a lot to learn!”

The Thinker, the master of ceremonies, could also represent Sharp himself, fulfilling his role - one he perceived to be attacking ignorance, raising consciousness and considering the human condition. From innocence, to the human condition, to eternity, he has curated his exhibition to make a profound statement.

To conclude, the artist has added one final brass plate at the bottom of the frame, upon which he has modestly signed his own signature in capitals – SHARP – thus making the painting itself part of the astonishing art gallery he has created.

born 1955 UNTITLED 43, 44, 45, 1983/84, 1983 – 84 reprinted by the artist, 2020 archival pigment inkjet prints triptych 75.0 x 62.0 cm image (each) edition: 5/10 each signed, inscribed and numbered below image: Image Number: LAT-43/45/44 Print Number 5/10 Untitled 1983/84 Bill Henson (covered by mount)

ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000 (3)

PROVENANCE

Nathalie Karg, New York Private collection, New York Shapiro Auctioneers, Sydney, 24 November 2013, lot 72 Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

Bill Henson: Untitled 1983 – 1984, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (another example) Bill Henson Photographs 1974 – 1984, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 14 June – 7 July 1989, cat. 58 (another example) Bill Henson: Three Decades of Photography, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 8 January –3 April 2005; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 23 April – 10 July 2005 (another example)

LITERATURE

Malouf, D. and Schjeldahl, P., Bill Henson Photographs 1974 – 1984, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 1989, cat. 60 (illus., another example) Bill Henson – XLVI Esposizione Internazionale D’Arte La Biennale di Venezia 1995, exhibition catalogue, Australian Pavilion, Italy, AETA, 1995, p. 11 (illus., another example) Henson, B., and Annear, J., Mnemosyne, Scalo, Zurich, in association with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, pp. 278 – 9 (illus., another example)

born 1968, New Zealand SONG OF THE FROG, 2006 fibreglass and two pot paint 70.0 x 70.0 x 180.0 cm edition of 3

ESTIMATE: $100,000 – 140,000

PROVENANCE

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

The Promised Land, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 28 March – 21 June 2015 Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Contemporary 2015, Carriageworks, Sydney, 10 September – 13 September 2015

In 1968, the year that twentieth century art ‘influencer’ Marcel Duchamp died in France, contemporary artist Michael Parekowhai was born a world away in New Zealand. At art school the young Parekowhai avoided the prophesies circulating on the ‘death of painting’, instead tuning into sculpture and installation. He relished the open-ended dialogue with his audience that occurs when a ‘readymade’ is thrust into the gallery. Whereas Duchamp as Dadaist elicited readymades to undermine high-art’s privileged position, Parekowhai as impresario concentrated more on ‘made’ than ‘ready’, in a way that curator Natasha Conland describes as ‘a canny ability to make everyday objects do painless visual acrobatics, with a soft and often beautiful landing’.1

In a manner that we have become familiar with through mega-artist Jeff Koons, Parekowhai’s Song of the Frog, 2006, is an editioned and polished piece. But there the comparison stops. Where Koons may take us on a fast ride in a shiny new car, with a definite intention to sell it to us, Parekowhai slows us down as he puts more questions and cultural contradictions in our path. As a Mãori man of Ngãti Whakarongo descent, his works speak to biculturalism. Yet often these references are quietly implied and are devoid of parochialism, allowing his sculptures a place in any museum in the world—right alongside Koons and Duchamp. In making the Song of the Frog series of works in 2006 with his team of two pot polyurethane finishers, Parekowhai creates ballet dancer porcelain figurines on a larger-than-life scale. The figurines as source material (the readymade) embody that classical sense of young female beauty: poised and elegant. However, in Parekowhai’s hands, his young Mãori women have a pervading sense of vulnerability. In the case of the current work, even while the figure is seated with strongly supporting arms, the legs are akimbo and the body remains vulnerable. When an example of this work was shown in Parekowhai’s retrospective The Promised Land at the Gallery of Modern Art in Queensland in 2015 it was installed amid a brace of pick-up-sticks the size of spears pointing threateningly at the now very vulnerable seated figure.

Such games are to be taken seriously. Parekowhai is fascinated by childhood recollections: what would it have been like for a young Mãori girl, perhaps a little sister, even, to take part in a ballet school of the suburban white middle class? In asking this question, the viewer is not hectored with Mãori slogans that many of his 1990s contemporaries used to bridge the bicultural divide.

That is not to suggest that the work isn’t powerful, for the very title implies a sound that can fill a space and a movement of akimbo limbs to create dance. When Parekowhai showed an intricately carved piano at the Venice Biennale in 2011, curator Justin Paton questioned: ‘Will visitors hear the piano from a distance and find themselves drawn in by the sound?’2 Indeed they were. The piano was continuously played and the sound filled the palazzo. When Song of the Frog meets our gaze, we are initially struck by its stillness until an infectious sense of dance takes over; Parekowhai would surely choose Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake to allow his Mãori maiden to spring to life as princess Odette, and move on point to centre stage.

1. Conland, N., ‘On Show’, Exhibitions and Events at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tãmaki, Issue 12, 2009, p9 2. Paton, J., ‘Weighing in, lifting off Michael Parekowhai in Venice’, On First Looking into

Chapman’s Homer, Michael Lett and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery,

Sydney, 2011, p. 27

PETER JAMES SMITH

born 1972 FEEL THE EARTH, DEEPLY, 2019 oil and synthetic polymer paint on French linen in hand–painted artist’s frame 102.0 x 81.5 cm 109.5 x 89.0 cm (including artist’s frame) signed lower centre: – del / Kathryn / barton –inscribed with title lower left: feel / the / earth, deeply

ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in October 2019

EXHIBITED

Del Kathryn Barton, i wanted to build a bed for all the tired beds, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 3 – 25 October 2019, cat. 8

Featured in a recent solo exhibition – the first since her 2017 National Gallery of Victoria mid-career survey – Feel the Earth, Deeply, 2019 is one of the latest in a series of Del Kathryn Barton’s sumptuous and meticulously patterned portraits of women and chimeric goddesses. These mature and regal portraits draw their inspiration from the format of High Renaissance portraiture of the gilded elite, and often imbued with the unsettled eroticism of modern European artists, Egon Schiele and Louise Bourgeois. Included in many of her most commercially successful series, the three-quarter profile of the head and bust has been a mainstay of Barton’s practice since 2014 and has supplanted her earlier vulnerable paintings of girls – the ethereal females of this phantasmagorial universe aging alongside the artist, their creator.

Feel the Earth, Deeply features a woman, anonymous in her features save for the voluminous hair billowing in serpentine waves around her face, full of secrets. Described by the artist as ‘her companions’, the women of these serial portraits on both canvas and paper share the simple monumentality of the portraits with which Barton won the Archibald Prize on two occasions. This compositional format allows Barton to abandon herself to patterned detail and to carefully hone the emotional complexity of her sitters’ expressions. Barton’s woman is placed here within an empty and shallow pictorial space, filled only with a delicate veil of dotted patterns. Del Kathryn Barton’s profusion of patterning within the bodies and accoutrements of her figures, often extends beyond the canvas to become a Gesamkunstwerk, a total work of art. This harmonious aesthetic totality includes both the handpainted frame in which this painting is housed and the walls of Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney where the work was first exhibited, which were painted matte with varnished spray-painted polka-dots.

With an imperious, piercing gaze, the woman within this painting is confident and powerful. While she is not endowed with wings or multiple limbs, her other-worldly power is hidden in her swirling galactic eyes and elfin features. The clean, white ground of Barton’s canvas becomes her pale skin, while sinuous lines of black ink trace the bony contours of her face and fluorescent washes the shadows beneath her hair and clavicle. Unusually for Del Kathryn Barton, there are rare dashes of impasto paint in this painting, worked into the outermost edges of the woman’s medusa-like mane. No less an enchantress than the nameless, terrifying creatures of busier compositions, this woman holds the viewers’ gaze with unnatural and unwavering focus. As Julie Ewington has noted, the figures in Barton’s paintings ‘are always gazing either out of the canvas at the viewer or scanning their world’, there is ‘an insistence on watchfulness.’1 When portrayed in larger compositional groups, Barton’s figures are crowded by clawing insects and vulnerable wide-eyed young: even here she is the motherprotector. For Barton, the goddesses and creatures of her world have not escaped the competing emotional burdens that we are familiar with on earth, as described by the title of the exhibition that included this work: I wanted to build a bed for all the tired beds.

The title of her painting indicates that the deep symbiotic connection with her environment derives from her sensory attentiveness, an idea carried through in the titles of other paintings of this series, for example Listen to the Earth. Suspended in heightened tension, the embellished surfaces of this portrait vibrate like hairs standing on their end. Acting as a semi-human bridge between the viewer and the more fantastical creatures of Barton’s universe, the figure encourages us to proceed with caution and to abandon ourselves to the kaleidoscopic sensory experience of this world and beyond.

1. Ewington, J., Del Kathryn Barton, Piper Press, Sydney, 2014, p. 37 and 47

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

born 1973 RED XB STUDY, 2006 oil on canvas 40.5 x 45.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Red XB Study / 2006 Ben Quilty

ESTIMATE: $35,000 – 45,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Sydney, acquired directly from the artist Annette Larkin Fine Art, Sydney Private collection, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 2017

EXHIBITED

Autumn 2017 – Part II, Annette Larkin Fine Art, Sydney, 8 – 29 April 2017, cat. 1

Ben Quilty’s friend and assistant director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Lisa Slade, noted in her 2009 survey exhibition of his work: ‘Cars are, of course, a type of currency – not only do they reflect the identity of their owners, but they also provide a means of bartering, and sometimes altering that identity.’1 The visual symbol of a second-hand muscle car has been a relatable prism through which a generation of suburban Australians have experienced and acted upon the landscape. Ben Quilty, keen to depict objects, people and landscapes that also function as social commentary, has endowed the prized Ford cars with gravitas beyond their shiny surfaces. The old maxim of ‘paint what you know’ has served Quilty well and has sustained his enduring series of candy-coloured and lusciously thick paintings of iconic Australian cars.

Red XB Study, 2006 is a quintessential Quilty oil paint and aerosol study of the artist’s dream car. It is closely related to several works of the same subject and same name, all painted with Quilty’s idiosyncratic vigorous style, combining thick impasto strokes and slabs underpinned by spray-painted armatures and outlines. As Quilty has explained: ‘Most of my work investigates the relationship between a luscious surface and the darker and more confronting nature of the overall image. I enjoy the theatrics of forcing the viewer to move back from the enticing surface to see the more figurative imagery hidden in the paint.’2 The vigour and aggression of his painting technique mirrors and emphasises his thematic content, equating it with the recklessness of youthful hooning and macho posturing.

The abstract landscape in which this car is placed is sketched out with cursory marks of pink spray paint, appearing again in the larger related works, Red XB and Red XB II. Quilty’s use of spray paint underpainting and overpainting began in 2006 following a residency in Barcelona through the Australia Council for the Arts. Soon it extended beyond the canvas, continuing the painted scene on the surrounding walls, and linking previously unrelated singular works into vast metamorphic sequences. What we see in Red XB Study is a palimpsest of its wider context which, on the walls of Quilty’s studio, included a row of suburban houses and front gates, with a footpath receding into the distance. The cross hatching of the gate that runs along the bonnet of the car is present in all these Red XB works, to varying degrees of painterly abstraction.

With a saturated scarlet hue, the eponymous Red XB surges towards the viewer, barely contained by the tight edges of its stretched canvas, and steel frame. As opposed to other Quilty cars and vans, this Red XB model of the muscle car needn’t pop its hood in a gaudy display of power, not is it described by the artist as a landscape. Its simple design alone is a compelling subject, and the artist delights in the sensual pursuit of the act of painting it in sweeping and paint-laden gestures of its forms, stark against a pared-back landscape.

1. Slade, L., ‘Ben Quilty – We are History’, Ben Quilty Live!, University of Queensland, Brisbane, 2009, p. 22 2. correspondence between Lisa Slade and Ben Quilty, January 2008, MCA Collection Handbook [https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/artists/ben-quilty/] (accessed 4/4/22)

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

born 1973 RORSCHACH – THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT NO. 2, 2008 synthetic polymer paint, aerosol and oil on linen 214.0 x 366.0 cm overall (diptych) each signed on tape on stretcher bar verso: QUILTY

ESTIMATE: $150,000 – 250,000 (2)

PROVENANCE

GRANTPIRRIE, Sydney Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

Smashed, GRANTPIRRIE at the Melbourne Art Fair, Melbourne, 31 July – 3 August 2008, then touring to Newcastle University Art Gallery, Newcastle, New South Wales BEN QUILTY LIVE, The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 8 May – 19 July 2009; TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, 15 August – 15 November 2009

LITERATURE

Slade, L., Ben Quilty, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 2009, pp. 116 – 117 (illus.), 135 Slade, L. (et al.), Ben Quilty, Penguin Random House, Melbourne, 2019, pp. 92 – 93 (illus.), 344

Ben Quilty Fairy Bower Rorschach, 2012 oil on linen, eight panels 241.0 x 520.0 cm Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney © Ben Quilty

In the early 2000s, Ben Quilty smashed his way onto the scene with his exuberant, thick impasto paintings of quintessentially blokey subjects – cars (most often the Torana), hamburgers, and close-up images of the heads of wasted mates after a big night on the turps. Characteristically Australian motifs such as the Budgerigar (which served as a form of portraiture) and iconic historical figures like Captain Cook (at least the school history book version), were also part of his arsenal at this time. Quilty quickly became one of this country’s most recognisable contemporary artists, astutely using his position and profile, and most importantly, his work, to discuss some of the darker aspects of Australian culture and the ongoing legacy of our colonial past.

Quilty’s paintings have an energy that expects, indeed demands, that the viewer participate in the world he creates – one where figuration hovers at the edge of abstraction, and where the handling of paint is at once immediate, rough and joyful. In his body of Rorschach paintings however, the artist deliberately destroys these luscious surfaces, painting in his characteristically thickly trowelled style before pressing a second unpainted canvas directly onto the first. While Quilty’s paintings are spontaneous and made quickly, these doubled images rely on chance, their new forms only revealed when the two canvases are pulled apart. Like the Rorschach ink blots whose patterns were used in early psychological testing, the effect of pareidolia – the experience of seeing images in visual patterns, is also at play here, and in Quilty’s mirrored images, we are encouraged to ‘see’ our own perceptions and experiences in these ‘accidental’ abstractions.

The titles of Quilty’s Rorschach works are often signposts sent to guide the viewer through the canvases’ colourful squelches of paint, and several of these, such as Fairy Bower Rorschach, 2012 or the monumental Irin Irinji, 2018, refer to specific events of frontier violence in Australia’s colonial history.1 Painted after his first visit in 2016 to the community of Amata in the APY Lands of north-west South Australia, the twelve-panelled Irin Irinji depicts the site of the spearing of a white dingo scalper who defiled a significant water source, and whose death led to the massacre of a group of Aboriginal men. As curator Lisa Slade has noted, Irin Irinji powerfully evokes the burden of intergenerational dispossession and trauma and ‘… summons the contradiction of creation and destruction, the same aporia that is our lived experience of this country’.2

Ben Quilty Irin Irinji, 2018 oil on linen, twelve panels 224.0 x 551.0 cm Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide © Ben Quilty

Quilty began the painting Rorschach – The Butterfly Effect No. 2 with an image of a skull—a symbol that recurs throughout his practice— its dome-like crown adorned by a cast of serpents. Brandished by many a rebellious youth for its countercultural associations, the gaping mouth of Quilty’s skull calls to mind the imagery of heavy metal, bikers and tattoos, along with the more highbrow associations of the vanitas tradition, and the passing of time, and ultimately, life. Regardless of the way in which you come to it, it seems to both smile at and mock the viewer at the same time. The title of Quilty’s painting refers to the ‘Butterfly Effect’ in Chaos Theory – a concept developed by American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz as a metaphor to explain the way in which small changes in conditions may have large effects on weather. For Quilty, the Butterfly Effect captures the chaos at the heart of the making of his Rorschach paintings, while also asking, on a more existential level, about the role of art and the artist in contemporary life, and about just how we can make a difference. Given the fact that the artist’s high public profile has been generated as much by his activism and campaigning for various causes as for his art in recent years, he has ably demonstrated that this question is not just a rhetorical concern. For him, in fact, the two, are integrally linked. As he has said:

‘Change is the most powerful, poignant part of my creative process, and then by default, everything that comes out of that is about change. Change is seen in conservative circles as a very dangerous thing, but in my mind, if something’s broken and not right, it needs to change, and there are plenty of parts of my community that are broken, and not right. … [Art and design] carefully, and hopefully compassionately, and constructively … suggest ways to better ourselves. While humanity is a bit broken, there’s always a place for great art to be that vehicle of change, to touch on taboos, and to bring about change …’3

1. See Slade, Dr L, ‘The Colour of Quilty’ in Flanagan, R., L. Slade, V. Namatjira, F. Young and J.

Paton, Ben Quilty, Penguin Random House, Melbourne, 2019, p. 34 2. Slade, ibid., p. 33. As the artist said of this work on 12 January 2016 on Instagram:

‘This work is a pale replacement for the non-existent signage across this country commemorating the violent histories of Australia that us Irish Australians prefer to ignore.’ @ benquilty (viewed 28 March 2022) 3. ‘Art and Change with Ben Quilty’, National Gallery of Victoria, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPhTIFwiG5Y (viewed 28 March 2022)

KELLY GELLATLY

(1965 – 2012) .410 GUN, c.2009 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 153.0 x 153.0 cm signed and inscribed with title lower left: A / . 410 GUN / C

ESTIMATE: $35,000 – 45,000

PROVENANCE

Chalk Horse Gallery, Sydney Art Equity, Sydney Private collection, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 2010

With a bold composition and lustrous paint, enfant terrible Adam Cullen’s Ned Kelly is divorced from the landscape which had moulded him into an iconic bush hero. Adam Cullen’s paintings often feature individual figures painted with a folkish primitivism and placed against a saturated, monochrome background. They are thus transformed into symbolic anonymous figures of vernacular Australian culture and of Cullen’s personal pantheon: the outlaw, the gangster, the boxer, the policeman, the cowboy and the cocktail girl.

Beneath the artist’s often puerile humour lies a rich seam of social commentary and nationalistic fervour. Following in the footsteps of artist Sir Sidney Nolan, contemporary painter Adam Cullen found in the folk outlaw Ned Kelly both an Irish kinship and a relatable outcast figure who mirrored his own sense of wild lawlessness. With Cullen’s punkinspired spirit of transgression and a pervasive interest in violence, the figure of Ned Kelly was an obvious and enduring icon for the artist – appearing in many of his paintings from mid 2000s onwards, either alone or alongside his dogged policemen. The simple portrait composition of Kelly, looming large and toting a sawn-off shotgun reinforces the symbolic nature of his person in Australian culture – untethered to time and place and reimagined by successive generations. In 1999, critic Bruce James described Adam Cullen’s style as ‘a creole of perceptions, correct in themselves but incorrectly articulated’, with a ‘material coarseness calculated to offend the sensibilities of anyone who favours surface effects over subliminal content’.1 Painted some ten years later, .410 Gun entices with surface effects of dripping liquid outlines and bright colours, providing a formal entry point into an intimidating portrait of an impenetrable masked figure brandishing a weapon.

Weapons played a vital role in the shaping of the Kelly legend, with their proficiency in marksmanship becoming a strong element for artistic interpretation. The artist has annotated the title of this painting directly on to the front of the canvas, naming it with the calibre measure of the shotgun with which Kelly defended Glenrowan. Words in Cullen’s practice can be read as text, informing the viewer of the artist’s intent, but are also incorporated into the painting as part of the image – slanted and misspelt, complementing the paintings’ raw immediacy. For all of its superficial bravura, there is an underling poignancy to Cullen using the faceless icon of a 19th century bushranger to comment on what Tunnicliffe identifies in his artwork as ‘a gap between how we see ourselves and what we are, even when we appear our most heroic.’2

1. James, B., ‘Finding diamonds in the rough’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 13 July 1999, p. 12 2. Tunnicliffe, W., Adam Cullen. Let’s Get Lost, Art Gallery of New South Wales,

Sydney, 2008, p. 16

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

PATRICIA PICCININI

born 1965 THE OFFERING, 2009 silicone, fox fur and feral New Zealand possum pelt 11.0 x 15.0 x 8.0 cm edition: 2nd Artist’s Proof aside from an edition of 9

ESTIMATE: $8,000 – 12,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection, a gift from the artist in 2009 Menzies, Melbourne, 21 September 2016, lot 19 Private collection, New South Wales

43

EXHIBITED

Patricia Piccinini: Evolution, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 13 March – 14 June 2009 (another example) Patricia Piccinini: Unforced Intimacies, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 22 October – 21 November 2009 (another example) Patricia Piccinini: Hold Me Close to Your Heart, Arter, Istanbul, 21 June – 21 August 2011 (another example) The Shadows Calling: Patricia Piccinini and Peter Hennessey, Detached in association with Dark Mofo, Hobart, 12 June – 2 August 2015 (another example) Hyper Real, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 20 October 2017 – 18 February 2018 (another example) Patricia Piccinini: Curious Affection, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 24 March – 5 August 2018 (another example)

LITERATURE

Patricia Piccinini Online Catalogue Raisonné: [https://www. patriciapiccinini.net/90/60] (accessed 20/01/22)

DALE FRANK

born 1959 MANOBALAI WOLLEMI, 2007 oil and varnish on linen 120.0 x 160.0 cm signed and dated twice verso: Dale Frank 2007 / Dale Frank 2007

ESTIMATE: $18,000 – 24,000

44

PROVENANCE

Art Galleries Schubert, Queensland (labels attached verso, as ‘Manobala Wollami [sic.]’) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2008

born 1960 CACTI GARDEN, 1985 colour woodblock print 69.0 x 56.0 cm edition: 2/3 signed, dated, numbered and inscribed with title below image: 2/3 CACTII GARDEN [sic.] Cressida Campbell ‘85

ESTIMATE: $18,000 – 24,000

PROVENANCE

The Aberdare Art Prize Exhibition, City Council Art Gallery, Queensland Private collection, Queensland, acquired from the above on 25 June 1986

EXHIBITED

Aberdare Art Prize Exhibition, Ipswich City Council Art Gallery, Queensland, June 1986 Cressida Campbell: Woodblocks, Woodblock Prints and Paintings, Mori Gallery, Sydney, 12 – 30 March 1985, cat. 35 (another example) Australian Perspecta 1985, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 22 October – 31 December 1985 (another example) Review: works by women from the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 8 March – 4 June 1995 (another example) Australian prints from the Gallery’s collection (1998 –1999), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 6 November 1998 – 7 February 1999 (another example) Cressida Campbell, from the Gallery’s collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, September 2017 (another example)

LITERATURE

Bond, A., Australian Perspecta ‘85, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1985, p. 87 (another example) Kolenberg, H., and Ryan, A., Australian Prints from the Gallery’s Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1998, p. 125 (illus., another example) Crayford, P. (ed.), The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures, Sydney, 2008, cat. P8710, p. 342 (another example, as ‘Cactii Garden [sic.], 1987’)

RELATED WORK

Another example of this print is held in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

born 1936 LATE AFTERNOON WITH FLOWERING PALMS, 2007 oil on linen 92.0 x 122.0 cm signed and dated lower right: William Robinson 2007 inscribed with title verso: LATE AFTERNOON WITH FLOWERING PALMS

ESTIMATE: $70,000 – 90,000

PROVENANCE

Australian Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, New South Wales

EXHIBITED

William Robinson, Paintings and Lithographs 2000 – 2007, Australian Galleries, Sydney, 2 –24 October 2007 and Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 13 November – 9 December 2007, cat. 17 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 49)

By the time William Robinson came to paint Late Afternoon with Flowering Palms, 2007 he was well established as a great Australian landscape painter. With four of Australia’s most prestigious art prizes to his name (two Archibald and two Wynne prizes) as well as thirty solo exhibitions, the artist had every right to feel comfortable with the mantle. Robinson broke the mould when it came to painting the Australian landscape. Where many artists of his generation chose to look inwards towards the outback’s desperate beauty, Robinson focussed almost entirely on the ancient rainforests and eucalypt forests of southeast Queensland. His progress as a painter can be charted through his many solo exhibitions, as each show trumpeted Robinson’s latest innovation or discovery.

By the time of his 2007 exhibition which included Late Afternoon with Flowering Palms, the artist’s trademark staccato brushwork had been replaced by a more contemplative, patient method of applying the paint. The urgency to capture the moment and draw it to a towering crescendo had given way to a rhetorical meditation on the picture itself.

The current example is from a group of works painted around the Byron Bay area. The Robinsons had moved there from their Springbrook property and the views of the ocean provided the artist with fresh material. Where Robinson’s Kingscliff coastal works created in the mid-1990s had focused on the local beach activities, this later series featured the sea as viewed or glimpsed in the distance through dense forests. In this manner, Robinson brings together two important phases of his work.

Robinson’s paintings attempt to create the sensation of being in the landscape; as the artist explains the feeling he attempts to convey, ‘…I want to move away from observing the picture as some sort of representation. I want to sweep the observer down gullies and up into the sky. The observer is drawn into the landscape not physically but as a sort of connection to memory. The painting reminds us of experiences we might have had when walking in the bush... I am only presenting personal experience to be shared, but I would like to give some clues that may help the observer to experience the picture.’1

The sensation when viewing these fuller, later Robinson paintings such as Late Afternoon with Flowering Palms is one of contentment, with the artist’s enjoyment, confidence and wonder at what he has achieved as a painter easily felt within the finished work.

1. Seear, L., Darkness and Light, The Art of William Robinson, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2001, p. 118

HENRY MULHOLLAND

(c.1902 - 1959) GHOST GUMS, 1954 watercolour on paper on card 29.0 x 40.0 cm (sheet) signed lower right: ALBERT NAMATJIRA inscribed with title and date on frame verso: 1954 GHOST GUMS inscribed on frame verso: GIFT FROM ALBERT N. GIVEN TO DOUG MACCORMAC

ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE

Doug MacCormac, a gift from the artist to the vendor’s father, an accountant for Rex Batterbee’s Gallery who assisted Albert Namatjira with his financial affairs Private collection, Alice Springs Thence by descent Private collection, Perth

Albert Namatjira painting at Hermannsburg Mission, April 1952 photographer: M. Lockett State Library of South Australia, Adelaide

WALTER WITHERS

(1854 – 1914) ELTHAM LANDSCAPE oil on board 19.0 x 34.0 cm signed lower right: Walter Withers bears inscription verso: AFTERNOON STROLL, ELTHAM

ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

48

PROVENANCE

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in May 1979

EXHIBITED

Spring Exhibition, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 17 – 30 October 1979, cat. 45

FREDERICK McCUBBIN

(1855 – 1917) LOOKING NORTH FROM MOUNT MACEDON, 1906 oil on canvas on board 26.0 x 35.5 cm signed and dated lower right: F. McCubbin 1906 bears inscription verso: Looking North from / Mt Macedon / Sketch for large picture / at CTA Melb

ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

49

PROVENANCE

Private collection Christie’s, Sydney, 22 October 1975, lot 377 Earl Gallery, Victoria Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above

EXHIBITED

Exhibition of Australian Paintings, Earl Gallery, Victoria, nd, cat. 3 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, as ‘Looking North from Mt. Macedon’)

RELATED WORK

Looking North from Mount Macedon, 1906, oil on canvas, 62.0 x 123.0 cm, private collection

(1890 – 1923) NEAR KANGAROO GROUND, VICTORIA, 1920 oil on canvas 37.0 x 44.5 cm signed and dated lower left: Penleigh Boyd / 1920

ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Victoria Thence by descent Private collection, New South Wales Penleigh Boyd was one the first Australian artists to serve in the battlefields of Europe, where he fulfilled the role of a sapper in WWI. A sapper’s expertise was engineering and he became responsible for tunnelling and establishing trenches. Tragically while in the trenches at Ypres, West Flanders in 1917, Boyd was gassed, causing permanent lung damage. He was evacuated back to England and eventually, back to Warrandyte, Victoria in 1918, where he continued to paint unhindered by his injury. Kangaroo Ground, Warrandyte, stems from this period and in the context of Penleigh Boyd’s wartime experience, the work could be considered as a pacifist, antiwar painting.

The cutting in the foreground of the work is not some arbitrary feature, it is something Boyd would have understood well and had great feeling for. But rather than rising from the trench to a battlefield scene, the artist takes us up to a landscape which is distant, lush and beautifully serene. The artist has chosen to exaggerate the horizon to suggest the arc of the earth, which hints at the world beyond and signals that the subject of the work has a worldly context beyond the idyllic landscape depicted.

The rolling hills of Warrandyte depicted here by Penleigh Boyd were a world away from Flanders fields. But the idea that Penleigh Boyd created this current work en plein air, immersed in the contented majesty of nature, while reflecting on his wartime experiences, leaves us with a profound feeling of empathy. It is a work modest in size, but the scale of its impetus is immeasurable. On 28 November 1922, Boyd made the fateful decision to take his new Hudson car for a drive to Sydney. On a sharp bend near Warragal he lost control of his car and died from his injuries at the scene aged 33.

HENRY MULHOLLAND

(1867 – 1943) OLINDA HILLSIDE oil on canvas 51.5 x 77.0 cm signed lower left: A STREETON

ESTIMATE: $65,000 – 85,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 13 March 1975, lot 350 (as ‘Dandenong Ranges’) Private collection, Melbourne

With their remarkable evocation of light, atmosphere, colour and form, Arthur Streeton’s landscapes remain among the most highly regarded and much-loved paintings in Australian art. From his sun-drenched impressionist scenes of the 1880s, to his joyful depictions of Sydney’s beaches and harbour in the 1890s and grand pastorals of the 1920s and 30s, he has bequeathed a rich legacy of images that celebrate Australia’s unique natural environment and continue to define our national consciousness. Among his later landscape achievements arguably most poignant are those inspired by Streeton’s time at Olinda in the Dandenong ranges – encapsulated magnificently in this auction by lot 19 and the present, Olinda Hillside. Not only do such works remain unparalleled in their concerted quality, but they are significant for their sensitivity to place and to the conservation concerns of the artist who was staunchly opposed to the increasing devastation of the area’s native forests and trees.

After twenty-three years abroad as an expatriate in London, Streeton returned to Australia permanently in September 1923 and, following the sale of his iconic Golden Summer, Eaglemont, 1889 (National Gallery of Australia) for the extraordinary sum of 1000 guineas in 1924, was able to build a house on land he had purchased in 1921 at Olinda in the Dandenong Ranges. Initially a weekend retreat and place of contemplation before becoming his permanent home in 1939 after the death of his wife Nora, the house he built there – ‘Longacres’ – and the surrounding hills and panoramic vistas offered the perfect setting for Streeton to consolidate his appreciation of momentary sensations of colour and light and to explore new ways of representing the Australian landscape. As he wrote to his dear friend and fellow artist, Tom Roberts, ‘It’s refreshing to note how the old Dandenong Range takes hold directly as soon as you get there…’1 Living in this landscape, nurturing the indigenous trees on his property, and blending them into a garden of introduced plants and flowers led to an intimate knowledge of the environment2 – and in turn, some of his most enduring and memorable works.

Capturing the ephemeral beauty of the area, Olinda Hillside exudes a tangible sense of the arcadian pleasure Streeton found in his self-made paradise through the charm of everyday domestic detail, the verve of the brushwork, and the easy harmony of the composition. Bathed in a gentle light that is uniquely Australian, indeed the work does not bear the character of a political statement in the vein of other Olinda paintings such as Last of the Messmates, 1928 (private collection); The Vanishing Forest, 1934 (Art Gallery of Ballarat, on loan from the Estate of Margery Pierce), or particularly, the starkly confronting Sylvan Dam and Donna Buang AD 2000, 1940 (private collection) where Streeton not only documents the damage being wreaked on the natural world, but condemns with growing vehemence the political and commercial motivations underlying it. A passionate environmentalist in his later years, Streeton notably questioned why ‘should we suffer hundreds and hundreds of acres of valuable timber to be destroyed to facilitate some work of the moment when so little is gained for it?’3 Moreover, cultural historian Tim Bonyhady, has observed that from 1930 onwards ‘…one of Streeton’s refrains became that his ideal of an afterlife was not the ‘ghastly monotony’ of either heaven or hell but to come back to Olinda, haunt his blackwoods and ‘scare the life’ out of anyone who cut down any of the trees he had planted.’4

1. Streeton letter, 7 May 1923, cited in Galbally, A. (ed.), Letters from Smike: The Letters of Arthur

Streeton, 1890 – 1943, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p.170 2. Tunnicliffe, W., ‘The Big Picture: National Landscapes’ in Streeton, Art Gallery of New South

Wales, Sydney, 2020, p. 260 3. Argus, Melbourne, 27 November 1925, p. 23, quoted in Eagle, M., The Oil Paintings of Arthur

Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, p. 164 4. Bonyhady, T., ‘Beware of the Axe’ in Streeton, op. cit, p. 313

VERONICA ANGELATOS

ETHEL CARRICK FOX

(1872 – 1952) WILD FLOWERS oil on canvas 46.5 x 38.5 cm signed lower left: CARRICK FOX bears inscription on label attached to stretcher bar verso: 23 / Carrick Fox / Wild Flowers / 23 label attached to stretcher bar verso: Lucien Lefebvre–Foinet, Paris

ESTIMATE: $8,000 – 12,000

52

PROVENANCE

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in September 1981

EXHIBITED

Possibly: Exhibition of Paintings by the Late E. Phillips Fox and Ethel Carrick, Athenaeum Art Gallery, Melbourne, 27 February – 10 March 1934, cat. 63 Spring Exhibition, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 10 – 24 September 1981, cat. 63 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

BESSIE DAVIDSON

(1879 – 1965) STILL LIFE WITH FLOWERS, c.1935 oil on wood 41.0 x 33.0 cm signed lower right: Bessie Davidson bears inscription on old label verso: Salon des Tuileries / Bessie Davidson / 40 rue Boissonade / No. 3 Nature morte / (fleurs) bears inscription verso: D H6 3

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

53

PROVENANCE

Private collection, France Private collection, France, acquired from the above in February 2002 Private collection, France

EXHIBITED

Probably: 14e Exposition du Salon des Tuileries, Néo-Parnasse, Paris, 21 May – 5 July 1936, cat. 416 (as ‘Nature Morte’, label attached verso)

RUSSELL DRYSDALE

(1912 – 1981) STUDIO STILL LIFE, c.1937 pencil, pen and ink and watercolour on paper 22.5 x 29.5 cm (sight) signed lower centre: Russell Drysdale signed and inscribed with title on backing attached verso: Still Life / Russell Drysdale bears inscription on typed label verso: RUSSELL DRYSDALE STILL LIFE / LENT BY / DARYL LINDSAY

ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

54

PROVENANCE

Sir Daryl Lindsay, Melbourne (inscribed on label attached verso) Christie’s, Melbourne, 14 March 1972, lot 120 Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in October 1979

EXHIBITED

Spring Exhibition, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 17 – 30 October 1979, cat. 116 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

LITERATURE

Klepac, L., Russell Drysdale: the drawings, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2012, pp. 34 (illus., as ‘Study for a painting, c.1939’), 167

55

RUSSELL DRYSDALE

(1912 – 1981) GOLDEN GULLY, c.1949 ink and watercolour on paper 20.5 x 32.0 cm signed lower right: Russell Drysdale

ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

PROVENANCE

Alan Greenway, Australia and USA, acquired from the above Thence by descent Private collection, California, USA

RELATED WORK

Golden Gully, 1949, oil on linen on board, 66.0 x 101.6 cm, formerly in the Travelodge collection

56

WILLIAM DOBELL

(1899 – 1970) CAMPERS AT LAKE MACQUARIE, WANGI WANGI, NSW gouache on paper 12.0 x 18.5 cm signed lower left: W Dobell

ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

PROVENANCE

Artarmon Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Alan Greenway, Australia and USA, acquired from the above Thence by descent Private collection, California, USA

WILLIAM DOBELL

(1899 – 1970) STUDY FOR THE STUDENT, 1940 oil on card 45.0 x 27.0 cm signed and dated lower right: W Dobell / 40

ESTIMATE: $18,000 – 24,000

PROVENANCE

Mr and Mrs Geoffrey Collings, New South Wales Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Mr Alan Greenway, Australia and USA, acquired from the above Thence by descent Private collection, California, USA

57

EXHIBITED

Contemporary Art Society, David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney, 1940 William Dobell, David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney, 1 – 26 August 1944, cat. 33 (as ‘Study for “Portrait of a Student”, 1941’) Paintings and Drawings by William Dobell, John Martin & Co. Ltd., Adelaide Festival of the Arts, Adelaide, 1960, cat. 6 (as ‘The Study for the Student’) William Dobell Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 July – 30 August 1964, cat. 80 (label attached verso, as ‘Study for the Student (Warren Stewart)’)

LITERATURE

Penton, B., The Art of William Dobell, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1946, pp. 8, 121 (illus.) Gleeson, J., William Dobell, Thames and Hudson, London, 1964, cat. 88, pl. 33 (illus.), p. 192

RELATED WORK

The Student, 1940, oil on canvas, 108.0 x 72.0 cm, private collection

WILLIAM DOBELL

(1899 – 1970) NUDE, 1933 oil on composition board 21.0 x 24.5 cm signed and dated upper right: DOBELL / 33 bears inscription with artist’s name and title on partial label verso

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

58

PROVENANCE

Major Harold De Vahl Rubin, Sydney Christie’s, Sydney, 2 October 1973, lot 80 Private collection, New South Wales

SALI HERMAN

(1898 – 1993) MIGRANT WOMAN, WOOLLOOMOOLOO LANE, 1969 oil on canvas 64.0 x 76.5 cm signed and dated lower right: S. Herman, 69

ESTIMATE: $15,000 – 20,000

59

PROVENANCE

Artarmon Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Mr Alan Greenway, Australia and USA, acquired c.1970 Thence by descent Private collection, California, USA

LITERATURE

Thomas, D., Sali Herman, Collins, Sydney, 1971, pl. 72, pp. 108 (illus., as ‘Migrant Woman’), 113

RELATED WORK

Back Lane, Woolloomooloo, 1970, oil on canvas, 33.0 x 72.0 cm, private collection, illus. in Thomas, D., Sali Herman, Collins, Sydney, 1971, pl. 67

LLOYD REES

(1895 – 1988) A MORNING VISION (HIGH ABOVE SANDY BAY, TASMANIA), 1985 oil on canvas board 47.5 x 55.5 cm signed and dated lower right: L REES 85 inscribed with title verso: A MORNING VISION / (HIGH ABOVE SANDY BAY TASMANIA –

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

60

PROVENANCE

Mr Alan Greenway, Australia and USA Thence by descent Private collection, California, USA

CLIFFORD LAST

(1918 – 1991, British/Australian) FAMILY GROUP, c.1962 bronze on timber base 32.0 x 20.5 x 16.5 cm (including base) edition: 4/6 signed with artist’s monogram and numbered verso: L / IV/VI

ESTIMATE: $4,000 – 6,000

61

PROVENANCE

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne (as ‘Family’) Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in October 1982

ROBERT KLIPPEL

(1920 – 2001) NO. 462, 1982 cast 1983 bronze 41.0 cm (height) edition: A/P signed with initials, dated and numbered on base: RK No 462 83 AP’ Meridian Melbourne foundry stamp at base

ESTIMATE: $12,000 – 18,000

62

PROVENANCE

Alan Greenway, Australia and USA, acquired from the above Thence by descent Private collection, California, USA

RELATED WORK

No. 462, 1982, wood assemblage, 58.1 cm (height), whereabouts unknown, illus. in Edwards, D., Robert Klippel: Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture, (CD ROM), Deborah Edwards and the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002

NORMA REDPATH

(1928 – 2013) PICCOLA CITTÀ, 1976 silver on marble base 13.5 cm (height) edition: 4/5 signed, dated and numbered at edge: p.d’A. 4/5 015 / Norma Redpath 1976

ESTIMATE: $3,000 – 5,000

PROVENANCE

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in 1979

EXHIBITED

Autumn Exhibition, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 5 – 20 April 1979, cat. 156 Norma Redpath: Works from the Studio, 1970s & 1980s, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, 21 June – 7 July 2018 (another example)

63

RELATED WORKS

Piccola città (Small city), c.1962 – 63, pen and ink and fibre–tipped pen, 32.4 × 47.4 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Other examples of this edition are held in the collection of the Australian National University, Canberra

‘In 1972 she was appointed the inaugural H.C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at Australian National University. During the Fellowship she completed a commission for ANU’s School of Music (Extended Column, 1972 – 75) and developed a proposal for a major environmental sculpture: Piccola Cità. This ‘small city’ was a reworked version of an earlier 1962 work of the same title, but the individual elements were slightly altered in form and spaced further apart to create a walk-through environment for the university’s forecourt. Prohibitive costs meant the work was never realised, but it did generate two editions of maquettes: one in silver (1976) and another, slightly larger, in bronze (1978).’1

1. Eckett, J., Archetypes and the genius loci: Norma Redpath, 1967 – 2013, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 2018

FRANCIS BACON

(1909 – 1992, British) TRIPTYCH 1974 – 77, 1981 colour etching and aquatint 3 panels printed on one sheet 38.5 x 29.5 cm (each panel) 38.5 x 93.5 cm (overall image) edition: 25/99 published by Polígrafa, Barcelona, 1981 signed and numbered below image

ESTIMATE: $18,000 – 24,000

64

PROVENANCE

Marlborough Galleries, London Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney Private collection, Sydney

SYDNEY LONG

(1871 – 1955) FLAMINGOES, 1916 watercolour on paper 34.5 x 72.0 cm (sight) signed and dated lower right: SID LONG / .1916.

ESTIMATE: $12,000 – 18,000

65

PROVENANCE

Estate of Mrs L. S. Stephen, Sydney Lawsons, Sydney, 19 June 1984, lot 75 Earl Gallery, Victoria Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in September 1984

EXHIBITED

A Memorial exhibition of a selection of paintings by Sydney Long 1878 – 1955, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, October 1955, cat. 33 (label attached verso)

RELATED WORK

Flamingoes, 1917, watercolour and gouache on paper, 22.9 x 52.1 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

BERNARD HALL

(1859 – 1935) ANDANTE, c.1887 oil on canvas 32.0 x 70.0 cm signed lower left: B. Hall

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

PROVENANCE

Elsinore Mary Shuter (who later became the artist’s wife), acquired directly from the artist in 1890 Bernard Hall, Melbourne, until his death in 1935 Private collection, Melbourne Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 19 March 2013, lot 30 Private collection, New South Wales

66

EXHIBITED

Royal Institute of Oil Painters, London, 1888 27th annual exhibition, Royal Art Society of New South Wales, Sydney, 1906, cat. 73 Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Bernard Hall, Athenaeum Galleries, Melbourne, 27 May – 8 June 1935, cat. 35 (as ‘Andante (original sketch)’) Exhibition of Paintings and Antiques: The Works and Collection of the late Bernard Hall, Esq., Illawara, Melbourne, 2 – 13 June 1936, cat. 45 (as ‘Andante Sketch’)

LITERATURE

‘Institute of Painters in Oil Colours’, The Graphic, London, 10 November 1888, p. 491 The Times, London, 3 November 1888 The Globe, London, 5 November 1888 Probably: The London Magazine, London, 9th February 1889 ‘Royal Art Society: A Strong Exhibition’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 25 August 1906, p. 13

RELATED WORK

Andante, oil on canvas, 62.0 x 138.0 cm, Sotheby’s Australia, Melbourne, 30 April 1995, lot 50, private collection

RUPERT BUNNY

(1864 – 1947) AURORE ET SÉLÉNÉ, c.1921 colour monotype 24.5 x 34.5 cm (image) 28.0 x 38.0 cm (sheet) inscribed with title verso: Aurore et Céline [sic] / monotype/1928 AF/ Bunny bears inscription on label attached verso: Ville de Gand / Musée des Beaux–Arts / N° 1928 / Depot Hulin AF

ESTIMATE: $8,000 – 12,000

67

PROVENANCE

Galeries Georges Petit, Paris Georges Hulin de Loo, Ghent Paul van der Perre, Brussels Private collection, Belgium

EXHIBITED

Exposition Rupert Bunny. Monotypes, Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, 16 – 31 March 1921, cat. 23 on loan to the Museum of Ghent, Belgium, from 1928 – c.1945 (label attached verso)

LITERATURE

Thomas, D., The Life and Art of Rupert Bunny, A Catalogue Raisonné in Two Volumes, Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2017, Volume 2, p. 168

JANET CUMBRAE STEWART

(1883 – 1960) YOUNG GIRL SEWING, 1926 pastel on paper 61.0 x 50.0 cm signed and dated lower right: Cumbrae Stewart / 26

ESTIMATE: $15,000 – 20,000

68

PROVENANCE

Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 3 May 1988, lot 176 Earl Gallery, Victoria Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in June 1988

ARTHUR STREETON

(1867 – 1943) CAIRO, STREET SCENE, 1898 watercolour on paper on card 36.5 x 17.5 cm signed lower right: A STREETON bears inscription verso: Mrs Walker / Cooldrina / Packington St / Kew

ESTIMATE: $18,000 – 24,000

PROVENANCE

Ada Walker, Victoria, a gift from the artist Pearl Fagan (née Reed), New South Wales, a gift from the above Lysbeth St John Romaine Knight (née Fagan), New South Wales, a gift from the above Private collection, New South Wales, a gift from the above in the 1980s

CHARLES CONDER

(1868 – 1909) INTERIOR WITH WOMEN BY SEA oil on canvas 71.0 x 91.0 cm

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

70

PROVENANCE

The Redfern Galleries, London Sir Rex Nan Kivell, London (bears inscription on label verso) Private collection, New South Wales, by 1998

JESSIE TRAILL

(1881 – 1967) WORKING IN THE FIELD oil on canvas on board 100.5 x 60.0 cm

ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,0000

71

PROVENANCE

Estate of the artist Private collection, Victoria Thence by descent Private collection, Victoria

EMANUEL PHILLIPS FOX

(1865 – 1915) GOLDEN EVENING, c.1907 oil on panel 27.0 x 35.0 cm signed lower left: E PHILLIPS FOX signed and partially inscribed with title on label verso: Golden Evening / E. Phillips Fox bears inscription verso: 1

ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

72

PROVENANCE

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above April 1979

EXHIBITED

Possibly: Exhibition of Oil Paintings by the Late E. Phillips Fox and of Ethel Carrick, Anthony Hordern & Sons Ltd., Sydney, 1 – 15 October 1925, cat. 4 Possibly: Exhibition of Paintings by the Late E. Phillips Fox and Ethel Carrick, Athenaeum Art Gallery, Melbourne, 27 February – 10 March 1934, cat. 30 Autumn Exhibition, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 5 – 20 April 1979, cat. 54 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

BESSIE DAVIDSON

(1879 – 1965) CHAMBRAY LANDSCAPE, FRANCE oil on board 18.5 x 24.0 cm

ESTIMATE: $9,000 – 12,000

73

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Paris, acquired directly from the artist Christie’s, Melbourne, 18 April 1994, lot 261 (as ‘Savoie Landscapes (2)’) Tim Goodman, Sydney Goodmans Auctioneers, Sydney, 30 July 2001, lot 97 Private collection, New South Wales

JOHN PETER RUSSELL

(1858 – 1930) TREES, RIVER AND MOUNTAINS, c.1886 – 87 oil on wood panel 28.5 x 22.5 cm (irregular) signed lower left: J. RUSSELL

ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

PROVENANCE

Dr Guy Jouve Moncontour, Brittany, France, by 1978 Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in April 1979

EXHIBITED

John Peter Russell: Australian Impressionist, Rijksmuseum Vincent Van Gogh, Amsterdam, 10 January – 12 February 1978; University Art Museum, University of Queensland, Brisbane, 25 February – 19 March 1978; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 30 March – 6 May 1978; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 21 May – 26 June 1978, cat. 6 (label attached verso) Autumn Exhibition, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 5 – 20 April 1979, cat. 43 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, as ‘Trees, river with mountains in background’)

74

LITERATURE

Galbally, A., The Art of John Peter Russell, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1977, cat. 42, p. 99 (as ‘Untitled (Trees, River with Mountains in Background)’)

75

S.T. GILL

(1818 – 1880) NORTH BONDI BAY, c.1856 watercolour on paper 18.5 x 20.0 cm (oval) signed with initials lower left: S T G

ESTIMATE: $6,000 – 9,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 6 March 1970, lot 13 Private collection, Victoria Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 29 August 2012, lot 145 Private collection, New South Wales

EXHIBITED

Then and Now: 200 Years of Watercolour, McClelland Gallery, Victoria, 8 November – 13 December 1981, cat. 63 (label attached verso)

S.T. GILL

(1818 – 1880) WEST OF QUEENSCLIFF, VICTORIA watercolour on paper 10.5 x 33.5 cm (sight) signed with initials lower left: S T G signed and inscribed with title on label verso: West of Queenscliff / Victoria / S. T. Gill.

ESTIMATE: $6,000 – 9,000

76

PROVENANCE

Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 3 November 1982, lot 605 Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 16 April 1986, lot 148 Private collection, Victoria

LOUIS BUVELOT

(1814 – 1888) IN THE WESTERN DISTRICT oil on academy board 23.0 x 31.0 cm inscribed with title verso: In Western District

ESTIMATE: $15,000 – 20,000

77

PROVENANCE

Joseph Brown Galley, Melbourne Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in June 1980

78

EVELINE SYME

(1888 – 1961) MELBOURNE FROM ST KILDA ROAD (LOOKING NORTH ACROSS PRINCES BRIDGE) watercolour on paper on card 20.0 x 30.0 cm (sheet) signed with initials lower right: E.W.S.

ESTIMATE: $2,000 – 3,000

PROVENANCE

The Board and Management of CUSCAL, Sydney The National Australia Bank Art Collection, a gift from the above to commemorate the bank’s 150th anniversary and 30 years as partners, 20 May 2008

79

JESSIE TRAILL

(1881 – 1967) YALLOURN POWER STATION, 1924 watercolour on paper 38.0 x 57.5 cm signed and dated lower right: J Traill 1924

ESTIMATE: $5,000 – 8,000

PROVENANCE

Estate of the artist Private collection, Victoria Thence by descent Private collection, Victoria

RELATED WORK

The Works, Yallourn, 1924, watercolour on paper, in the collection of the Latrobe Regional Gallery, Victoria The Big Building Yallourn, May 1924, etching on cream wove paper, 40.8 x 33.2 cm (sheet), in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

ATTRIBUTED TO ALEXANDER WEBB

(Scottish, 1813 – 1892) I. MALOP STREET, GEELONG, c.1860 II. THE PROVIDENT INSTITUTE, MELBOURNE, c.1860 watercolour on paper i. 24.5 x 34.0 cm ii. 24.5 x 34.0 cm each inscribed with title on mount

ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000 (2)

80

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Adelaide Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 3 August 2011, lot 114 (as ‘Australian School’) Private collection, New South Wales

RELATED WORKS

Malop Street, Geelong, looking East; and Provident Institute, Melbourne, steel engravings from Victoria Illustrated: Second Series, 1862, collection of the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Malop Street from Johnstone Park, 1872, watercolour and pencil on paper, 46.0 x 66.2 cm, in the collection of Geelong Art Gallery, Victoria

EDWARD ATKINSON HORNEL

(Scottish, 1864 – 1933) GIRL AND BLUEBELLS, BRIGHOUSE BAY, 1919 oil on canvas 51.5 x 77.0 cm signed and dated lower left: E A Hornell 1919 –

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

81

PROVENANCE

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in March 1980

EXHIBITED

Spring Exhibition, Joseph Brown Gallery, 17 – 30 October 1979, cat. 60 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, as ‘On a Flowery Bank by the Sea’)

EDMUND BLAIR LEIGHTON

(British, 1852 – 1922) THE LETTER, 1921 oil on canvas 51.0 x 36.0 cm signed with initials and dated lower left: E.B.L. 1921

ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

82

PROVENANCE

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne (as ‘The Letter Writer’) Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in October 1988