Important Australian and International Fine Art by Deutscher and Hackett

Important Australian and International Fine Art AUCTION • SYDNEY • 14 SEPTEMBER 2022

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The Signature is a masterfully crafted and truly remarkable wine. But it would not be complete without the signature of an individual who has contributed greatly to the life and soul of Yalumba. Who will be the next Signatory? Only time will tell.

Embrace the Magnificent Unknown

3 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL ART AUCTION • SYDNEY • 14 SEPTEMBER 2022 Important Australian and International Fine Art featuring Selected works from the Collection of Joan Clemenger AO and Peter Clemenger AO Important Australian Art from the Collection of Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Lots 1 – 83

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email bids to: info@deutscherandhackett.com telephone: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611 telephone bid form – p. 187 absentee bid form – p. www.deutscherandhackett.com/watch-live-auction188

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LOTS 1 – 83 WEDNESDAY 14 SEPTEMBER 2022 7:00 pm 36 gosbell telephone:paddington,streetnsw029287 0600

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head of aboriginal art and senior art specialist Crispin holds a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts and History) from Monash University. In 1995, he began working for Sotheby’s Australia, where he became the representative for Aboriginal art in Melbourne. In 2006 Crispin joined Joel Fine Art as head of Aboriginal and Contemporary Art and later was appointed head of the Sydney office. He possesses extensive knowledge of Aboriginal art and has over 20 years experience in the Australian fine art auction market.

s pecialists

CHRIS DEUTSCHER executive director — melbourne

With a Bachelor of Business Accounting at RMIT, Alex has almost 25 years experience within financial management roles. He has spent much of his early years within the corporate sector with companies such as IBM, Macquarie Bank and ANZ. With a strong passion for the arts more recently he was the Financial Controller for Ross Mollison Group, a leading provider of marketing services to the performing arts.

ROGER McILROY head auctioneer

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

CLAIRE KURZMANN

FIONA HAYWARD senior art specialist

After completing a Bachelor of Arts at Monash University, Fiona worked at Niagara Galleries in Melbourne, leaving to join the newly established Melbourne auction rooms of Christie’s in 1990, rising to become an Associate Director. In 2006, Fiona joined Sotheby’s International as a Senior Paintings Specialist and later Deputy Director. In 2009, Sotheby’s International left the Australian auction market and established a franchise agreement with Sotheby’s Australia, where Fiona remained until the end of 2019 as a Senior Specialist in Australian Art. At the end of the franchise agreement with Sotheby’s Australia, Smith & Singer was established where Fiona worked until the end of 2020.

CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE

head of online sales, gallery manager - melbourne Claire has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art) from the University of Melbourne. She gained several years’ experience working as Gallery Assistant at Metro Gallery, Melbourne, assisting with exhibitions, events and marketing. She has acted as Artist Liaison for the Arts Centre Melbourne, coordinating aspects of artist care and has gained experience as a Studio Assistant for a number of emerging Australian artists.

ALEX CRESWICK managing director / head of finance

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

Ella has a Bachelor of Fine Art (Visual Art) from Monash University and studied in both Melbourne and Italy. From 2014, Ella worked at Leonard Joel, Melbourne as an Art Assistant, researcher, writer and auctioneer, where she developed a particular interest in Australian women artists. She is currently studying a Masters of Business (Arts and Cultural Management) at Deakin University with a focus on collection management and research.

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

s pecialists

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

VERONICA ANGELATOS art specialist and senior researcher

SCOTT LIVESEY auctioneer

ELLA PERROTTET registrar

contemporary art specialist and gallery manager – sydney

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

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

HENRY MULHOLLAND senior art specialist

DAMIAN HACKETT executive director — sydney

Veronica has a Master of Arts (Art Curatorship and Museum Management), together with a Bachelor of Arts/Law (Honours) and Diploma of Modern Languages from the University of Melbourne. She has strong curatorial and research expertise, having worked at various art museums including the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice and National Gallery of Victoria, and more recently, in the commercial sphere as Senior Art Specialist at Deutscher~Menzies. She is also the author of numerous articles and publications on Australian and International Art.

Damian has over 30 years experience in public and commercial galleries and the fine art auction market. After completing a BA (Visual Arts) at the University of New England, he was Assistant Director of the Gold Coast City Art Gallery and in 1993 joined Rex Irwin Art Dealer, a leading commercial gallery in Sydney. In 2001, Damian moved into the fine art auction market as Head of Australian and International art for Phillips de Pury and Luxembourg, and from 2002 – 2006 was National Director of Deutscher~Menzies.

Eliza Burton 03 9865 6333

0411 350 150

Lucie Reeves-Smith 0401 177 007

Lucie Reeves-Smith (Sydney) 02 9287 0600

CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTIONS

Damian Hackett 0422 811 034

Henry Mulholland 0424 487 738

AUCTIONEERS Roger McIlroy Scott Livesey

Chris Deutscher

SHIPPING Ella Perrottet 03 9865 6333

Alex Creswick (Melbourne) 03 9865 6333

Fiona Hayward 0417 957 590

ADMINISTRATION AND ACCOUNTS

s pecialists for this auction

Veronica Angelatos 0409 963 094

ABSENTEE AND TELEPHONE BIDS Eliza Burton 03 9865 6333

Crispin Gutteridge 0411 883 052

various vendors lots 8 – 83 page 50 prospective buyers and sellers guide page 180 conditions of auction and sale page 182 catalogue subscription form page 185 attendee pre-registration form page 186 telephone bid form page 187 absentee bid form page 188 index page 199

contents

selected works from the collection of page 14 Joan Clemenger AO and Peter Clemenger AO lots 1 –important4 australian art from the collection of page 36 Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers – Grundy lots 5 – 7

SELECTED WORKS FROM THE COLLECTION OF JOAN AND PETER CLEMENGER, MELBOURNE

The Clemengers’ art collection started modestly, with an eight by six-inch Ray Crooke painting that was bought from gallerist Barry Stern for £25. This was followed by a group of small paintings by Thomas Gleghorn; a Lawrence Daws for $5; a Fred Williams work on paper, bought from Rudy Komon Gallery for $190, and then a small John Olsen purchased when Peter had ‘had about three sherries… and was feeling fairly relaxed’. Driven by personal response rather than by fashion or art world ‘favourites’, the couple lived with their growing collection and rarely sold works: ‘We’ve not had a plan’, admits Peter, ‘we are just happy with what we’ve got’. 3 Their first significant acquisition was an Arthur Boyd ‘Wimmera’ painting from Melbourne’s Australian Galleries, which was $1,600 – quite a jump from the price of earlier purchases, and quite a stretch for the young couple at the time. As this sale attests, several important works followed including Fred Williams’ sublime masterpiece, Lysterfield Landscape , 1968 – 69, and

Joan and Peter Clemenger’s passion for art and generous philanthropy to the arts over many decades is all the more remarkable given that neither came from families with an interest in visiting galleries and collecting. This is something they developed together as a couple, and it has been one of the hallmarks of their extraordinary lifelong partnership. However, rather than focus exclusively on developing their own collection, the Clemengers made the visionary – and at the time, ground-breaking – decision to share their love of art and the enrichment it gave them, through philanthropy, and particularly through their support of the National Gallery of Victoria, a relationship that now extends over 40 years.

Lots 1 4

Joan and Peter met when Joan was working in the Collins Street studio of acclaimed Melbourne fashion and advertising photographer Athol Shmith, and the pair married in 1956. Peter had started working in advertising at the age of 16 and joined his father in establishing Clemenger Advertising just two years later. Today, Clemenger BBDO is the largest agency group in Australia. Not long after their marriage, Joan attended a Christie’s art appreciation course, which she loved. Visits to Melbourne’s small clutch of commercial galleries ensued, with Joan coming to know gallerists such as Joseph Brown, Max Hutchinson, Georges Mora, Anne Purves and Sweeney Reed.1 As Peter’s advertising business grew and he was increasingly required to travel overseas for work, their knowledge of art correspondingly expanded to include international modern and contemporary artists and dealers. In a story that has since become family lore, Joan once arrived at the reception of New York’s Chase Manhattan Bank and requested to see the Bank’s art collection. Such was Joan’s courage, determination, and bravura, that no further questions were asked, and she was subsequently taken on a private tour by David Rockefeller (1915 – 2017), the Bank’s chairman and chief executive at the time. As Jason Smith has so aptly described Joan: ‘She had a twinkle in her eye, a ready smile, and a fabulous laugh. But when she spoke, she meant business.’ 2

It did not stop there. In 1999, Joan made a commitment to build upon the important legacy of the Gallery’s G H Michell (1976 – 1987) and Margaret Stewart Endowments (1987 – 1997), which supported the acquisition of emerging Australian artists working in all media. Thus, the Joan Clemenger Endowment was born. Over the course of the Endowment’s four-year term, Joan was closely involved in the acquisition process, visiting galleries with the curators, and attending Acquisitions Meetings. The price for works was capped at $5,000 to ensure that the fund was truly benefiting artists at the beginning of their professional careers, and to enable the purchase of a greater number of works. It is telling that many of the artists whose work was acquired through this fund – including David Rosetzky, Ricky Swallow and Louise Weaver, to name but a few, are now some of our most celebrated contemporary artists.

Given the benefits they derived from travel, and from seeing the world’s best museums, Joan and Peter also established the Clemenger Travel Grant – an application-based program that enabled the professional development of the Gallery’s curators, conservators, and other professional staff. I was fortunate to be a recipient of this grant and can vouch for the life- and career-boosting benefits of the five-week trip I was able to undertake, visiting museums and colleagues across the UK and North America. The grant has now been running for close to 20 years.

A major donation by the Clemengers to the NGV in 1991 was the impetus for the establishment of what was to become known as the Clemenger Contemporary Art Prize, a series of six triennial exhibitions (running from 1993 to 2009) which celebrated the contribution of Indigenous and non-Indigenous mid-career and senior contemporary Australian artists. Having had the pleasure of working on two iterations of this Prize in 2006 and 2009 as Curator of Contemporary Art, I came to understand and appreciate the Clemengers’ deep commitment to Australian art and artists, their generosity of spirit, and their extensive knowledge. This unique and important series was a collaboration between the Gallery’s curators and Joan and Peter, with the development of each exhibition unfolding over several years. Peter’s keen eye was largely tuned to management of the budget and to the exhibition collateral, signage, and promotion; with Joan acting, in each iteration, as one of Prize’s three judges.

Jeffrey Smart’s Portrait of Germaine Greer, 1984. Significantly, the Clemengers enjoyed a warm and enduring relationship with both artists: Joan and Lyn Williams were particularly close, often working together in their philanthropic pursuits at the NGV, while the Clemengers would often stay with Jeffrey Smart when travelling in Italy and share a regular correspondence. Indeed, Joan and Peter travelled specially to Sydney to see Smart’s Portrait of Germaine Greer, 1984 as soon as it was finished, and bought it immediately, while still unframed. 4

In 2015 Joan and Peter Clemenger scored a rare ‘double’ in the Australia Day Honours, each becoming Officers of the Order (AO) for their support of the visual and performing arts and for their philanthropic work. Peter’s response to this very public recognition was characteristically low-key: ‘I got a letter telling me about the award and thought that’s nice…Then I opened another letter and found Joan had the same. That was wonderful.’ 6

Yet the Clemengers’ benefaction is by no means exclusive, and alongside their incredible support of the NGV they fostered long term relationships with a range of arts organisations. Peter was a patron of the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the pair are Lifetime Patrons of the Melbourne Theatre Company, and through the Joan and Peter Clemenger Trust (established in 2001) they support the Australian Ballet to bring international artists and companies to Australia to tour. Searching for a major tourism and reinvigoration project for Melbourne in the early 1990s, Peter established (and funded) the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and ran the organisation for nine years. It has since become one of the world’s top food and wine events and celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. Joan is a Fellow of Heide Museum of Modern Art and was central to the fundraising efforts that enabled the Museum to develop the 2012 exhibition Louise Bourgeois: Late Works and was also a supporter of a host of organisations ranging from Orchestra Victoria to Big Brother Big Sister and Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. The Clemenger Trust has also funded medical research through its support of, amongst other organisations, the Mental Health Research Institute of Victoria, the Centre for Eye Research Australia, the Peter McCallum Cancer Foundation and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, and has helped address the needs of vulnerable children, young people and families through its substantial support of Anglicare. 5

1. Joseph Brown (1918 – 2009) opened Joseph Brown Gallery at 5 Collins Street, close to Athol Shmith’s studio, in 1967. Max Hutchinson (1925 – 1999) was the founding director of Gallery A; Georges Mora (1913 – 1992) was the director of Tolarno Galleries; Anne Purves was the director, with husband Tam, of Australian Galleries, and Sweeney Reed (1945 – 1979) was the Director of Strines Gallery, and later, Sweeney Reed Gallery.

4 op. cit., p. 22

5. ‘Advertising Legend Peter Clemenger and Wife Joan Both Awarded AO in Australia Day Honours’, 26 January 2015, https://campaignbrief.com/ad-legendpeter-clemenger-and/?utm_source=pocket_mylist , accessed 23 July 2022

KELLY GELLATLY

After the end of the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, Joan and Peter’s support of acquisitions at the NGV broadened to include international contemporary art, but equally, they have also been quietly involved in the purchase of works across other collecting areas for decades. After Joan’s death in early 2022, Peter has continued the couple’s commitment to the NGV, ensuring that Joan’s legacy as a benefactor, art lover, and friend to artists continues through his involvement.

The author is grateful to Veronica Angelatos for the notes she took during her interview with Peter Clemenger at his Melbourne home on 26 May 2022, which have informed this piece.

3. Kevin Childs, ‘Portrait of a Patron’, Flight Deck , May 1993, p. 21 in ‘EXHIBITION: JOAN AND PETER CLEMENGER TRIENNIAL EXHIBITION OF CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN ART 1996 PART 1: APR 1993 – DEC 1994’, NGV RMU File G1111, accessed 29 June 2022

6. Money L., ‘Australia Day Honours: Ad Legend Clemenger and Wife Score The “Double”’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 January 2015, https://www.smh. com.au/national/australia-day-honours-ad-legend-clemenger-and-wife-score-the-double-20150123-12wu6a.htm l, accessed 23 July 2022

2. Jason Smith, speech notes for Joan Clemenger AO, Memorial Service, 5 April 2022. Jason Smith, also a Curator of Contemporary Art at the NGV from 1997 to 2007, worked on the 1999, 2003 and 2006 iterations of the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award.

Self – Portrait after a Haircut at 36 , 1976, pen and ink and hair on paper, 100.0 x 75.0 cm, private collection, Melbourne, sold Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 15 July 2020, lot 23

Joan Clemenger AO and Peter Clemenger AO, Melbourne acquired from the above in April 1979

EXHIBITED

RELATED WORKS

Self Portrait with Real Hair, 1977, ink and hair on paper, 76.0 x 51.0 cm, whereabouts unknown

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 1977

PROVENANCE

SELF – PORTRAIT, 1977 oil and hair on canvas 30.5 x 25.5 cm signed lower right: brett whiteley

LITERATURE

Self – Portrait in the Studio, 1976, oil, collage, hair on canvas, 200.5 x 259.0 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, winner of the 1976 Archibald Prize

BRETT WHITELEY (1939 – 1992)

ESTIMATE: $280,000 – 350,000

Autumn Exhibition, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 5 – 20 April 1979, cat. 157 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, as ‘Self Portrait’)

Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné , Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2020, cat. 117.77, vol. 3, p. 445 (illus.), vol. 7, p. 407

In little more than two years Whiteley had moved from a languorous vision of the studio to a sensational, confessional self-portrait set against a pale, terracotta ground. The absorbing detail of the first painting has disappeared, as the artist withdraws into his own head. Whiteley’s biographer, Ashleigh Wilson, describes the work as ‘a confronting depiction of the panic and desperation of drug addiction. Brett said he had wanted it to scare him straight.’1

In the former, Whiteley’s face appears in a hand-held mirror, as one small feature on a large, luxuriant ground of deep blue. The work is an anthology of Whiteley motifs, including the view of Sydney Harbour from a window, a reclining nude, an armchair, and a piece of blue-and-white china. The room is a veritable salon hang of the artist’s sculptures and drawings. The dominant impression is one of ‘luxe, calme et volupté’, in the manner of Henri Matisse, whose painting, The Red Studio, 1911, was Whiteley’s chief source of inspiration.

It might be argued that the hair is an affectation Whiteley used too frequently for comfort. It features in all three self-portraits from 1976 – 78, acting as a signature or trademark. No other Australian artist had such a wild, woolly set of curls. No other artist left traces of his own locks on so many canvases. One suspects a touch of trichophilia – a

It was, at the very least, a way of exposing his own dark obsessions to the widest possible audience and the full glare of publicity. As it turned out, he could be neither scared nor shamed into giving up heroin.

Throughout his career, Whiteley would return again and again to the self-portrait, as a form of self-examination and self-dramatisation. The present Self-portrait, 1977 sits squarely between his two Archibald Prize winners: Self-portrait in the studio , 1976, and Art, life and the other thing, 1978 (both in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales)

Brett16

Whiteley was never shy when it came to measuring himself against the masters. At the age of 16, while boarding at Scots College in Bathurst, he came across a book on Vincent Van Gogh and painted a self-portrait in emulation of the famously misunderstood Dutchman. At 16 we are all misunderstood and ready to identify with Van Gogh, but few teenagers could have created such an accomplished homage. The young Whiteley duplicates the three-quarter turn of the head, the painter’s sullen – or soulful – gaze which holds the viewer’s eye.

offering a hypodermic. It was a daring, overt reference to a drug habit that many of Whiteley’s admirers expected to cut short his career.

The second painting has a completely different tone. An unconventional triptych, it consists of a small, coloured photo of Whiteley’s face; a distorted full-length portrait of him drawing a copy of Dobell’s Joshua Smith, the controversial Archibald winner of 1943; and a panel that features a screaming baboon in handcuffs, staring helplessly at a hand

Brett Whiteley Self portrait in the studio, 1976 oil, collage, hair on canvas 200.5 x 259.0 cm Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Self-portrait represents a far less theatrical attempt at self-reflection. Whiteley looks out at us directly, with none of the emotional address of his early ‘Van Gogh’ style portrait, none of the mock decadence of 1976, or the drug-fuelled angst of 1978. His expression is completely blank, as if he wanted only to pause and take stock of himself. A handful of his own curly, reddish hair glued to the picture signifies a desire to explore a higher kind of realism, as if mere paint on canvas were insufficient to the task.

In retrospect, Whiteley’s life and work during the 1970s when he was widely perceived as Australia’s leading artist, may be seen as a time of great personal conflict. He was aware of the harm he was doing to himself with his drug addiction, but worried that giving it up might impair his creativity. He believed he had a gift he needed to share with everyone but couldn’t escape his habitual self-centredness. Having attained the height of success, he realised that from this pinnacle the only way is down.

2. Berg, C., The Unconscious Significance of Hair, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1951

One could be cynical about these additions, seeing them as pictorial short cuts that saved a lot of time and effort, but it’s entirely plausible Whiteley was motivated solely by inner necessity – or at least, his own, idiosyncratic version of the concept. Kandinsky had a complex, theoretical understanding of the term, involving the artist’s personality, the context of their times, and the harmonious nature of a composition.4 For Whiteley it was more like a compulsion to break the imaginary rules of painting, to be spontaneous and transgressive – and to be recognised for these revolutionary gestures. The urge was bound up with a selfconscious sense of his own genius.

5. Wilson, op. cit., p. 277

JOHN M cDONALD John McDonald is art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald and film critic for the Australian Financial Review www.johnmcdonald.net.au

Brett Whiteley - Portrait 2, 1975 photographer: Greg Weight Gift of Patrick Corrigan AM 2004. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program. © Gregory Weight/Copyright Agency, 2022 National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Canberra

4. Kandinsky, Wassily, On the Spiritual in Art, 1910

fetishising of hair with vague sexual overtones. A bald psychiatrist, Dr. Charles Berg, wrote an entire book in the subject, The Unconscious Significance of Hair (1951). 2

1. Wilson, A., Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2016, p. 272

In the midst of such inner turmoil, Self-portrait is a remarkably straight work – a still point in a stormy decade. It shows Whiteley looking at himself intently in the mirror and recording exactly what he sees. We’re not looking at a would-be genius or a sinful penitent. It’s not the dark, edgy image of a celebrity, but the portrait of an artist.

3. Brett Whiteley quoted in McGrath, S., Brett Whiteley, Bay Books, Sydney, 1979, p. 219

Wilson quotes a letter the artist addressed to his mother, in January 1979, in which he writes of ‘the realization of the deep responsibility I have to my talent, to share it with my fellow Australians… with the world… I am fighting the biggest struggle of my life at the moment. I am trying to become a great man.’5

In explaining his use of collage, which often saw him adding photographs or objects to a canvas, Whiteley said he did it ‘when I feel the need to describe in the focus of the painting something that requires infinite realism, a realism so absolute that no amount of painstaking brush strokes can accurately describe it.’3

O’Grady, D., ‘Smart Art in from Italy’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 27 October 1984, p. 44 Lynn, E., ‘Rich content but what does it mean?’, The Weekend Australian Magazine , 17 – 18 November 1984, p. 16 Smith, M., ‘Moved by man’s violent environment’, The Bulletin with Newsweek, Sydney, vol. 106, no. 5444, 27 November 1984, pp. 88, 89 (illus.)

James, R., Jeffrey Smart: The Question of Portraiture , Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria, 2009, pp. 17, 18 (illus.), 19 Blackhouse, M., ‘Animate Objects’, The Age , Melbourne, 28 February 2009, pp. 2 (illus.), 12, 13 Allen, C., ‘About Face’, The Australian, Sydney, 21 March 2009, pp. 18 – 19 Hart, D., and Edwards, R., Jeffrey Smart, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2021, pp. 113 (illus.), 128, 163

Jeffrey Smart: The Question of Portraiture , Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria, 4 March – 13 April 2009, cat. 51

O’Grady, D., ’The Smart perspective’, The Age , Melbourne, 19 October 1984, p. 11 (illus.)

The Jack Manton Exhibition 1989: recent works by twelve Australian artists , Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 12 July – 27 August 1989 (label attached verso)

Quartermaine, P., ‘Jeffrey Smart’s Brave New World’, Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 23, no. 1, Spring 1985, pp. 65, 66 (illus.)

PROVENANCE

Jeffrey Smart, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 21 April – 12 May 1986, cat. 1

LITERATURE

Jeffrey Smart Retrospective , Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 August 1999 – 6 August 2000, cat. 44, and touring to the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (label attached verso)

2JEFFREY SMART (1921 – 2013)

Head study 1984 for Portrait of Germaine Greer, 1984 , pencil on paper, 17.5 x 23.0 cm, private collection

Harris, S., ‘Smart Work – Expatriate having the last Laugh’,

RELATED WORKS

Drawing I for Portrait of Germaine Greer, 1984, pencil and watercolour on paper, 23.0 x 17.5 cm, private collection

About Face: Aspects of Australian Portraiture c.1770 – 1993 , National Portrait Gallery, Old Parliament House, Canberra, 31 March – 14 August 1994

Jeffrey Smart: Recent Paintings , Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 6 – 24 November 1984, cat. 10

Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney

Joan Clemenger AO and Peter Clemenger AO, Melbourne acquired from the above in November 1984

EXHIBITED

Jeffrey Smart, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 11 December 2021 – 15 May 2022

Johnston, S., ‘Living in the pasta’, Tatler, London, September 1984, vol. 279, no. 8, p. 142

Beeby, R., ‘Kicked off by the light’, The Age , Melbourne, 29 April 1986, p. 14

PORTRAIT OF GERMAINE GREER, 1984 oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas 96.0 x 120.0 cm signed lower left: JEFFREY SMART ESTIMATE: $1,000,000 – 1,500,000

The Advertiser, Adelaide, May 1986, pp. 16 – 17 (illus.) Shmith, M., ’Taking pleasure in being Smart’, The Age , Melbourne, 3 October 1987, p. 12 Hogan, J., The Jack Manton Exhibition 1989: recent works by twelve Australian artists , Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1989, pp. 25 (illus.), 26 McDonald, J., Jeffrey Smart. Paintings of the 70s and 80s , Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990, cat. 280, pl. 34, pp. 37, 122, 123 (illus.), 155, 161 Loxley, A., and Horton, W., About Face: Aspects of Australian Portraiture c.1770 – 1993 , National Portrait Gallery, Old Parliament House, Canberra, 1994 (illus. front cover) Grishin, S., ‘Lovely, subversive show for first Portrait Gallery’, The Canberra Times , Canberra, 9 April 1994, p. 47 Capon, E., Jeffrey Smart Retrospective , Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1999, cat. 68, pp. 166 (illus.), 211 Hawley, J., ‘Who’s that man?’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 7 August 1999, pp. 16–21 (illus.) McKew, M., ‘Lunch with Maxine McKew’, The Bulletin, Sydney, 7 September 1999, pp. 54 – 56 Capon, E., Jeffrey Smart Drawings and Studies 1942 – 2001, Australian Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2001, pp. 122 – 123 (illus.) Pearce, B., Jeffrey Smart, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2005, pl. 179, pp. 178, 179 (illus.), 232 (illus.)

Drawing II for Portrait of Germaine Greer, 1984, pencil and watercolour on paper, 17.5 x 23.0 cm, private collection

Study for Portrait of Germaine Greer (with stand–in), 1984 , synthetic polymer paint and oil on Fabriano paper, 37.5 x 46.5 cm, in the collection of R. Corporation, Melbourne

This extended even to the portraits, a small but important body of work that has begun to attract a surprising amount of attention. Smart’s archivist, Stephen Rogers, lists three distinct varieties. 2

It is a testimony to the public perception of Germaine Greer that viewers are surprised Jeffrey Smart has made her seem so prim, so demure. Surely, the outspoken author of The Female Eunuch (1970) should be shown making some provocative gesture, staring challengingly at the viewer. Instead, Smart has portrayed the 45-year-old Greer sitting stiffly on a chair, as if posing for a snapshot. She wears a long blue skirt and an equally conservative top. She clutches her leather handbag with both hands. She seems mildly amused to find herself in this predicament.

Drawing I for Portrait of Germaine Greer, 1984 pencil and watercolour on paper 23.0 x 17.5 cm Private collection

Firstly, the self-portraits, which came along every five to ten years, as Smart monitored his aging visage, perhaps taking his cue from fearless self-portraitists such as Rembrandt, or even Fred Williams, who once said ‘if you can’t paint a portrait then your art is in trouble.’ 3 It’s the kind of thing that serious artists do.

The most provocative feature of the painting is the large letter ‘R.’ spray-painted on the wall behind the sitter. Because it takes up more space in the picture than Greer herself, one might imagine there is some hidden meaning. If so, it’s likely to remain concealed for all eternity, as Smart repeatedly told interviewers that the R. was merely ‘a lovely bit of graffiti’ he saw on a wall and sketched for future reference. He also recounted how the filmmaker, Bruce Beresford, believed the R. stood for ‘ratbag’, although the charge was firmly denied.1

Jeffrey Smart

We are grateful to Stephen Rogers, Archivist for the Estate of Jeffrey Smart, an d Ermes De Zan for their invaluable assistance with this catalogue entry.

It was typical of Smart to create a distraction or a puzzle within a painting tha t might never be resolved. His usual tactic, when asked to explain the significance of a motif was to say it was all a matter of scale, or something the picture ‘required.’ Although he was a figurative painter, Smart continually drew attention to the formal or abstract elements within a composition. It was, one suspects, a way of combatting the idea that abstract art was somehow more advanced or progressive. Smart’s paintings, although filled with distinct, recognisable forms, could be as mysterious as any self-conscious abstraction.

Next came the ‘named’ portraits, beginning with David Malouf in 1980, followed by Germaine Greer (1984), then Marga ret Olley (1994), Clive

Jeffrey Smart

Head study 1984 for Portrait of Germaine Greer, 1984 pencil on paper 17.5 x 23.0 cm Private collection

James (1991 – 92), Ermes de Zan (2006) and Bruce Beresford (2009). Both Malouf and Greer were neighbours in Tuscany when Smart painted their portraits. The Olley and James portraits caused him a good deal of time and effort, requiring numerous sketches and oil studies. None of these paintings are simple ‘head and shoulder’ studies. In each instance Smart tried to include the subject within a carefully thoughtout Finally,composition.therewere the ‘unnamed’ portraits, in which actual people were included anonymously in more typical paintings. Smart’s long-term partner, Ermes De Zan, appears again and again, and the artist himself enjoys an occasional sneaky cameo, notably in Morning, Yarragon Siding, 1983 – 84 (formerly in the Holmes à Court collection, Perth), hiding behind a newspaper. Although he would paint – and identify – famous people, such as Giorgio Morandi or Alma Mahler, Smart also included many unidentified images of celebrities copied from newspapers or magazines. According to Stephen Rogers, the list includes Charles De Gaulle, Queen Elizabeth II, Pablo Picasso and even Marilyn Monroe.

Private collection

Although Smart’s reminiscence sounds suspiciously like an example of l‘esprit de l’escalier, anyone who knew him would agree this is exactly the kind of thing he would say.

‘Rosemary Roche, from Rome, was an agreeable and compliant model…’ he writes, ‘Germaine was not a particularly co-operative model when she initially posed. Perhaps she thought modelling was a waste of her time. She forcibly complained when she saw the finished painting, that she never used a handbag and never sat with her knees together.’6

Greer would not be the only sitter Smart quietly cut down to size. Clive James came in for even more drastic treatment in a portrait in which he is roughly the size of a mouse – a monumental putdown for such a massive ego. One major difference was that James pursued Smart to paint his portrait, whereas Greer was indifferent to the idea. Had the

Smart was not a natural portraitist and admitted he often had difficulty getting a likeness. He believed it was a gift certain artists possessed. Even some ‘quite bad artists’4 had the knack of capturing a striking likeness, but for him it was always a struggle. He tells us Germaine Greer said the portrait ‘was not in the least like her,’ 5 but that’s debatable. The uptight body language may be the most controversial aspect because Greer is the kind of personality who never takes a backward step, showing little concern as to who she might offend. The woman in this picture who sits with arms and legs pressed together, holding her handbag as if it were a life preserver, is not that self-confident, abrasive character.

Self Portrait at Papini’s , 1984 – 85 oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas 85.0 x 115.0 cm

To be precise, these are Picasso’s words, as recalled by Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933): ‘everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.’ 8

In the book, Jeffrey Smart: Drawings and Studies 1942 – 2001 (2001), Smart provides an engaging commentary on three drawings associated with the portrait. After he had finished a pencil study of Greer’s face, she was unwilling to spend any further time posing, so Smart used a friend as a body double.

When Greer complained the work was not like her, Smart says that he told her: ‘it will be soon’, self-consciously echoing Picasso’s famous comment about his Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1905 – 06 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).7

Jeffrey Smart

It’s conceivable that Smart was implying Greer’s self-confidence might be only skin-deep, but if there’s a gentle whiff of satire, it was not the primary motivation behind the po rtrait. Ermes De Zan recalls that Smart began with the idea for a composition, then said that he needed a figure. Greer was at hand and was duly asked to pose. In time, Smart would

becom e more conscious of the exaggerated status enjoyed by portraits, but it’s a peculiar fact that he viewed his sitters primarily as objects rather than personalities.10

followed his first instincts Clive might have fared even worse, being imm ortalised as a dirty old man in an overcoat waiting at a bus stop. In comparison, to echo the economist, E.F. Schumacher, small is beautiful.

artist22

Of all Smart’s ‘named’ portraits, David Malouf believes the Germaine Greer picture comes closest to capturing a sense of the sitter’s personality.12 It may require the insight of one intimately acquainted with both parties to make this distinction (at least one contemporary reviewer felt that Greer’s eyes betrayed ‘an obvious vulnerability’13), but there can be no doubt about Greer’s objecthood within the composition. Her blue dress forms part of sequence of primary colours between two doors painted in dazzling tones of red and yellow. These colours are irresistibly suggestive of Mondrian.

Greer’s white blouse quite literally blends in with the creamy-white wall, as Smart has artfully declined to provide a contour for her left shoulder (a touch of finesse he loved to point out). The thin-framed wooden chair rhymes with the graffitied R., while the strip of grey across the bottom of the picture heightens the impact of the colours in the same way that a mauve-grey sky, or a strip of asphalt, might add intensity to the reds and yellows of an urban landscape.

Germaine Greer with her pet cat , London photographer:1980s Homer Sykes

Nevertheless, Smart would deny any critical intentions with his portraits of either James or Greer. On the contrary, he insisted that Greer’s small essay from 1983 was his favourite piece of writing devoted to his work. In his autobiography, Not Quite Straight (1996), he describes her as ‘beautiful, intelligent, and wonderfully vivacious.’ 9

Why did Smart paint Greer holding a handbag she swears she never possessed? Was he playfully portraying her as a middle-aged bourgeoise? Adding a stereotypical ‘feminine’ touch to a feminist icon?

This is so different from everything we stereotypically look for in a portrait that it sounds brutal, almost heretical. We think of a successful portrait as a likeness that reveals something fundamental about the sitter, providing a window onto their soul. But Smart was less concerned with the inner life of his subjects than the way they might strike an equilibrium with other elements in the painting. His subjects were objects. ‘You don’t just put a face on canvas,’ he told journalist, Desmond O’Grady in 1984, ‘you make a design.’11

In the early 1980s, Smart and Greer were very close. They dined at each other’s Tuscan homes and mixed in the same circles. They even travelled to Australia together, when Greer was given two first-class air tickets, and asked Smart if he’d like to accompany her. It may have been on that trip, or the one after, that Smart noticed the wall that appears in the Greer portrait. Believe it or not, it belongs to the Members’ Pavilion at the Melbourne Cricket Ground! This helps decode the word half glimpsed at the top left on the picture and leaves us dumbstruck that Germaine Greer and ‘members’ should appear in the same painting.

13. Margaret Smith, ‘Moved by man’s violent environment’, The Bulletin, 27 November 1984 14. De Zan, op. cit. 15. Stephen Rogers, in conversation with the author. 16. JohnJOHNhttp://www.fact.on.ca/news/news0004/np000427.htmMcDONALDMcDonaldisartcriticforthe Sydney Morning Herald and film critic for the Australian Financial Review. He is also the author of Jeffrey Smart: the paintings of the ’70s and ’80s, Craftsman House, www.johnmcdonald.net.au(1990)

month, this same student had turned up at Greer’s home on Essex, was initially invited in, but became ‘troublesome’ and had to be removed by the police. The next day she returned and launched a full-scale assault on Greer that resulted in the writer being held captive for hours in her own home. The portrait, to which the stalker had attributed all kinds of mystical significance, had acted as a catalyst for this incident. It’s a bizarre reminder of the power of images, even such sedate, carefully composed ones as those pr oduced by Jeffrey Smart.16

Uccello, and their peers, Smart built his paintings upon a rigorous, underlying geometry. It’s this precise structure that gives his pictures a sense of underlying ‘rightness’ that may be felt by viewers who have no inclination for analysing the planes and angles. For such viewers the major reference to the Renaissance to be found in this portrait is that Smart has invested the fearsome Germaine Greer with the smile of the Mona Lisa

Withinvisited.a

2. Stephen Rogers, email correspondence with the author, 4 July 2022 Lyn Williams, in conversation with the author.

4. Interview with the author, in preparation for the documentary, Smart’s Labyrinth (1994). Not published.

10 Ermes

11.

1. McKew, M., ‘Lunch with Maxine McKew: Jeffrey Smart’, The Bulletin, 7 September 1999

12.

7. Ibid. 8.

Smart was so pleased with the painting that, according to De Zan, it inspired Self-Portrait at Papini’s , 1984 – 85 (private collection), in which the artist stands against a wall, between blue and green doors.14 Both paintings would be acquired by the same prescient collector, from successive exhibitions. When Australia’s new National Portrait Gallery was opened in the old Parliament House, Canberra, on 31 March 1994, the Portrait of Germaine Greer, 1984 which had been borrowed for the occasion, would feature on the cover of the catalogue.

One of the strangest stories attached to the portrait comes from January 2000, when Smart received a long, handwritten letter from a 19-yearold student in Bath, who had undertaken an elaborate analysis of the painting from a postcard. Not feeling inclined to respond to this lengthy, misguided hypothesis, he passed the letter on to Stephen Rogers, who replied on his behalf.15 Another letter followed, wondering whether the portrait might have been painted in Ethiopia, where Greer had recently

A more reassuring association might be with the Italian Renaissance masters that Smart admired. The ‘stillness’ he found in Piero della Francesca was the guiding principle for his own work. Like Piero,

5. Ibid. Smart, J. et al., Jeffrey Smart: Drawings and Studies 1942 – 2001, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 2001, p. 122 Stein, G., The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933, chapter 2. Smart, J., Not Quite Straight. A Memoir, Random House, 1996, p. 420 De Zan, in conversation with the author O’Grady, D., ‘Smart art – in from Italy’, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 October 1984, p. 44 De Zan op. cit.

Germaine Greer’s stone house in Montanare di Cortona, between the medieval town of Cortona in Tuscany and the border of Umbria, c.1979 –University94of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer collection, Pianelli, Italy, 2014.0054.00428

EXHIBITED

FRED WILLIAMS (1927 – 1982)

Fred Williams (1927 – 1982), Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1 November – 2 December 1995, cat. 4 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

Marlborough Fine Art, London (label attached verso) Joan Clemenger AO and Peter Clemenger AO, Melbourne acquired from the above in October 1996

LYSTERFIELD LANDSCAPE, 1968 – 69 oil on canvas 182.5 x 152.5 cm signed lower right: Fred Williams.

ESTIMATE: $1,600,000 – 2,000,000

McCaughey, P., Fred Williams , Murdoch Books, Sydney, 1996, pl. 66, pp. 152, 155 (illus.), 184 (as ‘Lysterfield Landscape, 1967 68’)

PROVENANCE

Estate of the artist

LITERATURE

A familiar Williams quote states, ‘I see things in terms of paint , all else is irrelevant’; this is certainly true but requires a fuller explanation. Williams’ sharpness of observation and alertness to subtle inflections defined his pictorial syntax. Despite descriptions of him making much out of the drabness of the bush, Williams didn’t see ordinariness. He was happiest on location, and equally so in the studio, where a reflective and considered setting allowed his intellectual disposition to take over: ‘…the knowledge that a painting must be conscious of itself, aware of its own nature and its own vocabulary, conscious of its own coding process.’1

Fred Williams

Williams’ You Yangs paintings from 1962 were to secure his reputation as Australia’s preeminent landscape artist, the work which ended the decade gave us a painter of perpetual inventiveness – one never prepared to settle into a stylistic cul-de-sac as a consequence of strong critical acclaim. A masterpiece from the zenith of Williams’ career, Lysterfield Landscape , 1968 – 69 eloquently attests to this legacy as one of the most visionary painters of his time – a unique artist unable to be placed within any movement or singular ‘school’ of

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Withthinking.thefirming of his reputation the sixties became a particular marker for Williams. Later it came to be regarded as his essential decade – a familiar art historical characteristic – the wish to settle on a defining period and to see other work as foregrounding or following it, a period which becomes an enduring reference point. The Heidelberg School painters between 1885 – 95 are an obvious example, Sidney Nolan too in the 1940s.

If26Fred

We are familiar with the artist’s rapid gouaches; quickly painted and sharply observed then rested in the mind’s eye as a visual aide-mémoire In the Clemenger Lysterfield we see the gouaches playing the role of second violin in a fully orchestrated masterpiece: it is a rare painting as the few complementary works of such monumental scale from this period are in public collections.

Lysterfield triptych, 1967 - 68

While his years in London between 1952 – 56 (including study at the Chelsea School of Art) were to shape his future, his time at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, then tucked at the back of the

Williams kept a mainly unbroken diary, and references to specific works appear infrequently. However this is not the case with Lysterfield. He began the painting in his Upwey studio, and on 12 November 1968 notes: ‘… an early start and I go well. An underpainting of a 6 x 5…’ The entry includes a small sketch. By the time of the second reference to Lysterfield he and the family had moved to Hawthorn, and again on 7 May 1969 Williams writes, ‘This underpainting is beautifully hard and I work well on it… it goes well with the one in the Commonwealth collection. A good step forward I hope .’ The Commonwealth painting he refers to is the celebrated Lysterfield triptych, 1967 – 68 in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. 2

oil on canvas on three panels 152.5 x 427.5 cm (overall)

The ideas and sharp art historical awareness which underpinned his working approach arose from looking at work by artists with distinctive technical ranges, and who often worked in a variety of media. Williams too was comfortable painting while making superb prints, each referencing and supporting the other.

Williams’ swiftly executed, wet-loaded brush watercolours from his London years shifted from a muted darkness of the English landscape to translucent C é zannesque half-tones and overlapping soft washes; by 1962 they anticipate a further lightness and subtlety of surfaces which would reach their sophisticated height by the end of the decade. His oil paintings from the late fifties to the end of the sixties are rich in glazes, techniques studied in the collections at the NGV and London’s museums and later in Venice where glaze upon glaze left its mark.

27 Gallery’s grand Swanston Street entrance, was also influential. Visual encounters were applied to full effect. Corot’s The bent tree (L’Arbre penché), c.1855 – 60 (National Gallery of Victoria) for example, helped settle the compositional arrangement of works such as Fallen Tree, 1962 and Landscape with bent tree , c.1959 (both in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales).

the same year he travelled to Europe a year later. He bought rolls of canvas in London and had them shipped to Australia and painting on board all but ended.

Now paint and glazes are pushed into the weave of the canvas as layers of wet on wet and drying paint become a field for immediate impasto calligraphic gestures. In the familiar ochres and browns from the late 50s to the You Yangs paintings, many have found the so-called monotony of the Australian landscape rejuvenated through Williams’ observation, jolting our visual complacency. Williams certainly didn’t see drabness. The depth of his subdued palette and the use of black and coloured accents were always an evolving part of his work. The landscape which inspired him was not repetitive, let alone uninteresting. Williams’ vision might have shaken many out of their preconceptions of the bush landscape.

The all-over gestural effects in the mid-60s hold a similar expressive immediacy to that of the important American abstract expressionist, Sam Francis, who he met in London. Williams maintained his interest in American abstraction and later, c olourfield formalism. 3

In 1963 he and his wife, Lyn, moved to Upwey, a short distance to locations titles with which we are familiar, including Lysterfield, Sherbrooke, Kallista. Awarded the Helena Rubenstein Scholarship in

Fred Williams Australian Landscape III, 1969 oil on 148.8canvasx198.0 cm

Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

only if you know the place they hold in his work… can they interpreted as landscapes… his latest attempt to translate the Australian scrub int o works of art.’5

The vertical format and scale of Lysterfield Landscape , the sublimely worked surface, considered calligraphic marks and the distinctive high horizon line create both the sensation of the landscape as its source and a work acutely aware of painting’s history across cultures as well as contemporary trends.

As a student Williams saw and admired Asian art, then mainly Chinese, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria and later at the British Museum. At the time Williams’ Lysterfield works were painted the writer, Craig McGregor, cited this as a central influence, ‘…Williams thinks the Chinese are the best landscape painters… as he says… “everything is dropping out of the frame, tumbling out Chinese fashion.’’’4

5. Gleeson, J., ‘Scrub and the field of art’, The Sun-Herald, 9 November 1969, p. 115

6. Plant, op. cit.

While it can be seen as handwriting – or a kind of personal mark making – calligraphy is a more accurate and authoritative description. In Chinese and Japanese culture calligraphy is an art form of the highest aesthetic consequence and meaning: and we should see Williams in the same light. In the photograph by David Moore, Fred Williams , 1969 (National Portrait Gallery), we see the artist working, not at the easel in the background, but on the floor where the method not only evokes a sense of Pollock or Sam Francis, but with its surface flat, it also emulates Chinese and Japanese artists in its physical execution.

DOUG HALL AM

As Williams’ painted marks became more pronounced and the surfaces open and sparse a particular ‘handwriting’ became an emblematic characteristic: no more so than in Lysterfield Landscape . It is a term often applied to describe his works from the mid-60s. Yet it seems colloquially self-effacing. Calligraphy is sometimes used as a catch-all but seldom explored further.

Matisse28

As Gleeson suggests, if the horizon line were not such a defining element in Lysterfield Landscape and if we were unaware of Williams’ preoccupation with landscape, calligraphic abstraction is the only possible conclusion viewers might draw. Perhaps this explains in part the international interest in his work. A new generation of Australian abstractionists also admired Williams’ work; Robert Jacks accompanied him on painting excursions to the You Yangs, and Margaret Plant regarded work from this period ‘…to be as contemporary as The Field though more modestly scaled’.6

remained a discreet and enduring exemplar in the use of colour and in Lysterfield we see it personalised, no more so than the simple painted accent, lower centre, where viridian green and orange are juxtaposed. When half tones appear elsewhere other coloured accents invoke the palette and colour combinations of Matisse, including the use of black as a compositional device to settle and hold the minimalist pictorial arrangement. While the painting might appear to us as spontaneous and the result of an inspired moment of realisation, it took many months to reach its complete status.

Lysterfield Landscape is a masterwork where Williams’ is at his most withheld, subtle and sophisticated. Paintings such as Australian Landscape III , 1969 (Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art) and Lysterfield triptych 1967 – 68 (National Gallery of Australia) employ a sequential format with white vertical screen-like separations across a horizontal canvas, where a calligraphic ensemble of painted gestures flit across the surface.

3. Sam Francis 1923 – 1994, American Abstract expressionist with a long interest in Japan, its art and culture. The Idemitsu Museum of Arts, Tokyo, holds 160 works – the largest single collection of his work.

James Gleeson was also clear in his interpretation of Williams’ masterly complexity, ‘…the sparseness and refinement of the style… restraint and sophisticated simplicity… suggest a strong influence from Japan…

2. Lyn Williams, conversation with the author, July 2022.

1. Plant, M., ‘Tribute to Fred Williams’, Art Journal, no. 23, National Gallery of Victoria, May 1982

4. McGregor, C., In the Making, Thomas Nelson Australia, Melbourne, 1969, p. 107, cited in Hart, D., Fred Williams: Infinite Horizons, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2011, p. 101

Fred Williams , 1969 photographer: David Moore National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Lisa, Michael, Matthew and Joshua Moore

PROVENANCE

John Brack , Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 7 28 September 1991, cat. 5

EXHIBITED

Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso)

oil on canvas 137.0 x 106.5 cm

Joan Clemenger AO and Peter Clemenger AO, Melbourne acquired from the above in September 1991

signed and dated lower right: John Brack / 1990 inscribed with title on artist’s label verso: POSIES

ESTIMATE: $600,000 – 800,000

4JOHN BRACK (1920 –POSIES,1999)1990

Produced in Brack’s studio, the late paintings were the result of intense preparation and a meticulous technique. He would set up elaborate tableaux, using fishing line and tape to suspend props when necessary, and create a model from which a detailed preparatory drawing was then made. He also used fine brushes and glazes to minimise the appearance of brushstrokes and heighten the sense of pictorial realism in these works, the aim being to engage viewers so that they could focus on the meaning of his imagery rather than being distracted by expressive painterly bravura. 3 A dark, irregular border surrounding these scenes

John Brack’s motivation for painting remained consistent throughout his career. In 1956, following the National Gallery of Victoria’s purchase of Collins St, 5p.m., 1955, he wrote to Eric Westbrook, the gallery’s director, explaining, ‘One either has a subject, or one has not… If I choose to paint the life I see around me, it is because I find people more interesting than things.’1 Finding subject matter in his immediate surroundings, Brack satisfied this intense interest in people, and paintings such as The New House , 1953 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) and The Bar, 1954 (National Gallery of Victoria) still stand as acute observations of modern Australian life. While the clothing, hairstyles, interiors and other accoutrements of mid-century suburban life imbue these paintings with a strong sense of nostalgia, it is what they reveal about human behaviour and its inevitability, irrespective of the era, that is most compelling. It is this element which also provides the thematic link between Brack’s figurative paintings of the 1950s and 60s and his later works. From the early 1970s on, the human figure disappeared from his paintings almost entirely, replaced by inanimate objects – museum postcards, umbrellas, pencils, playing cards and wooden artists’ manikins, among others – which were combined with various domestic props to construct subtle visual metaphors. As Sasha Grishin wrote, ‘Brack’s new approach [permitted] him to express the whole complexity of social interconnections’ 2 and his perspective on the perennial forces of human nature was transformed from one that was local to a broader more universal view.

John Brack

John Brack has long been recognised as a towering figure within twentieth century Australian art, one of the few artists of his generation who addressed the reality of life as it was lived in the cities and the suburbs. As Patrick McCaughey observed however, ‘even if he may look direct, accessible and easy to read… the imagery retains an ambiguous and enigmatic quality. Paintings infer hidden meanings; references just beyond the grasp or consciousness of the viewer.’6 A still life then, is more than just a still life. In Brack’s hands, they ‘offer an alternative route. They give back to painting the richness and ambiguity of metaphor. The paintings and their images stand for more than their literal presence.’7

Painted in 1990, Posies came towards the end of Brack’s career. He turned seventy that year and would stop painting altogether four years later. Many of the works made at this time show the artist reflecting on his life as well as looking forward. ‘John was getting older, and so he was starting to think of the future – not his future but the future. And when the 1980s came (and it did synchronise with grandchildren coming) there was a realising that it was the same again – we’d very much seen this, been there. That was the beginning of his making an image for perpetuation … There is an optimism at the end of John’s life that wasn’t there earlier.’ 5 The floral subject and joyous colours of this picture create an air of celebration which is also present in related

Private collection, Melbourne

also32 became a familiar element of the late works. Highlighting the illusionistic nature of painting, as well as Brack’s remarkable skill, it also points to the possibility of other realities. As Helen Brack observed, ‘The margins here are very important, because they are about the dark past, other ages. He was extremely interested in how you can use structure to say what you want to say.’4

1. Brack to Eric Westbrook, 15 April 1956, National Gallery of Victoria Artist File Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack , Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, p. 140 Ibid., p. 132 Brack, H., quoted in Gott, T., A Question of Balance: John Brack 1974 – 1994, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, 2000, p. 11 Ibid., p. 34 McCaughey, P., ‘The Complexity of John Brack’ in Lindsay, R., John Brack , National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 7 Ibid., p. 9

contemporary paintings such as Watching the Flowers , 1991 and Six Bouquets , 1991 (both private collection). Unlike the floral still-lives Brack had painted during the late 1950s, which depicted cut flowers in vases – carnations, gerberas and solandra – just as you might find them in a mid-century suburban home, the domestic setting here is artificial, carefully constructed like a stage set which deliberately emphasises some details and omits others. Although cool and restrained, the flecked carpet and subdued striped wallpaper of this environment clearly connects to notions of home. More importantly, it also connects to family, a theme which was particularly prominent in Brack’s work during these years. The articulated wooden hands often stand in for people in these late paintings and in this image, it is possible to see them as representing Brack and his wife, Helen – the central pair holding the larger posies – surrounded by their four daughters. The variations between the posies subtly distinguish between the generations – larger bouquets and more varied flowers symbolising the age and experience of the parents, for example – as well as between each individual. In the same way, the similarities between each posy simultaneously reflect the immutable biological connection that unites them. A still life. A family portrait. A floral tribute.

KIRSTY GRANT

Watching the flowers , 1990 – 91 oil on canvas 137.5 x 107.0 cm

John Brack painting ‘Six Bouquets’, 1991 photographer: David Johns © David Johns

35 Important Australian Art from the Collection of Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Lots 5 – 7

Ian Fairweather, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 19 November 1 December 1958, cat. 2

5IAN FAIRWEATHER (1891 –GAMELAN, 19581974)

synthetic polymer paint and gouache on four sheets of cardboard on hardboard 126.5 x 189.5 cm signed with artist’s monogram lower right: IF inscribed with title lower right: Gamelan

Festival Exhibition, Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide, March 1962, cat. 25

LITERATURE

EXHIBITED

John and Jan Altman, Melbourne

ESTIMATE: $700,000 – 900,000

Australian Irresistibles 1930 – 1970, Bonython Gallery, Sydney, 11 August 2 September 1970, cat. 47

Geoff K Gray Auctions, Sydney, 13 February 1974, lot 33 Jack and Beryl Kohane, Melbourne Niagara Galleries, Melbourne

PROVENANCE

Fairweather’s first encounter with Bali was in the early 1930s. Travelling to Australia from China, where he had lived for the past few years, his boat stopped at Buleleng on the northern coast of the island and, after going ashore, he changed his plans and stayed there for almost nine months. It was a happy and productive time during which he painted almost forty known works. Some were Chinese landscapes – painted from notes and recollections of his recent experiences – but the majority depicted Balinese figure subjects, studies of solitary figures or scenes describing local people going about their daily lives. 3 In 1933 he painted two mural-sized works which are ambitious both in terms of scale – being among the largest works he ever made – and the complex, multi-figure scenes they depict. Bathing Scene, Bali, c.1933 – 34 was acquired by the Tate Gallery, London in 1935 (Presented by the Contemporary Art Society) and the following year, Leicester Museums

Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, pp. 149, 204 Bail, M., Fairweather, Art & Australia Books in association with the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1994, ill. 15, pp. 57 (illus.), 58, 61 Bail, M., Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Sydney, 2009, cat. 155, pl. 129, pp. 146 47, 150, 151 (illus.), 158, 255

Ian Fairweather has been described as ‘the least parochial of Australian painters, an artist of exceptional force and originality’1 and he is undoubtedly one of the most singular artists to have worked in Australia during the twentieth century. Although he is claimed as an Australian and spent many years living here, he had a restless spirit and the story of his life reads like the pages of an adventure book. Born in Scotland, Fairweather undertook his formal art education at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, studying under the formidable Henry Tonks and in 1922, being awarded second prize for figure drawing. As a prisoner of war in Germany during the First World War he had access to books about Japanese and Chinese art, and later, studied these languages at night. In 1929 he sailed to Shanghai where he lived for several years, the country’s unique art, culture and philosophy exerting a lasting influence on his art. Peripatetic by nature, or perhaps reluctant to establish roots and commit to ongoing relationships, Fairweather travelled extensively – from London, to Canada, China, Bali, Australia, the Philippines, India and beyond – ‘always the outsider, the nostalgic nomad with a dreamlike memory of distant places and experience.’ 2

Bonython Galleries, Sydney, c.1967 Australian Galleries, Melbourne

The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Collection, acquired from the above in 1996

FAIRWEATHER (1891

IAN –GAMELAN, 19581974)

two decades witnessed the production of many of Fairweather’s finest paintings and the 1960s saw his art acknowledged in significant ways, with works being included in the landmark exhibition Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (1961); the European tour of Australian Painting Today (1964 – 65); and in 1965, a major travelling retrospective of his work was mounted by the Queensland Art Gallery.

Gamelan was painted in 1958, five years after Fairweather had settled on Bribie Island, off the coast of Queensland, and where, for the rest of his life, he famously lived in a pair of huts built with materials salvaged from the surrounding bush. Conditions were primitive – no running water, sewerage or electricity – and Fairweather’s handmade bed and chairs were reportedly upholstered with fern fronds.7 Despite the rudimentary nature of his surrounds however – or perhaps because of it – the next

and Art Gallery purchased Procession in Bali, 1933, a panoramic scene thought to depict an episode from a traditional marriage ceremony. In a letter to his friend, Jim Ede, Fairweather, who was typically selfcritical, wrote, ‘Don’t think too badly of the paintings – they are terribly crude on the surface and were done under trying conditions’, adding, ‘oh hell – Bali was somewhere near to heaven.’4 It was a place that obviously had a profound impact on Fairweather and remembering his experience of Bali decades later, he declared, ‘I was hypnotised and never recovered.’5 A second, much shorter and less pleasant visit to Bali, followed the infamous journey of 1952 when he left Darwin Harbour on a hand-built raft with the aim of sailing to Timor. By way of explanation, he subsequently told an interviewer that Timor ‘(was) the next best thing to Bali where I had done the best painting of my life’.6

Ian Fairweather (from ‘Track’ series), 1966 photographer: Robert Walker Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane © Robert Walker/Copyright Agency, 2022

While the title of the painting refers to the traditional Indonesian percussion orchestra which Fairweather presumably witnessed in Bali, Gamelan is not a representational depiction. Murray Bail sees it as a ‘remembrance of… happy times on Bali, which in turn traces more memories, or moods of memories’, 8 while composer Martin Armiger identifies a connection between the sound of the gamelan and the construction of the picture. ‘As rhythm builds on rhythm… simple melodies take on subtle variations, the various strands interweave delicately. The relationships between these melodic strands shift… gradually, hypnotically’. 9 He continues ‘…patterns emerge from gamelan, as form emerges from… this painting’10 , subtly evoking the experience of its subject through gestural line, shape and layering which emphasise the process of art-making, more than the end result.

Ian Fairweather (from ‘Hut’ series), 1966 photographer: Robert Walker Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane © Robert Walker/Copyright Agency, 2022

gouache on four sheets of cardboard on hardboard 145.5 x 198.0 cm

Gethsemane , 1958

Ian Fairweather

Alongside Last Supper, 1958 (Art Gallery of New South Wales); Gethsemane, 1958; and Kite Flying, 1958 (both Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art), Gamelan is one of four important large-scale paintings which Fairweather completed in 1958. Variously composed of three or four cardboard sheets joined together, the increased scale of these works signalled a newfound confidence and authority in Fairweather’s approach, the expanded pictorial scope opening up his compositions so that they retain their distinctive linear complexity, but simultaneously assume a new sense of strength and monumentality. The significance of these works was recognised early on by distinguished collectors renowned for their sophisticated and discerning eyes –author Patrick White purchased Gethsemane from its second exhibition in 1961, and curator and art historian, Daniel Thomas AM, was the first owner of Last Supper, buying it in 1962. Sending the works to Treania Smith at Macquarie Galleries, Sydney in 1958, with detailed instructions for their preparation and mounting, Fairweather wrote, ‘I guess they are really murals – in feeling as well as size – and not at home in living rooms’. He added, ‘They have given me hell – They are an attempt to climb up to something out of something else.’11 The ‘something’ he was seeking was abstraction, and these works are especially significant in

Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

that they mark the beginning of a move towards pure abstract imagery which h e likened to ‘the Buddhist idea of suspended judgement – The mind is cleared of thought but not of awareness – Always the purpose of art is to find its way through the forest of things to a larger unity containing all thing s’.12 M., Fairweather Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, p. 220 Canberra, 27,

vol.

no. 1, 1982, p. 54 3. Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Millers Point, 2009, p. 23 4. Ian Fairweather to Jim Ede, late 1933, quoted in quoted in Roberts, C. & Thompson, J. (eds.), Ian Fairweather: A Life in Letters, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2019, p. 15 5. Ian Fairweather to Treania Bennett, 12 April 1956 in Roberts & Thompson, ibid., p. 387 6. Bail, 2000, op. cit., p. 103 7. Ibid., p. 119 8. Ibid., p. 146 9. Armiger, M., ‘Fairweather and Music’ in Bail, M., et. al., Fairweather, Art & Australia Books in association with Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1994, p. 58 10. Ibid. 11 Ian Fairweather to Treania Smith, early 1958, Roberts & Thompson, op. cit., p. 218 12. Ian Fairweather to Annette Waters, 23 – 25 October 1958 in Roberts & Thompson, op. cit., p. 226 KIRSTY GRANT

Ian

1. Bail,

2. Bail, M., ‘The Nostalgic Nomad’, Hemisphere,

PROVENANCE

John Brack: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 11 December 1987 – 31 January 1988, cat. 67

John Brack , Gallery A, Melbourne, 29 March – April 1965, cat. 6

Medical supply shop window, c.1965 photographer: Laurence Course

The collection of the artist Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne

RELATED WORK Study for ‘Elastic Stockings’, 1964, watercolour, pen and ink on paper, 54.5 x 40.5 cm, private collection

John Brack and Fred Williams , Albert Hall, Canberra, 1 – 13 August 1967, cat. 7

John Brack , Gallery A, Sydney, 14 May 1965, cat. 4

John Brack, Selected Paintings 1950s – 1990s , Geelong Art Gallery, Geelong, 15 June 1996, cat. 8

LITERATURE

Brook, D., ‘Goths and venetians’, The Canberra Times , Canberra, 3 August 1967, p. 25 Millar, R., John Brack , Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1971, pl. 6, pp. 25, 35 (illus.), 52, 108 Grishin, S., John Brack Retrospective: Paintings and Drawings, 1945 – 1977, Australian National University, Canberra, 1977, pl. 26 Lindsay, R., John Brack: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, pl. 67, pp. 55 (illus.), 122, 123, 130, 131, 140 Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack , Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. 1, pl. 26, pp. 97 (illus.), 99, vol. 2, cat. o145, pp. 20, 129 (illus.) Grant, K., John Brack , National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009, p. 138 (illus.)

John Brack Retrospective , National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 24 April – 9 August 2009; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 October 2009 – 31 January 2010 (label attached verso)

JOHN BRACK (1920 – 1999)

John Brack: Selected Paintings 1947 1977, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, 15 March – 1 April 1977, cat. 21

John Brack: Retrospective: paintings and drawings , Australian National University, Canberra, 21 September – 16 November 1977, cat. 26

ELASTIC STOCKINGS, 1965 oil on canvas 130.0 x 96.0 cm signed and dated lower right: John Brack 65

EXHIBITED

The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Collection, acquired from the above in 1996

ESTIMATE: $300,000 – 400,000

The Rosette , 1965 oil on canvas 81.5 x 53.5 cm private collection © Helen Brack

John Brack was appointed head of the National Gallery School in Melbourne in 1962 and over the following six years, he transformed it into a serious training ground for professional artists. The demands of the job meant reduced painting time, but he maintained a studio behind his office, undertaking a number of private commissions, as well as being represented in important exhibitions including Australian Painting at London’s Tate Gallery (1963) and Australian Painters 1964 – 66: The Harold Mertz Collection at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC (1967). These years also saw the creation of the shop-window paintings, a series in which his stated aim to produce pictures which ‘operate on numerous levels of meaning [and]… have some reference to the complexity of life’1 was successfully achieved.

44 John Brack

Brack often found subjects walking the city streets and recorded the details of what he saw in quick sketches which were later used as aides memoire in the studio. Additional detail was sometimes provided by photographs taken by his friend Laurence Course, an art historian and keen photographer. Brack often incorporated his own reflection looking through the window, and the recognition that there were people inside the shop looking out, to add visual ambiguity and narrative complexity to these paintings. Summing this up, he said, ‘The exterior and the interior

obviously inanimate status. Brack’s most concentrated series of shop window subjects emerged during the early 1960s, and this time, the windows featured in paintings such as Still Life with Self Portrait, 1963 (Art Gallery of South Australia) and The Happy Boy, 1964 (National Gallery of Australia) – the latter based on Roper’s medical supply shop in Swanston Street, Melbourne – displayed surgical instruments, prosthetic limbs and other medical aids. Bearing obvious associations with the human body, these objects enabled Brack to comment about life without depicting the figure, instead using subject matter that seemed to him, more appropriate for a contemporary artist.

A number of Brack’s images relate to shops and shop window displays, and the first, made in 1955, depicts a display of commercial kitchen equipment he had seen at the top of Bourke Street in Melbourne. Simply titled, The Slicing Machine Shop , 1955 (private collection), it depicts gleaming meat slicers, measuring scales and giant mixers which assume threatening, anthropomorphic qualities belying their

KIRSTY GRANT

of the window become mixed up, they become a paradox… illustrative not simply of shop windows but of the whole aspect of life itself, so that people who pass by are entangled with the beautiful display, gleaming instruments… [which] have something to do with the props that hold people together.’ 2

3. See photograph by Laurence Course in Grant, K., John Brack , National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009, p. 139

5. McCaughey, P., ‘The Complexity of John Brack’ in Lindsay, R., John Brack , National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 8

Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide © Helen Brack

45 John Brack

1. John Brack interview, Australian Contemporary Art Archive, no. 1, Deakin University Media Production, 1980, transcript, p. 3

This painting is classic Brack, exemplifying not only his great technical skill, but the distinctive intellectual ingenuity he brought to his art, and through which he created such a unique and significant place in the history of twentieth century Australian art. As Patrick McCaughey wrote, ‘His appeal is to the intelligence: to read what has been so clearly described. Yet behind the impersonal, unbroken surface lies a world which seethes with irony, ambiguity, where the normal is displaced or held in a different balance. The lucidity of Brack’s art, his subjects and his mode alike, do not disguise the complexity of his imagination.’5

2. John Brack quoted in The Lively Arts: John Brack , ABC-TV documentary

4. John Brack, Deakin University interview, op. cit., p. 6

The primary focus of Elastic Stockings , 1965 is an elaborate sign advertising said garments which dominates the top half of the image. The decorative, graphic qualities of the sign must have appealed to Brack, and luminous shades of yellow hint at the gold lettering of the original. Instead of depicting the window as he had encountered it, full of a myriad of practical items, 3 his very singular vision and unique perspective of the world transformed what he saw, presenting a dramatic contrast between the showy signage and the lacklustre display of surgical instruments below. The result is humorous, but also somewhat melancholy. As he said, ‘What struck me is they had window displays [of surgical instruments] as you would display ladies’ dresses… to make them attractive… to attract… the passer by… to say ‘I will buy one’.4

Still Life with self portrait , 1963 oil on canvas 149.2 x 78.6 cm

1. Gascoigne mentioned the importance of this approach to her practice in various interviews throughout her career, first stating in 1972: ‘…If it looks good to me, I keep it. I never bother at the time what I am going to do with it. I take it home and store it on exposed shelves in the garden. It may or may not come good for me. I like to have a lot of stuff to look at.’ Artist statement in Bottrell, F., The Artist Craftsman in Australia, Jack Pollard, Crows Nest, New South Wales, 1972, p. 39

painted and stencilled sawn wood from discarded soft drink crates on plywood backing 92.0 x 83.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: AUTUMN 1989 / Rosalie Gascoigne

Despite Gascoigne’s self-proclaimed role as a ‘regional artist’, few of her works respond directly to a particular place or experience and instead conjure the sensations or essence of being in the landscape. Gascoigne’s ‘place’ – the Canberra/Monaro region, is instead the starting point for works whose associative and experiential possibilities reverberate beyond her immediate environment and come to evoke the Australian landscape more broadly. The title of her works also play an important role, as Gascoigne never named a piece until it was finished; giving herself time to sit with her art and encouraging a piece to ‘work on’ her, before endowing it with a name. As a result, the intrinsic connection between the work and its name – which often reflects her love and knowledge of Romantic poetry – creates an active and participatory role for the viewer who is given a starting point, but then left to infer, imagine and experience an individual and necessarily personal response. In many ways, it is within this space of discovery and re-discovery, of shifting moods and associations, that the power of Gascoigne’s work lies.

The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Collection, acquired from the above in 1989

PROVENANCE

ESTIMATE: $180,000 – 240,000

Rosalie Gascoigne first used the planks of found soft-drink crates in her work in the late 1970s, employing the wooden boards of brands such as Tarax, Crystal, Swing, and most notably, the distinctive daisyyellow of Schweppes, in elegant compositions that lyrically evoked the Australian bush. Gascoigne was initially dependent upon finding this ‘new’ material in the various dumps that she haunted on the outskirts of Canberra, but soft-drink crates were to become something of a signature material after she discovered them in abundance in a depot at Queanbeyan, where discarded crates could be bought by the truckload. As a result of the artist’s maxim, ‘See a lot, take a lot’1, her frequently replenished stockpile allowed an ongoing dialogue with this material that was to extend over many years. Gascoigne soon progressed from working with larger boards to splitting or sawing the planks into strips or small squares, before moving, as she has in Autumn, 1989 to assembling panels of these strips before gluing them to backing boards. The sense of movement that these component parts enabled, and the ability to try things out three-dimensionally, was an essential part of her act of making, as she never sketched or pre-planned anything on paper. As Gascoigne’s studio assistant, artist Peter Vandermark has

ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 –AUTUMN,1999)1989

LITERATURE

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

McDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne , Regaro Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1998, p. 106 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné , ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 346, pp. 236 (illus.), 332

commented: ‘Her hands were always moving things around, her eyes always assessing the arrangements her hands made. She’d say her art was seeing, watching and trying out...’ 2

Rosalie Gascoigne , Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 31 October - 18 November 1989, cat. 15

EXHIBITED

3. Frost, R., Nothing Gold Can Stay, ‘Poetry Foundation’, KELLYpoems/148652/nothing-gold-can-stay-5c095cc5ab679https://www.poetryfoundation.org/,accessed15August2022\GELLATLY

The jostling squares of Autumn – with its bleached and weathered slithers of burnished yellow and red, capture the season at its most majestic, as the leaves change colour and fall from the trees, creating a carpet of amber upon the ground. We can almost feel and hear the rustling of our feet moving through piles of leaves. Yet to experience Gascoigne’s Autumn is to also come to understand the transience of nature, and of life, as captured in a poem she likely knew – Robert Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay (1923): ‘Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. / Her early leaf’s a flower; / But only so an hour. / Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief, / So dawn goes down to day. / Nothing gold can stay.’3

2 ‘Peter Vandermark and Marie Hagerty in Conversation with Mary Eagle’ in Eagle, M., From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, The Australian National University Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 2000, p. 20

49 Important Australian and International Fine Art Property of various vendors Lots 8 – 83

PROVENANCE

Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso)

Arthur Boyd, Shoalhaven River – Small Landscapes , Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 29 June – 13 July 1976, cat. 23

expressive potential of impasto painting – the oil on copper medium was an arduous pursuit, with each plate requiring several weeks to complete and Boyd frequently suffering ‘tennis elbow’ as a result of painstakingly holding the brush across the painting to achieve maximum control of the miniature detail.1 Yet as Darleen Bungey elucidates in her compelling biography of the artist, the decision to embrace such a precise and time-consuming practice was a conscious one by Boyd; ‘While the big picture allowed him to ‘let off steam… hoping it would work’, copper necessitated that he deliberately ‘set about to make it work… It was as if he was choosing to rein himself in, to balance the scales between the wild expressionist paintings and works which would demand patience and a more formal technique.’ 2

Joan Clemenger AO and Peter Clemenger AO, Melbourne Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1976 Private collection, Melbourne, a gift from the above

McGrath, S., The Artist and the Shoalhaven, Bay Books, Sydney, 1982, pp. 52, 126, 127 – 9 (illus.)

Eager to rediscover his roots, his ‘Australianism’, after more than a decade abroad, in 1971 Arthur Boyd returned to the country of his birth to take up a Creative Arts Fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra. Over the blazing summer of 1971 – 72, Boyd and his wife Yvonne were invited by the Sydney art dealer Frank McDonald to visit Bundanon for the weekend, staying at a home he shared on the south coast of New South Wales with art historian Sandra McGrath and her husband Tony. Here the artist’s joyful rediscovery of the Australian bush with its stark contrasts and clarity of light was nothing short of an epiphany, and thus in 1974, Boyd purchased the nearby property Riversdale on the banks of the Shoalhaven River. Once again, the magic of the dour, untamed Australian landscape became the impetus for his art, and over the subsequent twenty-five years until his death in 1999, Boyd would dedicate himself almost exclusively to capturing the myriad moods of the Shoalhaven in images that are today imprinted upon the national psyche as some of our most beloved and iconic.

EXHIBITED

Significantly, Boyd’s first exhibition of works inspired by the Shoalhaven region was a series of miniature, jewel-like cabinet pictures on copper plate which he affectionately termed ‘little colour notes’ –elegantly encapsulated here by Cleft Riverbank with Bush and Fern, 1976, An unusual and highly original choice for an artist during the seventies – and especially one so accustomed to the immediacy and infinitely

LITERATURE

Paying homage to both the Old Masters and the very ‘craft of painting’ itself, the copper plates were thus serious perceptual works embodying an important period of ‘research’ that enabled the artist to glean valuable insights into the area and accurately record salient visual details for further exploration in his larger, more ambitious renderings of the Shoalhaven. Idyllic and classically serene, Cleft Riverbank with Bush and Fern offers an especially charming example of these intimate copper paintings which not only celebrate the artist’s sheer wonder at the soul-piercing beauty of the Shoalhaven area, but eloquently attest to his reverence for his artistic predecessors. Suffused with warmth and lyricism, the present composition acknowledges Boyd’s enormous debt in particular to eminent Australian impressionist, Tom Roberts, with its glowing, honey-coloured palette reminiscent of the Heidelberg master’s iconic Bailed Up! 1895 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) and the motif of the cleft riverbank, an obvious reference to Roberts’ In a Corner on the MacIntyre , 1895 (National Gallery of Australia). As Boyd himself reflected, ‘I found at Bundanon a particular rock formation that fascinated me, because the rock and its reflection in the water made a diamond shape. It reminded me of a Tom Roberts painting in which there is a bushranger and a horse drinking… It’s a wonderful painting – the key is as high as it can go and the relationships are perfect.’3

CLEFT RIVERBANK WITH BUSH AND FERN, 1976 oil on copper 31.0 x 24.0 cm signed lower right: Arthur Boyd

1. McKenzie, J., Arthur Boyd at Bundanon, Academy Editions, London, 1994, p. 28 2. Bungey, D., Arthur Boyd: A Life, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2008, pp. 497 – 498 3. Boyd cited in McGrath, S., The Artist and the Shoalhaven, Bay Books, Sydney, 1982, p. 79 VERONICA ANGELATOS

8ARTHUR BOYD (1920 – 1999)

ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney

BRETT WHITELEY (1939 – 1992)

ESTIMATE: $350,000 – 450,000

LITERATURE

PROVENANCE

THE FRENCHMAN, 1987 oil on canvas 83.0 x 83.0 cm signed lower right: brett W signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: THE FRENCHMAN / brett whiteley 1987

Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1987

Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné , Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2020, cat. 50.87 (addendum)

By54

the time Brett Whiteley painted The Frenchman , 1987, he was undoubtedly Australia’s most well-known contemporary artist, recognised and celebrated for his artistic achievements as much as for his embodiment of the persona of the artist-genius – freewheeling, unpredictable, eccentric, and brilliant. While it was a role that Whiteley played well, he had also been struggling for over a decade with heroin addiction, a battle that he openly discussed in interviews and occasionally explored in his work, including in his Archibald Prizewinning painting Art, Life and the Other Thing of 1978. Sadly, Whiteley also fulfilled the artist cliché of dying young – of an overdose, in 1992. He was 53 years old.

‘Every painting of Whiteley’s is a roll in the hay with the muse of art history: as soon as an issue about the nature of art or perception was raised by another painter – Gorky, de Kooning, Bacon, Giacometti, Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Piero della Francesca, Uccello, Masaccio – Whiteley was into it, either painting his way through it or arguing it out. His intellectual appetite is matched by no other Australian painter I’ve met. Like Ashile Gorky, with whose early years Whiteley’s have much in common, his outstanding act as a painter is the decision not to be original – not to narrow his style into the crippling uniqueness of a trademark, but to keep it open, and to preserve the flow of ideas between his art environment and his own experience.’2

Despite having attended John Santry’s sketch club in Northwood, Sydney and life-drawing classes at the Julian Ashton Art School, Whiteley was largely self-taught. He learnt much from studying the work of other artists, and across the early years of his career it is possible to discern the influence of many – from fellow Australians William Dobell, Russell Drysdale, Sali Herman and Lloyd Rees (who Whiteley referred to as one of his ‘little gods’1) to Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio Morandi, William Scott, and Vincent van Gogh. As Australian critic Robert Hughes wrote of the artist in the mid-1960s as Whiteley was taking London by storm:

Yet despite his debt to art history, Whiteley’s work was undeniably his own – characterised by his extraordinary draughtsmanship, his facility of line, and for his capacity to create a sensory overload thr ough an accumulation of forms, movement, rapid brushwork, and the combination of different materials (from product packaging and tree branches to the artist’s own hair). Figures push against the edges of the canvas, their forms stretched and distorted; perspectives tilt, and even the works’ empty spaces – with their vast swathes of yellow, blue, and orange, are ‘electrified.’3

Brett Whiteley in his Surry Hills studio surrounded by works he created in Paris photographer: Andrew Fisher

2. Hughes, R., ‘The Shirley Temple of English Art? Brett Whiteley’s Splash in the Mainstream’, The Bulletin, Sydney, 18 December 1965, cited in Pearce, B., ‘Persona and the Painter’, in Pearce, B. et al., Brett Whiteley: Art and Life, Thames & Hudson (Australia) in association with The Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1st published 1995, new edition 2014, p. 26

4. Reed, A., ‘He Climbed into His Own Picture’, The Australian, 8 November 1969

Portraiture was a constant of Whiteley’s career and his numerous paintings and drawings of Wendy Whiteley – the artists’ wife and muse for over three decades, are rightly prized for the way in which their curvilinear lines capture her voluptuous form; for their relaxed intimacy, and for their celebration of sensuality and sexual pleasure.

Private collection

GELLATLYBrett

KELLY

3. This is how curator Barry Pearce described the empty spaces in the artist’s Lavender Bay paintings. See Pearce, ibid., p. 36

5. ‘Brett Whiteley – Animals and Birds’, Brett Whiteley Studio, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2002, birds/index.htmlhttps://archives.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/media/archives_2002/brett_whiteley_animals_,accessed2August2022

Whiteley began making self-portraits just prior to his 1967 arrival in New York with Wendy and their young daughter Arkie after he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship, and his self-portraiture continued into the 1980s. Interested in schizophrenia and madness, the artist’s harrowingly honest likenesses often investigate a sense of psychological turmoil through the extreme distortion and elongation of his face, as well as the inner toll of Whiteley’s constant quest – for the next great work, or for ‘enlightenment’ or peace – we can’t know. As Whiteley said: ‘one gets into the habit of having an invented world – the external world is so repugnant. It’s a natural schizing and I became addicted to the split.’4

images at Sydney’s Robin Gibson Gallery in 1983, followed by the solo exhibition Birds , at his Surry Hills studio.6 The protagonist’s torso fills the composition, his profile assuming a distinctly beak-like form while the confident white brushstrokes that curve around the lines of his body create a sense of wings flapping or feathers being ruffled to puff up a body against the cold. Despite the distinct marker of the shirt and tie and the subject’s large, clasped hands at the bottom of the image, Whiteley creates a portrait of a man at a moment of transition, as he cranes his neck and twists his body, as if hoping for escape – for flight – beyond the frame.

1. Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: A Sensual Line 1957-67, Macmillan Art Publishing, South Yarra, 2010, p. 22 cited in Grishin, S. ‘Baldessin / Whiteley: Parallel Visions’ in Grishin, S. et al., Baldessin / Whiteley: Parallel Visions, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2018, p. 5

The bird was a recurring motif for Whiteley, and birds, eggs and nests occur as subjects, and as real-life collage elements, across the artist’s oeuvre. A favourite animal since childhood, he remarked in later years: ‘People ask me “why paint birds?” and I look at them dumbfounded! I’ve got no answer, except that they are the most beautiful creatures’. 5 The Frenchman was painted during a period in which Whiteley was increasingly captivated by birds, having held an exhibition of bird

6. Some Recent Works: Birds (11), the Drought of 83 (7), Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney, 30 July –17 August 1983 and Birds, Artist’s Studio, Surry Hills, Sydney, 5 – 19 July 1988

Whiteley Orange Fiji Fruit Dove, c.1983 oil on 184.0canvasx202.5 cm

ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

RELATED WORK

Evening on the Esplanade , 1988 – 89, oil on canvas, 33.0 x 80.0 cm, private collection

In comparison to the larger version, Evening on the Esplanade, 1988 –89 (private collection), the study displays an interesting mirror image of the composition, and one in which the unspoken interaction between the three figures is reversed. Both versions feature one solitary man in the foreground and a man and woman, seated together; the two groups placed on opposing sides of the image. In this study, Smart encourages the viewer to enter the composition through the turned, beckoning head of the figure in the foreground. Staring blankly at the viewer, yet partially concealed by a fence railing and a rusting dustbin, the man seems to be either oblivious to the presence of the lovers perched precariously on the railing, or pointedly turning away from them. In the large version, however, the man gazes out towards the sea, while the woman, distanced from her partner, gazes wistfully towards him. Both arrangements suggest an intrigue, a complex web of unfulfilled desires and unrealised actions, adding to the dramatic possibility of Smart’s moody vista.

Scholar of modern art and author of Smart’s first monograph, Peter Quartermaine identified the source of his power as ‘from playing off what seems the everyday world depicted in real perspective against the adroitly concealed mechanics of the ‘abstract’ composition within the frame. This interplay lies at the heart of Smart’s work; it reaffirms the artist’s need to trade constantly with our everyday surroundings, and the pictures themselves celebrate an understanding of, and respect for, the world we inhabit’ 1

Although appearing to be faithful recordings of real-world places, Jeffrey Smart’s paintings are most often composite images, constructed from disparate elements recalled from real life locations or gleaned

Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1989

10JEFFREY SMART (1921 – 2013)

LITERATURE

PROVENANCE

Much has been written about the enigmatic qualities of Jeffrey Smart’s still and quasi-surreal paintings of suburban scenes. A Baudelairean painter of modern life, Smart painted a carefully geometrically constructed material world populated by anonymous figures engaged in puzzling and solitary activities. Although he spent the last forty years of his life living and working in Tuscany, Smart continued to paint from there the globally uniform imagery of post-war urban boom. It was the sculptural and semiotic qualities of these concrete and steel monuments that Smart admired and conveyed in most of his works. An intimate work, Study for Evening on the Esplanade, 1988 – 89 juxtaposes a contemplative solitary figure in the foreground with an amorous couple in the background, each personage seated on concrete benches on a built and fenced promenade along the seashore. Predictably, the skies above are glowering (although the time of day is only discernible from the title), and the brilliantly white silhouettes of seagulls proliferate. Jeffrey Smart’s freeze-framed scene on the esplanade is taut with emotive tension and suspended animation.

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

signed lower left: JEFFREY SMART bears inscription on gallery label verso: STUDY FOR EVENING ON / THE ESPLANADE, 1988

Jeffrey Smart, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 1 – 29 May 1989, cat. 15

McDonald, J., Jeffrey Smart. Paintings of the 70s and 80s , Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990, cat. 331, p. 162

STUDY FOR EVENING ON THE ESPLANADE, 1988 oil on canvas on composition board 25.0 x 48.0 cm

EXHIBITED

1. Quartermaine, P., ‘Jeffrey Smart’s Brave New World’, Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 23, no. 1, Spring 1985, p.

from other artworks (both his own and those painted by artists whom he admired). This complex weaving of motifs required a disciplined compositional sequence: starting with pencil studies, then (often several) oil studies and finally, a large-scale painting. The dialogue between these artworks is multifaceted, stretching across a lifetime of observations. This work is denoted as a study with the artist’s marker of painted borders, here a reinforcing sequence of white/French grey/ navy blue, all tones prevalent in the main composition. With a quality of completeness, it is no mere aide-memoire.

MIST IN AFTERNOON SUNLIGHT, 2002 oil on linen 122.0 x 183.0 cm

Australian Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso)

PROVENANCE

EXHIBITED

works feature aspects of the weather as subject matter, sunlight, mist, cloud fronts. These ephemeral forces of nature override creatures in the landscape and celebrate creation as the work of a higher power.

By the time of his Sydney and Melbourne Australian Galleries exhibitions in 2002 (which included the present work), the artist’s trademark staccato brush work had given way to 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 painting itself.

Robinson’s paintings attempt to create the sensation of being in the landscape, as the artist explains: ‘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

HENRY MULHOLLAND

As the years have passed Robinson’s work has taken on a more spiritual tone. Gone are the whimsical farmyard scenes, where the chickens, geese and goats mischievously mirrored the politics and hierarchies of the local Brisbane art scene. However, those important formative works alerted Robinson to the possibilities of altered perspectives and alternate approaches to conventional horizons. Many of his mature

signed and dated lower right: William Robinson 2002 inscribed twice with title verso: MIST IN AFTERNOON SUNLIGHT

William Robinson: Recent Paintings, Australian Galleries, Sydney, 13 August – 7 September; Melbourne, 24 September – 25 October 2002, cat. 4 (label attached verso, as ‘Mist in Afternoon Light’)

Rainforest Mist in Afternoon Light, 2002, oil on canvas, 167.0 x 244.0 cm, private collection, Brisbane, illus. in Hart, D. (et. al), William Robinson. The Transfigured Landscape , Queensland University of Technology and Piper Press, Brisbane, 2011, p. 127

11WILLIAM ROBINSON born 1936

The Laverty Collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2002

Similar to the larger, closely related Rainforest Mist in Afternoon Light , 2002, the landscape of this work might resemble the Tower of Babel as Robinson’s twisting escarpment climbs its way toward the heavens. Upwards and outwards the foliage and trees writhe and swirl. White cumulus clouds loom large or drift in the distance. The eastern side of the escarpment is lush and green, while the western side is rich in violets and warm earth tones. As the sun lowers in the west, it highlights the trunks of the trees, which split the light into rays. The late afternoon mist drifts up and around the ancient landforms, while shafts of sunlight beam through the trees and catch the mist – affording the work its lyrical title.

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

RELATED WORK

When William Robinson came to create Mist in Afternoon Sunlight, 2002, 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. When it came to painting the Australian landscape many artists of Robinson’s generation chose to look inwards towards the outback’s desperate beauty, while Robinson focussed almost entirely on the ancient rainforests and eucalypt forests of southeast Queensland.

ESTIMATE: $180,000 – 250,000

Quilty’s budgies were conceived as portraits of real-life human subjects, captured in ‘mug-shot style’. 5 In PAT, 2004 the blocky form is built up of slabs of green and gold paint, trowelled onto the surface of the canvas in sweeping, confident arcs. Although at rest and clearly clinging to his perch, the possibility of flight (and escape?) is captured in the zig zag-like marks on the bird’s wing, creating an uneasy tension between repose and animation. The painting exudes a love of the medium of paint and the act of painting, best summed up by the artist himself: ‘For me the most exciting thing is that incredible energy that comes about when you start to try and find something new. And painting, the whole act of it – putting one tiny, tiny, tiny bit of colour into this huge, big expansive mass of thick paint can be an incredible feeling and can leave me for a week on a high.’6

Quilty first exhibited his budgerigar images in 2004 in his solo exhibition Young and Free? 3 , using the phrase from Australia’s national anthem (which was officially changed to ‘one and free’ on 1 January 2021) to

KELLY GELLATLY

PROVENANCE

Fittingly,persona.

Ben Quilty is undeniably one of Australia’s most well-known contemporary artists, his face frequently gracing our television screens in the guise of spokesperson-painter and cultural commentator. Part of the appeal of the artist’s work, and of Quilty himself, is accessibility – the immediacy of the way in which both art and artist communicate. The outer-suburban environment in which Quilty grew up, and the rites of passage of young men in this milieu – drinking, fast cars, larrikinism, and risk taking – fuel his early work, and we can relate to his lusciously painted canvases as easily as we can sing the lyrics of Cold Chisel’s ‘Khe Sanh’. Yet from the outset, Quilty’s work has unflinchingly explored masculine aggression, and the way in which Australian males work to define themselves as ‘Australian’1, along with mortality, and the stains of our colonial legacy. As Nick Mitzevitch has noted, the means of communication may be deceptively straightforward, but the message is

12BEN QUILTY born 1973 PAT, 2004 oil on canvas 130.0 x 100.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: ‘PAT’ / 04 / Ben Quilty

2 Mitzevitch, N., ‘Foreword’, Ben Quilty, The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 2009, p. 11

1. ‘Ben Quilty in Conversation with Lisa Slade’, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 2009, https://www.janmurphygallery.com.au/artist/ben-quilty/videos/, accessed 13 July 2022

6. ‘Ben Quilty and the Maggots’, Artscape, ABC Arts, 2011, https://www.janmurphygallery.com. au/artist/ben-quilty/videos/, accessed 13 July 2022

‘Wenot:rarely encounter an artist whose work combines such broad appeal and such a starling, singular vision. Quilty’s paintings possess an extraordinary presence: he achieves such delicious, inviting and seductive experiences in paint that the paint surface appears as if ‘live’. But, if we step back from the tour de force of the paint surface, if we marshal the image into focus, we see that Quilty also unflinchingly investigates our culture and history.’ 2

5. Ibid.

4. Quilty cited in Slade, L., ‘Ben Quilty: We Are History’, Ben Quilty, 2009, p. 24

point to the complex bundle of issues surrounding nationalism and identity that this jaunty native bird encapsulated in his paintings. As he has observed, domestic budgies are ‘far from their native form –both geographically and physically’ and are ‘a fitting representation of the way white Australian society has claimed its own identity.’4 The budgerigar’s ability to mimic human speech also highlights the role of adaptation and change in the conscious construction of any ‘new’

ESTIMATE: $100,000 – 140,000

Private collection, Sydney, acquired directly from the artist

3. Ben Quilty: Young and Free?, Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane, 2004

signed with initials and dated lower left: S.T.G. / 1848

ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE

Port Adelaide looking across Gawler Reach, 1847, watercolour on paper, 19.7 x 32.4 cm, in the collection of Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Port Adelaide looking across Gawler Reach, 1848, watercolour on paper, 28.2 x 46.1 cm, in the collection of Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

PORT ADELAIDE, 1848 watercolour on paper 28.0 x 49.0 cm

Kendall Whaling Museum, Sharon, Massachusetts, USA, 1967

RELATED WORKS

Frank T. Sabin, London

New Bedford Whaling Museum, Massachusetts, USA, 2001 (museums merged)

13S. T. GILL (1818 – 1880)

New Bedford Whaling Museum deaccession Marion Antiques & Turkey Auctions, Massachusetts, USA, 9 April 2022, lot 9 (as ‘South Australia, Port Adelaide’) Private collection, Melbourne

Widely recognised as one of the most engaging and observant artists of Australian colonial life, the young Samuel Thomas Gill, aged twenty-one, arrived with his parents and siblings in December 1839, only three years after Adelaide was founded on the lands of the Kaurna people. Having received training in Plymouth and London, within three months Gill was promoting his artistic availability. In an advertisement in The South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register, he proclaimed his willingness to capture ‘correct likenesses’ of individuals, horses, dogs, local scenery and residences ‘sketched and… suited for home conveyance’, to record and inform distant family and friends of life in Australia.1 In addition to these domestic genres, Gill travelled to townships around the colony, undertaking commissions including recording the early copper and silver mining industries, and participating in exploratory travels.

is known to its original owners, and following considerable debate about its best (or least worst) location, the Port had been formally opened in its current location in 1840.

Port Adelaide looking across Gawler Reach, 1848 watercolour on paper 28.2 x 46.1 cm

Gill is well known for returning in his later years to earlier scenes and events, as with his series recalling life on the goldfields commissioned by the Melbourne Public Library (now State Library Victoria) in 1869, or episodes from the ill-fated Horrocks Expedition of 1846. Port Adelaide, however, was one location that he captured in multiple watercolours in a short period of time, evidence of this vital infrastructure for exporting the proceeds of its new produce, agricultural and mineral industries. With the emergence of this wonderful watercolour from institutional storage, four finished watercolours of this outlook on the banks of Gawler’s Reach are now known (two in the Art Gallery of South Australia; National Library of Australia), plus further studies. 2 Another earlier version (presumably one of Allen’s) remains unlocated, the source of the watercolour painted in London by English artist-copyist Thomas Hosmer Shepherd (now Art Gallery of South Australia), and also for the hand-coloured lithograph in George French Angas’ South Australia Illustrated, published in London in 1847. Views by Gill from the other side of the river are also known in multiples. 3

64 S. T. Gill

Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

The scene here looks southeast across the calm river to the port’s facilities and the Mount Lofty Ranges on the distant horizon. On the left, the large red two-storeyed building is the warehouse of the South Australian Company, above their McLaren Wharf (named for the

Gill’s skill and presence in the new city was a boon to those wishing to have evidence of its growth, and to promote its possibilities. In 1845, he was commissioned by local newspaper owner James Allen to paint a series of views of Adelaide, which Allen then took to England and used to illustrate a series of lectures in 1846, intended to entice immigrants and investment. This program was heartily supported by the South Australia Company, the original investors in this colony-as-commercialenterprise, who subsequently owned many of the paintings. The majority of the views displayed by Allen were lively streetscapes of Adelaide’s major roads, marvellous records of the town’s early architecture and bustling population. The commission also included two views of Port Adelaide. Built on the mangrove-lined tidal estuary of Yerta Bulti, as it

Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

65 S. T. Gill

Beforeactivity.them,

For the last fifty-five years, this watercolour has been in the United States, in the Kendall Whaling Museum collection, later merged with the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Commercial whaling had begun in South Australian waters long before the colony was founded, and whaling was the first industry established by the South Australia Company upon its arrival on Kaurna land in 1836. Although American whalers were active in these waters from the early 1800s, it is understandable that the Museum decided this painting was not relevant to their collection. Their custodianship has, however, helped protect it from excessive light exposure and the watercolour retains its crisp colours for our enjoyment

3. See David Coombe’s interactive map of Gill’s depictions of Port Adelaide at openstreetmap.fr/en/map/s-t-gill-port-adelaide_494979#17/-34.84020/138.50458umap.

South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register, 7 March 1840, p. 1

ALISA BUNBURY

are individuals he observed, or whether they are ‘types’ – staffage drawn from his precise grasp of anatomy and posture. There is evident repetition in the foreground accoutrements – the rotting wicker basket, discarded wine bottles, spar and anchor, and remnant mangroves on the muddy bank – but there is little sense of rote duplication in these paintings. Instead, Gill makes evident his enjoyment in each scene, deftly capturing the trivia of daily life, from mending a net to contemplating the changing tide.

While Gill carefully recorded the ships, it is impossible to say how much the characters who populate the foreground of these works

manager of the Company). The central light-coloured stone building is the Customs House, above the Government’s Queen’s Wharf and warehouses. And the third building of note, on the right, is the Port Tavern, now proudly two-storey like the others. This was a comparatively recent development after the original single-storey building was destroyed by fire on 29 January 1847. In Gill’s various versions, we can see the original tavern, construction in progress amid a grid of scaffolding, and the resulting new tavern. Thus by 1848, when this painting was created, the Company, Government and inn make up the triumvirate of buildings necessary for seamen in town and mercantile

4. The South Australia Company donated art to the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1890, 1929 and 1931, twenty-four works in total – of which fifteen are by Gill.

upon the river, Gill depicts a range of watercraft, from ships that have sailed across turbulent oceans to small dinghies and rowboats. It is clear that Gill made close observations of these vessels. Versions painted up to 1847 show the French ship Ville de Bordeaux , which had been seized for illegal trading, at anchor at the right of the image. In the Art Gallery of South Australia’s 1848 watercolour, the steamer Juno is depicted on the left, one of the first examples of steam-powered ships to travel to the colony. Interestingly, the South Australia Company also owned that watercolour, demonstrating their understandable ongoing interest in the development of the Port and their resulting profits. The Company subsequently donated that and other paintings to the now Art Gallery of South Australia in 1890.4

Port Adelaide looking across Gawler Reach, 1847 watercolour on paper 19.7 x 32.4 cm

1.today.

2. A small watercolour is either by Gill or his friend Eliezer Montefiore (State Library of New South Wales SSV*/Sp Coll/Gill/3), while the National Library of Australis holds related sketches.

Thence by descent, to the present owner, United Kingdom

PROVENANCE

[View from Arapiles and plant studies], 1868, pencil on paper, folio 36, Sketchbook XXXVI, in the collection of State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Hon. J. A. Macpherson, Victoria

14EUGENE VON GUÉRARD (1811 – 1901)

ESTIMATE: $140,000 – 180,000

RELATED WORKS

The Mitre Rock and Lake from Mount Arapiles , 1874, oil on canvas, 61.2 x 106.8 cm, private collection, illus. in Bruce, C., Comstock, E., & McDonald, F., Eugene von Guerard 1811 – 1901: A German Romantic in the Antipodes , Alister Taylor Publishers, New Zealand, 1982, pl. 41, p. 150

signed with initials and dated lower right edge: E. V. G. / 29.1.70. bears inscription on frame verso: Left Hand side of Arapiles / … / A VIEW FROM MOUNT ARAPILES / WIMMERA DISTRICT / VICTORIA AUSTRALIA / ? 1868

Eug ene von Guérard’s Mount Arapiles towards the Grampians has not been on public view for the past 152 years. It was painted in January 1870 for The Hon. John Alexander MacPherson (see lot 17), during his brief term as the seventh Premier of Victoria.1 The connection between the artist and his patron firmed during the 1870s when von Guérard was, in effect, the first director of the National Gallery of Victoria and MacPherson a founding trustee of the Public Library, Museums and National Gallery of Victoria. In 1876, MacPherson commissioned a second work from von Guérard, this time a reprise of an important 1864 composition depicting Gippsland’s Snowy Bluff, a subject sketched by the artist when, in 1860 he accompanied Alfred Howitt on a government-sponsored expedition. 2 MacPherson’s version of View of the Snowy Bluff in the Valley of the Wonnangatta, Gippsland, 1876, which received a glowing review in the Argus , is now in the Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth. 3 For MacPherson, one of the appeals of the view of the Grampians from Mount Arapiles may have been that, as noted by von Guérard, it looked towards Dundas, his electorate between 1866 and 1878.4

MOUNT ARAPILES TOWARDS THE GRAMPIANS, 1870 oil on academy board18.5x30.5cm

Von Guérard spent four days sketching at Mount Arapiles in October 1868. He had long been aware of the imposing sandstone-quartzite formation that rises from the flat Wimmera Plains north-west of the Grampians (Gariwerd). Known as Dyuritte to its Traditional Owners, the Wotjobaluk, Jaadwa, Jadawadjali, Wergaia and Jupagulk peoples, it was named Mount Arapiles by the explorer Major Thomas Mitchell in 1836. 5 And it was through Mitchell’s two-volume publication, Three

[View from Arapiles and plant studies], 1868

On the first day, Wednesday 14 October, von Guérard sketched the view that became the subject of Mount Arapiles towards the Grampians Along with the sketchbook drawing and a related large drawing, his experience of the day is captured in diary entries at the back of this sketchbook. After a two hour walk from the homestead, he climbed –almost certainly up Central Gully – and then ‘hand climbed’ up ‘broken and fissured rocks’ to find this viewpoint. There, despite rain which forced him to sketch from the shelter of ‘a gorge of the main rock,’ he was delighted by ‘mountainside eagles, butterflies [and] flowers.’ To the right of the main drawing he made studies, with descriptive notes, of the Weiss bluhend Erika (white-blooming erica), a star-shaped flower (the fairy waxflower?) and a bush of ‘violet to mid grey’ bell-shaped flowers ( Prostanthera rotundifolia?). Later that day, he changed position to a vantage point near the top of Central Gully and embarked on the second, larger drawing – the same outward view but framed by different cliffs.

Eugene Von Guérard

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Volume 14a: Sketchbook XXXVI, No. 18 Australian, 1865 - 70, 1872

He faithfully reproduced, at top left, a distinctive sheer wall capped by twin dark horizontal breaks that climbers immediately recognise as the west-facing ‘Wind Wall’ on ‘Starless Buttress’. 8 He worked ‘till 6 o’clock’ and was guided back to the station, in darkness, by shots fired by his ‘worried’ host.

Von Guérard discovered the spectacular view depicted in Mount Arapiles towards the Grampians at the top of the cliffs above and to the northeast of Central Gully. From the north side of the gully, and after a scramble southeast towards the cliff edge, he settled on a vantage point from which the view to the southeast, over expansive plains that stretch towards the Grampians and Black Range. From there his view was dramatically framed by the distinctive free-standing pinnacle, Bluff Major, on the left and the cliffs on the south side of Central Gully on the right.9 The artist, with his deep and sustained interest in geological subjects, was captivated by the square stepped, blocky forms and overhangs that characterized the monumental Bluff Major. Bluff Major is typical of numerous isolated free standing and undercut pinnacles found on the east facing cliffs, their forms sculpted by wave action during the marine incursion of the late Miocene.10 On the right, the afternoon sun illuminates and casts shadows over a wall of metamorphosed ‘quartzeous sandstone’ – identified by both Mitchell and von Neumayer – highlighting the cracks and fissures in its gnarled surface. Far below, the twenty-metre high Taylor’s Rock, known to climbers as Declaration Crag, rises from the sunlit Wimmera plains like an ancient ruin. Despite its tiny presence in the landscape it is depicted with startling accuracy.11 The site has been protected since 2019, following the rediscovery of its cultural Throughsignificance.thetwofigures

(and their dog) in the foreground the viewer is invited to share, vicariously, the exhilaration of being perched high on this rocky outcrop, close to skies of swiftly moving clouds and

Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia (1839) that von Guérard discovered it.6 In the 1850s von Guérard made copies of the illustrations in Mitchell’s book, including those of the impressive and geologically significant Mount Arapiles. Then, in 1862, his fellow artist and good friend, Nicholas Chevalier, travelled to Mount Arapiles with their mutual friend, the eminent German geophysicist, Georg von Neumayer. Von Guérard had accompanied them on the first leg of the expedition, to Cape Otway. On his solo expedition to Mount Arapiles in 1868, von Guérard stayed at properties owned by the Wilson brothers –John Wilson at Woodlands, Samuel Wilson at Longerenong and Charles Wilson at Walmer – where he saw Chevalier’s paintings on the walls. At Alexander Wilson’s property, Vectis, he was reunited with one of Chevalier’s most important works, Mount Arapiles and the Mitre Rock 1863.7 St Mary’s Lake Station, a property managed for Wilson by Mr McDonald and close to Mount Arapiles, was von Guérard’s base for four days sketching on and around the mountain.

5. So named because 23 July, the day Mitchell climbed the mount, was the anniversary of the Battle of Salamanca.

Eugene von Guérard

Mount Arapiles towards the Grampians is one of two Arapiles subjects painted by the artist. The second The Mitre Rock and Lake from Mount Arapiles , like plate 31 in Mitchell’s pioneering publication, portrays the view to the northeast. It was commissioned by Melbourne banker and politician Sir George Verdon in 1874.

East south east view from the Arapiles , 14 u.16 - 17 Oct. 68, 1868

4. Von Guérard, Sketchbook XXXVI, 1867-68-69-70, Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales, DGB16, v. 14a, pp. [84]

6. Mitchell, T.L., Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, T. & W. Boone, London, 1839, Vol II, pl. 31 and 33, p. 191

2. Eugene von Guérard View of the Snowy Bluff on the Wonnangatta River 1864, oil on canvas, 95.2 x 152.7 cm, National Gallery of Victoria

11. Keith Lockwood, email correspondence, 27 July 2022

The author is grateful to Keith Lockwood, Geoff and Maureen Little, and Ross Cayley, for their generous assistance in identifying von Guérard’s vantage point for this painting.

10. Cayley, R.A and Taylor, D.H., Grampians. Special Map Area Geological Report, Geological Survey Report 107, Natural Resources and Environment, Crown (State of Victoria), 1997, p. 19

The return of von Guérard’s Mount Arapiles towards the Grampians to the public arena brings with it new insights into the life of his politically significant patron, and his own remarkable career as the most adventurous and, arguably, the greatest landscape painter to work in Australia in the nineteenth century.

1. The family later adopted ‘Macpherson,’ with a lower case ‘p’, as the preferred form of their family name.

9. Ross Cayley, email correspondence, 1 August 2022. On the basis of extensive field work, Keith Lockwood, author of Arapiles: A Million Mountains, Skink Press, Natimuk, 2008, with Geoff and Maureen Little of Natimuk, independently identified the view as that looking down Central Gully to the southeast towards the Grampians and Black Range, with Taylor’s Rock in the middle distance, email correspondence, 30 July 2022.

Folio 7 in album, Wimmera, Dixson Library, Item 09. PXX 18

7. Nicholas Chevalier, Mount Arapiles and the Mitre Rock, 1863, National Gallery of Australia. On his visit, von Guérard looked out for Chevalier’s vantage point for both this work and View from Mount Arapiles, 1863, National Gallery of Victoria.

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

DR RUTH PULLIN

Eugene Von Guérard

3. Argus, 24 July 1876, p.5

The Mitre Rock and Lake from Mount Arapiles , 1874 oil on canvas

Private collection

61.2 x 106.8 cm

8. Eugene von Guérard, East south east view from the Arapiles, 14 u.16-17 Oct. 68 , 1868, pencil and crayon, 35.4 x 58.3 cm. Folio 7 in album, Wimmera, Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales, Item 09. PXX 18. Ross Cayley, Senior Geologist, Geological Survey of Victoria, email correspondence, 2 August 2022.

69 soaring birds, with the plains of Mitchell’s Australia Felix stretching out far below. The attention of the standing figure has been captured by the activities of his seated companion, perhaps the artist with his sketch pad.

Possibly: The artist’s family (It seems probable that Pedro Rima Condor was once owned by a member of Earle’s family. The portrait is mounted in the same way and carries the same kind of inscription (without the numbering), of the many drawings from an album once owned by Earle’s half-brother, the Royal Navy hydrographer William Henry Smyth (the drawings are now part of the Nan Kivell collection, National Library of Australia)

LITERATURE

This work will be included in the forthcoming monograph by Dr Mary Eagle on Augustus Earle.

PEDRO RIMA CONDOR. A PERUVIAN, AND REGULAR DESCENDANT, OF THE ONCE ILLUSTRIOUS FAMILY OF THE INCAS, 1820 pencil and watercolour on paper on the artist’s washed paper mount inscribed with title and date on artist’s paper mount: Pedro Rima Condor. / a Peruvian, and regular descendant, of the once Illustrious Family / of the Incas. at present a Servant in the House of Sr Abadia Lima. Drawn from / nature. / 1820. 31.0 x 21.0 cm (sheet) 37.5 x 26.0 cm (mount)

A poignant image from embattled Viceregal Peru on the eve of the declaration of independence, this is a hitherto unknown watercolour from Augustus Earle’s visit to Lima, Peru between mid-July and early November 1820. Although modest and disarming in format (as if Earle is disguising his subversive message, sotto voce , in the familiar clothing of the costumbrismo tradition), the artist’s portrait of Pedro Rima Condor nevertheless broadcasts an indictment of Spanish colonial rule and its ruthless exploitation of the indigenous population – a message reiterated in Earle’s inscription. Earle’s subject here anticipates the subject matter that would interest and occupy the artist throughout his ever-itinerant career, as the indigenous, the colonised, and the enslaved, became centre stage in so much of his subsequent work in South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. The portrait of the indigenous Pedro Rima Condor was painted in 1820 within a year of the proclamation of Peru’s independence on 28 July 1821, albeit decades before the feudal society of the Spanish Viceroyalty it so eloquently critiques was finally replaced by a democratic Republic. Earle’s portrait is as spare and mournful a marker of colonial Peru in 1820, as Rugendas’ suite of Peruvian paintings of the 1840s are extravagant and celebratory markers of the newly emerging Peruvian nation.

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Northumberland, United Kingdom Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood, Exeter, United Kingdom, 16 April 2021, lot 1562 (as ‘British School Early 19th Century Portrait of Pedro Rima Condor, Full-length Standing’)

Private collection

ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

15AUGUSTUS EARLE (1793 – 1838)

‘…The manner of this drawing in pencil, ink and watercolour, the uncanonical pictorial concept, and the English inscription and style of handwriting1 strongly substantiate the world-travelling Anglo-American painter Augustus Earle (1793 – 1838) as its creator. The attribution firms when we take into consideration that the work was painted in the embattled Spanish stronghold of Lima, in 1820. War was then imminent and Earle is the only non-Peruvian artist known to have been in Lima in 1820. Peru was embattled because Chile, the country bordering it on the south, upon throwing off Spanish rule in 1817 had turned immediately to the task of forcibly removing Spain from the region. Chile’s navy was under the control of Lord Cochrane, a profit-minded, ex-naval officer from England, who instituted a policy of raiding ports along the coast of Peru and confiscating ships and merchandise. In 1819, Cochrane temporarily blockaded Lima’s port of Callao, interrupting shipping in and out of the port. In August 1820, his squadron transported Chilean troops to a place from which they could attack Lima, then sailed on to blockade Callao, again freezing the movement of vessels into and out of the port. Peru declared its independence in July 1821.

National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

before sailing on that vessel on 12 December, bound for England. The portrait of Pedro Rima Condor was painted sometime during the four and a half months between mid-July and early November. Painstakingly drawn from life, it pictures a subdued man, dressed in ragged clothes, his gaze averted from the artist. The portrayal was out of keeping both with Peruvian art and with the prevailing international mode of portraying national and occupational types. Portraits drawn from life were then very rare in Peru where a strong tradition existed of formal portraits in which the subject’s social position was expressed through elaborate detailing and a lavish display of jewellery and gold leaf. (Besides Spanish Peruvians, the tradition included portraits of Inca ‘grandees.’) Capturing a facial likeness and a lifelike presence was of less importance in those beautiful images than portraying the subject’s place in society. After Peru’s independence, an existing international tradition flourished, of costumbrismo prints and drawings that portrayed a range of local occupations. These, too, were not portraits drawn from life but standardised depictions of the costume, activities, and mannerisms of a range of Peruvian types. 2

The inscription below the portrait informs us that Pedro Rima Condor was a descendant of ‘the once Illustrious Family of the Incas.’ 3 The ‘Rima’ and ‘Condor’ of his name are variations of words in the Inca language Quechua (this being the sole Inca language the Spanish conquerors attempted to use and record). ‘Cuntur’ was the Quechua word for the great bird, the ‘condor’. Rima = Lima = Rimac referred to an Inca god (Rimachi – son of Tupac Inca) and to the region encompassing Lima and the Rimac river valley (this having been the most densely populated region in the Inca empire). As with many of Earle’s portraits, the face is shown in three-quarters view. The fully rounded head is

Life on the ocean, representing the usual occupations of the young officers in the steerage of a British frigate at sea [detail], c.1836 oil on canvas 58.4 x 91.4 cm

Earle painted the oil from a scene he sketched while the Hyperion remained on watch in Callao bay in 1820.

Augustus Earle

Disembarking from a small American trading vessel in mid-July 1820, Earle moved freely between the port and the city six miles away, until early November when the Spanish administration ordered the immediate exodus of non-resident foreigners, and Earle, together with others of his nationality, was collected from the coast outside Lima by a British warship. For a month, he watched events from aboard HMS Hyperion

We are grateful to Dr Mary Eagle for kindly granting permission to reproduce excerpts from her research on the present work, to be included in her forthcoming monograph on Augustus Earle.

4. Augustus Earle, A Narrative of a Nine Months’ Residence in New Zealand in 1827; together with a Journal of a Residence in Tristan d’Acunha, London, 1832, p. 9

to the house would have been with the American trader, Captain Zacharias Nixon. In 1821 and 1822 Sir Walter Scott’s garrulous friend, Captain Basil Hall, who patrolled the west coast of South America, on naval duty to protect British trading vessels, made a brief contact with Abadia, describing him as a generous public figure. Richard Cleveland, an American trader who had business dealings with Abadia and his partner, explained Abadia’s power: ‘His talents and education, and the extraneous circumstances of his being agent at Lima of the Philippine Company, and of his brother’s being about that time one of the cabinet of King Ferdinand all combined to give him an influence with the Viceroy and the Cabildo, unsurpassed by any other individual in the kingdom.’ Cleveland was less complimentary about Abadia as a person: ‘... although of superior education, and extensive intercourse with mankind, he was bigoted and priest-ridden.’ 5 To which Earle’s portrait adds a further note – Abadia’s generosity did not extend to his servants.

2. See exhibition catalogue: Maljuf, N., Reproducing Nations: Types and Costumes in Asia and Latin America, ca. 1800 – 1860, Americas Society, New York, 2006.

5. Cleveland, R.J., Narrative of Voyages and Commercial Enterprises, 3rd edition, Charles H. Peirce, Boston, 1850, pp. 392 – 3

Augustus Earle Callao, port, and Fortalezza del Real [detail], 1820 National Library of Australia, Canberra

Don Pedro Abadia was a prominent and influential Spanish merchant of Lima. Unlike the majority of Peru’s Spanish merchants and administrators – who were monopolist and set in their ways – Abadia publicly endorsed free trade and modern machinery (for example, he imported English steam engines and employed Cornish miners to manage his mines in upcountry Peru), hence he was nudged into playing a major role in the trade war that accompanied the decline of Spain’s power internationally in the early 1800s. Speculative traders from around the world, hoping to open rich new markets, flocked to Callao and on arrival sought the support of Abadia. Earle’s first visit

3. According to Stevenson in A Historical & Descriptive Narrative of Twenty Years’ Residence in South America (1825), p.303, ‘The principal occupations of the Indians who reside in Lima is the making of fringes, gold and silver lace, epaulettes, and embroidery; some are tailors, other attend the business of the market, but very few are servants or mechanics.’

1. Earle’s handwriting changed slightly over the years. This inscription fits the date of the work.

DR MARY EAGLE

73 sculpted to show the flat ridge of the forehead, the slope of the temple – its angle is echoed below by the line between nose and jaw – the long straight jut of nose, the small dark eyes rimmed by flesh, the distinctively shaped cheeks under high cheekbones, jutting lips, small chin and a slightly sunken jaw that curves below the cheek before turning in a straight line to the ear. As in other carefully studied portrait drawings, Earle outlined the fine wrinkles on the neck and cheeks, the broader frown lines on the forehead, and the parallel lines of facial hair. As well as following the bodily form, these lines delicately trace the lines of age and indicate a sustained unhappiness. Earle may have had Pedro in mind when, eleven years later, he characterised the Incas as ‘gentle and civilised.’4 The inscription goes on to say that Pedro Rima Condor was a servant in the home of ‘Sr Abadia.’ The servant’s shuttered face above patched and torn clothes could indicate an apathetic disregard for personal appearance, yet Pedro cared about personal hygiene – his shirt is clean – therefore the ragged outer garments were not due to carelessness but to sheer poverty. What does this say about his employer?

Earle’s independent eye has earned him much attention – even more now that the imagery from Europe’s colonies has come under serious review. Unlike the majority of artists who travelled abroad, Earle had few commercial outlets for his work. Apart from coastal profiles, panoramas and portrait commissions, he had two engagements as an illustrator. Most of his depictions of social life (totalling around 200) went into the possession of his family, and those works, rather than connecting with the practices of traditional travel art and the new modes of natural science, were Earle’s private comment on what he saw in the many places he visited. Accordingly, it seems probable that Pedro Rima Condor was once owned by a member of Earle’s family. The portrait is mounted in the same way and carries the same kind of inscription (without the numbering), of the many drawings from an album once owned by Earle’s half-brother, the Royal Navy hydrographer William Henry Smyth (the drawings are now part of the Nan Kivell collection, National Library of Australia). Of Earle’s four known Peruvian subjects (four, now this work has surfaced), Smyth’s album included two, both of them coastal profiles. One is a drawing of the fort of Callao, evidently sketched from the deck of the Warrior between the American ship’s arrival and Earle’s disembarkation (National Library of Australia). The other is an immensely long 360-degree panorama sketched from aboard HMS Hyperion during the month that vessel hovered out of reach of Callao’s guns (also National Library of Australia), while the third (untraced) Peruvian work, Road from Callao to Lima, is known through a copy drawing in the British Museum.

16JOHN RAE (1813 – 1900)

PANORAMA OF HYDE PARK, c .1893 watercolour on photographs on paper on stretched linen 21.0 x 144.5 cm inscribed upper centre: 1842 inscribed lower centre: Hyde Park / Drawn with Camera by John Rae Town Clerk inscribed upper left: Supreme Court/ and Watch House, St. James Anglican Church, General Hospital/ (now Mint), Hyde Park Barracks inscribed upper centre: Campanile, Seminary, St. Mary’s R.C. Cathedral, Markers Mill, Gerard’s Mill, Victoria Terrace/ John Alexander, Colonel Mundy, Judge Dickinson/ Craigend Mill inscribed upper right: The Museum, Darlinghurst Jail, Sydney College/ (now Grammar School), Hyde Park Terrace, Lyons Terrace inscribed centre right: Prosper De Mestre/ Liverpool St. inscribed lower right: King/ The Flying Pieman

ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

G. E. Friend, Sydney (label attached verso) Sam Whitney, Sydney John Williams, Sydney, 28 August 2011, lot A28 Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

RELATED WORKS

PROVENANCE

Supreme Court and St James Church, from Elizabeth Street, 1842, watercolour, 25.0 x 33.5 cm, Mitchell and Dixson Collections, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Hyde Park, St James Parsonage Dispensary, afterwards the Mint, and Emigration Barracks , 1842, watercolour, 26.0 x 34.5 cm, Mitchell and Dixson Collections, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Hyde Park, St Mary’s Cathedral and Belfry, 1842, watercolour, 26.5 x 34.5 cm, Mitchell and Dixson Collections, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Hyde Park, windmills, Woolloomooloo, Darlinghurst Gaol, Museum, Sir E. Deas Thomson’s house , 1842, watercolour, 26.0 x 33.0 cm, Mitchell and Dixson Collections, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Hyde Park, Museum, Darlinghurst Gaol, Sydney Grammar School, Burdekin’s and Lyons’ Terraces , 1842, watercolour, 26.0 x 34.0 cm, Mitchell and Dixson Collections, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Junction of Elizabeth & Liverpool Sts, Hyde Park, Burdekin’s Terrace, Lyons’ Terrace, outlet of Busby’s Bore , 1842, watercolour, 26.0 x 34.5 cm, Mitchell and Dixson Collections, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

The Royal Australian Historical Society, Sydney

Rae was also an enthusiastic participant in Sydney’s burgeoning cultural scene. He helped organise the first exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in 1847; painted; published; acquired art and a notable library; and was a popular lecturer at the Mechanics’ School of Arts, speaking on topics ranging from poetry to photography.1

The principles of the camera obscura, by which a scene can be projected onto a surface through a pin-hole or lens, had been known for centuries and was employed by many artists as sketching guides. Rae used these projections as the basis for accurately rendered, multisheet watercolour panoramas of numerous locations in Sydney as well as Newcastle, Wollongong and pastoral vistas. Many of these watercolours are held in the State Library of New South Wales collection, including the sheets that make up his view of Hyde Park from Elizabeth Street, capturing Sydney-siders riding, promenading and playing multiple

This76 180-degree panorama of the open expanse of Sydney’s Hyde Park in the 1840s is unrecognisable to those familiar with the deeply shaded, tree-lined park we know today. It is a rare example of evolving technologies of visual reproduction used in the nineteenth century, by a man who was influential in the growth of Sydney over six transformative decades. Born and educated in Aberdeen, John Rae arrived in New South Wales in 1839 and was appointed by the newly formed Municipal Council as the city’s first full-time town clerk in 1843. From then until his retirement in 1893, he was actively involved in the shaping of the city, holding prominent public service positions.

John Rae , c.1884 in Sydney illustrated by J.S. Prout; with letterpress description by J. Rae. State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

He was well versed in this latter topic, using a home-made portable camera obscura from the 1840s, and practicing as an early proponent of photography from the 1850s. He even built a camera obscura on the roof of his house, Hilton, in Darlinghurst, as was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, which published lengthy accounts of his lectures on this new technology in 1855. 2

2. ‘Photography. Being some extracts from a lecture delivered by John Rae’, The Sydney Morning Herald , 14 September 1855, p. 8, and ‘School of Arts’ [Mr Rae’s second lecture], The Sydney Morning Herald , 20 September 1855, p. 2

3. DG V*/Sp Coll/Rae/1, DG SV*/Sp Coll/Rae/16-20, State Library of New South Wales

ALISA BUNBURY

77 cricket matches. 3 Although the watercolours are dated 1842, some of the buildings depicted were not constructed until later in that decade and it seems likely that Rae signed them retrospectively.4 This tallies with the knowledge that he returned to his earlier art in the 1880s and 1890s, exhibiting in the Calcutta International Exhibition (1883) and again, at the Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition (1888 – 89).

John Rae

1. The Mechanics’ School of Arts was the forerunner to the Sydney Technical College, now part of TAFE New South Wales.

1900, an appreciative obituary noted that ‘many interesting relics of Old Sydney have been preserved from forgetfulness by Mr Rae’s brush and pencil.’7

Newcastle in 1849, 1849

Around 1893 a selection of Rae’s early watercolours were photographed and published in album format; he also hand-coloured a number of these photographs. Such is the case here: six photographs of the Hyde Park set have been carefully aligned and pasted together, overpainted with watercolour such that the underlying photograph can barely be seen. Buildings have been carefully labelled and the central inscription notes that they were ‘drawn with camera’ by Rae. 5 Further examples of these hand-coloured photographs are held in the City of Sydney art collection, in a set gifted by the artist to a friend.6 Upon his death in

7. The Sydney Morning Herald , 17 July 1900, p. 4

6. Margaret Betteridge, Sydney Town Hall: The Building and its Collection , Council of the City of Sydney, 2nd edition, Sydney, 2016, pp. 138 – 39

4. For example, the roof of the Australian Museum was not started until 1849.

5. The Australian Museum did not open until 1857, the same year that Sydney Grammar took over the buildings of Sydney College.

6 watercolour panels mounted onto linen State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

ESTIMATE: $100,000 – 150,000

Private collection, United Kingdom

The Argus, Melbourne, 31 July 1876, p. 4 Gray, J., Louis Buvelot: his life and work, Masters Research thesis [unpublished], VCA – School of Art, The University of Melbourne, 1977, ‘Miss Ellen Frey’s list of works [alphabetical, by title] and owners, 1904’, vol. 2, cat. 6 (as ‘Bacchus Marsh Pasture, Hon J Macpherson’)

Thence by descent

signed and dated lower left: Ls Buvelot. 1876 bears inscription on frame verso: L Buvelot. N1 framer’s label attached verso: Isaac Whitehead Carver & Gilder

PROVENANCE

Hon. J. A. MacPherson, Victoria, acquired directly from the artist in 1876

17LOUIS BUVELOT (1814 – 1888)

BACCHUS MARSH PASTURE, 1876 oil on canvas 58.0 x 86.5 cm

LITERATURE

Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2021

Buvelot first visited and began sketching the w aterways, floodplains, cleared paddocks and forested hills around the small township of Bacchus Marsh, set between the Lerderderg and Werribee rivers, in autumn 1876. Although he did not paint en plein air, th e numerous pencil sketches he drew – helpfully dated and titled – were the source for several oil paintings completed later that year in his Fitzroy studio. These included two views of Goodman’s Creek (Art Gallery of New South Wales, University of Melbourne) and a watercolour of the nearby Pentland Hills (Art Gallery of New South Wales), which was translated into a chromolithograph gifted to subscribers to the Art Union of Victoria.4 Buvelot was also painting to commission: one scene of Bacchus Marsh was produced for local art collector Thomas Welton

Buvelot has just completed for the Chief Secretary, an oil painting representing a quiet landscape at Bacchus Marsh. The features of the landscape are very simple, and but for the two white gum trees, which occupy a prominent position in the foreground, the scene might be mistaken for an English one. An amphitheatre of low wooded, and softly rounded hills encloses a verdant arena, in which a rich crop of thistles bears a not indistinct resemblance to a field of standing corn. A waterhole set in a green framework of scrub, lights up the picture pleasantly, and reflects the sheen of the summer sky, and while the tone of the picture is bright and sunny, the sentiment it breathes is one of perfect repose.’1

by Buvelot had been acquired for the newly formed National Gallery of Victoria. Although von Guérard was appointed painting master for the Gallery School over Buvelot, it was Buvelot’s more fluid approach that had the greater impact among his contemporaries and successors. Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts came to regard him as ‘the father of Australian landscape painting’, McCubbin stating that ‘there was no one before him to point out the way; he possessed, therefore in himself the genius to ca tch and understand the salient living features of this country’. 3

‘M.80

Within a few years of his arrival in Melbourne in 1865, aged fifty-one, Swiss-born Louis Buvelot was the most admired landscape artist working in the colony of Victoria, superseding his predecessor Eugene von Guérard, the elder by four years. In contrast to von Gu é rard’s carefully rendered (or to some, ‘laborious’) depictions of pastoral properties and awe-inspiring remote scenery, Buvelot was praised for being ‘disdainful of tedious detail… With the dry bed of a creek, some ragged scrub, a patch of verdure, and the rugged stem of an old gum tree he succeeds in constructing a picture which you can return to again and again with pleasure’. 2 By 1870, three substantial landscapes

Hon. J. A. MacPherson, Chief Secretary, from the photograph by Batchelder, 1869 wood engraving State Library of Victoria, Melbourne

2. ‘The Exhibition of the Victorian Academy of Arts’, The Argus, Melbourne, 1 December 1870, p. 7 The von Guérard quote above is also from this review.

9. One of the Gallery’s rooms (now State Library Victoria) was named the Buvelot Gallery.

5. ‘News of the day’, The Age , Melbourne, 18 May 1876, p.3. Stanford is briefly discussed in Gerard Vaughan’s ‘Art collectors in colonial Victoria 1854 – 1892: An analysis of taste and patronage’, University of Melbourne, BA Hon. thesis, 1976, pp. 16, 44 – 45. MacPherson is not mentioned.

ALISA BUNBURY

1. The Argus , Melbourne, 31 July 1876, p. 4

Louis Buvelot Goodman’s Creek, Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, 1876 oil on canvas 48.9 x 71.1 cm Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

7. The Argus , Melbourne, 24 July 1876, p. 5

3. McCubbin cited in The Art of Frederick McCubbin , The Lothian Book Publishing Co., Melbourne, 1916, p. 85.

Stanford, praised by a reviewer as ‘a perfect gem… the best work that has yet emanated from M. Buvelot’s studio’. 5 Two months later, Bacchus Marsh pasture , 1876 was similarly praised in the media, painted on commission for John Alexander MacPherson.6

Not enough is yet known about MacPherson as a collector. Born into a pastoral family, and trained as a lawyer, he was elected to the Victorian Parliament in 1864, serving briefly as the seventh Premier of the colony (September 1869 – April 1870). Notably it was during these months that the new Public Library, Museums and National Gallery of Victoria Act was passed and MacPherson and several of his ministers were appointed trustees, a position he held until 1880. As discussed in lot 14 , he was known to be acquiring art as early as 1870, and in 1876, while serving as Chief Secretary, MacPherson commissioned at least two paintings: a dramatic mountainous Gippsland view from von Guérard (now Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth)7, and this, a distinct contrast in its tranquillity and benign rusticity, the young woman tending the cows akin to a peasant in Dutch landscapes of the seventeenth century. Bacchus Marsh pasture remained with MacPherson’s descendants until recently. It is housed in its original gilt frame, demonstrating the best-known style of the pre-eminent Melb ourne fr ame maker Isaac Whitehead. 8

4. Summer evening in the Pentland Hills , 1876, chromolithograph, various collections.

6. Miss Frey, executor of Madame Buvelot’s estate, titled Stanford’s painting Bacchus Marsh, stream and this Bacchus Marsh, pasture, in her list L’oeuvre australienne de Louis Buvelot de Morge , 1905. See Jocelyn Gray, ‘Louis Buvelot: his life and work’, Victoria College of the Arts (University of Melbourne) MA thesis, 1977, vol. 2, n.p.

Buvelot’s declining eyesight prevented him from painting in his last years. He died in May 1888 and was buried in Kew Cemetery: a publicly funded monument was later erected. Only two months after his death, the National Gallery of Victoria held a commemorative retrospective, the first such exhibition of an ‘Australian’ artist.9 Few recall his early, successful career in Brazil (1835 – 52), almost equal in years to his working career in Australia but without the posthumous and continuing praise and recognition.

8. Holly McGowan-Jackson and Jessica Lehmann, ‘Framers in focus: Isaac Whitehead’, 26 July 2021, see: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/framers-in-focus-isaac-whitehead

King William Street , 1882 – 85 from the album Sweet, Lindt and Frith photographer: attributed to Samuel Sweet albumen-silver photograph Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

JACQUES CARABAIN (1834 – 1933, Dutch/Belgian)

5. While Carabain was typically very accurate, the two buildings painted beside the bank do not correspond to the buildings recorded in photographs.

Described as the ‘Canaletto of colonial thoroughfares’, Jacques François Carabain is one of the cohort of European artists who spent time in ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ in the later nineteenth century.1 Born and trained in Amsterdam, he travelled widely throughout Europe, honing his ability as a painter of brightly lit, romantic-realistic views of cityscapes and historic buildings. In 1880 he became a Belgian citizen. Carabain’s biography in Australia is less clear, with his earliest known painting of an Australian landscape – of the river port of the Yarra – dated 1879 (ANZ Collection). However there is no other evidence that he had arrived by that date – indeed newspaper articles of 1885 describe Carabain as a recent arrival, setting up a studio in Collins Street east (the artists’ end) and exhibiting with the Victorian Academy of Arts in March of that year. 2 Although offering portraiture ‘as the most immediately remunerative’ art form, landscapes were clearly his passion, and a local reviewer praised them as ‘notable for a certain sunny quality, for the accuracy of their local colour, and for the realism of their treatment.’3

This view of Adelaide is one of a number of impressive antipodean streetscapes by Carabain: of Collins and of Swanston streets in Melbourne (State Library of Victoria); King and George streets in Sydney (National Library of Australia); and of Queen Street in Auckland, a highlight painting in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. In this Adelaide view, Carabain shows King William Street from the corner of Currie Street, looking north to the belltowers of the Adelaide Town Hall (left) and the General Post Office (right). The imposing edifice that dominates the scene is the Bank of Adelaide, built in 1880 – 01 with dramatic two-tone stonework, not apparent in this rendition. While the painting is dated 1907, it is evident that Carabain based his view upon an earlier photograph, a practice he is known to

probably: sold at auction, Antwerp, May 1968 (as ‘View of Adelaide’) Private Christie’s,collectionLondon, 18 March 1969, lot 113 (as ‘Looking South along King William Street, Adelaide’) Corporate collection, Melbourne Corporate collection, Sydney

PROVENANCE

1. Roger Blackley, The Guide, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2001, see: aucklandartgallery.com/explore-art-and-ideas/artwork/6706/queen-street-aucklandwww.

have employed.4 The small two-storey building beside the bank, for example, was replaced in 1898 with the ornate National Mutual Life Association building that remains today. 5 Noticeably, when compared with photographs from the 1880s and ‘90s, Carabain has made the aesthetic decision to omit the large, insulator-laden telegraph poles that marched along the major roads, and their multitude of taut wires that bisected the sky (conversely, he did include them in his views of Collins and Queen streets). 6 Tom Roberts made a similar excision, avoiding the wires in his famous impressionist painting, Allegro con brio, Bourke St West c.1885–86 (National Gallery of Australia). Carabain also only hints at the horse-drawn trams that ran along King William Street. By doing so, he conveys a calm, prosperous and orderly city, its occupants enjoying the morning sun.

4. Queen Street, Auckland was based upon a photograph by George Valentine. It is not confirmed whether Carabain personally visited New Zealand. Similarly, the 1879 painting of the Yarra is likely to have been based on a photograph.

KING WILLIAM STREET, ADELAIDE, 1907 oil on canvas 95.0 x 125.0 cm signed and dated lower left: Jacqs - Carabain / 1907 signed and inscribed on artist’s label verso: The Main Road a Adelaide Western Australia/ original / Jacques / Carabain

2. ‘The Victorian Academy of Arts’, The Argus, Melbourne, 28 March 1885, p. 13. Similarly, it is not confirmed when he left Australia, with 1889 often cited.

6. Collins St, Melbourne, 1889, oil on canvas, 125.0 x 95.0 cm, sold Christies, Melbourne, 26 November 1996, lot 144

Fish, P., ‘Wild scenes at glimpse of what’s on offer’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 23 August 2008, p. 64 (illus.)

ALISA BUNBURY

ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

3. ‘Art notes’, The Argus, Melbourne, 27 April 1885, p. 6

LITERATURE

‘Mr Streeton’s Pictures’, The Argus, Melbourne, 6 July 1921, p. 13 Colquhoun, A., ‘Arthur Streeton’s Art’, The Herald, Melbourne, 6 July 1921, p. 9

ARTHUR STREETON (1867 – 1943)

EXHIBITED

Recent Australian Landscape by Arthur Streeton, Education Department, Sydney, 21 – 28 November 1921, cat. 2

LITERATURE

Mr Norman Bayles, Melbourne Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 2 November 1983, lot 40 (as ‘Rain Burst over the Dandenongs’) Lister Gallery, Perth Company Collection, Perth Sotheby’s, Sydney, 8 May 2012, lot 33 Private collection, Melbourne Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 6 May 2015, lot 43 Private collection, Melbourne

Arthur Streeton, Victorian Artists’ Society Galleries, Melbourne, 5 – 6 July 1921

‘Arthur Streeton. A Farewell Exhibition’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 22 November 1921, p. 11 Streeton, A., The Arthur Streeton Catalogue , Melbourne, 1935, cat. 731 (as ‘Melbourne, from Sassafras’, 1920)

MELBOURNE FROM SASSAFRAS, 1921 oil on canvas 64.0 x 101.0 cm signed lower right: A STREETON ESTIMATE: $120,000 – 160,000

PROVENANCE

‘Art Notes. Paintings by Mr A. Streeton’, The Age, Melbourne, 6 July 1921, p. 11

seen as symbols of Australian life and land, and today, Streeton is still widely acknowledged as the creator of quintessentially national images. His status as one of the country’s most celebrated painters was marked in 1931 with a retrospective exhibition at the National Art Gallery of New South Wales. Displaying more than 170 works of art, it was at the time, the largest such exhibition ever presented by that institution. 2 Writing that same year, 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’. 3 While many works of this time reflect Streeton’s familiarity with the region and his 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.

The valley from Olinda top, ‘Let the Rose glow intense and warm the air’ – Keats , 1925 oil on canvas

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

After86

Arthur Streeton

living in London for more than a decade, Arthur Streeton returned to Australia with his wife and young son for an extended visit 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 weekends up there… working at the bramble and bracken… and planting no end of trees… blackwoods… Lambertiana Cypress… Acacia Elata ’.1

Located close to the highest peak of Mount Dandenong and just a short distance from Olinda, the township of Sassafras is named after a native evergreen tree which grows in the area’s cool temperate conditions. Streeton painted there on several occasions during 1921, and in Melbourne from Sassafras, 1921, he presents a monumental panoramic view. From a high vantage point, the scene looks out across densely

63.8 × 101.6 cm

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

4. Ibid.

2. Tunnicliffe, W., ‘The Big Picture: National Landscapes’ in Tunnicliffe, W. (ed.), Streeton, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2020, p.265

5. Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 22 November 1921, p. 11 GRANT

3. 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

KIRSTY

drew appreciative comment from contemporary critics, one of whom wrote that ‘the Victorian metropolis is… little more than suggested, [but] the interest [arises] from the poetry of the treatment… Melbourne from Sassafras , affords a nearer glimpse [of the city], but the interest is chiefly due to the clever handling of the sky from which showers of rain over the level field break the light. The technical difficulty of suggesting the myriad of trees massed on the rising steep in the foreground has been overcome with a sombre effect which contrasts with the animation of the scene below.’5

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

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

Streeton’s mastery is on full display here, the foreground hills resembling a patchwork of deep shadow contrasting with illuminated areas, the white trunks of tall trees glistening in the light. The cloudy, pale blue sky is marked by soft vertical brushstrokes which describe a shower of rain just right of centre, and highlight Streeton’s direct observation of the subject. Exhibited both in Melbourne and Sydne y in 1921, the painting

treed hills in the foreground, opening up to a broad expanse of flat, parti ally cleared land that extends towards the distant city beyond. From his earliest painted impressions, such as those included in the famous 9x5 Impression Exhibition in 1889, to images of Sydney Harbour and classic ‘blue and gold’ pastoral landscapes, Streeton’s ability to convincingly depict light and atmosphere was a distinctive skill often commented upon by critics: ‘It all appears to be so simple – a daub of paint here and another of different colour there… A master of his medium, he gives us everything else… The great thing is the lasting impression of a landscape filled with light’.4

ESTIMATE: $200,000 – 300,000

Mr. Streeton’s Exhibition of Paintings of the Grampian Mountains , Athenaeum Hall, Melbourne, 1 – 6 November 1920, cat. 7 (as ‘Boronia Peak and Stawell’)

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired via private auction, c.1936 Thence by descent

LITERATURE

PROVENANCE

W. Schmidt, by 1935

Colquhoun, A., ‘Arthur Streeton’s Art Pictures Exhibited’, The Herald, Melbourne, 1 November 1920, p. 8 (as ‘Boronia Peaks’) Streeton, A., The Arthur Streeton Catalogue , Melbourne, 1935, cat. 743 (dated 1921, as ‘Boronia Peak’)

ARTHUR STREETON (1867 – 1943)

Private collection, Melbourne

signed lower right: A. STREETON bears inscription on stretcher bar verso: Stawell from Boronia Peak / The Grampians / Victoria / 7

BORONIA PEAK AND STAWELL, 1920 oil on canvas 51.5 x 76.5 cm

EXHIBITED

Streeton and his family sailed from London in late 1919, arriving in Melbourne in February the following year. Renting a house in Murphy Street, South Yarra and a city studio in Bourke Street, he presented a solo exhibition at the Victorian Artists’ Society Galleries in March, before spending several months in Sydney. A second Melbourne exhibition in November featured new paintings – including Boronia Peak and Stawell , 1920 – which Streeton had made on recent painting trips to the Grampians and the Dandenong Ranges. Archibald Colquhoun announced it in the Herald, writing: ‘At the Athenaeum Hall, Collins street today, Mr Arthur Streeton opened with a private view of an exhibition of about 20 paintings, chiefly depicting the sunlit peaks and melting distances of the Grampians district and the picturesque country in the vicinity of Sherbrooke.’1 He went on to note that Streeton’s ‘subject matter, particularly in the Grampians pictures, is scenic, in a typically Australian way, and there is evidence throughout… of an artistic sincerity of purpose, and a close and unbiassed observation of the changing effects in nature.’ 2

Celebrated as one of Australia’s most distinguished painters, Streeton was renowned for his depictions of the Australian landscape, and by the mid-1920s, had established a reputation as ‘the pre-eminent creator of

Arthur90

national images’. 3 In the aftermath of the First World War in particular, the Australian pastoral landscape assumed new and potent meaning, symbolising a peaceful and prosperous future, as well as contributing to the expression of a burgeoning national identity. As Mary Eagle notes, Streeton’s first paintings in that genre were created around Heidelberg in the late 1880s, 3 and the best known of them, Golden Summer, Eaglemont, 1889 (National Gallery of Australia) – rolling grassy plains, gum trees and grazing sheep, together underneath a brilliant blue sky – combines all of the elements that characterise his now iconic ‘blue and gold’ landscapes.

While most lauded Streeton and his art during these years, some were critical of what they perceived to be an overly commercial attitude which included regular, well-promoted exhibitions and a business-like approach to sales. Similarly, a skilful technique and great facility with his medium was seen by some as a mark of insincerity, the sign of an artist who was resting on his laurels rather than pushing into new creative territory. The balance of judgement ultimately fell in Streeton’s favour however, with contemporary works that reflected the skill honed over the course of a long and productive career continuing to be acquired during these decades for major public collections including the National

Arthur Streeton Blue Vista from the Sundial, 1920 oil on canvas 64.0 x 102.5 cm Private collection

3. Eagle, M., The Oil Paintings of Arthur Streeton in the NGA , National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, p. 161

us through the scene, from the buildings and road in the lower right seemingly spot-lit through a break in the clouds, to the rocky outcrop in the upper left of the scene and finally, the lake in the upper right which reflects the delicate blue of the springtime sky. Distinctively of its time and place, this painting reminds us why Lionel Lindsay, writing a decade later, enthusiastically and presciently claimed that ‘The importance of Arthur Streeton to Australian Art cannot be overstated. He is great, as Melba was great, a product of the soil and sun of this wide land. In fifty years’ time… every art institution in this country will have its Streeton gallery when a greater recognition of his genius has been pronounced by time.’4

Mr Streeton’s exhibition of paintings of the Grampian Mountains , Athenaeum Hall, Melbourne, exhibition catalogue cover, 1920 Douglas Stewart Fine Books, Melbourne

Boronia Peak and Stawell emerged from Streeton’s first visit to the Grampians – or Gariwerd to its traditional owners – in the Western District of Victoria. In the Spring of 1920 he stayed at Harry Armytage’s farm at Dunkeld, in the shadow of Mount Sturgeon, and was clearly captivated by the pictorial potential of the area, returning again the following winter. Visiting once again in 1926, he stayed further afield at Willaura, where he began the Land of the Golden Fleece paintings in which the dramatic form of the Grampians rises up in the background, framing the pastoral scene below. In this work, Streeton’s vantage point takes us high up into the mountains, looking across an expanse of flat, open ground to a majestic mountain range that fills the picture plane, and into the landscape beyond. His brushwork is confident and varied, fine lines defining the white trunks of the trees in the foreground and much broader strokes, only slightly variegated in colour, describing the rugged, facetted forms of the mountain. He skilfully uses light to guide

1. Colquhoun, A., ‘Arthur Streeton’s Art’, The Herald, Melbourne, 1 November 1920, p. 8 2. Ibid.

4. Lindsay, L., ‘Streeton’s loan exhibition’, Art in Australia, third series, no. 42, 15 February 1932, p. 9

KIRSTY GRANT

Arthur Streeton, Mount Rosea, Grampians , 1920 oil on canvas 63.5 x 76.0 cm Private collection

91 Gallery of Victoria, the National Gallery of New South Wales and the Art Gallery of Western Australia. In 1931, he was honoured with a major retrospective at the National Gallery of New South Wales, and additional acknowledgement of his career and contribution came six years later in the form of a knighthood for services to art.

PROVENANCE

Private Christie’s,collectionMelbourne, 24 November 1999, lot 6

2. Anne Gray cited in Perkin, C., ‘Such Dreams of Colour’, Weekend Australian, 8 – 9 August 2009, p. 4

Having just returned from his first and only trip to England and the Continent, McCubbin’s practice was characterised by a lighter palette and a much looser application of paint, reflecting the liberating, painterly influence of his artistic mentor Romanticist J. M. W. Turner, as well as Corot, Monet and his English contemporary, George Clausen. That influence can be seen in these wonderfully atmospheric paintings such as the present Kensington Road, South Yarra, c.1908 which, each in their different ways dazzlingly colourful masterpieces, capture the

ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

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.

FREDERICK M c CUBBIN (1855 – 1917)

1. McCubbin to Roberts, December 1907, Letters to Tom Roberts, vol. II, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Frederick McCubbin’s move with his family to the rented property ‘Carlesberg’ in Kensington Road, South Yarra at the end of 1907 introduced some of the happiest and richest years in his art. Many of his finest paintings belong to this time – Winter Sunlight, 1908, in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Moonrise, 1909 in the National Gallery of Victoria, and Golden Sunlight, 1914, gifted to the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum by Dame Nellie Melba, being among the best.

signed lower right: F McCubbin letter of authenticity attached verso, signed by Louis McCubbin, dated 1 March 1946

KENSINGTON ROAD, SOUTH YARRA, c .1908

oil on canvas on board 25.5 x 35.5 cm

feelings he expressed in a letter to his old friend Tom Roberts: ‘This is the loveliest place I have ever lived in. A charming old colonial house’ perched right over the Yarra with three acres of garden and trees... The winding stream, gums, osiers and wattle; interspersed. The night effects; sunrise, moonrise, we can see every way.’1 The old garden led to a paddock, which ran down to the Misses Armytage’s Como estate. The views over the Yarra were spectacular, whether towards Richmond as in The Coming of Spring, 1912, or the even more panoramic Flood Waters (also known as Rainbow over the Yarra), 1913 – both in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. A rainbow sometimes appeared in these later South Yarra views, a phenomenon of beauty and a metaphor of harmony. They had their genesis in numerous smaller sketches, spontaneous responses captured with a breadth of technique that gives them their special feeling of freedom and atmospheric delight.

Although McCubbin is principally known for large scale paintings which depict subjects drawn from Australian pioneering life, he considered his smaller, later works a significant aspect of his art. As Anne Gray, Curator of the National Gallery of Australia’s exhibition McCubbin: Last Impressions elaborates, ‘McCubbin’s art was most remarkable during his final years. The late McCubbin is one of the top 10 artists in Australia. His daring, his experimental painterliness, and his ability to capture the Australian landscape produced some incredible work.’ 2

Private collection, Sydney

Named after his maternal grandfather, Caleb Williamson, he made his appearance in his father’s art shortly after his birth on 31 January 1898, in a series of pencil sketches, including some gently intimate moments with his mother. 2 Roberts also drew a separate pencil study of a big-eyed baby; a pastel of a less happy moment; and a full pastel portrait. In the same vein as the latter pastel, the present Portrait of Caleb Roberts , c.1899 similarly captures that characteristic directness of gaze of the young, combined with that special look that belongs to a new life, so innocent and appealing. By 1905, when Caleb – or ‘Ca’ as he was called – would have been seven years old, Roberts painted his

With all the attention paid to the big subject pictures of Tom Roberts, there is a tendency to overlook the fact that he was a very good painter of portraits. Roberts painted fellow artists and musicians, charming ladies, the very highly placed, and some engaging images of his wife and son. In the Opening of the First Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1901 – 03, he portrayed the whole galaxy of Australian political talent. During the early 1900s, Roberts’ chief source of income came from painting portraits. Furthermore, artists often used members of their families as models, including Roberts’ life-long friend, Frederick McCubbin, who also frequently used his wife and children in his subject and landscape paintings. Soon after another oil portrait of Caleb in 1905, Roberts made a plaster relief of his wife, Lillie, followed by the oil painting of c.1906 in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia. In between, he completed the large and formal portrait of Rt. Hon. Marquis Linlithgow, c.1905, now in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia. His last portrait of Caleb was another plaster cast of about 1907. A posthumous bronze cast of this sculpture is housed in the collection of Monash University, Melbourne.

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.

PORTRAIT OF CALEB ROBERTS, c .1898 oil on canvas 42.0 x 33.5 cm

RELATED WORK

Caleb Roberts , c.1898, pastel on paper, 53.5 x 39.5 cm, private collection, in Topliss, H., Tom Roberts 1856 1931: A Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, vol. 1, pp. 155 – 156, cat. 302, vol. 2, pl. 135 (illus.)

PROVENANCE

signed lower right: Tom Roberts

Writing from London to his close friend, S.W. Pring, sometime honorary secretary of the Society of Arts, Sydney, Tom Roberts included a pen sketch of himself at his easel painting this portrait of his only son, Caleb (1898 – 1965).1

son again, this time as a young schoolboy, whose face is still dominated by his eyes and direct look, a childhood innocence now touched by experience. While self-portraits provide fascinating insights into the personalities of the artists who paint themselves, those of artists’ children are invariably touching in their own intimacy. And so, it is with Portrait of Caleb Roberts , c.1899, for Roberts was particularly gifted at portraying children and young people – his pastel Elizabeth and Carmen Pinschoff, 1900 (National Gallery of Victoria) being among his very best.

Private collection, Sydney Lawsons, Sydney, 15 November 1994, lot 154 Private collection, Sydney

ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

1. This pen sketch is illustrated in Topliss, H., Tom Roberts, 1856 – 1931: A Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, 2 vols; see vol. I, p. 61, pl. 72 2 Ibid., p. 246, sketchbook X

22TOM ROBERTS (1856 – 1931)

Salon d’Automne , Grand Palais des Champs– Élysées , Paris, 1 October – 8 November 1910, cat. 183 (as ‘Bacchanale’)

BACCHANALE (BACCHANAL), c .1910 oil on canvas on composition board 113.0 x 149.5 cm signed lower left: Rupert C W Bunny

The

William Frater, Melbourne

Exhibition of Paintings by Rupert Bunny, Athenaeum Art Gallery, Melbourne, 4 – 15 July 1933, cat. 2 (as ‘Bacchanal’)

fauvist contemporary, Bunny too was profoundly influenced by the audacity, colour and raw energy of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes who had sacked the bastille of Parisian sensibilities the previous year with their scandalous performances of Prince Igor and Cleopatra combining outrageous choreography with exotic tales of sex and violence.1 A daring and then-unprecedented foray into modernism by an Australian artist, indeed Bacchanale may well have been one of the works that prompted fellow expatriate artist, Phillips Fox, to describe Bunny in 1911 as ‘…a little bitten by the post-impressionists.’ 2 As elaborated by David Thomas in his comprehensive catalogue raisonné of the artist, the bold ‘…flatness of the picture plane and occasional awkwardness in the profiling of the foreground figures’ in Bacchanale further augmented its modern, ‘mural-like effect.’3 Set in the south of France where Bunny was to spend so much time during the coming decades, ‘…the striking play of light and flickering highlights add to the visual excitement. The whorl of figures, of lovers or those exhausted by their pleasures, centres on Silenus, greedily drinking from a flask of wine. In the distant centre, a group dances with Bacchic exuberance, while on the hill slope to the left, centaurs gallop in pursuit of a luckless nymph into the forest. The painting expresses the frenzied pleasure and intoxicated chaos that is part of the Bacchic rite, celebrated in honour of Bacchus, god of wine.’4

PROVENANCE

Thomas, D., The Life and Art of Rupert Bunny, A Catalogue Raisonné in Two Volumes , Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2017, volume 1: pp. 158, 159, 160 (illus.); volume 2: cat. O333, p. 47

Interestingly, Bacchanale was originally gifted by Bunny to fellow artist Jock Frater with whom he shared a close friendship in Melbourne from the 1920s onwards. Both participated in group exhibitions with the Twenty Melbourne Painters from 1927; the Contemporary Art Group from 1931; Contemporary Art Society 1939; and the Victorian Artists Society, and also enjoyed regular social catch ups together at Café Francois, and later Mario’s in the 1930s, as well as Bunny’s South Yarra flat. Several years later, Frater subsequently gifted the work to Bill Harding, a student whom he mentored from the 1950s until Frater’s death in 1974 through weekly painting sessions at Lucerne Cres, Alphington, Bill’s studio in Templestowe, or en plein air in favourite localities.

158, volume 2: cat. O333, p. 47 2. Fox, letter to Hans Heysen, 13 September 1911 3. Thomas, op.cit. 4. VERONICAIbid. ANGELATOS

One of the most internationally successful Australian artists of his generation, Rupert Bunny was born in Melbourne and first trained at the National Gallery School, before settling permanently in Paris during the early 1890s where la belle époque was at its height. By 1904, he had become the first Australian artist to receive an honourable mention in the Société des Artistes Francais; was elected a sociétaire of various French exhibiting institutions; and enjoyed the prestige of being the only Antipodean artist until then to have his work acquired by the French State, with Après le bain , c.1904 bought from the New Salon for the Musée de Luxembourg (now the Musée d’Orsay).

LITERATURE

Bill Harding, Melbourne, a gift from the above Thence by decent Private collection, Melbourne

ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 90,000

23RUPERT BUNNY (1864 – 1947)

L’Art et les Artistes , Paris, November 1910, p. 81 ‘Art Notes: The Art of Rupert Bunny’, The Age , Melbourne, 4 July 1933, p. 12

1. Thomas, D., Life and Art of Rupert Bunny, Catalogue Raisonné in Two Volumes Thames Hudson, Melbourne, 2017, volume 1, p.

First exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in October 1910 alongside such radical works as Matisse’s iconic La Danse , 1910, now in The Hermitage, St Petersburg , Bacchanale (Bacchanal), c.1910 heralded a significant new chapter in Bunny’s oeuvre that featured vibrant mythological paintings conceived in the academic figure tradition, yet ground-breaking in their bold palette and pulsating rhythms. Like his

EXHIBITED

Private collection, Sydney

Until the early 1920s, Gruner had painted in the Barbizon-informed plein air manner championed by his teacher and then employer, Julian Ashton, for whom the young man was one of his favoured protégés.

ANDREW GAYNOR

Mitchell River, Victoria is one of four known works from this Gippsland journey, with the others being Lakes Entrance , last exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1940; Bairnsdale, Victoria, not seen publicly since its sale at auction in 1974; and Valley near Bairnsdale , 1930, sold through Deutscher and Hackett in November 2021. Mitchell River, Victoria was also reproduced in colour in Art in Australia (as ‘Gippsland Lakes’) in an edition devoted to Gruner’s work in 1933. The magazine was a solid supporter of the artist throughout his career and had similarly featured his paintings in an earlier volume in 1929. Mitchell River, Victoria has been owned by two distinguished collectors, Dr. Walter Pye, who donated his family’s Darling Point mansion ‘Lindesay’ to the National Trust in 1963; and his close friend Sir James Fairfax AC. The latter was forthright in his appreciation of Mitchell River, Victoria, and on Pye’s death, Fairfax purchased the painting, referring to it thereafter as ‘Walter’s Gruner.’

ELIOTH GRUNER (1882 – 1939)

We are grateful to the East Gippsland Historical Society; and Steven Miller, Head of the Edmund and Joanna Capon Research Library and Archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales, for their assistance with this catalogue entry.

LITERATURE

Tildesley, B., ‘The Gruner Exhibition at the National Art Gallery’, Sydney Mail, Sydney, 28 December 1932, p. 17 Elioth Gruner’s Oil Paintings, special issue of Art in Australia Sydney, 3rd series, no. 50, 15 June 1933, p.25 (illus., as ‘Gippsland Lakes’) Dobson, R., Australia Land of Colour, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1962, p. 12 (illus., as ‘Gippsland Lakes, Victoria’)

Gruner’s paintings of farmers and cattle in the frosty early morning wer e immensely popular and had already earned him three Wynne Prize awards between 1916 and 1921 (he went on to win another four by 1937). These earlier works were also distinguished by an almost impressionistic use of paint application and texture. He travelled to London in 1923 where he encountered the British artist Sir William Orpen, who openly criticised his work, advising Gruner to use a thinner, more pastel-like application of paint. Orpen also suggested that he place an increased emphasis on structure, pattern and rhythm of forms in the landscape, much in the manner of English modernist painters who also favoured painting such scenery from a high vantage point. Over the next years, Gruner concentrated on these ideas with increasing success and Mitchell River, Victoria shows his mature absorption of such strategies. It is also important to note that whilst other artists would have focussed on the unusual sequence of the silt jetties, Gruner instead recognised the stronger design inherent in the cropped aspect he chose here. In a review of similar paintings from 1930, one newspaper critic proclaimed Gruner’s ‘eloquent’ works were ‘of the first rank of landscape painting… [H]e has given us a new outlook on Australian landscape.’1

Walter D. Pye, New South Wales, by 1933 Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 14 August 1989, lot 408 (as ‘The Entrance’) James Fairfax AC, New South Wales

ESTIMATE: $100,000 – 140,000

Loan Exhibition of the Works of Elioth Gruner, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 21 December 1932 – 21 February 1933, cat. 73

PROVENANCE

1. ‘An impression of the Society of Artists’ Annual Exhibition’, Art in Australia, 3rd series, no. 34, October – November 1930, p. 16

In the early months of 1930, Elioth Gruner stood on top of the summit now known as Eagle Point, ten kilometres south of Bairnsdale. Here on the lands of the Gunaikurnai people he painted Mitchell River, Victoria, c.1930 which shows the junction of the river as it flows into Jones Bay through a cutting made by an earlier flood. In the distance are the hills to the north of Bairnsdale whilst in the foreground lie a series of farmlets below the ‘Bluff’ at Eagle Point. To the right, just out of frame, run the unusually long natural phenomena known as the Mitchell River silt jetties. It is a harmonious view of a bucolic land unmistakeably shaped by European hands.

EXHIBITED

MITCHELL RIVER, VICTORIA, c .1930 also known as GIPPSLAND LAKES oil on canvas 65.0 x 79.0 cm signed lower right: GRUNER

Ingram, T., ‘Art Market’, in Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 27, no. 2, Summer 1989, p. 293 (illus., as ‘The Entrance’)

Thence by descent

PROVENANCE

SYDNEY HARBOUR FROM CREMORNE POINT, 1909 – 10 oil on canvas 30.0 x 60.0 cm signed lower right: Sid Long. bears inscription verso: SYDNEY HARBOUR BY SYDNEY LONG / Property of Geoffrey Phillip, 79 Werrington Crescent W9

ANDREW GAYNOR

From its earliest days as a colony, Sydney’s majestic harbour has transfixed artists. William Westall’s paintings from the early 1800s are among the first, and in 1855 Conrad Martens produced a handcoloured lithograph with a view almost identical to this lot. Before colonisation, the land around Cremorne was called Wulwarrajeung

25SYDNEY LONG (1871 – 1955)

ESTIMATE $60,000 – 80,000

Sydney Long is renowned for his pastoral fantasies Spirit of the plains , 1897 and Pan, 1898 – symbolist masterworks that are amongst the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ most popular paintings. As a gifted student under Julian Ashton, Long shared a studio with George Lambert and was engaged for some years to Thea Proctor until she returned the ring and left for London in 1902. He organised an Art Union in 1905 with Pan as the prize to raise money for overseas travel, but his unscrupulous business partner made off with the funds and many of Long’s paintings, forcing the artist to spend some years painting new works to fulfil his unexpected debts. By 1907, he was almost solvent again and began to work towards fulfilling his ambition of reaching London, and it is plausible that Sydney Harbour from Cremorne Point , 1909 – 10, was one of the last works completed before he left in September 1910.

The Rowley Gallery, Kensington Park, London (label attached verso) Geoffrey Phillip, London Sotheby’s, London, 4 November 1987, lot 145 James Fairfax AC, New South Wales Thence by descent Private collection, Belgium

RELATED WORKS

Sydney Harbour view, 1907, oil on cardboard, 32.0 x 40.0 cm, in the collection of the New England Regional Art Museum, New South Wales Harbour view, 1908, pencil, watercolour, Chinese white highlights, 31.5 x 29.5 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

2. Sydney Harbour from Cremorne Point, 1910, watercolour 12” x 9”, Sydney Long, A.R.E.: loan exhibition, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, 9 April – 31 May 1941, cat. 108, ‘lent by H. Cosgrove, Esq.’

by the Indigenous Cammeraygal people, but Martens’ print was titled Sydney from Robertson’s Point , as Cremorne was then known (after James Robertson who was granted land there in 1820). This lithograph is a precisely topographical view which includes the then-levelled rock known as Pinchgut as it appeared before the construction of Fort Denison. The name was changed to Cremorne from 1853 when James Milson purchased the estate and established a pleasure ground based on the renowned Cremorne Gardens in England. Arguably the most famed of the harbour paintings are Arthur Streeton’s panoramas from the 1890s and, more specifically, 1907, emblazoned with his trademark sunshine and blue. By contrast, Sydney Long elicits a less strident response in Sydney Harbour from Cremorne Point, with an almost smoky haze suggestive of mystery and repose.

100

1. Sydney Long, 1926, cited in Grey, A., Sydney Long: spirit of the land, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2012, p. 116

The headland at Cremorne had been declared public land in 1905 after mining interests had tried to dig there for coal in the 1890s, and Long’s painting may also be interpretated as a celebration of the government’s enlightened decision. The view is taken from near the end of the Point, and Fort Denison can be seen to the right, with Lady Macquarie’s Chair behind it. At the centre, the illuminated bay captures Woolloomooloo in the distance; and to the left, Garden Island as it appeared until the Naval Dock was built during World War Two. Long later wrote that ‘I see it always as a mass of different colours blue, green, violet, grey all blended in that indescribable way that makes up what most people call the blue of the Harbour;’1 and in all respects, this description tallies closely to that of Sydney Harbour from Cremorne Point. As it appears never to have been exhibited, the painting may well have been a private commission; and a possible preparatory watercolour sketch was included in a major loan exhibition of Long’s work held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1941. 2

101

2. Elizabeth Colquhoun cited in Peers, J., More than just gumtrees: a personal, social and artistic history of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors, Dawn Revival Press, Melbourne, 1993, p. 197

PROVENANCE

ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

swimming baths dating from the 1840s. By the turn of the century, clusters of bathing boxes were built within the ti-tree scrub by private individuals, or to service the patrons of nearby guesthouses. In Bathing Boxes, Beaumaris , Clarice Beckett turns her gaze to one such group located in the cove of Watkins Bay, at the end of the street where the artist lived. Beckett’s distinctive style is immediately recognisable and, when seen collectively, her paintings provide an unsurpassed record of the changing landscape of the region. By the time Bathing Boxes, Beaumaris was likely painted, bathing huts could be found on all beaches in the area, sometimes two or three deep. The aspect of this work is nearly identical to that of Yachts in the bay, c.1933, a smaller painting in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia; and the Beckett family’s own hut was just outside the frame to the left. The artist’s compositional skill and mastery of colour allows the jumble of huts to be elegantly constrained by the greens of the grass and trees; and the single patch of blue water to the right emphatically anchors the whole design.

3. Clarice Beckett, c.1928, cited in Hollinrake, R, Clarice Beckett: the artist and her circle, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1979, p. 21

Private collection, Melbourne, thence by descent

With her hand-made painting trolley in tow, Beckett would wander the same areas repetitively, always approaching a scene with a different ambition as to the mood she wished to capture. Indeed, when asked why she never felt the desire to travel more widely, she responded ‘I have only just got the hang of painting Beaumaris after all these years, why should I go somewhere else strange to paint?’ 3 From the earliest days of colony, this locale attracted pleasure seekers with the first public

1. The family subsequently lived at ‘St Enoch’s’, Dalgetty St, Beaumaris, from 1919. The house burned down in 1945.

ANDREW GAYNOR

102

Clarice Beckett’s enduring connection to the Bayside region of Port Phillip Bay was forged in early childhood. Although raised in Casterton in regional Victoria, her family often holidayed at Beaumaris, a coastal suburb to the south of the city of Melbourne.1 Beckett’s mother counted the artists Walter Withers and Ola Cohn among her friends and on their advice, she enrolled Clarice (and her sister Hilda) in National Gallery School in 1914, studying under Frederick McCubbin. Inspired later by a lecture by the artist-theorist Max Meldrum, Beckett joined his classes for nine months. Meldrum taught his own theory of ‘optical science’ aka Tonalism, which, as its name implies, revolved around building an image based on tonal values alone. Although she remained within the Meldrumite orbit throughout her subsequent career, Beckett’s paintings were truly a combination of the Gallery School’s academic teaching, Tonalism – and herself. As her colleague Elizabeth Colquhoun noted, her paintings were more ‘fragile’ than Meldrum’s; ‘It was a different kind of thing, but it was very truthful.’ 2

BATHING BOXES, BEAUMARIS, 1928 30 oil on canvas on compressed card 47.0 x 67.0 cm signed lower left: C Beckett bears inscription verso: 29 framer’s label attached verso: John Thallon, Melbourne

Private collection, Melbourne, a gift from the above

CLARICE BECKETT (1887 – 1935)

Private collection, Melbourne

A related work, Bathing Boxes, Beaumaris , c.1932, depicts the same scene from the seaward side, and was offered by Deutscher and Hackett in April 2021. Ultimately, this idyllic view no longer remains as a huge storm in 1934 destroyed bathing boxes up and down the coast, most of which were not replaced. Bathing Boxes Beaumaris , therefore, retains historic as well as aesthetic importance.

103

1. Thomas, D., ‘Hawkins, Harold Frederick (1893 – 1977)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/ biography/hawkins-harold-frederick-10457/text18547, published first in hardcopy 1996, accessed online 18 March 2022.

Hawkins first studied and exhibited in the years leading up to World War One and was greatly inspired by the Vorticist movement’s use of angularity and compositional dynamics. During the war, however, Hawkins was horribly wounded leaving him with two withered arms; only the left hand was (just) capable of holding a brush. Nonetheless, he doggedly retrained to be able to sketch and paint again, an almost

Eighth Annual Interstate Exhibition, Contemporary Art Society, Education Galleries, Sydney, 12 – 28 November 1946, cat. 68

ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

2. See ‘Thomas, D., ‘Weaver Hawkins’, Project 11: Weaver Hawkins, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 7 February – 14 March 1976

In Concrete mixers, 1946, Weaver Hawkins captures one moment in the building boom in Australia’s suburbs caused by the housing shortage that followed the end of World War Two. Hawkins and his family had arrived in Sydney in 1935 and settled soon after in the bushland suburb of Mona Vale, bracketed by Pittwater at its north-west and a long surf beach to its east. The section of Waterview Street that they lived in soon became known as ‘the mad half mile’ due to its concentration of artists, writers and actors, including Rah Fizelle, Arthur Murch (who lived next door between 1941 and 1943), and Peter Finch’s family around the corner. Hawkins’ family also soon became close friends with that of the artist couple Frank and Margel Hinder. It was the perfect environment for him as Hawkins had experienced a highly unusual upbringing in England with Victorian liberalists as parents. He wore his own handcrafted leather sandals and never donned a tie, proclaiming ‘we are rationalists, socialists and nonconformists.’1 His wife Irene was also a freethinker and they had spent more than a decade prior to Australia travelling and living in several countries in Europe and the Pacific.

ANDREW GAYNOR

Hawkins exhibited Concrete mixers at the Contemporary Arts Society (CAS) in Sydney shortly after its completion. Titled Eighth Annual Interstate Exhibition, this was one of the first post-war gatherings of CAS artists from across the country, an extraordinary collective statement which included Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, Jean Bellette, Margaret Olley, and many others.

CONCRETE MIXERS, 1946 oil on composition board 60.0 x 77.5 cm signed and dated lower left: Raokin 46

miraculous feat achieved over an eighteen-month period. He returned to exhibiting but, annoyed at the attraction his art now gained due to his injuries, he began signing his name ‘Raokin’, a play on an Italian mispronunciation of his name. Apart from Vorticism, he was also fascinated by alternate theories including dynamic symmetry, Platonic solids, and magic squares. 2 The first works to successfully align these influences date from the mid-1920s when he was exhibiting in British groups shows which included Vorticism’s founder Wyndham Lewis. Hawkins’ paintings include a number of intimate studies of his domestic life as well as charged, sinuous landscapes, but he was also attracted to ‘subjects of strenuous work and play. [I]t was his tough mind which chiefly created order out of chaos in works which he hoped might help to make the world a better place.’ 3 In Concrete mixers , the physicality of the scene would have included noise, oaths, sweat and fumes; yet Hawkins’ skill at design – his ordering of the ‘chaos’ – results in an image that elegantly charts the progress of the workers, from first pour of the concrete, though to toiling up the hill with a wheelbarrow, and finally, the return for a well-earned breather. His colours, dominated by a radiant pink, enliven the experience.

PROVENANCE

EXHIBITED

104

WEAVER HAWKINS (1893 – 1977)

3. Thomas, D., ‘Hawkins, Harold Frederick (1893 – 1977)’, op. cit.

Private collection, Sydney, acquired in the 1970s

Private collection, Sydney

105

‘…Crooke’s paintings reveal a humility of attitude which does not seek the unusual but achieves it. If his paintings of Australia’s tropical North and the native people going about their simple daily tasks or sitting as monuments in the deep shadow of their huts, spell such an enchantment, it is because poetical truth is deeper than ordinary

3. Gleeson, J., ‘Introduction’, Ray Crooke, Collins, Sydney, 1972, n.p.

2. Smith, S., North of Capricorn: The Art of Ray Crooke, Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville, 1997, p.7

106

Drawingvision.’1

FROM THE ISLAND (THURSDAY ISLAND), 1965 oil on canvas on composition board 61.0 x 91.0 cm signed lower left: R Crooke inscribed verso: FROM THE / ISLAND / Y32 accompanied by a photograph of the work signed and dated by the artist

VERONICAibid. ANGELATOS

1. Langer, G., The Courier-Mail, Brisbane, 8 November 1967

ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

Private collection, Queensland, until 1987 Private collection, Sydney

inspiration from a lifetime of experience living in Northern Queensland and the adjacent Melanesian islands, Ray Crooke is celebrated for his quiet but intensely evocative landscapes which emphasise the monumental simplicity and laconic grace of people shaped by their environment. Whether engrossed in daily rituals, glimpsed in the cool of shaded rooms or ensnared within webs of light and shade beneath jungle vegetation, his compositions bear a strong sense of locality, describing with unprecedented accuracy this remote region and the unique light that so distinguishes it. Yet while his finished compositions such as the magnificent From the Island (Thursday Island), 1965 offered here appear as ‘snapshots’ or portraits of specific places, they are nevertheless ‘the remembrance of things past’, emerging from his mind’s eye following the disciplined distillation of observed fact previously explored through studies and sketches. Encapsulating the artist’s desire to create ‘a romantic form of expression based upon imagination and emotion’2, indeed such works give precedence to mood over action or narrative to examine, rather, the fundamental relationship between man and nature.

PROVENANCE

Fundamental to such conscious ordering of forms towards an aesthetic ideal is Crooke’s enduring preoccupation with tonal relationships, contours and silhouettes, and the dramatic juxtaposition of dark against light. Indeed, despite his richly decorative and highly developed sense of colour, one only need compare such tropical landscapes with those of his artistic predecessor, Paul Gauguin, to discern ‘the differences between an artist working through tone and one who worked through colour.’ 3 Underpinning the strength and authenticity of his vision, thus the image here is built up from a dark ground organised around tonal relationships to reveal a carefully constructed scene, punctuated by the sudden intrusion of brilliant light from the sparkling harbour beyond the verandah. Imbuing the work with a powerful sense of mystery and curious timelessness, it is this sensation of clear defining light which gives stature to islander life and reveals Crooke’s abiding interest in the dignity of man. Betraying strong affinities with the art of Florentine Renaissance masters Giotto and Piero della Francesca in their quest to locate the eternal in the present moment – that point of intersection between time past and time to come – Crooke’s meditations accordingly invite his audience to experience the art of stillness, to appreciate the flow of time in its purest, most metaphysical sense. For, as James Gleeson astutely asserts, that ‘special kind of magic’ in Crooke’s paintings ‘only begins to work when one has discovered the stillness and the silence that lies at the heart of everything he paints... This stillness is not the mere stillness of arrested motion, but the projection of a mind preoccupied with deep and permanent things.’4

RAY CROOKE (1922 – 2015)

107

PROVENANCE

Savill Galleries, Sydney Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 3 November 1993, lot 30A Private collection, Sydney

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.

Herman painted old Sydney, then slums, with sympathy, a fresh eye and a lively mind. ‘To anybody used to pictures of gum trees and the harbour,’ he said, ‘my slum pictures were startling. But I painted houses, because houses are part of people and people are part of houses.’1 These pictures are peopled with anecdote – a woman sweeps the front footpath or sits at the window watching the passing parade (as in the present work), a child chases a dog and others play in a vacant lot. For those who lived in these small, often cramped terrace houses, the street offered the place to socialise. Herman also involves the personalities of the houses themselves, as in the peeling paint. As Barry Pearce observed, ‘With a palette knife he plastered and scraped his pigments across the canvas so that the textures took on the very character of the buildings he was portraying.’ 2 Through paintings such as these, where ideas, technique, and humanism harmonise, Sali Herman has long endeared himself to collectors.

ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

2. Pearce, B., Swiss Artists in Australia, 1777 – 1991, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1991, p. 68

The rich vein of humanitarianism that runs throughout Sali Herman’s art finds ideal expression in Backyards, Paddington, 1952. The older parts of inner Sydney, of Paddington and Woolloomooloo and their Victorian terraces attracted Herman during the forties as much as the people and street life around them. He was so fascinated by their character, both architectural and human, that he produced a series of paintings which today are not only full of the social history of a time now past, but are also fascinating as works of art. It began with McElhone Stairs , 1944 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), which was awarded the 1944 Wynne Prize, accompanied by the howls of outrage that then plagued art prizes. Sydney Scene , 1946 was acquired by Yehudi Menhuhin; The Law Courts, 1946 went to the National Gallery of Victoria,

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EXHIBITED

possibly: Sydney Painting 1952, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 15 – 25 July 1952, cat. 26 (as ‘Backyards at the Cross’)

BACKYARDS PADDINGTON, 1952 oil on canvas 46.0 x 56.0 cm signed and dated lower left: S. Herman, 52

29SALI HERMAN (1898 – 1983)

Melbourne (via the Felton Bequest); and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney added Near the Docks , 1949 to its collections. Other prominent private and public collectors gained similar works. Mr and Mrs Kenneth Myer chose the engaging Feeding the Cats , 1952, and the state galleries in Adelaide and Perth acquired Reconstruction, 1950 and Woolloomooloo, 1952, respectively.

1. Herman, cited in Hetherington, J., Australian Painters: Forty Profiles, F.W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1963, p. 77

109

In many ways, Olsen’s life and his art are inseparable. His oeuvre represents the cumulative response of an artist’s life experiences, its people and their attitudes towards life and art. The present work belongs to an extremely important time in the artist’ life. He had returned from a three-year sojourn in Spain, where he absorbed the works of masters from Goya to Tapi è s. Now resettled back in Australia he was ready to challenge trends in the local painting of the day. The works from this inspired, energetic period formed the cornerstones of Olsen’s career and provided the springboard from which the artist launched himself into the centre of Australian painting. Acclaim quickly followed, and conservative critics were swept aside as the baton was passed from Passmore to Olsen and he became the Pied Piper for progressive Sydney painting.

signed and dated lower right: John Olsen 62 bears inscription with title verso: CHILDS / SEVENTH / BIRTHDAY / 3 / To Clunes / By Transport / JOHN OLSEN / CLUNE GALLERIES / SYDNEY

HENRY MULHOLLAND

30JOHN OLSEN born 1928

John Olsen: Recent Paintings , Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 1 – 18 October 1963, cat. 3

In a review of Olsen’s 1963 exhibition at Terry Clune Gallery, which included the key Olsen works from the early 1960’s , including Child’s Seventh Birthday, 1962, Daniel Thomas wrote ‘…Olsen’s city pictures are full of humanity and conversation… Such work makes nonsense of any distinction between abstract and figurative art, and Olsen’s special significance at present in Australian painting is that he has been right through abstraction and come the other side… There is a world of difference between such confident assurance and the timidities of semi-abstract art.’1

Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney

CHILD’S SEVENTH BIRTHDAY, 1962 oil on composition board 122.0 x 92.0 cm

PROVENANCE

EXHIBITED

110

Terry Clune Galleries, Sydney

Spate, V., John Olsen, Georgian House, Melbourne, 1963, pl. 31 (illus.), p. 19

As Thomas says, a distinctive quality of Olsen’s work is its conversational nature. The works tell and show us a story; whether it’s a landscape, a portrait or an event, they become a detailed mud map of that event in paint. The works’ meandering lines come across as rollicking yarns rich in anecdote and detail. There is a genuine three-way conversation between Olsen, his subject and his materials, and out of this synergy his images are distilled. Child’s Seventh Birthday, 1962, conveys the wanton joy of a child’s birthday – indeed, few things live as large in a happy child’s imagination as an approaching birthday party, they are major childhood events that are etched in their memory. The joie de vivre of the event as imagined by the child, through the eyes of the artist is expressed here in line, colour, form and atmosphere, as the artist and his materials party on the surface.

In 1963 Virginia Spate published the first monograph on the artist. Included amongst the paintings illustrated are important examples such as Up and Down the Sea Port, 1961 (Art Gallery of Western Australia); Journey into The Beaut Country No.1, 1962, (National Gallery of Australia); Journey into The Beaut Country, 1962 (Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art); Spanish Encounter, 1960 and Australian Flux , 1960 (both in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales). Along with the major the institutions cited, many of the private collectors of the works listed in Spate reflect the cultural elite of the time. Curators, critics, taste makers and influential collectors such as Daniel Thomas, Robert Hughes, James Fairfax, Mervyn Horton, Leslie Walford, Clement Meadmore each acquired works from this formative period of the artist’s career. Child’s Seventh Birthday, 1962, was loaned for the 1963 exhibition by Anthony and Sandra McGrath, the latter being the art critic for The Australian during the 70s and 80s, and author of the definitive 1978 monograph on Brett Whiteley. The prestige of these institutions and private collections underscore the importance of the early 1960s works, not only to Olsen but to our artistic language as a nation. Olsen painted the way Australian’s talked, behaved and expressed themselves. Few in number and tightly held, these paintings represent an exciting time in Australian art, when the wunderkind of 1950s Sydney painting came of age.

LITERATURE

ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

Anthony and Sandra McGrath, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1963

Recent Paintings, Gouaches & Drawings by John Olsen, Terry Clune Galleries, Sydney, 6 March 1963, cat. 11 (kindly lent by Mrs Tony McGrath)

1 Thomas, D., The Week in Art, Telegraph, Sydney, 17 March 1963

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Painted just prior to the artist’s departure for a sojourn to Asia, United States and the United Kingdom i n 1981 (during which she eagerly attended exhibitions of her artistic mentors Henri Matisse and Giorgio Morandi), Kitchen Cupboard and Christmas Bells , c.1981 is a superb example of Olley’s masterful manipulation of light and space. Featuring the distinctive red and yellow native flowers in a stoneware jug, balanced alongside various wine bottles, a ceramic stove pot and bowl of mandarins atop the rustic wooden kitchen cupboard, the composition is deliberately nonchalant, with the fruit bowl casually resting upon the folded red and white striped cloth as if the artist had just placed the items there only moments before. However, this ambience conceals a carefully considered orchestration of space. Arranged and rearranged like props in a theatre set, the objects in Olley’s paintings were meticulously placed and, in time, became as acquainted to viewers as they were to the artist herself. The double-handled earthenware fruit bowl, green glass vase, jug and striped tablecloth are all recurring ‘characters’ on her stage, imbued with the stories and memories of her colourful life. As Barry Pearce elucidates in the catalogue accompanying the artist’s retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1996, there is more to Olley’s paintings than a mere still-life – we are invited into her personal domain: ‘Darkness and light, fertility and decay, space and time, tragedy and comedy, solitude, camaraderie; all the things we know and imagine about life and humanity can be gathered at her table within the rooms of her world.’3

PROVENANCE

ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

2. Capon, E., quoted in Pearce, B., Margaret Olley, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1996, p. 7

‘The art of Margaret Olley is the art of deliberate choices. The same could be said of Olley h erself, who dispels all theories of Australia’s isolation, repression of women and fashion following… she persists in painting that which is around her; one reason for this is loathing of pretence, of adopting ways of thinking that are not true to the reality of Unswayedself.’1

Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane

31MARGARET OLLEY (1923 – 2011)

by changing fashions and the tide of late Modernism, Margaret Olley was forever steadfastly devoted to the humble still life. As observed by her dear friend and former director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Edmund Capon, ‘still-lifes and interiors are her métier, and Margaret Olley is a part of that tradition, from Vermeer in the seventeenth century to Morandi in the twentieth century – two of her most admired artists – which finds inspiration, beauty and a rich spirit of humanity in the most familiar o f subject matter.’ 2

Margaret Olley, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, 11 September 1981, cat. 12 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, as ‘Kitchen Cupboard with Christmas Bells’)

Private collection, Brisbane, acquired from the above in 1981

EXHIBITED

KITCHEN CUPBOARD AND CHRISTMAS BELLS, c .1981 oil on composition board 76.0 x 101.5 cm signed lower left: OLLEY bears inscription with title on frame verso: KITCHEN CUPBOARD AND CHRISTMAS BELLS / 12

1 France, C., Margaret Olley, Craftsman House, 2002, p. 13

3. Pearce, B., Margaret Olley, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1996, p. 21

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113

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in October 1990

1. Gleeson, J., ‘Introduction’, Margaret Olley, The Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 1964, n.p.

PROVENANCE

A striking example of the still-life and interior scenes for which Olley remains widely celebrated, Bush Fuschias encapsulates well the way in which she repeatedly turned to the quotidian for inspiration, excavating her domestic setting to uncover the beauty inherent in everyday life. While the majority of her paintings were executed in her home in Paddington where she lived from 1964 until her death in 2011, several were painted at the homes of nearby friends which offered different vantages such as the spectacular harbour view captured here. Deliberately positioning the natural border of the

window frame slightly off-centre to engender a sense of sincerity and unaffectedness, Olley further emphasises this impression of familiarity in the arrangement on the table and sideboard behind of items which are eminently unpretentious – native wildflowers in an earthenware vase, various compotes of oranges and apples, a Chinese blue and white ginger jar. Notwithstanding the apparent randomness of her arrangement however, fundamental to such compositions is the artist’s careful ‘orchestration’ to create a harmonious image which was inspired directly by her experience of the theatre in 1948 when she assisted with painting the sets for Sam Hughes’ productions of Shakespeare’s Pericles and Cocteau’s Orphée (designed by Jean Bellette and Sidney Nolan respectively). Observing the actors being instructed to enter the stage and count twenty seconds before speaking their lines, the young artist soon came to appreciate the importance of creating space for oneself; as she fondly recalls, ‘space is the secret of life… it is everything.’ 2 Over the ensuing decades, Olley consequently came to arrange the objects in her art as characters on a stage – objects both commonplace and beautiful, shuffled this way and that, plunged into deep shadow or transformed by lighting.

Thus, in Bush Fuschias the various elements are poignantly orchestrated to lead the viewer’s eye and mind through an intimate, deeply personal drama to a tantalising glimpse of the harbour beyond. Paying homage to the great European masters of her métier such as Vermeer, Bonnard, Matisse and Cézanne, as well as her domestic surroundings which continue to provide inspiration, indeed the work reveals the very essence of the artist’s identity; as Barry Pearce aptly notes,

Margaret Olley, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 10 – 22 October 1990, cat. 22 (label attached verso)

2. Margaret Olley cited in Pearce, B., Margaret Olley, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1996, p. 14

Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso)

BUSH FUCHSIAS, c .1990 oil on composition board 62.0 x 76.5 cm signed lower right: Olley bears inscription on gallery label verso: BUSH FUCHSIAS

3. Pearce, B., ‘Margaret Olley Retrospective’, State of the Arts, Sydney, August – November 1996, p. 5

VERONICA ANGELATOS

‘…I can think of no other painter of the present time who orchestrates his or her themes with such richness as Margaret Olley. She is a symphonist among flower painters; a painter who calls upon the full resources of the modern palette to express her joy in the beauty of things.’1

A much-loved, vibrant personality of the Australian art world for over 60 years, Margaret Olley exerted an enduring influence not only as a remarkably talented artist, but as a nurturing mentor, inspirational muse and generous philanthropist. Awarded an Order of Australia in 1991 and a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2006, Olley featured as the subject of two Archibald-Prize winning portraits (the first by William Dobell in 1948, and the second by contemporary artist Ben Quilty in 2011, just prior to her death) and was honoured with over 90 solo exhibitions during her lifetime, including a major retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1997. Today her work is held in all major state and regional galleries in Australia, and the myriad contents of her Paddington studio have been immortalised in a permanent installation at the Tweed Regional Gallery in northern New South Wales, not far from where Olley was born. Bequeathing a legacy as bountiful as the subject matter of her paintings, indeed her achievements are difficult to overstate – and reach far beyond the irrepressible sense of joy her art still brings.

114

EXHIBITED

‘…to live with a Margaret Olley painting is to experience the transfiguration of a passionate, highly focused personality into art. In her paintings, the space surrounding each bowl of fruit, each vase of flowers, and through which the eye traverses a cacophony of surfaces such as patterned carpets, modulated walls, and cluttered tabletops, resounds with her presence. These are reflections of the things she loves, and which embellished the centre of how she prefers her existence to be.’ 3

ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

MARGARET OLLEY (1923 – 2011)

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1. Pearce, B., cited in ‘Brett Whiteley. The Art of the Warrior’, Good Weekend, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 17 February 1990, p. 18

Private collection, Melbourne

Private collection, acquired from the above in May 1990 Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso)

Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné , Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2020, cat. 25.89, vol. 7, p. 722

LITERATURE

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in April 1994 (label attached verso)

Spencil II, 1989, charcoal on paper, 65.0 x 94.0 cm, private collection

Australian Galleries, Melbourne

EXHIBITED

33BRETT WHITELEY (1939 – 1992)

SPENCIL I, 1989 charcoal on paper 65.0 x 94.0 cm

signed lower right: brett whiteley bears artist’s studio stamp lower right

ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

SpencerWendy.quickly

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RELATED WORK

Girlfriend Reading Baudelaire , 1989, pen and ink on paper, 56.0 x 76.0 cm, private collection

Thence by descent

became Brett’s companion, appearing by his side in the society pages and travelling with him to the United States, Bali, Tokyo and Kyoto and Paris. For two years, between 1987 and 1989, with her help, Whiteley strove to maintain his sobriety, and painted feverishly. Many of these works featured his new muse, her lithe swimmer’s body and mass of unruly curls rendered in sultry inky portraits, bold charcoal strokes and even in the vast erotic painting, Sunday Afternoon, Surry Hills (which was included in the 1989 Wynne Prize, to much consternation).

Brett Whiteley: Recent Paintings, Drawings, Photographs, Ceramics and Wood Carvings from Byron Bay, Marrakech, Japan, San Gimignano – Tuscany, Australian Galleries, Sydney, 1 – 26 March 1990, cat. 29

2. Whiteley, B., ‘Recent Nudes’, exhibition catalogue, Artist’s Studio, Sydney, 1981, n.p.

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

A celebration of the female nude is one of the most persistent themes within the Whiteley oeuvre, from the semi-abstract bathroom nudes of 1960s London, through to languorous and often explicit scenes from the final years of the artist’s helter-skelter life. Spencil I, 1989 is a furtive glimpse of a reclining nude. This sweeping charcoal drawing shows only the lower half of a young woman, delighting in and emphasising the curvaceous landscape of her haunches and upturned legs. Despite the anonymising effect of the close cropping of this nude, Spencil I is

‘Whiteley at his most spectacular’, Business Review

Weekly, 2 March 1990, pp. 114 – 115 (illus.)

not an idealised paragon from the Her and Towards Sculpture series of Brett Whiteley’s late work. It is a tender and intimate portrait of Janice Spencer, the artist’s young girlfriend, identifiable by her curly mane and the title Whiteley chose for this drawing. Affectionately nicknamed ‘Spencil’, Spencer was a model and addiction mentor who Whiteley had met at a local Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Sydney in the late 1980s, during a difficult period of estrangement and separation from his wife

Bearing a similar composition to a Parisian work, Girlfriend Reading Baudelaire, here the nude is evoked with minimal sweeping strokes and bold tonal modulations. Some superimposed lines follow the shape of her legs in a couple of different poses, giving the impression of a restless idleness and a hastily finished portrait. Like in Sunday Afternoon and Girlfriend Reading Baudelaire , Spencer’s identity is thinly-veiled and her face obscured from view. With a languid and confident gesture, Whiteley’s master draftsmanship is apparent. As Barry Pearce noted, the artist ‘draws with the naturalness of a bird singing’1, and this classic reclining nude is a moment of pure and sober sensuality. Taking a pause from his pursuit of the elusive ‘uncut gem’ of the ‘Great Nude’2, Whiteley had chosen to live in the moment, rejoicing instead in the beauty that his eye beheld.

117

Brett

The Park under Sunlight, 1976, oil on canvas, 210.0 x 152.4 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Essentially addressing the nature and process of drawing the landscape en plein air, Park from the Window, Lavender Bay presents a continuation of Whiteley’s Fijian quest for contemplative peace within the (tropical) landscape. Now, Whiteley, in an homage to Matisse, was recording these stunning views looking out from calm interior of his own home. Park from the Window relates to major paintings as Park Under Sunlight , 1976, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria and prefigures his popular editioned prints of 1978 – 1980, such as Orange Fruit Dove in Clark Park and Garden in Sanur (Bali), in which variegated leaves are fanned out in the foreground of a landsc ape view.

LITERATURE

34BRETT WHITELEY (1939 – 1992)

ESTIMATE: $70,000 – 90,000

atmospheric rain-soaked harbour views, and stepped rows of rooftops, Whiteley f ound a restorative change of pace. Far from the political and philosophical angst of his earlier works, Nancy Borlase noted, Whiteley’s works from this period were imbued with contemplative quality, ‘a fresh appraisal of nature, reflecting a domestic tranquillity and a lifestyle in harmony with the bay.’1 Whiteley described this new impetus as ‘recording… points of optical ecstasy, where romanticism and optimism overshadow any form of menace and foreboding’. 2

EXHIBITED

2. McGrath, S., Whiteley Bay Books, Sydney, 1979, p. 168

RELATED WORKS

‘An

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

The large vertical south-facing windows of Whiteley’s sitting room studio offered breathtaking views either over the stately palms of Clark Park, or in the opposite direction, on the harbour with a glimpse of the Harbour Bridge or Opera House. Park from the Window, Lavender Bay features a dense charcoal depiction of the fences and foliage of the park, crowned by a towering skyline of the central business district and naïve outlined clouds. Presenting the window as a clear vignette within the image was an artistic device that Whiteley had been using for some years. It allowed him to contain and frame the view, distancing himself from it while also providing space in the foreground to imply his physical presence.

118

3. Drawing and How to Get it 1975, illus. McGrath, ibid., p. 183

Private collection, Melbourne Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 19 November 2004, lot 53

The Bulletin,

PARK FROM THE WINDOW, LAVENDER BAY, c .1975 – 76 also known as CLARK PARK, LAVENDER BAY pen and ink, charcoal, pencil and gouache on paper 76.0 x 102.0 cm signed lower left: brett whiteley

Drawing was the cornerstone of Brett Whiteley’s artistic practice and many of his greatest paintings were accompanied by a series of works on paper featuring alternate compositional emphases. With a confident flourish, Whiteley’s drawings were spontaneous appraisals of the artist’s innermost thoughts and visions, now revealing precious insights into his approach to artmaking. Park from the Window, Lavender Bay. c.1975 –76 is a key large work on paper from Whiteley’s first year in their house on the foreshore of Sydney’s Lavender Bay. The house’s panoramic views on to the harbour provided the artist with a new format, which he called ‘windowscapes’, and through w hich he could claim this patch of Sydney as his own private domain. With close views of verdant gardens,

Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso)

Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné , Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2020, cat. 112.75, vol. 3, p. 282 (illus.), vol. 7, pp. 331 – 332, 951

PROVENANCE

On,

July 2 1975 Rainy Day – All Day, 1975, ink and collage on paper, 162.0 x 89.5 cm, private collection, sold Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 30 April 2014, lot 26

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, acquired from the above in July 1995

Simon Tilley, Sydney

A delicate sequence of ink studies of individual leaves, pinned to a drawing board, is placed in the foreground of this work, alongside a tabletop displaying an arsenal of artist’s tools. Amusingly, Whiteley has drawn a quill and inkpot in ink, a pencil with sharp lead lines and a stick of willow charcoal with a wide and wonky mark of the medium itself. This self-reflexive format was first developed within one of Whiteley’s notebooks, in which he had also noted beside each medium a list of its qualities, such as ‘the great unalterable’ (ink), ‘vulnerable to making mistakes by itself’ (charcoal) and ‘quick + daring + precise’ (pencil). 3

Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso)

Barry Stern Gallery, Sydney, acquired from the above in July 1978 Private AustraliancollectionGalleries, Melbourne, February 1990 (label attached verso)

Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2013

1. Borlase, N., Unexpected Whiteley’, Sydney, 23 November 1974, p. 57

Brett Whiteley: paintings, drawings and three scrolls plus one bronze from 1960 Italy never before shown in Australia, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 12 – 25 July 1978, cat. 44

Private collection, Melbourne, until 1995

119

1. Whiteley, B., quoted in Hawley, J., ‘Brett Whiteley: The Art of the Warrior’, The Age Good Weekend, Melbourne, 17 February 1990, p. 17

VERONICA ANGELATOS

35BRETT WHITELEY (1939 – 1992)

LITERATURE

The quintessential ‘city of love’, Paris had always held special appeal for Brett Whiteley who considered her a kind of ‘mistress’, weaving her beguiling feminine charms through the myriad streets and boulevards. As he poignantly mused, ‘… I love the stoniness and creaminess, that wonderful, soiled magnolia feeling. Paris is so sensual, beautiful, flirtatious, mischievous, arrogant, orderly, civilised. They call Paris a whore because she seduces you on every corner, and every street I turned, l could see another picture’.1 Significantly, Whiteley’s untiring affair with Paris began at the age of 20 when, as the recipient of the Italian Travelling Scholarship, he visited the city to explore the haunts of one of his greatest artistic mentors, Modigliani. Fascinated by the possibility that the brilliance of the past might somehow be embedded in the very fabric of the streets and buildings, the young artist had hoped he might gain, by proximity, further understanding of the inextricable link between Paris and ‘genius’. Returning to the city three decades later, Whiteley reflected that he had been too ‘obsessed with modernism and abstraction’ in his earlier years to paint the city; by contrast, ‘now, with fresh eyes, I could respond figuratively and lyrically to the one ravishing subject – Paris and her cultural heroes’. 2

Australian Galleries, Sydney (labels attached verso) Lex Aitken, Sydney, acquired from the above in July 1992 Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 10 March 2004, lot 79 Private collection, Sydney

Setting himself the ambitious task ‘to produce one work a day for sixty days’, thus in June 1989 Whiteley embarked upon his celebrated ‘Paris, Regard de Côté’ series of gouaches, drawings and photographs – paying homage in particular to that district of the École de Paris that Marquet, Utrillo and Nicolas de Staël had so immortalised through their art. Although acutely aware of the vast legacy bequeathed by his artistic predecessors, Whiteley never falls victim to the visual cliché in his views of the city’s various landmarks and streetscapes. As he recognised in his text accompanying the acclaimed exhibition of the series at Australian Galleries in 1990, ‘…how to find a new vision is the challenge. What one is after is a high-octane visual poetic journalism, brief, essential and above all, fresh. This can best be achieved by drawing, and not by the heavy métier of oil paint… To revive the sketch, to Zen in and out quickly, to stalk the streets with a tiny leopard camera, to try to look at the obvious obscurely, and to introduce into each view the right amount of humour, or irony, or Dada’. 3 Richly redolent and exuding sensuality, the superb ink and brush drawing offered here illustrates well how successfully Whiteley achieved his goal. Featuring the towers of the famous medieval cathedral of Notre-Dame located on the Île de la Cité – widely considered the historical heart of Paris – the sketch betrays all the informality of a camera shot, a transitory moment in time most likely drawn from near the Louvre looking upstream towards the footbridge of the Pont des Arts, and the iconic Pont Neuf beyond. Noticeably bereft of figures, the subject here is unequivocally Paris – her architecture invested with an almost anthropomorphic quality to capture the essential character and beauty of this city he so loved.

Brett Whiteley’s Paris, Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney, 11 September – 28 November 1999, cat. 14

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2 Ibid.

PROVENANCE

FOOTBRIDGE AND PONT NEUF, 1989 brush and ink on rice paper 56.0 x 77.0 cm dated lower right: 9/ 6/ 89 bears artist’s stamp lower right

EXHIBITED

3. Whiteley, B., ‘Preface’, Paris ‘Regard de Côté’, exhibition catalogue, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 1990, n.p.

ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

Brett Whiteley: Regard de Côté, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1 March – 6 May 1990, cat. 60

Brett Whiteley: Paris – The Complete ‘Regard de Côté’ Series Shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1990 Plus Works From Other Visits 1982 – 92, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 21 July – 8 August 1992, cat. 60

Comprising the last major series produced by the artist before his untimely death in 1992, such works eloquently attest not only to Whiteley’s unwavering sense of discovery and engagement, but to his extraordinary ability as a draughtsman to create incandescent moments of vision; in his words, ‘…to make freshness permanent. Out of billions of seconds of futility, occasionally, sparks of the life force are immutably held forever’.4

Whiteley, B., Paris ‘Regard de Côté’, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 1990, cat. 60 (illus.), n.p. Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné , Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2020, cat. 202.76, vol. 4, p. 462 (illus.), vol. 7, p. 733

4. Whiteley, B., quoted in Klepac, L., Brett Whiteley: Drawings, Beagle Press, Sydney, 2014.

121

Rapidly and emphatically executed, this portrait is almost exclusively created by chains of short, curved lines, spirals and sweeping concatenated waves. It is closely cropped, with the outermost edges of the radiating lines reaching the edge of the paper contained only by a delicate red pastel border. Fixed points amongst these swirling lines of wrinkles and hair are the eyes, often wide-open and staring directly at the viewer. In Tê te , the locked gaze comes from the right eye’s concentric circles, while the larger, lashed, left eye peers greedily over the shoulder and beyond the frame. As the artist David Hockney noted of Picasso’s late works, ‘I realised it’s about intense looking, what it does and what it can do’. 3

felt tipped pen and pastel on paper 29.5 x 20.0 cm (sight) 30.8 x 21.8 cm (sheet) signed and dated upper left: 14.8.67 / picasso accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the artist’s son signed and dated by Claude Ruiz Picasso, 1 April 2014

3. Hockney, D., ‘ Picasso: Or, the Important Paintings of the 1960s’, in David Hockney, London, Academy Press, 1988, p. 83

With cheeky twinkling eyes, a mischievous smile and swirling hirsute features, Picasso’s felt-tip pen drawing, Tê te , 1967, is a swift portrait of the elderly artist’s alter ego, bearded and satyr-like. Aged well into his eighth decade, Picasso found an astounding burst of frenetic energy, producing a vast series of prints known as Suite 347 in 1968, focussed on the female nude and power of the artist’s gaze. Alongside these prints, Picasso produced a number of intimate symbolic (self) portraits acting out the role of the artist, many inspired by the works of the grand masters of the past.

Although Picasso was never bearded, his swashbuckling avatars within these 1960s works featured a bushy beard, a broad flattened face and snub nose, concentric wrinkles and swirling eyes. A pockmarked upper lip and upraised nostrils give the impression of an animal muzzle, a slightly simian aspect. Mythological creatures appeared throughout Pablo Picasso’s oeuvre, the artist drawn to their playfulness and tragicomedic narrative potential. With passionate intensity, the emphatic, repeated curved lines serve a dual purpose, evoking a hairy, leering Silenus figure, while also creating a hypnotic effect. Beyond the mask of charades and self-mocking caricature, Picasso presents himself (albeit metaphorically) with candour and humility, accepting the perils of his advancing age with an endearing and self-deprecating humour.

1. Varnedoe, K., ‘Picasso’s Self Portraits’, in Rubin, W. (ed.), Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, Museum of Modern Art, New York and Thames and Hudson, London, 1996, p. 161

122 36

PROVENANCE

PABLO PICASSO (1881 – 1973,TÊTE,Spanish)1967

Private collection, Spain Nicholas Gallery, Belfast, Ireland (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above

2. Head of a Man, 1969, ink on paper, 30. 5 x 24.0 cm, Zervos XXXI, 210, private collection, illus. in Rubin, ibid., p. 164

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

Prompted by the unflinching self-introspection of Rembrandt’s late self-portraits, Picasso’s self-representations from this period are characterised by a sardonic, costumed masquerades, and a caricatural appraisal of his advancing age and voyeuristic dynamics with young muses in the studio.1 Tête is closely related to a series of ink on paper portraits of a musketeer, called Head of a Man 2 This suite shows a progressive portrait of a bearded man with a hat, based on a famous portrait of Rembrandt. The man’s features are evoked with increasingly abstract and profusive curlicued lines, the final point an almost identical mythological metamorphosis to that found in Tê te

ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000

123 2022AgencyPicasso/CopyrightSuccession©

wax crayon on paper 25.0 x 24.5 cm

124 37

SANS TITRE, 1963

Thus reduced to poetic essentials, Mir ò ’s vocabulary is universally accessible and whimsically humorous. Sans Titre features many of the artist’s most recognisable motifs, featuring in his works since the late 1930s: an asterisk-like star, a crescent moon, Twombly-esque concentric spirals, a cross hatched ladder and two figures evoked with a pseudo morse code for the eyes and nose, dot-dash-dot. The sparse matrix of symbols is endowed with a personal and autobiographical power known only to the artist, but whose joyful poetic quality can be keenly felt by all.

JOAN MIRÒ (1893 – 1983, Spanish)

Private Artcurial,collectionParis,27

signed and dated lower left: Mirò / 22 /II/63 accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Association pour la Défense de l’œuvre de Joan Miró (ADOM), signed and dated by Ariane Mainaud, 2 October 2013

March 2013, lot 144 Nicholas Gallery, Belfast, Ireland (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above

ESTIMATE: $45,000 – 65,000

By the 1960s Catalan artist Joan Mir ò was a titan of Modern Art, his idiosyncratic works combining abstract formalism with surrealist whimsy having been exhibited to great acclaim in major retrospective exhibitions both New York and Paris. Despite having spent most of his time between Montroig on the north-eastern coast of Spain and Paris, where he worked alongside his peers from the Ecole de Paris, in 1956 Mir ò settled on the island of Mallorca, in a purpose-built studio designed by Josep Lluís Sert, a prestigious architect and friend of the artist. Mir ò’s final years on the island were the most prolific of his artistic career, prompted by a period of contemplation of the past and renewal and reinvention of his early symbolic vocabulary. The works produced from this period were boldly experimental, and emphatic in their gesture. Sans Titre, 1963 is a small work on paper, an intimate, spontaneous composition drawn quickly in the space of a single day, as indicated by the date inscribed lower left, 22nd February 1963.

Prioritising a flat and compressed pictorial plane, Mir ò’s art was radical and decidedly modern. With authoritative bold lines in unmodulated colours placed on a uniform white sheet of paper, Mir ò creates a grid of interlocking symbols. These totems of Mir ò ’s artistic language are suspended together like a constellation. Avant-garde in their reductive expression, these glyphs are intended to be suggestive rather than literal, working in the realm of surrealist and Dadaist free association. Like his peers in the Ecole de Paris, Mir ò was influenced by contemporary psychology and reappraisal of children’s art. They found the purest form of artistic expression in automatic, spontaneous drawing, unhindered by conscious censorship or imposed formal logic.

PROVENANCE

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

125

38JOY HESTER (1920 – 1960)

MOTHER AND CHILD, c .1950 s watercolour, ink and gouache on card 51.0 x 41.0 cm signed upper right: Joy Hester

3. Ibid., pp. 76-79

Images of children and of mothers and children feature in Hester’s work of the mid-1950s, years which followed the birth of her son, Peregrine, in 1951, and daughter, Fern, three years later. Major works such as Girl with Hen, 1956 (National Gallery of Australia) and Two Girls in the Street , 1957 (National Gallery of Victoria) – ambitious in scale, finish and in their use of colour – depict the playfulness and innocence of childhood. In contrast, it is the intimacy of a mother’s bond with her baby that is the focus of works like Mother and Child, 1955 (National Gallery of Australia). Two large faces fill the sheet and, like Hester’s images of lovers where figures merge and blend into one, the mother and child are connected, but also retain their individuality. In this work, probably painted around the same time, there is a sense of separation, indicative perhaps of the age of the child, a toddler who is beginning to assert some independence. Characteristically, it combines loose, expressive brushstrokes, a striking use of colour – bolder than many of Hester’s works – and continues her familiar habit of depicting faces without noses. 3 For Hester, ‘art existed as an equal in a democracy of love, friendship and children’4 and as this work depicts the profound relationship between mother and child, it also presents a poignant evocation of innocence and experience.

126

4. Barrett Reid quoted in Gellatly, op. cit., p. 37

Private collection, Florida, USA, acquired from the above in 2008

ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE

2. Petherbridge, D., ‘The Haptic Eye/I’ in Joy Hester: Remember Me, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2020, p. 52

KIRSTY GRANT

1. Gellatly, K., Leave no space for yearning: The Art of Joy Hester, exhibition catalogue, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2001, p. 12

Private collection, Connecticut, USA

Hester painted primarily on paper, using brush and ink, watercolour and gouache, and she had a facility with these media that allowed her to work in a manner that appeared spontaneous and intuitive. While this focus on drawing is often explained in terms of her gender and a lifelong lack of financial means, artist and writer, Deanna Petherbridge argues an alternative case, assigning conscious agency to Hester in her approach and choice of materials. ‘The more I think about Hester’s work, the more I am convinced that its insights, pathos and power flourished out of and because of the constraints of the domesticity and Bohemian poverty of her short life as a woman artist and mother, as well as her responses to the wider crises of her time. The very choice of drawing as her main medium and form of expression… and her often-recorded habit of sketching on the floor in company as a means of unself-conscious communication, signifies a deliberately alternative pathway.’ 2

Joy Hester was a central figure among the group of artists who gathered around John and Sunday Reed, the enlightened contemporary art patrons whose home, ‘Heide’, in the rural outer-Melbourne suburb of Heidelberg, offered ‘a vibrant intellectual environment and… haven of shared ideas’.1 A friend and respected peer of artists including Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker (whom she married in 1941), Hester was a painter and poet whose work was often deeply personal, reflecting aspects of her own life, as well as describing experiences and emotions that are universal.

127

Richard Madigan, New York, acquired directly from the artist Christie’s, Sydney, 30 November 2004, lot 41 (as ‘Faun Being Attacked by Parrot’) Private collection, Melbourne

ALBERT TUCKER (1914 – 1999)

FAUN ATTACKED BY PARROT, 1966 synthetic polymer paint on 38.0cardboardx50.0cm

signed and dated lower right: Tucker 66

PROVENANCE

LITERATURE

Faun and Parrot, 1966, medium unknown, 91.0 x 91.0 cm, whereabouts unknown, in Uhl, C., Albert Tucker, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1969, cat. 18.52, p. 106

ESTIMATE: $18,000 – 25,000

Uhl, C., Albert Tucker, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1969, cat. 18.50, p. 106 (as ‘Faun attacked by Parrots’)

RELATED WORK

128

LOVERS AND CROWS, c .1966 oil on composition board 50.5 x 63.5 cm

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Melbourne

129

40ARTHUR BOYD (1920 – 1999)

Bonython Art Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney Christie’s, Melbourne, 2 May 2002, lot 46 Private collection, Deutscher~Menzies,SydneyMelbourne, 8 September 2004, lot 106

ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

signed lower right: Arthur Boyd

Private collection, Sydney Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 26 November 2014, lot 27

130

PROVENANCE

LITERATURE

41JOHN COBURN (1925 – 2006)

ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

MEXICO II, 1968 oil on canvas 106.5 x 99.0 cm signed lower left: Coburn signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: JOHN COBURN / “MEXICO II” / 12/68

Private Christie’s,collectionMelbourne, 21 August 1988, lot 584 Corporate collection, Sydney

Amadio, N., John Coburn Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, p. 197

Amadio, N., John Coburn Paintings , Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, p. 202

Solander Gallery, Canberra Private collection, Sydney

SPIRIT OF FIRE II, 1982 oil on canvas on composition board 75.5 x 60.0 cm signed lower right: Coburn

RELATED WORK

131

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

42JOHN COBURN (1925 – 2006)

PROVENANCE

Spirit of Fire , 1982, oil on canvas board, 76.0 x 61.0 cm, private collection

LITERATURE

VERONICA ANGELATOS

Upon the invitation of film-makers Ken Duncan and Robert Raymond, and esteemed naturalist Vince Serventy, John Olsen first ventured to the Australian interior in the early 1970s to participate in the ‘Wild Australia’ film series commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Commission. Immediately awestruck by the incredible diversity of the various ecosystems he encountered during the journey, Olsen thus began his enduring fascination with observing and painting the teeming life of wetlands, estuaries and lily ponds – stimulated not only by individual species, but a sense of the whole, seething mass, ‘a carnival of life’. Indeed, the artist’s sheer wonderment at the miracle of mother nature and her life-affirming properties is especially palpable in his reflections upon travelling to Lake Eyre in 1974 where he witnessed the arid, salt-encrusted plains of the South Australian desert erupting into life following the extraordinary floods of 1973 (only the second such

Over the subsequent two decades, Olsen would continue this devotion to the Australian outback with repeated visits to Lake Eyre and North Queensland providing the impetus for some of his most lyrical insights into the natural environment. A particularly charming example of Olsen’s meditations upon his travels to the interior, Rookery, 1989 derives from a blissful period in Olsen’s life, painted the year he married his fourth wife, Katharine Howard, who ran a guesthouse in Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains at the time. With its pulsating calligraphic line denoting the busy flight paths of the teeming birdlife and highly tilted plane that may be viewed on both a macro and micro level, the composition resonates with a vitalistic energy – betraying a sense of not only keen observation, but joyful celebration derived from the artist’s spiritual immersion in the landscape as well. For Olsen indeed, the wild reaches of the Australian outback offered more than mere external phenomena to be accurately recorded. More fundamentally perhaps, the experience became the catalyst for a myriad of ideas and metaphorical connections that would permeate Olsen’s art for decades to come, reaffirming his Taoist belief in the total interconnectedness of all living forms and thus, heralding a new spirituality in his art. As Olsen himself poignantly muses,

43JOHN OLSEN born 1928

occurrence since white settlement); ‘…I draw studies of insects, animals and birds that will eventually be realised as prints and watercolours. My devotion to Chinese art and philosophy finds a fulfilment in this experience. Nothing too small or too strange should escape my attention – an insect’s wing, the leap of a frog, the flight pattern of dragonflies. They all induce poetic rapture’.1

John Olsen , Australian Galleries, Sydney, 2 – 28 April 1990, cat. 13

Olsen, Greenhill Galleries, Perth, 24 October – 9 November 1989, cat. 2

PROVENANCE

2. The artist quoted in Hart, D., John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1991, p. 135

132

John Olsen – Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Sydney, 13 January – 30 April 2019

Private collection, New South Wales, acquired from the above 5 April 1990

EXHIBITED

Summer Group Show, OLSEN Gallery, Sydney, 16 December 2020 – 16 January 2021

Olsen J., and McGregor, K., John Olsen: Drawing – The Human Touch, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, Australia, 2014, p. 160 (illus., dated as 1990)

ESTIMATE: $55,000 – 75,000

1. The artist quoted in Olsen, J., Drawn from Life, Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney, 1997, p. 116

Australian Galleries, Melbourne (labels attached verso)

ROOKERY, 1989 watercolour, gouache, pastel and pencil on paper 152.0 x 102.0 cm

Amphibia: The Anisimoff Collection, OLSEN Gallery, Sydney, 23 June –10 July 2021

LITERATURE

signed and dated lower right: John Olsen 89 inscribed with title lower left: ROOKERY

‘…The enigma of it all. It is a desert and it can be full. After the rains, it is so incredibly abundant; so what you are looking at in one place, as if through an act of the Dao, becomes full… It has an effect on you when you are there because all the time it is impossible for you to accept fully the sense of impermanence and transitoriness. Somehow it affects you - you realise that you are looking at an illusion really. I don›t think that there is anything more Buddhist than that.’2

133

Robinson often deploys humour in his portraits and also references other artists’ work. For example, his second Archibald prize Self-Portrait with Stunned Mullet, 1994 takes its cheeky smile from William Hogarth’s The Shrimp Girl, 1740 – 45, while in Equestrian Self-Portrait, 1987, together with the present example, the artist parodies European noblemen as they preferred to have themselves portrayed – perched high upon a fine steed while prancing about in full military regalia. Thus, Robinson here depicts himself as the hero riding forth to rescue Shirley who is shown marooned on a rock surrounded by water, as she waves her arms gesturing in a theatrical, ‘only you can save me William’ manner. The corona effect around Bill and his steed echoes the sunset beyond and alludes to the haste and passion with which Bill races toward Shirley in anticipation of their ‘sunset encounter’.

Jennifer Manton, Sydney Estate of the above, Sydney

RELATED WORK

Equestrian Self–Portrait, 1987, oil on linen, 136.0 x 188.0 cm, in the collection of Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Winner of 1987 Archibald Prize

134

44WILLIAM ROBINSON born 1936

signed lower right: William Robinson inscribed with title verso: SUNSET ENCOUNTER

SUNSET ENCOUNTER, c .1988 48.5 x 55.5 cm

1. Klepac, L., William Robinson, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2001, p. 40

William Robinson, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney, 28 October – 22 November 1989

Thence by descent

EXHIBITED

This delightful, whimsical painting by Robinson is typical of the artist at the time. Robinson was gaining great critical recognition for his work, and both he and his wife Shirley were enjoying the commercial success that came with it. Accordingly, Sunset Encounter, c.1988 has a happy, celebratory feel, depicting Bill and Shirley as they jaunt about their recently purchased bush property at Beechmont, rounding up stray cows, and generally cavorting and delighting in each-other’s company. Bill Robinson, the artist, is shown riding his horse; the same horse on which he depicted himself in his first of two Archibald Prize winning portraits, Equestrian Self-Portrait, 1987.

In Robinson’s own words, he explains the genesis of his work from this period: ‘The story of these paintings begins in 1984, when I moved from a small farm to two hundred acres of bush, rainforest and cliffs at Beechmont in Southern Queensland. This landscape was very elusive to

ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

me and I began to paint it with the figures of Shirley and William walking in it with cows and wildlife. I tried to describe the feeling of being in the landscape and walking around in it – climbing grassy hills looking up through the gum trees to the sky, and down steep cliffs to the valley below; being blown by strong winds, caught in the lightning and rain; being in the landscape with a torch looking for cows and with the night sky so brilliant with the moon and stars, encountering dingos, snakes, kangaroos and birds.’1

PROVENANCE

Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney

Jack Manton, Queensland

Another example of Robinson’s quirky humour – the type that Bill and Shirley would have shared and enjoyed over their lifetime together – the painting attests to the centrality of Shirley’s image in Robinson’s work – as important as any other subject, if not more so. The partnership they shared and the manner in which Bill included Shirley in his work reflects their devotion to one another and records one of the great love stories of Australian art.

HENRY MULHOLLAND

135

1. McMahon, E., First Draft, Dobell Archives, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, see John Kelly, Cow up a Tree, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 1999, p. 12

136

Fusing intelligent social commentary with playful humour, reality with non-reality, John Kelly is recognised internationally as one of the most original artists of his generation. Widely acclaimed for his iconic theme of ‘the cows’ exemplified here brilliantly by Dobell’s Cow – Painted, 1992, Kelly completed a Masters of Arts at RMIT University in 1995, following which he was awarded the prestigious Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship to further his studies as an Affiliate student at the Slade School in London. He has since regularly exhibited in the United Kingdom with Piccadilly Galleries, Agnew’s, and Merville Galleries, and his surrealist cow sculptures have been included in a number of major international exhibitions including the Champs de la Sculpture II (1999) on the Champs Elysées, Paris; La Parade des Animaux (2002) in Monte Carlo; the Musée d’Art Moderne de Contemporaine, Nice (2007); The Hague (2007); Glastonbury (2006 and 2007); and Cork City (2011). Closer to home, he is known to local audiences through his beloved Cow up at Tree sculpture permanently situated on the Harbour Esplanade at the Docklands, Melbourne.

Corporate collection, Sydney

ordered to make papier-mâché cows and move them around the base in the hope of fooling Japanese pilots. Said Bill, ‘I think the authorities underestimated the eyesight of Japanese airmen…’’’1

2. Hammond, V., ‘Cow Up a Tree / Sculpture’ at https://www.onlymelbourne.com.au/cow-up-atree

3. Kelly, cited in John Kelly, Cow up a Tree, op. cit.

VERONICA ANGELATOS

Interestingly, if in his inaugural iterations of the theme, Kelly referenced this bizarre episode as his source of inspiration – specifically branding his cows ‘Dobell’s Cows’ in titles such as the present and evoking the mysterious workshop of Dobell’s airfield as their setting – over time ‘Dobell’s cows’ gradually morphed to become ‘Kelly’s cows’, isolated from the original historical narrative and acquiring their own history and curious identity. Variously depicted as stacked, balanced, wheeled, propped on trestles, assembled sideways or upside down, indeed there is no suggestion of wartime tragedy, despair or bleakness. Quite the contrary, these beautifully painted works become ‘humorous forays into the artist’s inventiveness… poignantly quizzical metaphors for aspects of Australian culture and colonial history, or even enigmatic signifiers of art’s shifting purposes and the puzzling scenarios in which it finds itself.’ 2 As the artist himself elucidates, ‘My intention is to create work that encapsulates the concepts and ideas that intrigue me. I take historical subjects such as Dobell’s cows… and my own personal experience to build a framework within which I can create my own vision of things. Within this I pursue a multi-layered research of imagery that portrays a dumbness to camouflage a more sophisticated intent. Through this I generate visual ideas and concepts in paintings and sculptures that create their own history by engaging in the real world as works of art… I like to create works that reach beyond their absurdity to reflect something of my visual and intellectual environment. This is my intent.’3

PROVENANCE

45JOHN KELLY born 1965 DOBELL’S COW – PAINTED, 1992 oil on board 60.0 x 120.5 cm signed and dated lower right: Klly 92 inscribed with title verso: Dobell’s Cow – Painted

ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

Occupying the vast majority of his oeuvre, Kelly’s whimsical cow interpretations were originally inspired by William Dobell’s creation of papier-mâché cows during World War II, deployed as camouflage around defence bases in a strategy intended to deceive enemy warcraft. As Dr McMahon recalls, ‘When World War II broke out, Bill [Dobell] served as a camouflage labourer, and later as an artist recording the work of the Civil Construction Corps which built airfields and other defence projects. As a camouflagist he was one of several, later famous artists, who had been

137

SKULL RM, 2005 oil on linen 60.0 x 50.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: ‘Skull RM’/ oil on linen / 2005 / Ben Quilty

ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

LITERATURE

Private collection, New South Wales, a gift from the artist Menzies, Sydney, 23 June 2011, lot 78

Art Market Report, Issue 40, Third Quarter 2011, p. 34 (illus.)

138

Private collection, Canberra

PROVENANCE

BEN QUILTY born 1973

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

Corporate collection, Sydney

RELATED WORK

Bunjil, 2002, painted aluminium and wood, 2500 cm height, unique, commissioned by the Melbourne Docklands Authority, Melbourne Eagle , 2002, painted wood, 500 cm height, unique, in the collection of the Pt. Leo Estate, Victoria

139

cast and painted bronze 97.0 cm edition:height1/9

signed with the artist’s monogram, dated and numbered at base

PROVENANCE

BUNJIL, 2009

47BRUCE ARMSTRONG born 1957

48TIM STORRIER born 1949

2. Capon, E., ‘Foreword’ in Lumby, C., Tim Storrier: The Art of the Outsider, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, p. 8

140

‘My affinity for the Australian landscape has to do with a sense of place, which is both physical and emotional, and the fact that l always know where I

for

the subtlety of nature’s fugitive diurnal moods, its mysterious, silently unfolding rituals and vast droning presence, Tim Storrier’s iconic outback paintings evoke a poignant sense of place that is inextricably Australian. As Edmund Capon, a former director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales remarked, ‘they could not, I believe have come from any country other than Australia.’2 Typically juxtaposing the element of fire against low horizons and expansive skies, indeed his meditations are indelible echoes of this brooding landmass – longcontemplated narratives inspired by Storrier’s own highly personal experience of the landscape and enhanced by the alluringly beautiful texture and finish of his art. Utterly individual and exquisitely rendered, thus his images feature among the most instantly recognisable and universally admired in Australian art.

PROVENANCE

Corporate collection, Sydney

Likelife.the

ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

1 Storrier cited in Van Nunen, L., Point to Point: The Art of Tim Storrier, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1987

Encompassingam...’1

28 July VERONICA1989ANGELATOS

If Storrier first captured the imagination of the art world during the eighties with his signature images of burning ropes set against expansive desert plains, by the turn of the millennium his evocations had become less literal and direct, announcing ‘…a more sophisticated exploration of the emotive, melancholic mood that has always haunted [his] work.’ 3 Painted at his grand Victorian property ‘Yarras’ in Bathurst, New South Wales, The Evening Lament (Yarras), 2001 exemplifies well this transition, belonging to a series of nocturnal landscape ‘vignettes’ in which the horizon line has now completely disappeared – replaced instead by swatches of celestial skies variously framed

between ‘columns’ of simmering blaze lines and/or garlands of roses decoratively arranged in a manner reminiscent of wallpaper. Betraying a fundamental concern with the tension between the decorative and representational function of art, the work is a meticulously composed, psychologically laden image which, though clearly derived from the natural world, nevertheless resonates with symbolic meaning and the artist’s own deeply personal vision. Indeed, in the manner of European Romantic and Neoclassical predecessors such as David, Ingres, Casper Friedrich and Delacroix, Storrier here contemplates the insignificance of humankind when compared to the awesome magnitude of the natural world, drawing upon the symbolism of the fading light of day as a metaphor for change or the fin de siècle (end of an era), while the sensuous floral blooms poignantly allude to evolution, the passing of time and the grandeur of decay in the same vein as a traditional vanitas still

finest of Storrier’s work, The Evening Lament (Yarras) accordingly highlights the artist’s enduring interest in the dichotomy between the classical and romantic, between the disciplined order of a painting’s surface and the submerged, darker implications of its subject. Disquietingly beautiful, the work encapsulates superbly the real power of Storrier’s unique vision; as Paul McGillick astutely elucidates, ‘…Tim Storrier’s art is about ambiguity and irony. It is never what it seems. Storrier’s critics have invariably been taken in by the surface charm of the work. What they have not appreciated… is the contradiction between Storrier’s pretty palette and the ugly, decaying and often violent imagery of the pictures.’4

THE EVENING LAMENT (YARRAS), 2001 synthetic polymer paint on linen 137.0 x 183.0 cm signed lower right: Storrier signed, dated and inscribed with title on stretcher bar verso: The Evening Lament (Yarras) / Storrier/ 2001

3. Lumby, ibid., p. 142 – 3 McGillick, P., shock Paddo?’, Sydney,

Australian Financial Review,

‘Culture

141

Wynne Prize 2003 , Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 22 March – 25 May 2003

ESTIMATE: $18,000 – 24,000

PROVENANCE

142

Aida Tomescu. New Paintings , Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney, 1 – 26 May 2002, cat. 4

EXHIBITED

AIDA TOMESCU born 1955 MAREA NEAGRA I, 2002 oil on canvas 183.0 x 152.0 cm signed, dated, and inscribed with title verso: Aida Tomescu / ‘Marea Neagra I’ (I) / 2002 / oil on canvas / 183 x 152

Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney (label attached verso) The Laverty Collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2002

PROVENANCE STATION, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne

SWEET EMILY (SML), 2020 voile, acrylic and wood 75.5 x 60.5 x 6.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: “Sweet Emily (Sml)” / NIESCHE / 2020.

ESTIMATE: $9,000 – 12,000

EXHIBITED

143

JONNY NIESCHE — When I am very stressed, I make jam, STATION, Melbourne, 30 May – 27 June 2020

JONNY NIESCHE born 1972

LITERATURE

RELATED WORK

Another example of this print is held in the collection of the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria

Crayford, P., (ed.), T he Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures Pty Ltd, Sydney, 2008, cat. P8702, p. 341

colour woodblock print 33.5 x 41.5 cm edition: 4/10 signed, dated and inscribed with title below image

EXHIBITED

PROVENANCE

Mori Gallery, Sydney

51CRESSIDA CAMPBELL born 1960 JOHN DORY, 1987

144

ESTIMATE: $8,000 – 12,000

Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1987

Cressida Campbell – Woodblock Prints 1985 – 1987, Mori Gallery, Sydney, 18 August – 5 September 1987, cat. 2

Crayford, P., (ed.), The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures Pty Ltd, Sydney, 2008, cat. P8515, p. 341 (dated 1985)

PROVENANCE

145

52CRESSIDA CAMPBELL born 1960 OBJECTS, 1984

Mori Gallery, Sydney

RELATED WORK

EXHIBITED

unique colour woodblock print 49.0 x 33.5 cm

Cressida Campbell: Woodblocks, Woodblock Prints and Paintings , Mori Gallery, Sydney, 12 – 30 March 1985, cat. 39

LITERATURE

Private collection, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1985

Objects , 1984, woodblock, 49.0 x 33.5 cm, private collection, in Crayford, P., (ed.), ibid, cat. W8512, p. 348 (dated 1985)

edition: 1/6 (unique print, edition unfilled) signed, dated, numbered and inscribed with title below image

ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

Private LeonardcollectionJoel,Melbourne, 2 November 1977, lot 152 Corporate collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

MELBOURNE AS IT WAS IN 1837, FROM THE EMERALD HILL SIDE NEAR THE FALLS, 1873 oil on canvas 68.0 x 90.0 cm signed and dated lower left: H L Van den Houten / 1873. signed and inscribed with title on artist’s label verso: Melbourne as it was in / 1837 from the / Emerald Hill side near the / Falls / Price 5 gns / by H. L. Van den Houten signed on frame verso: Van den Houten

PROVENANCE

Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, 1876, preview exhibition at Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition, 2 September –16 November 1875, Melbourne Public Library, Melbourne, cat. 3237 (as ‘Melbourne as it was in 1837’)

ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

146

53H. L. VAN DEN HOUTEN (1801 – 1879, Dutch/Australian)

EXHIBITED

PROVENANCE

The artist’s granddaughter, a gift of the artist E. W. Deakin, Sydney, a gift from the above Private Sotheby’s,collectionMelbourne, 28 April 1997, lot 214

Jennifer Manton, Sydney Estate of the above, Sydney

ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

VALLEY OF THE GROSE, 1883 oil on board 43.5 x 57.0 cm signed and dated lower left: W. C. Piguenit 1883

Jack Manton, Queensland

W.C. Piguenit, 1836 – 1914: retrospective , Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 16 December 1992 – 14 February 1993 and touring, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 10 March – 2 April 1993; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 13 May – 4 July 1993, cat. 16 (label attached verso)

147

Thence by descent

54WILLIAM PIGUENIT (1836 – 1914)

Jennifer Manton, Sydney

BAY OF NAPLES, c .1898 watercolour on paper 20.0 x 15.5 cm (sheet) signed lower left: A Streeton bears inscription on gallery label verso: Sir Arthur Streeton / “Naples”

Estate of the above, Sydney

PROVENANCE

148

Jack Manton, Queensland

RELATED WORK

ESTIMATE: $8,000 – 12,000

Bay of Naples , 1898, watercolour on paper, 34.5 x 22.5 cm, private collection, formerly in the collection of Mr Shakespeare, Sydney, cat. 255 in the Arthur Streeton Catalogue , 1935

55ARTHUR STREETON (1867 – 1943)

The Sedon Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso)

bears inscription on label verso: Naples – watercolour 1898 / No. 4 / Painted during a trip to England. This was the “study” / for the larger water colour “Bay of Naples” numbered / 206 in the official Streeton Catalogue. bears inscription on label verso: “NAPLES” A. STREETON / MR. T. MANTON. / RCD AT GALLERY 3–4–73

Thence by descent

ESTIMATE: $8,000 – 12,000

FROM BALMORAL ARTIST’S CAMP, 1887 watercolour on paper 28.5 x 39.0 cm

Richard Ashton, Sydney, by 1965 Private collection, Mosman Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above, by auction, late 1970s

signed and dated lower right: J.R ASHTON / 1887

149

EXHIBITED

‘The Art Society’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 22 July 1887, p. 7

JULIAN ROSSI ASHTON (1851 – 1942)

PROVENANCE

possibly: The Art Society, Sydney, 20 July 1887

LITERATURE

EXHIBITED

Private collection, Deutscher~Menzies,QueenslandSydney,10 March 2004, lot 128 Private collection, Sydney

COASTAL HILLS, NEW SOUTH WALES, 1954 oil on canvas on board 41.0 x 59.5 cm

Amy Rees, Sydney, the artist’s sister Elsie Golden, Queensland, a gift from the above Thence by descent

ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000 57

150

LLOYD REES (1895 – 1988)

John Martin’s Gallery, Adelaide, 1954 Lloyd Rees , Moreton Gallery, Brisbane, 1955

PROVENANCE

signed and dated lower right: Rees / 54 inscribed with title verso: Coastal Hills / N. S. W

Art Galleries Schubert, Queensland (label attached verso)

signed and dated lower right: HANS HEYSEN 1938

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Queensland

ESTIMATE: $16,000 – 20,000

151

58HANS HEYSEN (1877 – 1968)

GRAZING CATTLE, 1938 watercolour on paper 31.5 x 38.5 cm

Private collection, Gold Coast, Queensland

Thence by descent

Private Christie’s,collectionSydney, 14 August 1994, lot 67

PROVENANCE

Thence by descent

Private collection, California, USA

152

ESTIMATE: $5,000 – 8,000

Mr Alan Greenway, Australia and USA

signed and dated lower right (inverted): RUSSELL 21. bears inscription verso: J21

FLAME TREES, 1921 pencil and watercolour on paper 25.0 x 30.5 cm (sheet)

JOHN PETER RUSSELL (1858 – 1930)

Thence by descent

153

THE RIVER LEYSSE, CHAMBÉRY, c .1930 s oil on card 23.0 x 28.0 cm

Private collection, Rouen, France, acquired directly from the artist, c.1945

ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

60BESSIE DAVIDSON (1879 – 1965)

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Sydney

signed lower left: Bessie Davidson

Private collection, Rouen, France Sotheby’s, Sydney, 28 June 2005, lot 393C (as ‘Stream in the Alps’)

was an artist and a teacher, and his arrival in Australia established a direct link with the Weimar Bauhaus, where he had studied from 1919 until 1925. Founded by architect, Walter Gropius, in 1919, the Bauhaus was a highly influential school whose manifesto proposed a radical challenge: ‘Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the c lass distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist. Together let us conceive and create the new building of the future, which can embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity’. 3 Hirschfeld-Mack enrolled in October 1919 and began his apprenticeship in the graphic printing workshop which was run by Paul Klee. Learning various printmaking techniques, he also mastered the use of the printing press, undertaking commercial jobs for external clients, as well as limited edition fine art printing. The Neue europäische Graphik series, which featured prints by artists including Vassily Kandinsky, Kurt Schwitters and Max Beckmann, was produced at the Bauhaus and with fellow student, Josef Albers, Hirschfeld-Mack is said to have designed, as well as printed, some of the portfolio covers.4

Conditions on the Dunera were poor. Drastically overcrowded, it lacked sufficient bedding, shower and toilet facilities for its more than 2,500 passengers. Exercise above deck was restricted to less than thirty minutes a day and throughout the 57-day voyage, many suffered from seasickness and other illnesses. More shockingly, the internees also endured verbal and physical abuse from the army officers onboard, as well as having the few possessions they had been allowed to take with them damaged, discarded and stolen. Their resilience and optimism in the face of adversity was remarkable. To counteract the difficulties of their situation, the passengers organised card and chess games –one of the chess sets being fashioned out of bread dough – as well as holding language classes, musical concerts and lectures on a wide range of subjects, from literature to economics and agriculture.1

Lots –

154Ludwig

Hirschfeld-Mack arrived in Australia on the HMT Dunera, disembarking in Sydney Harbour in early September 1940. It had been a long and complicated journey. Having left his wife and children in Germany some years earlier, when the rise of Nazism made finding permanent employment for someone of his Jewish heritage almost impossible, Hirschfeld-Mack was teaching in England. Following the fall of France in May 1940, he was interned as an ‘enemy alien’ and despite having been classified only a few months earlier as an ‘alien class C’ – a person who presented the lowest risk to England and the allies – he was subsequently deported as part of a program that transported internees to Australia and Canada.

The69diversity

A Collection of Works by Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack

(German/Australian 1893 – 1965)

Hirschfeld-Mack2

of these ship-board activities – which continued and expanded once the men were interned in camps in regional New South Wales and Victoria – reflected the knowledge and expertise of the internees, many of whom were highly-trained professionals, intellectuals and skilled artists and artisans. Alongside the architects, doctors, engineers, chemists, teachers and business executives on board the Dunera, were 27 artists, 9 jewellers, 30 leather workers, 12 photographers, as well as a weaver, a potter and a maker of musical instruments.

The estate of the artist

ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 50,000

155

Private collection, Italy

signed lower right: L. H. MACK

LUDWIG HIRSCHFELD–MACK (German/Australian, 1893 – 1965)

PROVENANCE

RED, GREY AND ORANGE COMPOSITION, c .1935

signed verso: L. H. MACK

oil on compressed card 35.5 x 49.5 cm

From 1920, Hirschfeld-Mack experimented with the technique of monotype, which, as the name suggests, produces a single, unique printed impression, as opposed to an edition of identical multiples. Monotypes are traditionally made by applying paint or ink to a printing plate (usually metal or glass) and then transferring the design – which appears as a mirror image of the design on the plate – to paper. Hirschfeld-Mack used a different technique, the ‘Durchdrückzeichnung’ or ‘press through drawing’, whereby the paper is laid down onto an inked surface and the image is created by drawing on the back of the sheet, the pressure of the pencil transferring ink from the plate to the paper. While Klee is known to have used a similar technique, in a letter written many years later, Hirschfeld-Mack stated that he introduced the technique to the Bauhaus, noting that ‘…Paul Klee asked me if he could use [it] for his works.’5 This influence continued during his internment in Australia and it is likely that fellow Dunera-boys, Erwin Fabian and Bruno Simon – both of whom recorded the experience of internment in powerful, sometimes harrowing monotypes – learnt the distinctive printing technique from him.6

Ludwig Hirschfield–Mack (far left), with Theo Bolger and Marli Heimann operating the apparatus during a performance of Kreuzspiel, photographer:1924Gert Maehler

156

Produced between 1947 and the early 1960s, this group of monotypes displays the rich creative possibilities of the medium in HirschfeldMack’s hands. Positive and negative linear designs are combined with areas of tone, which was achieved by applying pressure to the back of the sheet, and often highlights the texture of the papers he used. Other tools, such as a comb which created the distinctive parallel wavy lines seen in Composition, c.1962, were used to create a variety of marks and effects. Colour, generally added later, is a key element of these works, reminding us of Hirschfeld-Mack’s lifelong interest in colour and its theory, from teaching the colour seminar at the Bauhaus in 1922, to his renowned experiments with colour and music.7 According to his second wife, Olive, Hirschfeld Mack wanted to create a feeling of transparency in these works and would apply the colour slowly, revisiting the work over an extended period, each time carefully considering the effect of adding more colour. 8 An important early example, Off to the Stars, 1947, which combines printing in brown ink with delicate washes of blue and pink watercolour, exemplifies his approach. Inscribed by the artist, its title too, is characteristic of the optimistic and sometimes other-worldly themes he often addressed in his art.

Hirschfeld-Mack painted Red, Grey and Orange Composition, c.1935 in Berlin. Its bold, fragmented composition exemplifies Bauhaus abstraction, but with its striking elements of line, layering and rich textural qualities, it has a distinctive Hirschfeld-Mack inflection. The focus on pattern – parallel lines, cross-hatching and fields of dots and dashes – which is primarily achieved by drawing through areas of creamy-coloured paint (probably with the end of a paintbrush) to reveal the layer below, also creates an interesting link to the techniques adopted in his monotypes. Studio photographs from the mid-1930s show that alongside abstract works such as this, Hirschfeld-Mack was also painting figurative images during these years, and given the increasing restrictions being placed on all aspects of contemporary life by the Nazis, they represented a far safer option. Abstract art was branded ‘degenerate’ and as Hirschfeld-Mack explained, ‘Artists who experimented and followed the new abstract or near abstract trends of our time, were put on a black list, and were not permitted to draw or paint any longer. These artists had to sign a paper, that they would cease painting altogether and they were controlled by the Gestapo in ruthless house searches. If they continued painting, they were arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps.’ 9 The historical context of this painting imbues it with particular significance. As a strong expression

4. Ibid., p. 39

7. See McNamara, A., ‘The Bauhaus in Australia: Interdisciplinary Confluences in Modernist Practices’ in Stephen, A., Goad, P., & McNamara, A., (eds.), Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia, The Miegunyah Press, Carlton, 2008, pp. 12 – 13

of abstraction made in a place and at a time when this was forbidden, it exemplifies the subversive power of art (and artists) and the critical role of creativity. As a reflection of Hirschfeld-Mack’s Bauhaus training and the artistic and intellectual milieu of which he was a part, it creates a tangible link between avant-garde European modernism and the history of twentieth century Australian art.

6. See Keaney, op. cit., pp. 91 – 92 and Butler, R., Printed: Images by Australian Artists 1885 – 1955, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2007, p. 222

9. Quoted in Schwarzbauer, op. cit., p. 113

KIRSTY GRANT

8. Hazel de Berg, interviews with Olive Hirschfeld, 8 December 1965, National Library of Australia

2. See Keaney, M., ‘Images of Displacement: Art from the Internment Camps’ in Butler, R., (ed.) The Europeans: Emigré Artists in Australia 1930-1960, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997, p. 101

Ludwig Hirschfield–Mack in his studio in Geißlerpfad with various artworks on display, 1934 photographer unknown

1. The details of Hirschfeld-Mack’s life and journey to Australia in this essay are drawn from Schwarzbauer, R. with Bell, C., Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack: More Than a Bauhaus Artist, History Smiths, Melbourne, 2021.

157

3. Cited in Schwarzbauer, op. cit., pp. 36 – 37

5. Ibid., p. 47

158 62LUDWIG HIRSCHFELD–MACK (German/Australian, 1893 –COMPOSITION,1965)1962 monotype and watercolour on paper 22.5 x 28.5 cm (sheet) signed and dated lower right: L. H. Mack 1962 ESTIMATE: $4,000 – 6,000 PROVENANCE The estate of the artist Private collection, Italy

Private collection, Italy

LUDWIG HIRSCHFELD–MACK (German/Australian, 1893 –COMPOSITION,1965)1962

PROVENANCE

ESTIMATE: $4,000 – 6,000

monotype and watercolour on paper 22.0 x 28.0 cm (sheet) signed and dated lower right: L. H. Mack 1962

159

The estate of the artist

ESTIMATE: $4,000 – 6,000

160

monotype and watercolour on paper 18.5 x 22.0 cm (image) 22.5 x 28.5 cm (sheet) signed and dated lower left: L. H. Mack 1958 dated verso: … Mai - 1958

LUDWIG HIRSCHFELD–MACK (German/Australian, 1893 –COMPOSITION,1965)1958

Private collection, Italy

PROVENANCE

161

Private collection, Italy

ESTIMATE: $4,000 – 6,000

The estate of the artist

signed and dated lower right: Mack 1947 inscribed with title verso: off to the stars.

PROVENANCE

OFF TO THE STARS, 1947 monotype and watercolour on paper 22.0 x 23.5 cm (image) 24.0 x 28.5 cm (sheet)

65LUDWIG HIRSCHFELD–MACK (German/Australian, 1893 – 1965)

LUDWIG HIRSCHFELD–MACK (German/Australian, 1893 – 1965) COMPOSITION, c .1962 monotype and watercolour on paper 22.5 x 28.5 cm (sheet) inscribed lower right: L. H. Mack bears inscription verso: Painted in the 1960’s / signed by / Olive Hirschfeld / 7/12/’65

162 6766LUDWIG

PROVENANCE

The estate of the artist Private collection, Italy

ESTIMATE: $4,000 – 6,000

The estate of the artist Private collection, Italy

HIRSCHFELD–MACK (German/Australian, 1893 – 1965) COMPOSITION, c .1960 monotype and watercolour on paper 28.0 x 19.5 cm (sheet) signed lower right: L. H. Mack

ESTIMATE: $4,000 – 6,000

LUDWIG6968

ESTIMATE: $4,000 – 6,000

PROVENANCE

The estate of the artist Private collection, Italy

ESTIMATE: $4,000 – 6,000

HIRSCHFELD–MACK (German/Australian, 1893 – 1965) COMPOSITION, 1960 monotype and watercolour on paper 24.0 x 15.5 cm (sheet) signed and dated upper right: L. H. Mack 1960

163

The estate of the artist Private collection, Italy

LUDWIG HIRSCHFELD–MACK (German/Australian, 1893 – 1965) COMPOSITION, 1962 monotype and watercolour on paper 25.0 x 24.5 cm (sheet) signed and dated lower left: L. H. Mack 1962 inscribed verso: For Olive / Christmas / 1962

PROVENANCE

Drawing, Print and Watercolour, Contemporary Art Society of Australia, Adelaide, 1952, cat. 20 (another example, as ‘The Garden’)

LITERATURE

Paintings by Dorrit Black , Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 18 – 28 March 1936, cat. 26 (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. 28 (another example)

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

‘Art Exhibition. Miss Dorrit Black’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 18 March 1936, p. 12 Burke, J., Australian Women Artists: One Hundred Years 1840 –1940, George Paton and Ewing Galleries, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1973, cat. 10, pp. 23, 37 (illus., another example, as ‘The Garden’) North, I., The Art of Dorrit Black , Macmillan, Melbourne and Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1979, cat. L.32, pl. 19, pp. 73 (illus., another example), 132 Burke, J., Australian Women Artists: 1840 – 1940, Greenhouse Publications, Melbourne, 1980, pl. 12, p. 96 (illus., another example), 162 Coppel, S., Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School, Scolar Press, Aldershot, England, in association with the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1995, cat. DB 32, p. 161 (illus., another example) Lock–Weir, T., Dorrit Black. Unseen Forces , Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2014, p. 204 (illus., another example) Samuel, G. (ed.), Cutting Edge. Modernist British Printmaking, Bloomsbury, London, 2019, pp. 50 – 51, 70, 75, 115 (illus., another example) Noordhuis – Fairfax, S. (ed.), Spowers and Syme , National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2021, pp. 52 (illus., another example), 94

Estate of Edith Lawrence, London

164

signed in image with artist’s monogram signed, numbered and inscribed with title below image: Corner of the Garden 2/50 Dorrit Black

RELATED WORKS

Thence by descent

Private collection, London Bonhams, London, 16 December 2021, lot 23

EXHIBITED

British Lino–cuts , Ward Gallery, London, 10 June – 8 July 1936, cat. 39 (another example)

Dorrit Black Memorial Exhibition, Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide, 1952, cat. 63 (another example, as ‘The Garden’)

Private collection, Sydney

Exhibitions of Paintings by the late Dorrit Black , Hahndorf Academy Gallery, Adelaide, 1959, cat. 36 (another example, as ‘The Garden’)

Dorrit Black (1891 – 1951), Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide, 24 April – 15 May 2011, cat. 33 (another example)

Dorrit Black: Unseen Forces , Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 14 June – 7 September 2014 (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)

70DORRIT BLACK (1891 – 1951)

Australian Women Artists: One Hundred Years 1840 – 1940, George Paton and Ewing Galleries, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 2 – 27 September 1973; and touring, cat. 10 (another example, as ‘Garden’)

Dorrit Black 1891 – 1951, Art Gallery of South Australia, and touring, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Newcastle Art Gallery, New South Wales; The Ewing and George Paton Galleries, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1975 – 76, cat. 60 (another example)

Study for Corner of the Garden, c.1936, watercolour on paper, 28.0 x 38.5 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

CORNER OF THE GARDEN, c .1936 colour linocut on paper 26.0 x 31.0 cm (image) 28.5 x 35.0 cm edition:(sheet)2/50

165

PROVENANCE

AUSTRALIAN FLOWERS, 1927 hand–coloured woodcut 11.0 x 11.0 cm (image) 23.0 x 17.0 cm (sheet)

Butler, R., and Deutscher, C., A Survey of Australian Relief Prints 1900/1950, Deutscher Galleries, Melbourne, 1978, cat. 29, p. 21 (illus., another example)

166

edition of 32 tipped into the deluxe edition of Art in Australia, Margaret Preston Number, No. 22, December 1927 signed with initials in image lower left: MP signed and inscribed with title below image: Australian flowers Margaret Preston

LITERATURE

Butler, R.,The Prints of Margaret Preston, A Catalogue Raisonné , Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1987, cat. 120, p. 131 (illus., another example)

71MARGARET PRESTON (1875 – 1963)

Private collection, Sydney

ESTIMATE: $8,000 – 12,000

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

EXHIBITED

RELATED WORK

Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 16 May 2006, lot 72 Private collection, Melbourne

A Survey of Australian Relief Prints 1900 – 1950, Deutscher Galleries, Melbourne, 13 April – 5 May 1978, cat. 29 (another example)

PROVENANCE

Thea Proctor and Margaret Preston Exhibition, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 18 November – 2 December 1925, cat. 20 (another example)

LITERATURE

Woman’s World, Sydney, vol. 6, no. 1, January 1926, p. 64 (illus., another example, as ‘N.S.W. Wild Flowers’)

Private collection, Sydney Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 16 May 2006, lot 73 Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibition of Woodcuts by Margaret Preston, Dunster Galleries, Sydney, September 1926, cat. 66 (another example)

72MARGARET PRESTON (1875 – 1963)

Art in Australia, Sydney, No. 57, 15 November 1934, p. 90 (illus., another example)

Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

RELATED WORK

167

ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

signed, numbered and inscribed with title below image: 25 th proof Sturt’s pea etc. Margaret Preston signed with initials in image lower left: MP.

The Home , Sydney, vol. 8, no. 8, August 1927, p. 26 (illus., another example)

Art in Australia, Sydney, 3rd Series, No. 22 (Margaret Preston Number), December 1927, p. 76, pl. 41 (illus., another example, as ‘Australian Wild Flowers’)

Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1987, cat. 88, p. 109 (illus., another example)

EXHIBITED

STURT’S DESERT PEA, 1925 hand–coloured woodcut 18.5 x 24.5 cm (image) 26.5 x 29.0 cm edition:(sheet)25/50

SEATED NUDE, 1927 pastel on paper 55.5 x 38.0 cm (sheet)

168

ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

PROVENANCE

signed and dated lower right: Cumbrae Stewart / 1927

Earl Gallery, Geelong Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above November 1985

EXHIBITED

JANET CUMBRAE STEWART (1883 – 1960)

Premier Exhibition of Fine Art, Earl Gallery, Geelong, November 1985, cat. 18 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, as ‘Deep in Thought’)

A Century of Women Artists , Melbourne Fine Art Gallery, Melbourne, 9 October – 3 November 1996, cat. 17 (label attached verso, illus. front cover of exhibition catalogue)

169

Private collection, Melbourne

ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

74THEA PROCTOR (1879 –THE1966)KISS watercolour on paper 25.0 x 49.0 cm (fan shaped) signed lower centre: THEA PROCTOR

Private Christie’s,collectionMelbourne, 27 April 1998, lot 78

PROVENANCE

EXHIBITED

170

The Laverty Collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in May 1985

PROVENANCE

LANDSCAPE, c .1940

oil on card on composition board 40.5 x 35.0 cm

signed lower left: G. Cossington Smith

GRACE COSSINGTON SMITH (1892 – 1984)

ESTIMATE: $15,000 – 20,000

Clinton Tweedie, Melbourne

GRACE COSSINGTON SMITH (1892 – 1984)

The Laverty Collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in c.1985

signed and dated lower left: G. Cossington Smith 51 signed and inscribed with title verso: Bush in Kuringai Chase / G. Cossington Smith

Geoffrey and Alex Legge, Sydney

PROVENANCE

ESTIMATE: $15,000 – 20,000

171

BUSH IN KURINGAI CHASE, 1951 oil on canvas on 37.5cardboardx50.0cm

Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne

As her teacher and mentor Max Meldrum observed following Beckett’s memorial exhibition in 1936 ‘the late Miss Beckett had done work of which any nation could be proud. No European critic would say that Miss Beckett belonged to any particular school, and that would be the highest compliment one could bestow. She ranked as a great artist.’ 2

172

1. Colquhoun, A., ‘Australian Artists of To-Day: Miss Clarice Beckett’, The Age, Melbourne, 18 July 1931, p. 7

TREES BESIDE THE YARRA RIVER, c .1925 oil on pulpboard 25.0 x 35.5 cm signed lower left: C. Beckett

Clarice Beckett painted several works featuring the Yarra River during the middle of the 1920s. By selecting a simple subject of the trees and river, she was able to transform the subject through tone into one of light and shade. Writing about Beckett in a feature article in The Age at this time, art critic Alexander Colquhoun states, ‘when Miss Clarice Beckett held her first show at the Athenaeum gallery in 1923, her work certainly found admirers, but the admiration was by no means general, and there was a good deal of confusion in the public mind as to whether she was a futurist, or only a new and dangerous variety of Meldrumite.’1 Neither her work, nor her way of working are, however, in any respect uncertain; rather merely the results of a sincere and reverent observation of Nature.

2. Meldrum, M., ‘Work of Clarice Beckett’, The Age, Melbourne, 5 May 1936, p. 9

77CLARICE BECKETT (1887 – 1935)

ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

Estate of Max Meldrum, Melbourne

Max Meldrum & Associates , Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 19 – 26 March 1997, cat. 75

EXHIBITED

PROVENANCE

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

Mrs Hilda Mangan, Victoria, the artist’s sister Gallery Huntley, Canberra (label attached verso) Private collection, Canberra

RELATED WORK

EXHIBITED

Exhibition of paintings by Clarice Beckett, Gallery Huntley, Canberra, 10 – 28 June 1980, cat. 2 (as ‘Sketch for “Bay Road”’)

173

78CLARICE BECKETT (1887 – 1935) SKETCH FOR BEACH ROAD, c .1933 oil on 16.0cardboardx23.0cm

Beach Road, c.1933, oil on canvas on board, 44.0 x 49.0 cm, private collection, illus. in Lock, T., Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2021, p. 123

Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings by Max Meldrum, Velasquez Gallery, Melbourne, 4 – 22 June 1940, cat. 89

Private collection, Melbourne

The Road to Monbulk , 1933 was painted by Meldrum while he and his family were staying with painters John and Mary Farmer at Olinda after his return from spending five years in France and America. Notably, the work featured in the artist’s exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1961, and was first exhibited at the Athenaeum Gallery in a solo exhibition in 1936, with watercolour painter Harold Herbert noting in The Argus , ‘Country roads near Melbourne are among the best of the landscapes.’1 The paintings of roadways which Meldrum undertook during this period, including Olinda Falls Road depicted here, portray different times of day and varying conditions of light and atmosphere; the aim of the painter being to capture the essential beauty of his subject matter through an ordered arrangement of the various elements in their tonal relationship to one another.

1. Herbert, H., ‘Meldrum and His Methods’, The Argus, Melbourne, 25 February 1936, p. 8

THE ROAD TO MONBULK, 1933 oil on compressed card 38.0 x 45.5 cm signed lower right [indistinctly]: Meldrum

174

EXHIBITED

Exhibition of Pictures by Max Meldrum, David Jones Gallery, Melbourne, November 1937, cat. 10

Paintings by Max Meldrum, Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne, 24 February – 7 March 1936, cat. 7

ESTIMATE: $4,500 – 6,500

PROVENANCE

Max Meldrum, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 3 March – 15 April 1961, cat. 39

Max Meldrum and Family, Victorian Artists’ Society Gallery, Melbourne, 23 October – 4 November 1998, cat. 42

Estate of Max Meldrum, Melbourne

79MAX MELDRUM (1875 – 1955)

Thence by descent

Loan Exhibition of Paintings by Max Meldrum, National Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 19 March – 16 April 1947, cat. 18 (as ‘Interior – Ida by Piano’)

Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne

IDA IN THE STUDIO, 1943 oil on board 46.0 x 38.0 cm signed lower left: Meldrum

Paintings by the Late Max Meldrum, Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne, 8 – 13 July 1963, cat. 17

ESTIMATE: $8,000 – 12,000

PROVENANCE

Estate of Max Meldrum, Melbourne

Ida in the Studio, 1943 depicts Meldrum’s first born daughter Ida (1906 – 1990) at the piano in his Kew studio. Meldrum painted a number of interior scenes during his later years, and this work relates to a similar composition purchased by the Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art in 1952. Other interior paintings by Meldrum are held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales; Bendigo Art Gallery; Castlemaine Art Museum; Geelong Gallery; and McClelland Gallery & Sculpture Park.

EXHIBITED

80MAX MELDRUM (1875 – 1955)

175

TREES IN LANDSCAPE, 1961 oil on board 68.0 x 90.0 cm signed and dated lower right: Clifton / ‘61 bears inscription verso: TREES IN LANDSCAPE 1961 / CLIFTON PUGH / PROV: SIR A. BURNEY / LONDON

Private collection, Perth, acquired from the above in 1999 Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 29 November 2017, lot 102

CLIFTON PUGH (1924 – 1990)

176

PROVENANCE

Sir A. Burney, London

Private collection, Perth

Private collection, Sydney

ESTIMATE: $12,000 – 18,000

ESTIMATE: $12,000 – 16,000

SQUARE TO SQUARE synthetic polymer paint on composition board 122.0 x 122.0 cm inscribed with artist’s name and title on typed label verso: 25. SQUARE TO SQUARE / ROGER KEMP.

177

82ROGER KEMP (1908 – 1987)

PROVENANCE

Corporate collection, Sydney

178 83SALI HERMAN (1898 – 1993) PADDINGTON STREET SCENE oil on canvas 58.5 x 89.5 cm signed lower right: S. Herman ESTIMATE: $18,000 – 25,000 PROVENANCE Private Sotheby’s,collectionMelbourne, 23 August 1992, lot 195 (as ‘Terraces’) Private collection, Melbourne

179

ALL PARTIES ARE STRONGLY URGED TO READ THE CONDITIONS OF AUCTION AND SALE INCLUDED IN THIS CATALOGUE

ARTIST’S NAMES

h. “signed” / “dated” in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, the work has been signed/dated by the artist.

All information published in Deutscher and Hackett catalogues represent statements of opinion and should not be relied upon as fact. All dimensions are listed in centimetres, height before width and are approximate. All prices are in Australian dollars.

c. Circle of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work showing the influence and style of the artist and of the artist’s period.

180

d. Studio/Workshop of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work possibly executed under the supervision of the artist.

RESERVES

PRE-AUCTION VIEWINGS

SYMBOL KEY

f. Manner of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work created in the style, but not necessarily in the period, of the artist.

e. School of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work by a follower or student of the artist.

PRE-SALE ESTIMATES

In both Sydney and Melbourne pre-auction viewings are scheduled for several days in advance of each auction. Deutscher and Hackett specialists are available to give obligation free advice at viewings or by appointment and prospective buyers are strongly encouraged to thoroughly examine and request condition reports for potential purchases. Pre-auction viewings are open to the public and are free to attend.

▲ Unless ownership is clearly stated in the provenance, this symbol is used where a lot is offered which Deutscher and Hackett owns in whole or in part. In these instances, Deutscher and Hackett has a direct financial interest in the property or means that Deutscher and Hackett has guaranteed a minimum price.

CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTIONS

Catalogues can be obtained at Deutscher and Hackett offices or by subscription (see the Catalogue Subscription Form at the back of this catalogue or online for more information).

1. PRIOR TO AUCTION

prospective buyers and sellers guide

a. NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work by the artist.

The price range estimated against each lot reflects the opinion of our art specialists as to the hammer price expected for the lot at auction and is informed by realised prices for comparable works as well as the particularities of each lot including condition, quality, provenance and rarity. While presale estimates are intended as a guide for prospective buyers, lots can be sold outside of these ranges. Pre-sale estimates include GST (if any) on a lot but do not include the buyer’s premium or other charges where applicable.

Terms used in this catalogue have the meanings ascribed to them below:

The reserve is the minimum price including GST (if any) that the vendor will accept for a lot and below which the lot will not normally be sold.

● Used to indicate lots for sale without a reserve.

i. “bears signature” / “bears date” in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, the work has possibly been signed/dated by someone other than the artist.

g. After NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a copy of a work by the artist.

b. Attributed to NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, probably a work by the artist, in whole or in part.

EXPLANATION OF CATALOGUING PRACTICE AND TERMS

All reference to artists make use of common and not full names in accordance with the standards outlined in the National Gallery of Australia reference publication Australian Art: Artist’s working names authority list. For instance, John Brack rather than Cecil John Brack; Roy de Maistre rather than Leroy Leveson Laurent De Maistre; Rosalie Gascoigne rather than Rosalie Norah Gascoigne.

The purchase price will be the sum of the final bid price (including any GST) plus a buyer’s premium set at 25% (inclusive of GST) of the final bid price. Buyers may be liable for other charges reasonably incurred once ownership has passed.

Lots paid for in full may be collected from Deutscher and Hackett premises the day after the auction occurs but lots paid for by cheque may not be collected until all funds have cleared. Proof of identification is required upon collection and lots not collected within seven days of the sale may incur costs associated with external storage and freight.

Auctions are open to the public and are free to attend. Deutscher and Hackett may exclude any person at any time in its discretion.

Where GST applies to some lots the final bid price will be inclusive of the applicable IfGST.abuyer is classified as a “non-resident” for the purpose of GST, the buyer may be able to recover GST paid on the final purchase price if certain conditions are met.

Prospective bidders are advised to enquire about export licences — including endangered species licences and cultural heritage permits, where relevant — prior to bidding at auction. Telephone the Cultural Property and Gifts Section, Museums Section, Ministry for the Arts, on 1800 819 461 for further information. The delay or denial of such a licence will not be grounds for a rescission of sale.

Deutscher and Hackett directly offers services including storage, hanging and display, appraisals and valuations, collection management and research and in all instances will endeavour to coordinate or advise upon shipping and handling, insurance, transport, framing and conservation at the request and expense of the client. Deutscher and Hackett does not accept liability for the acts or omissions of contracted third parties.

Bidders must register to bid prior to the commencement of an auction. Deutscher and Hackett may impose other obligations on the registration of bidders in its discretion.

TRANSPORT AND SHIPPING

Where appropriate, Deutscher and Hackett will include the known provenance, or history of ownership of lots. Non disclosure may indicate that prior owners are unknown or that the seller wishes to maintain confidentiality.

PAYMENTS

EXPORT

3. AFTER THE AUCTION

UNSOLD LOTS

The fall of the auctioneer’s hammer indicates the final bid and the buyer assumes full responsibility for the lot from this time.

Lots are offered for sale on a consecutive basis. Deutscher and Hackett will determine the conduct of the auction in its absolute discretion, including the regulation of bidding. Consecutive or responsive bids may be placed by the auctioneer on behalf of the vendor up to the reserve.

COLLECTION

Buyers are required to pay a 10% G.S.T which sum is: a. included in the final bid prices where buying from a GST registered vendor; and b. included in any additional fees charged by Deutscher and Hackett; and c. included in the buyer’s premium.

Bidding usually opens below the listed pre-sale estimate and proceeds in the following increments (the auctioneer may vary the bidding increments at his or her $500discretion):–1,000 by $50

The copyright in the images and illustrations contained in this catalogue may be owned by third parties and used under licence by Deutscher and Hackett. As between Deutscher and Hackett and the buyer, Deutscher and Hackett retains all rights in the images and illustrations. Deutscher and Hackett retains copyright in the text contained in this catalogue. The buyer must not reproduce or otherwise use the images, illustrations or text without prior written consent.

RESERVE

SUCCESSFUL BIDS

PROVENANCE

181

CONDUCT OF AUCTION

As a courtesy service, Deutscher and Hackett will make reasonable efforts to place bids for prospective buyers in absentia provided written or verbal instructions (as indicated on absentee bid forms included at the back of this catalogue or online) are received 24 hours prior to auction. Where successful, lots will be purchased at the lowest possible bid and in the event of identical absentee bids, the bid received earliest will take precedence. Deutscher and Hackett accepts no responsibility for errors and omissions in relation to this courtesy service and reserves the right to record telephone bids.

$1,000 – 2,000 by $100 $2,000 – 3,000 by $200 $3,000 – 5,000 by $200 / $500 / $800 $5,000 – 10,000 by $500 $10,000 – 20,000 by $1,000 $20,000 – 30,000 by $2,000 $30,000 – 50,000 by $2,000 / $5,000 / $8,000 $50,000 – 100,000 by $5,000 $100,000 – 200,000 by $10,000 $200,000 – 300,000 by $20,000 $300,000 – 500,000 by $20,000 / $50,000 / $80,000 $500,000 – 1,000,000 by $50,000 $1,000,000+ by $100,000

Unless indicated otherwise, all lots are subject to a confidential reserve price determined by the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett or the auctioneer may place any number of bids on behalf of the vendor below the reserve price and is not obliged to identify that the bids are being placed on behalf of the ven dor.

PURCHASE PRICE AND BUYER’S PREMIUM

ABSENTEE OR COMMISSION BIDS AND TELEPHONE BIDS

Risk in the lot, including risk of loss or damage, will pass to the buyer on either the date payment is due, whether or not it has been made, or on collection by the buyer, whichever is earlier. The buyer is therefore encouraged to make arrangements to ensure comprehensive cover is maintained from the payment due date.

LOSS OR DAMAGE

BIDDING INCREMENTS

2. THE AUCTION

REGISTRATION

Where a lot is unsold, the auctioneer will announce that the lot is “bought in”, “passed”, “withdrawn” or “returned to owner”.

Payment must be made within seven days of the date of sale in Australian dollars by cash, cheque, direct deposit, approved credit cards or electronic funds transfer. If payment is made by credit card the price will increase by any merchant fees payable by Deutscher and Hackett (1.15% (including GST) for Visa and Mastercard and 1.65% (including GST) for American Express). In certain circumstances, extension of payment may be granted at the discretion of Deutscher and Hackett. Cleared funds will be held in an interest bearing trust account by Deutscher and Hackett until remitted to the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett will be entitled to retain any interest earned during this period. Payment by the vendor of any charge to Deutscher and Hackett is to be made within fourteen days of invoice

GOODS AND SERVICES TAX

g. The ‘lot’ refers to the item(s) described against any lot number in the catalogue.

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

All factual information provided by the vendor is merely passed on by Deutscher and Hackett from the vendor or other source. Deutscher and Hackett has made no attempt to verify this information. All additional statements of opinion represent the specialist opinions of Deutscher and Hackett employees and should not be relied upon as statements of fact.

a. The ‘buyer’ refers to the party with the highest accepted bid for any lot at auction and/or such party’s principal where bidding as agent.

f. ‘GST’ refers to the goods and services tax imposed by the A New Tax System (Goods and Services) Act 1999 as amended.

4. Responsibility to inspect: Responsibility remains with the buyer to satisfy its, his or her self by inspection and evaluation prior to purchase as to the nature and condition of any property.

CONDITIONS AT AUCTION

h. The ‘reserve’ refers to the minimum price (including any GST) the consignor will accept for a lot.

PRELIMINARY CONDITIONS AND DISCLAIMER

b. Deutscher and Hackett disclaims liability for any misrepresentations, errors or omissions, whether verbal or in writing, in the catalogue or any supplemental material.

e. The ‘buyer’s premium’ refers to the 25% (inclusive of GST) payable by the buyer calculated as a percentage of the hammer price.

c. ‘Deutscher and Hackett’ refers to Deutscher and Hackett Pty Ltd ACN 123 119 022, its subsidiaries, officers, employees and agents.

1. Definition of terms:

DEFINITIONS

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

3. Property is sold ‘as is’: To the extent permitted by law:

5. Registration: Bidders must register to bid and obtain a bidder’s paddle prior to the commencement of the auction. Registration requires that bidders provide proof of identity and Deutscher and Hackett may impose other obligations on the registration of bidders in its discretion.

d. The ‘hammer price’ refers to the final bid price (including any GST) accepted by the auctioneer, or in the case of a post-auction sale, the agreed sale price (including any GST).

6. Auctioneer’s discretion: Deutscher and Hackett reserves the right to absolute discretion over the conduct of the auction including the regulation of bidding and its increments. This discretion extends to the challenge or rejection of any bid, the right to withdraw any lot and the right to determine the successful bidder or reoffer a lot in the event of a dispute. The prospective buyers and sellers guide details an indicative process for the conduct of auctions. All parties are strongly urged to read the prospective buyers and sellers guide included in this catalogue.

ALL PARTIES ARE STRONGLY URGED TO READ THE CONDITIONS OF AUCTION AND SALE INCLUDED IN THIS CATALOGUE

a. no guarantees, warranties or representations are made (express or implied) by Deutscher and Hackett or the vendor in relation to the nature and condition of any lot; and

b. The ‘vendor’ refers to the party consigning property for sale and/or such party’s principal where acting as agent.

182 conditions of auction and sale

d. If payment is made via Visa, Mastercard or American Express, any merchant fees payable by Deutscher and Hackett on the transaction as indicated in the prospective buyers and sellers guide. Payment must be made within seven days of the date of sale in Australian dollars by cash, cheque, direct deposit, approved credit cards or electronic funds transfer using the form and/or trust account details provided at the back of this catalogue. In certain circumstances, extension of payment may be granted at the discretion of Deutscher and Hackett. Once funds have cleared, the proceeds of the sale less the buyer’s Premium, GST and any commission or costs charged as agreed will be remitted to the vendor within thirty-five days of the date of sale provided payment has been received in full. Funds will be held in an interest bearing account by Deutscher and Hackett until remitted to the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett will be entitled to any interest earned during this period. Application for a cultural heritage export licence or any other licence in no way affects the buyer’s obligation to make payment or collection within the periods specified in sections 10 and 13a.

16. Governing law and jurisdiction: These terms and conditions and any matters concerned with the foregoing fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of the state in which the auction is held.

b. In exchange for services rendered by Deutscher and Hackett, a buyer’s premium calculated at 25% (inclusive of GST) of the hammer price.

7. Bidding: Deutscher and Hackett may sell each lot to the highest bidder at auction provided the reserve price has been met or where the net amount accounted to the vendor is at least equivalent to the net amount that would have been achieved for a sale at the reserve price. The fall of the auctioneer’s hammer marks the acceptance of the highest bid and the conclusion of a contract for sale between the vendor and the buyer. Unless otherwise agreed in writing with Deutscher and Hackett, the individual physically present at the auction who signals the bid accepts personal liability to pay the purchase price, including the buyer’s premium and all additional fees, taxes and charges.

i. Deutscher and Hackett breach: To the extent permitted by law, the sole and maximum remedy to a buyer for breach of warranty is a refund of original purchase price, including buyer’s premium. In such an event the sale contract shall be rescinded and all costs associated with returning the property (in the state in which it was sold) to the premises of Deutscher and Hackett are to be borne by the buyer. Deutscher and Hackett is not liable for any indirect or consequential loss or damage for any matter arising directly or indirectly as a result of the sale.

17. Severability: In the event that any provisions of this agreement should be found unenforceable in a court of law, that part shall be discounted and the remaining conditions shall continue in full force and effect to the extent permitted by law.

GOODS AND SERVICES TAX

15. Termination, Breach and Legalities:

iii. Resell the property without reserve at the next auction or privately on five days notice. Any disparity between sale and resale prices, including associated costs such as, but not limited to, legal, storage and sale expenses, will be to the account of the defaulting buyer.

vi. Take any other action Deutscher and Hackett deems necessary or appropriate.

10. Post auction private sale: Should the lot fail to sell at auction, Deutscher and Hackett is authorised to sell the lot privately for a period of seven days in which event this agreement shall apply to the relevant buyer to the full extent of its provisions.

a. included in the final bid prices where buying from a GST registered vendor; and

The buyer assumes risk for the property in all respects from this date and neither Deutscher and Hackett nor the vendor will be liable for loss or damage occurring after the payment due date. The buyer is encouraged to make arrangements to ensure comprehensive cover is maintained from this date. Title in the lot does not pass to the buyer, even if the lot is released to the buyer, until the buyer has paid all sums owing to Deutscher and Hackett. If a buyer makes a claim against Deutscher and Hackett for damage or loss after sale, the buyer’s premium and the final bid price shall be payable notwithstanding.

viii. Provide the vendor with the buyer’s details to permit the vendor to take action against the buyer to recover the money.

i. Cancel the sale and retain any payment or property in Deutscher and Hackett custody as collateral or liquidated damages.

9. Application of GST to buyers: Buyers are required to pay a 10% GST which sum is:

b. included in any additional fees charged by Deutscher and Hackett; and c. included in the buyer’s premium.

c. Post sale packing, handling, shipping and storage where applicable.

13. Freight:

If a buyer is classified as a “non-resident” for the purpose of GST, the buyer may be able to recover GST paid on the final purchase price if certain conditions are met.

11. Payment: The buyer will not acquire title until payment has cleared in full. Interest at a rate of 17.5% p.a. will be charged over outstanding accounts where no extension of terms has been granted. Interest will be payable from the payment due date. With respect to each lot purchased, the buyer agrees to make the following payments within seven days from the date of sale:

183

a. the date payment is due, whether or not it has been made; and b. collection by the buyer.

iv. Apply any part payment received from the buyer in respect of any lots at its discretion.

b. Buyers are required to make their own arrangements for packing, handling, shipping and transit insurance for their property. Deutscher and Hackett does not accept responsibility or liability for the acts or omissions of any third party, such as a shipping agent, whether or not such a party has been recommended or suggested by Deutscher and Hackett.

v. Retain any of the buyer’s property held by Deutscher and Hackett until the buyer has satisfied its obligations to Deutscher and Hackett.

a. The buyer may only remove a lot from the Deutscher and Hackett premises once payment has been cleared in full and must be removed no later than seven days after the date of sale. Should items not be removed by this time, storage and insurance costs may be charged to the buyer. If a lot has not been collected within 30 days after the date of sale and alternative arrangements have not been with Deutscher and Hackett, the lot may be re-sold by Deutscher and Hackett without reserve at the next auction and Deutscher and Hackett may set off any amounts owed for storage and insurance costs and its standard commission before remitting the proceeds to the buyer.

a. The hammer price.

12. Risk and Title: Risk in the lot, including risk of loss or damage, will pass to the buyer on the earlier of:

vii. Refuse to permit the buyer to participate in future auctions.

a. Buyer breach: Deutscher and Hackett may, in addition to other remedies available by law, exercise one or more of the following rights or remedies for breach:

8. Amounts inclusive of GST: Unless otherwise specified, all amounts specified in this section as payable by the buyer, or otherwise used to calculate payment to Deutscher and Hackett, are inclusive of any GST component. Deutscher and Hackett will provide buyers with a tax invoice that meets the requirements of the Australian Taxation Office.

POST-SALE CONDITONS

ii. Charge the buyer interest at the rate of 2% above the rate fixed under section 2 of the Penalty Interest Rates Act 1984 (Vic).

The limited warranty and the right to rescind the sale is not assignable and the buyer must have retained title to the lot without disposing of any interest in it up until the buyer notifies Deutscher and Hackett of the forgery allegations. The buyer acknowledges that it has no rights directly against Deutscher and Hackett if a lot is established to be a forgery.

a. the buyer must supply two independent expert testimonies attesting to the forgery. Deutscher and Hackett is entitled to request further expert evidence where it deems the evidence provided to be unsatisfactory; b. there must be no conflict of opinion among accepted experts in the field; and c. the forgery must be able to be proven through means that at the time of publication of the catalogue were commonly employed and that will not damage or otherwise put the lot in jeopardy.

14. Limited Warranty of Authorship: If a buyer is able to establish that a lot is a forgery in accordance with these conditions for sale within five years of the date of sale, the buyer shall be entitled to rescind the sale and obtain a refund of the hammer price from the vendor. The buyer must return the lot in the state in which it was sold within fourteen days of notifying Deutscher and Hackett of the forgery allegations. For a lot to be established as a forgery, the following conditions must be satisfied:

sydne y • 02 9287 0600 m e l b o u r n e • 03 9865 6333 NOW C ONSIGNIN G forthcoming auction s of important a ustralian + i n t e r n a tional fine info@deutscherandhackett.comartwww.deutscherandhackett.com

IMPORTANTSALECLEMENGERNO.:071AUSTRALIAN AND INTERNATIONAL FINE ART

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

SALE CODE:

Expiry

Signature Date

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss)

please email, post or fax this completed form to:

14 SEPTEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 83 36 GOSBELLPADDINGTONSTREETNSW2021

DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 36 GOSBELLPADDINGTONSTREETNSW2021

185 CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTION FORM q Fine Art (Single issue) $45* q Tax invoice required q Aboriginal Art single issue (Single issue) $45* q Annual Fine Art Auctions (3 issues) $120* q Annual Fine Art & Aboriginal Art Auctions (4 issues) $160* * Price includes G.S.T. postage and handling. Additional $10 per catalogue for international orders

Name (please print) Business name CityAddress State Post Code Telephone/Home Business/Mobile Fax Email Subscription Payment by: q Visa q AMEX q Mastercard

SYDNEY AUCTION

Name on card Card number date

tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611

Telephone/Mobile Email FORM

186

ATTENDEE PRE-REGISTRATION

Business name

SALE CODE: CLEMENGER SALE NO.: ANDIMPORTANT071AUSTRALIANINTERNATIONALFINE ART

SYDNEY AUCTION 14 SEPTEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 83 36 GOSBELL NSWPADDINGTON36DEUTSCHERthispleaseNSWPADDINGTONSTREET2021email,postorfaxcompletedformto:ANDHACKETTGOSBELLSTREET2021

Name (please print)

info@deutscherandhackett.com

CityAddress State Post Code

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss)

and

dollars.

Buyers and Sellers

Name (please print)

applicable). Bids are made in

TELEPHONE BID FORM

including buyer’s premium or GST

SALE CODE: IMPORTANTSALECLEMENGERNO.:071AUSTRALIAN AND INTERNATIONAL FINE ART

Please to the Prospective Guide Conditions of Auction Sale in this catalogue

for information regarding sales.

refer

please email, post or fax this completed form to:

Billing address (PO Box insufficient)

CityAddress Post Code Telephone numbers for auction date in order of preference

State

187 INTERNAL USE ONLY

LOT NO. ARTIST/TITLE COVER BID* 10.8.2.1.3.4.5.6.7.9.

RECEIVED BY

*Not (where Australian

I accept that DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT provides this complimentary service as a courtesy to its clients, that there are inherent risks to telephone bidding, and I will not hold DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT responsible for any error.

1. 2.

SYDNEY AUCTION 14 SEPTEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 83 36 GOSBELLPADDINGTONSTREETNSW2021

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss)

By completing this form, I authorise DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT to contact me by telephone on the contact number(s) nominated. I understand it is my responsibility to enquire whether any Sale-Room Notices relate to any lot on which I intend to bid. I also understand that should my bid(s) be successful, a buyer’s premium of 25% (inclusive of GST), will be added to the final hammer price.

DATETIME

Signature (required) Date

and the

DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 36 GOSBELLPADDINGTONSTREETNSW2021 tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611 info@deutscherandhackett.com

Facsimile

Should the bid be successful, the buyer will be obliged to pay the final bid price plus buyer’s premium of 25% (inclusive of GST) of the final bid price. DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT provides this complimentary service as a courtesy to clients and does not accept liability for errors and omissions in the execution of absentee bids.

Billing address (PO Box insufficient)

info@deutscherandhackett.com BID

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

SYDNEY AUCTION 14 SEPTEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 83 36 GOSBELL NSWPADDINGTON36DEUTSCHERthispleaseNSWPADDINGTONSTREET2021email,postorfaxcompletedformto:ANDHACKETTGOSBELLSTREET2021

Signature (required) Date

ABSENTEE

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

INTERNAL USE ONLY

DATETIME

RECEIVED BY

CityAddress State Post Code Telephone Business/Mobile

LOT NO. ARTIST/TITLE

188

FORM

SALE CODE: CLEMENGER SALE NO.: ANDIMPORTANT071AUSTRALIANINTERNATIONALFINE ART

MAXIMUM

tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611

BID* 10.8.2.1.3.4.5.6.7.9.

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

Please refer to the Prospective Buyers and Sellers Guide and the Conditions of Auction and Sale in this catalogue for information regarding sales. By completing this form, absentee bidders request and authorise DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT to place the following bids acting as agent on their behalf up to and including the maximum bid specified. Lots will be bought at the lowest possible bid authorised by a bidder in absentia.

Facsimile Email

Name

PicassoPablo womanaofPortrait 1947.artist,theofGiftindustrielle.créationdemoderne-Centred’artnationalMuséeParis,Pompidou,Centre1938. Meguerditchian/Dist. RMN-GPMNAM-CCI/GeorgesPompidou,© CentrePhoto2022.Agency,Picasso/Copyright© Succession PRESENTING PARTNER ORGANISING INSTITUTIONS PREMIUM PARTNER MAJOR PARTNERS SUSTAINABILITY PARTNER LEARNING PARTNER WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF

Songlines from Australia’s First Peoples in a spectacular immersive experience Hotel Partner Accommodation Partner Media PartnerTourism Partner Curatorial PartnerCreated & Produced by ON SHOW 8 June — 9 October 2022 National Museum of Australia BOOK NOW nma.gov.au/connection V FROM THE CREATORS OF AN GOGH ALIV E The creation of Connection is supported through the Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund, an Australian Government initiative.

Paul Thomas,

Allan Vizents and Jeff Jones Perth research day 1982. Photograph. Private Collection.

192

Paul Thomas

and Allan Vizents Working material for Perth booklet 1982. Ink on paper. Private Collection. Until 20 Nov 2022 FREE

193 The Library warmly thanks our Treasures Gallery supporters. Their generosity has made it possible to bring these treasures to life for the whole community.Treasures Gallery Open Daily | 9am–5pm | Entry Free Until Sunday 11 December 2022 National Library of Australia, Canberra Kenneth Rowell, Costume designs for Cochenille, Spalanzani and Guests (detail), The Tales of Hoffmann, State Opera of South Australia, 1982, Kenneth Leslie Rowell Costume Design Archive (Pictures), nla.cat-vn6938134 Kenneth Rowell: Designer for the Stage

McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery is the home of Australian sculpture, located 45 minutes from Melbourne. With a wide-ranging collection of more than 100 sculptures, the park comprises eight hectares of designed landscape and vast areas of indigenous Australian bushland. The gallery exhibition program focuses on the development of modern sculpture and various forms of spatial practice, and encourages contemporary artists to address challenging issues in an Australian and global context.

03 9789 1671

Image: McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery, photo Mark Chew.

Tuesday to Sunday 10am – 5pm

Langwarrin VIC 3910

Tuesday to Sunday 10am – 5pm

390 McClelland Drive

Langwarrin VIC 3910

194

390 McClelland Drive

03 9789 1671

196

197

Lot 13 S. T Gill Lot 16 John Rae Lot 17 Louis Buvelot Lot 18 Jacques Carabain Lot 21 Frederick McCubbin Lot 22 Tom Roberts Lot 41 John Coburn Lot 45 John Kelly Lot 47 Bruce Armstrong Lot 48 Tim Storrier Lot 53 H.L. Van Den Houten Lot 57 Lloyd Rees Lot 73 Janet Cumbrae Stewart Lot 82 Roger Kemp

CULTURAL HERITAGE PERMITS

LOTS CONSIGNED BY GST REGISTERED ENTITIES

RESALE ROYALTY

198 COPYRIGHT CREDITS

Lot 40 © Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency 2022 Lot 41 © John Coburn/Copyright Agency 2022 Lot 42 © John Coburn/Copyright Agency 2022 Lot 43 © John Olsen/Copyright Agency 2022 Lot 45 © John David Kelly/Copyright Agency 2022 Lot 46 © Ben Quilty

Email: Phone:movable.heritage@arts.gov.au1800819461Lot1©WendyWhiteley/CopyrightAgency,2022Lot2©courtesyofTheEstateofJeffreySmartLot3©EstateofFredWilliams/CopyrightAgency2022Lot4©courtesyofHelenBrackLot5©IanFairweather/DACS.CopyrightAgency2022Lot6©courtesyofHelenBrackLot7©RosalieGascoigne/CopyrightAgency2022Lot8©ArthurBoyd/CopyrightAgency2022Lot9©WendyWhiteley/CopyrightAgency,2022Lot10©courtesyofTheEstateofJeffreySmartLot12©BenQuiltyLot28©RayCrooke/CopyrightAgency2022Lot29©SaliHerman/CopyrightAgency2022Lot30©JohnOlsen/CopyrightAgency2022Lot31©MargaretOlleyTrustandTheOlleyProject

Lot 47 © Bruce Armstrong Lot 48 © courtesy of the artist Lot 49 © Aida Tomescu/Copyright Agency 2022 Lot 51 © Cressida Campbell/Copyright Agency 2022 Lot 52 © Cressida Campbell/Copyright Agency 2022 Lot 57 © Alan and Jancis Rees/Copyright Agency 2022 Lot 58 © Hans Heysen/Copyright Agency 2022

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

Under the provisions of the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act, 1986, buyers may be required to obtain an export permit for certain categories of items in this sale from the Cultural Property Section:

Canberra ACT 2601

Department of Communications and the Arts GPO Box 2154

ARMSTRONG, B. 47 ASHTON, J. R. 56

TOMESCU, A. 49 TUCKER, A. 39

GASCOIGNE, R. 7 GILL, S. T. 13 GRUNER, E. 24

VAN DEN HOUTEN, H. L. 53 VON GUÉRARD, E. 14

M c CUBBIN, F. 21 MELDRUM, M. 79, 80 MIRÓ, J. 37

BECKETT, C. 26, 77, 78 BLACK, D. 70 BOYD, A. 8, 40 BRACK, J. 4, 6 BUNNY, R. 23 BUVELOT, L. 17

QUILTY, B. 12, 46 R

RAE, J. 16 REES, L. 57 ROBERTS, T. 22 ROBINSON, W. 11, 44 RUSSELL, J. P. 59

WHITELEY, B. 1, 9, 33, 34, 35 WILLIAMS, F. 3

E EARLE, A. 15 F FAIRWEATHER, I. 5 G

CAMPBELL, C. 51, 52 CARABAIN, J. 18 COBURN, J. 41, 42 CROOKE, R. 28 CUMBRAE STEWART, J. 73

D DAVIDSON, B. 60

199 i ndex A

KELLY, J. 45 KEMP, R. 82 L LONG, S. 25 M

HAWKINS, W. 27 HERMAN, S. 29, 83 HESTER, J. 38 HEYSEN, H. 58 HIRSCHFELD-MACK, L. 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69 K

OLLEY, M. 31, 32 OLSEN, J. 30, 43 P

N NIESCHE, J. 50 O

PICASSO, P. 36 PIGUENIT, W. C. 54 PRESTON, M. 71, 72 PROCTOR, T. 74 PUGH, C. 81

SMART, J. 2, 10 SMITH, G. C. 75, 76 STORRIER, T. 48 STREETON, A. 19, 20, 55

200

specialist fine art auction house and private gallery

Important Australian and International Fine Art

Articles inside

prospective buyers and sellers guide

important australian art from the collection of Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers – Grundy

selected works from the collection of Joan Clemenger AO and Peter Clemenger AO

lots 5

conditions of auction and sale