Thousands of people work in the wine industry but few end up on the bottle. At Yalumba, we’ve been making wine since 1849. One thing we’ve learnt over the years is that you can’t do much with a bunch of good grapes unless you have already picked a bunch of great people. With this in mind, in 1962, we decided to honour the great people who have made an outstanding contribution to life and tradition at Yalumba by crafting ‘The Signature’. Each release of this iconic Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz blend bears the signature of the person honoured. With the 55th Signature, we salute Andrew Murphy. Murph started his working life in the cellar where he quickly rose to Cellar Manager, qualified as a Winemaker, was promoted to Operations Manager and is today our Director of Wine. So he doesn’t need anybody to tell him that the wine which now bears his name is one of the finest Signatures we have crafted yet. In fact, he’d probably say the wine he’s ended up on is the one he’d most like to upend.
One family. Many stories.
Judy Argent 2008 2
Clive Weston 2009
Jane Ferrari 2010
Robert Hill-Smith 2012
Andrew Murphy 2013
Important Australian Works of Art from the Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC
FINE ART AUCTION • SYDNEY • N.A.S. CELL BLOCK THEATRE • 30 AUGUST 2017
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MELBOURNE • VIEWING 105 commercial road, south yarra, victoria, 3141 telephone: 03 9865 6333 • facsimile: 03 9865 6344 info@deutscherandhackett.com
SYDNEY • VIEWING 16 goodhope street, paddington, new south wales, 2021 telephone: 02 9287 0600 • facsimile: 02 9287 0611 info@deutscherandhackett.com
SYDNEY • AUCTION cell block theatre, national art school forbes street, darlinghurst, new south wales, 2010 telephone: 02 9287 0600
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sydney auction
melbourne viewing sydney viewing absentee/telephone bids live online bidding
LOTS 1 – 54 WEDNESDAY 30 AUGUST 2017 7:00pm cell block theatre, national art school, sydney forbes street darlinghurst, new south wales telephone: 02 9287 0600 THURSDAY 17 – SUNDAY 20 AUGUST 2017 105 commercial road south yarra, victoria, 3141 telephone: 03 9865 6333 11:00am – 6:00pm THURSDAY 24 – TUESDAY 29 AUGUST 2017 16 goodhope street paddington, new south wales, 2021 telephone: 02 9287 0600 11:00am – 6:00pm email bids to: info@deutscherandhackett.com fax: 02 9287 0611 telephone: 02 9287 0600 telephone bid form – p. 147 absentee bid form – p. 148 www.deutscherandhackett.com/watch-live-auction
www.deutscherandhackett.com • info@deutscherandhackett.com
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specialists CHRIS DEUTSCHER executive director — melbourne Chris is a graduate of Melbourne University and has over 35 years art dealing, auction and valuation experience as Director of Deutscher Fine Art and more recently, as co–founder and Executive Director of Deutscher~Menzies. He has extensively advised private, corporate and museum art collections and been responsible for numerous Australian art publications and landmark exhibitions. He is also an approved valuer under the Cultural Gifts Program.
DAMIAN HACKETT executive director — sydney Damian has over 25 years experience in public and commercial galleries, and the fine art auction market. He completed a BA (Visual Arts) at the University of New England, was Assistant Director of the Gold Coast City Art Gallery, and in 1993 joined Rex Irwin Art Dealer, a leading commercial gallery in Sydney. In 2001 Damian moved into the fine art auction market as Head of Australian and International art for Phillips de Pury and Luxembourg, and from 2002–2006 was National Director of Deutscher~Menzies.
HENRY MULHOLLAND senior art specialist Henry Mulholland is a graduate of the National Art School in Sydney, and has had a successful career as an exhibiting artist. Since 2000, Henry has also been a regular art critic on ABC Radio 702. He was artistic advisor to the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust Basil Sellers Sculpture Project, and since 2007 a regular feature of Sculpture by the Sea, leading tours for corporate stakeholders and conducting artist talks in Sydney, Tasmania and New Zealand. Prior to joining Deutscher & Hackett, Henry’s fine art consultancy provided a range of services, with a particular focus on collection management and acquiring artworks for clients on the secondary market.
CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE head of aboriginal art and senior art specialist Crispin holds a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts and History) from Monash University. In 1995, he began working for Sotheby’s Australia, where he became the representative for Aboriginal art in Melbourne. In 2006 Crispin joined Joel Fine Art as head of Aboriginal and Contemporary Art and later was appointed head of the Sydney office. He possesses extensive knowledge of Aboriginal art and has over 15 years experience in the Australian fine art auction market.
MARA SISON registrar Mara has a Bachelor of Arts (Humanities) from the University of Asia and the Pacific, Philippines and a Master of Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies from Deakin University. She gained her experience in the private and not-for-profit sectors as a Gallery Manager and Exhibitions Coordinator for MiFA Asian Contemporary Art and Melbourne Fine Art Galleries and as an Administration Officer for Australia China Art Foundation.
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ROGER McILROY head auctioneer Roger was the Chairman, Managing Director and auctioneer for Christie’s Australia and Asia from 1989 to 2006, having joined the firm in London in 1977. He presided over many significant auctions, including Alan Bond’s Dallhold Collection (1992) and The Harold E. Mertz Collection of Australian Art (2000). Since 2006, Roger has built a highly distinguished art consultancy in Australian and International works of art. Roger will continue to independently operate his privately-owned art dealing and consultancy business alongside his role at Deutscher and Hackett.
SCOTT LIVESEY auctioneer Scott Livesey began his career in fine art with Leonard Joel Auctions from 1988 to 1994 before moving to Sotheby’s Australia in 1994, as auctioneer and specialist in Australian Art. Scott founded his eponymous gallery in 2000, which represents both emerging and established contemporary Australian artists, and includes a regular exhibition program of indigenous Art. Along with running his contemporary art gallery, Scott has been an auctioneer for Deutscher and Hackett since 2010.
ALEX CRESWICK head of finance With a Bachelor of Business Accounting at RMIT, Alex has almost 15 years experience within financial management roles. He has spent much of his early years within the corporate sector with companies such as IBM, Macquarie Bank and ANZ. With a strong passion for the arts more recently he was the Financial Controller for Ross Mollison Group, a leading provider of marketing services to the performing arts. Alex is currently completing his CPA.
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH gallery manager – sydney Lucie completed her studies in Belgium, obtaining Masters of Arts in Art History (Modern and Contemporary Art), together with a Bachelors of Art History, Archaeology and Musicology from the Université Catholique de Louvain. Since returning to Australia in 2014, she has gained sound experience in cataloguing, research and arts writing through various roles with the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre and with private art advisory firms Tutela Capital and LoveArt International.
MELISSA HELLARD head of marketing and client services Melissa has a Bachelor of Communication (Media) from RMIT University, and a Master of Art Curatorship from The University of Melbourne. Melissa gained experience in the corporate sector assisting companies such as NAB, AFL and Fiat Chrysler Group in a variety of fields including marketing, events and sponsorship. With an enduring passion for the visual arts, Melissa was more recently the Finance and Administration Assistant for Deutscher and Hackett.
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specialists for this auction
ART SPECIALISTS Chris Deutscher 0411 350 150 Damian Hackett 0422 811 034 Henry Mulholland 0424 487 738 Crispin Gutteridge 0411 883 052 AUCTIONEERS Roger McIlroy Scott Livesey ADMINISTRATION AND ACCOUNTS Alex Creswick (Melbourne) 03 9865 6333 Lucie Reeves-Smith (Sydney) 02 9287 0600 ABSENTEE AND TELEPHONE BIDS Lucie Reeves-Smith 02 9287 0600 please complete the absentee bid form (p. 148) or telephone bid form (p. 147) SHIPPING Mara Sison 03 9865 6333 CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTIONS Louise Choi 03 9865 6333 catalogue $40 at the gallery $45 by mail $55 international (including G.S.T. and postage)
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contents lots 1 — 54
page 26
prospective buyers and sellers guide
page 140
conditions of auction and sale
page 142
catalogue subscription form
page 145
buyer pre-registration form
page 146
telephone bid form
page 147
absentee bid form
page 148
index
page 159
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catalogue research + essays
DR MARY EAGLE Former Head of Australian Art, National Gallery of Australia ANN GALBALLY Professorial Associate in Art History, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne HESTER GASCOIGNE PhD Candidate, Department of Art History and Film Studies, University of Sydney ANDREW GAYNOR Australian art specialist, writer and researcher KIRSTY GRANT Former Director of Heide Museum of Modern Art Former Senior Curator, National Gallery of Victoria HENRY MULHOLLAND Senior Art Specialist Deutscher and Hackett BARRY PEARCE Emeritus Curator of Australian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales DR RUTH PULLIN Guest Curator, Eugene von Guérard: Nature Revealed, National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery, National Gallery of Australia, 2011 – 2012 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH Sydney Gallery Manager Deutscher and Hackett DAVID THOMAS Former Director Art Gallery of South Australia, Bendigo Art Gallery, and Newcastle Art Gallery EDITOR: KIRSTY GRANT
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Important Australian Works of Art from the Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC Lots 1 – 54
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JAMES FAIRFAX AT RETFORD PARK, WITH PALOMA, HIS RHODESIAN RIDGEBACK AND HER OFFSPRING MAX (BACKGROUND), 1988 photograph by The Australian
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JAMES FAIRFAX
EDWARD SIMPSON
Uncle James was an enigma in more ways than one, a paradox… aren’t we all? Shy, yet famous. Wealthy, yet not domineering. Powerful, yet determined to be respectful. Solitude-loving, yet unbelievably well-connected. Intellectual, yet practical. Non-judgemental, yet discriminating … and an Australian to boot … a rare bird indeed! Good Lord - what on earth will I buy him for Christmas?! (Practical items relating to the table service of cheese and wine, and books on World War II, as it turned out…) Much of his life was not of his own choosing, but James Fairfax’s art collection most certainly was. How any great collector develops their eye and taste would be an interesting thing to track, and sadly a task beyond both the scope of this article and my meagre psychoanalytical abilities. I would however make the point that in James’ case, as with many collectors, he loved the fact that he was in control. Great collectors are natural obsessives, and one may easily make the argument that truly great collecting is a category of mental illness – but for James, the art works were also his babies. James’ proximity to the world of the arts was part of his Fairfax family upbringing and, like his sister, my mother Caroline (a great collector in her own right), he just breathed it all in, from the word go, every single day. They both grew up in the expectation of being involved in cultural matters, and with the imperative of contributing to them as much as possible. Noblesse Oblige, but without the cynicism that phrase engenders these days. Contributing to society, as its own reward. His first purchase of visual art was at the tender age of 12, in 1945, from the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney – an Eric Wilson streetscape of Paris. Wilson had taught James art at Cranbrook School, and sadly died of cancer the following year, but already, one can see that an intimate personal connection to the work was vital for it to pass muster in James’ eyes. A thread had been started. The young James would often visit galleries with his mother and aunt but would also participate in theatre, opera, ballet, everything artistic. Art was an extension of life, not some optional add-on. A great illustration of this was when his
father, Sir Warwick, famously sent Russell Drysdale out to far western New South Wales to document the particularly savage drought of 1944, an undertaking which resulted in the creation of numerous Australian masterpieces. This was no affectation – it was simply what the Fairfax family saw as important, both to them as individuals, and as a family, a company, and for the community they lived in. James himself is best known for his fondness of the work of the Australian Moderns (many of whom he knew personally) and European Old Masters (Titian, Rubens, Canaletto, Rembrandt, ter Brugghen, David, etc). The James Fairfax Galleries in the Art Gallery of New South Wales bears adequate testimony to that – let alone his remarkable gifts to other State galleries in Australia. This European bent is of course a nod to his own Anglican background and his immersion in European culture through his Oxford years – the happiest years of his life, as he often stated – it is what he knew best, and most instinctively. But his collection and artistic desires were in fact far broader than that. I actually think that a more revealing side to James Fairfax’s psyche is shown by his passion for collecting Asian art and artefacts – lesser known, and perhaps a lesser collection on its own, compared to the Europeans, but just as strong a force in his life. His first overseas trip in 1947, aged 14, was to Japan and it had a major impact on him, his cultural awareness, his developing taste, and collecting eye. Following a tumultuous few years, he returned to Japan in 1988, and again in 1990, in order to find the mental and emotional space to write his memoirs, stylishly retreating to a 16th century Samurai house near Kyoto – with of course, many other trips, all over Asia, in between, and afterwards. Rural Japan was the perfect place for James to find the peace and serenity needed to reflect on his own quite extraordinary life. My point is that Asian (and especially Japanese) religious, philosophical and artistic thought was a great attraction to James – and not just intellectually – he really absorbed what it meant to be Zen. To be present. And through this, he managed to attain a degree of transcendence that I have rarely, if ever, seen in anyone else. Thus, it was simply a real delight to spend time with him, and a lesson in life to see how he lived his. I
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RETFORD PARK, BOWRAL
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have said on many occasions that James was the wisest person that I have ever had the privilege to meet. And by that I certainly do not mean that he was perfect – not at all – I simply mean that James had wisdom and insight in abundance. It is this wisdom that permeates his collection. Several art experts have confided in me that, if James had purchased an example of a particular artist’s work, then that was the work by which to judge that artist’s output. A telling comment. Much of his extraordinary art collection has already been gifted to the public. More will be in coming months – and proceeds from this auction will help create a charitable foundation that will benefit Australians for generations to come, particularly in the area of children’s medical research and treatment. An appropriate legacy, befit ting the benevolent and generous attitude of the man himself. James Fairfax’s art collection and its subsequent benefaction, is only one aspect of this remarkable man – his contributions to journalism, politics, public debate, medical research, conservation, education, scholarships, philanthropy in general, his knowledge and friendships with artists from Patrick White to Jeffrey Smart, his utterly beautiful houses and gardens, parties with everyone from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Royal families of Britain, Spain and elsewhere, to celebrities major and minor, his connections and contributions both in Australia and internationally, are well worthy of a proper biography – and no doubt that will be attempted at some stage. His dining companions alone would make an extraordinary and fascinating list, and be the envy of the most ardent socialites. But beyond all that, Uncle James was a thoughtful and kind gentleman, and a force for good, who lead by example, and who made a remarkable and lasting contribution to Australia’s cultural life. And, by the way, he was without doubt one of Australia’s pre-eminent art collectors. I sincerely doubt there will be another like him. TOP: HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS PRINCE CHARLES WITH JAMES FAIRFAX AT WINDSOR CASTLE, 2003
EDWARD SIMPSON
BOTTOM: GOUGH WHITLAM, JAMES FAIRFAX AND PAUL KEATING, MARCH 1991
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TOP: DINING ROOM WITH MURALS BY DONALD FRIEND, RETFORD PARK BOTTOM: GREEN ROOM, RETFORD PARK WITH SIDNEY NOLAN’S GIRAFFE, 1963
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TOP: ERMES DE ZAN, MERVYN HORTON, JAMES FAIRFAX AND JEFFREY SMART, RETFORD PARK, c.1980 BOTTOM: BARRY HUMPHRIES, JAMES FAIRFAX AND EDMUND CAPON, DECEMBER 1992
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DAVID GONSKI, JAMES FAIRFAX AND EDMUND CAPON AT THE ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES, 2003
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JAMES FAIRFAX EDMUND CAPON
The words connoisseur and connoisseurship are, in today’s world of instant gratification and easy categorisation, not merely overlooked but thought to represent outdated and irrelevant values. And yet the informed instinct of the connoisseur can see and sense those subtle and often concealed qualities that reveal truth and authenticity. The connoisseur would delight in the art of contemplation. James Fairfax was the quintessential connoisseur; informed, thoughtful and considered; one whose instincts had been shaped and nourished through learning and quiet erudition. Nowhere were those instincts more apparent than in his love and appreciation of art. And like the true connoisseur, he was eager to share that love and appreciation of art with kindred spirits; connoisseurs are in my experience a generous breed. That innate spirit of generosity was, for James Fairfax, a prime motivation for his benefaction. His willingness and desire to share his love of art is demonstrated in the many gifts he made to our art institutions and such benefaction was not only out of that wish to share his love of art, but equally out of his sense of responsibility. In 1991 James published volume 1 of his autobiography under the rather ironic title, My Regards to Broadway and in the last sentence of the penultimate – but – one chapter, where he sketchily details his encounters with art he writes, ‘I am at present contemplating plans to pass over both my Old Master collection and some of the best of the Australian paintings to public collections’.1 He was, as we know, so well true to his word. James was profoundly conscious of the privileges and opportunities that his circumstances had provided and he felt deeply that those privileges came with a duty to share them. This was not done with even the slightest sense of superiority, far from it, for James was a discreet and modest person; thus it was that his private passion became a quiet but public benefit. It was back in the late 1980s that we began to discuss with James his intentions to support the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 1991 he donated Jacob van Ruisdael’s Wooded hillside with a view of Bentheim
Castle, c.1655–60; it was to be the first of many. At the time of that first gift the collection of European Old Masters in the Gallery was modest at best and I had no great ambitions for its enhancement, bearing in mind the relative paucity of suitable works, the likely costs involved and of course the relentless presence of other priorities. It was that gift and the promise of more to come that ultimately gave the Gallery both the interest and the opportunity to enhance that modest representation. His benefaction significantly changed the complexion and above all the status of the Gallery’s European Old Master collection, not only with his own gifts but in the stimulus and confidence it provided the Gallery to pursue further acquisitions. In 1992 the Gallery staged an exhibition and published a catalogue of the Fairfax collection, which included works donated by James to other institutions. These included; Jacob Jordaens’ Mercury and Argus, Jan Steen’s marvellous The Wedding Party, and a number of Rembrandt etchings to the National Gallery of Victoria, and Vernet’s beautiful suite of four oil on copper panels illustrating The Four Times of Day to the Art Gallery of South Australia. Both the exhibition and the book included works which were to become gifts to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and which now hang in the aptly named James Fairfax Galleries. During the decade of the 1990s, James gave to Sydney twelve paintings and six important drawings. These works indisputably reveal much about his personal art collecting journey as well the subtle shifts and evolutions in his taste; understandably with increasing knowledge and confidence a more varied flavour emerged in the breadth of the collection. Throughout that journey however, there is no doubt that the works of art James acquired were a consequence of his, and his alone, determinations. Like the true connoisseur, he was no compulsive buyer for he would look, contemplate, re-visit and, in particular with his characteristic sense of responsibility, thoroughly research the provenance of any work he was considering. Thus it is that every work of art in the Fairfax collection bears the subtle stamp of approval of James; and therein lies its aesthetic cohesion and compatibility. There was only one occasion
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THE JAMES FAIRFAX GALLERIES, ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
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that I can recall when he asked me what I thought about a painting before he purchased it; and that was Moroni’s Portrait of a Young Man, c.1565–70 which he bought from Colnaghi in New York in 1992 and which now happily adorns the walls of the James Fairfax Galleries in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Like many, if not all, passionate art collectors, James did enjoy the occasional quest and subsequent discovery. In 1989 he bought JacquesLouis David’s portrait of a rather unsmiling Madame Ramel de Nogaret, which in some ways was an unexpected purchase; not because of the painting itself but because of the severity of the subject. Maybe he knew that somewhere there was the accompanying portrait of Monsieur Ramel de Nogaret, because six years later he found that companion picture in a sale at Hotel Drouot auction house in Paris and thus re-united husband and wife, from which one draws the inevitable conclusion that Monsieur appears to be a much more agreeable prospect than Madame. James’ attachment to his art is manifest in his taste and his acquisitions; the collection could only have been made by him and his eyes and sensibilities. Whilst it is difficult to make any overriding assumptions, there is a sense of intimacy that is revealed in his selection. James, in his own fastidious way, remembered almost everything about his collection and the process. He recalled, for example, the purchase of his first Old Master drawing, Ingres’ pencil sketch of the Hon. Frederick North, which he purchased in 1964 for what the then thought the ‘vast sum’ of £8000 and which is now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales – a drawing which he also recalled my earmarking as a particularly desirable acquisition for the Gallery. Of course James was attracted not only by the sheer eloquence of Ingres’ deft and lightness of touch in such drawings, but also by the subject; North was a kind of aristocratic aesthete, connoisseur and eccentric who travelled widely, read Greek
and several other languages and would apparently arrive at dinner parties in London wearing the academic robes of the University of Corfu, of which he had been the founding chancellor (in 1824). James would have approved. Whilst it is for his evolving collection of European Old Master works from Titian to Ter Brugghen, Guardi to Delacroix and beyond, that James is best known, it should not be overlooked that he remained an active buyer and supporter of Australian art. Indeed, the house in England was a mini museum of Australian art and, with his lifelong fascination with Japan, the arts of Asia were a constant feature of his art collecting life. There was one small painting in his collection which I personally coveted and which I first saw at Retford Park probably two decades ago. It was hanging in the main drawing room adjacent to the very much larger and dominant Titian portrait; some years later it was not there. It had been removed to James’ bedroom where it remained to the very last and I can understand why. It is a small picture of great delicacy, intimacy and beauty, a true connoisseur’s choice, by the baroque painter Giovani Francesco Romanelli (1610 – 1662) The Three Marys at the Sepulchre, painted circa 1646–8 which, with its characteristically bright colours and mellifluous texture, is reminiscent of late Renaissance Mannerism. As a religious work it is an unusual choice for James, but in all other respects it reflects, in its quiet and contemplative assurance, his own composure. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald in 1999, when asked ‘did he ever feel a pang about giving away so much’ he characteristically replied, ‘there’s far more pleasure than pang’. 1. Fairfax, J., My regards to Broadway: A Memoir, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1991, p. 326 EDMUND CAPON DIRECTOR, ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES (1978 – 2011)
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JAMES FAIRFAX, ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES © FAIRFAX SYDNICATION
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GIVING SOMETHING BACK SEBASTIAN SMEE
SEBASTIAN SMEE TALKS TO JAMES FAIRFAX ABOUT HIS GIFTS TO AUSTRALIA’S PUBLIC GALLERIES The Spectator, London, 2 August 2003 In the past, great benefactors to the visual arts have generally doubled as tastemakers. Their success, as the US critic Jed Perl recently noted, is often best judged by the extent to which their avidities become what the culture takes for granted. But how does taste, which is private, become public in this way? It’s a complicated question, and in answering it one can never hope to filter out sheer force of personality as a decisive factor. In curmudgeonly cases such as Grenville L. Winthrop, whose spectacular collection is showing at the National Gallery, and Albert Barnes, as well as more effervescent personalities such as William Beckford or Peggy Guggenheim, a degree of egotism and grandstanding inevitably play their part. Although tastemakers are generally what Perl called ‘oxygenators of the new’, in Australia, a country understandably more obsessed with its present and future incarnations than its past, they can usefully take on a contrary role, that of ‘oxygenators of the old’. On a recent visit to Sydney, I went to see an exhibition of James Fairfax’s collection of European Old Masters at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. For many years Fairfax was the director and chairman of the Fairfax media empire, which owned the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age (newspapers of record in Australia’s two biggest cities), as well as a number of television and radio interests in Australia and overseas (including, for a short spell in the Eighties, The Spectator). The Fairfax ownership of the Sydney
Morning Herald was one of the longest continuous family ownerships of any publishing house in the English-speaking world. But in 1987, a failed takeover bid by James’s half-brother Warwick sent the company into receivership. The debacle left James Fairfax dismayed and, one can only presume, saddened. But the sale of his shares also left him with an extra A$168 million in the bank, which meant, as he put it himself, ‘I had rather more to spend on paintings than before’. Philanthropists such as Winthrop and Barnes function as reminders that a cantankerous character and a streak of cultural generosity can go hand in hand. James Fairfax strikes one as a very different case. Despite the fate of the family company, he is remarkably free from bitterness, and very far from being the old curmudgeon that Winthrop clearly was. He has collected and given away a great deal of Australian art, but over the past two decades, his specialty has become Old Masters. Unfortunately, Old Master collecting in Australia, even when coupled with philanthropy, is liable to be seen by large sections of the public as an elitist indulgence. Given the relative dearth of Old Masters in the country, appreciation for anything less than the most obvious examples of greatness, on which everyone can sagely concur, is considered more or less a waste of time. This was proved in a depressing spectacle last year, when an unprecedented loan of several Italian masterpieces and many provincial works of nonetheless substantial interest came to Australia’s National Gallery. The show was panned, however, in Rupert Murdoch’s national daily, the Australian, on the grounds that the works were minor – and poorly conserved to boot. The review so angered the Italian lenders that it will likely be a long time before another exhibition of Italian Old Masters is allowed anywhere near Australian soil.
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JAMES FAIRFAX, RETFORD PARK
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In Australia, elitism – a word finally impossible to separate from true distinction in the arts – carries a more than usually pejorative connotation. Inside the Sydney exhibition of Fairfax’s collection (which includes paintings by Rubens, Moroni, van Ruisdael, Claude, Boucher, Tiepolo, van Mieris, and Canaletto; six marvellous Rembrandt etchings; and drawings by Ingres, Watteau and Fragonard) I overheard one magnanimous old biddy proffer the opinion that Mr Fairfax was probably ‘clearing out things he no longer wants from one of his enormous homes’. The comment was made inside the James Fairfax Galleries, named in honour of Fairfax’s many contributions to the gallery’s permanent collection, and just a few metres away from ‘Portrait of a Nobleman’ by Titian, bought last year for around A$7 million. It is a painting which, if Fairfax’s previous largesse is anything to go by, is likely to enter the gallery’s collection at some point. ‘Why bother?’ Fairfax may well be entitled to ask. The explanation he gives is almost anodyne in its straightforwardness. All his gifts began, he told me, ‘with a simple idea, which was to give something back to the people who had supported firstly our newspapers, and then the various other activities such as radio and television when they came’. Whatever the reason, Fairfax’s steady stream of carefully targeted gifts to Australian public galleries has breathed life into the permanent collections of each of Australia’s five most important state galleries, as well as the National Gallery in Canberra. He is also a major benefactor in the UK: his name is carved into a wall in the British Museum’s Great Court; he has established a graduate scholarship at Oxford University; and he has given substantial amounts to a plethora of good causes in the UK.
Of course, cynical comments like the one I overheard inside the Sydney exhibition might make any philanthropist think twice. What is the public, after all, but what Kierkegaard called ‘a monstrous abstraction, an allembracing something which is a nothing’? Why be ‘public-spirited’, especially in this day and age when, in the arts, the idea of a shared community of sophisticated taste and responsive imagination feels hopelessly splintered and strained? In such an atmosphere, collecting, even when coupled with high-level philanthropy, is probably best celebrated for its peculiarity, the loving idiosyncrasy of the sensibility it reveals. Although eccentricity can be what Jed Perl described as the ‘yeast that keeps a tastemaker’s relationship with the public lively’, Fairfax is far from convincing in the eccentricity stakes. He is single, and he seems surrounded by down-toearth and capable people. What he clearly does have, like any genuine art collector, is a tremendous appetite for sensuous experience, and this finds expression in his collection. When I enquired about the man in the Titian portrait, he described him as ‘wearing a black gown looking towards the left, as though someone were coming into the room. He’s got a very sensitive face’. Collectors such as Fairfax are thin on the ground today. They may be ‘guilty’ of elitism, but they are carried along by the admirably democratic belief that others will come to see what they see. It is impossible to get a glimpse into the life such people lead, or to contemplate the love for art their fortunes enable them to indulge, without feeling a twinge of envy. But how rare and exemplary is the underlying optimism that lubricates their generosity. SEBASTIAN SMEE AUSTRALIAN PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING ARTS CRITIC FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
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ROY DE MAISTRE 1 (1894 – 1968) THE BEACH, 1924 oil on wood panel 35.5 x 44.0 cm signed and dated lower left: de Mestre / 1924 signed, dated and inscribed verso: St Jean de Luz / 1924 / R de Mestre / 4 / Montparnasse estimate :
$60,000 – 80,000
PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Private collection Clune Galleries, Sydney Mrs M. E. Fairfax, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1970 Thence by descent The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales EXHIBITED Exhibition of Oil Paintings by R. de Mestre, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 6 – 17 April 1926, cat. 15 The Beach Show: Australian Waterside Views 1870 – 1930, Clune Galleries, Sydney, 30 March – 20 April 1971 (illus. on exhibition invitation, as ‘The Striped Tent’)
’In On The Beach, 1924 the group lounging on the sands is sealed to a setting of flooding sunshine with rich effect, against a firmly painted background of buildings.’1 A Sydney art critic gave wholehearted approval to the painting — which, as research suggests, is probably not this but a larger painting, on canvas, in which the beach is hemmed behind by tall buildings. Yet the adjectives ‘flooding sunshine’ and ‘rich effect’ are much better suited to James Fairfax’s work, the central motif of which is the rich glow of sunlight through sunlit canvas, than to the grey tonality and oblique light of the larger work. Both paintings were in the exhibition Roy de Maistre held six months after returning to Sydney from two years studying abroad as the holder of a NSW Travelling Scholarship. The artist had felt extremely nervous about how his paintings would be received in his home city, where his modernist style had raised the hackles of some of the art community’s powerful figures. One is immediately struck by the ‘perfection’ of this painting: its elegance of construction, its exquisite detail, its finish, above all, its glowing light. The effect of effulgent light is the sum of a simplified composition, luscious brushwork and light-filled colours — white with orange, red, pinks, viridian green, blues, sand, white-beige — subtly warmed by the wood panel which the artist has deliberately left un-primed, letting it show in narrow outlines between the zones of colour. Similarly, I am told that when painting on canvas de Maistre, in the 1920s, would apply an initial layer in grey tones against which the coloured over-painting was supposed to shine the more brightly. There, perhaps lies the difference between the larger beach scene mentioned above, which is on canvas and (judging from its tonality) may have an underpainting in greys, and this, where the wood, glowing behind the paint, infuses the image with its warmth in much the same way as, in the image, the sun, shining through the canvas, irradiates the striped tent.
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ROY DE MAISTRE WITH BOAT HARBOUR, 1925 photograph from a private collection
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ROY DE MAISTRE AT ST JEAN DE LUZ, c.1930 photograph from a private collection
De Maistre, whose first study had been music, conceived his art as a composite of music and painting. A performance so perfectly tuned as The Beach has about as much relation to a sketch from nature as a chattering passage of music by Ravel to the noise of a railway station, yet the connection was there in both cases. De Maistre’s studio image was strictly true to life. One may walk onto the sand by the Yacht Club at St Jean de Luz, face the south, and see the scene he painted. Everything in the painting is in its correct form and place: the direction of light, the curve of the beach, the neighbouring town of Ciboure (complete with the buildings of that time), the rounded hill and, at its side a distant molar-shaped mountain peak — the Haya (Trois-Couronnes) in the Western Pyrenees. De Maistre, as the composer of this piece of visual music, plucked from the scene its basic shapes, tuned his colours, and practised his theme over and over before attaining the state of finished art we see here. The impeccable facture appears to have been the work of one session, without a single change of mind. Details such as a tent rope drawn through wet paint with a dry, narrow brush, and the briskly painted pattern on a girl’s print dress serve to objectify the brushwork’s apparent spontaneity. It was a rare achievement. We would be missing the point if our response to the work stopped at beach subject, colour, form and brushwork. A sun-filled beach subject may be the springboard but is not the source of the intimacy and pleasure the work expresses. The artist almost certainly did not know the women and children grouped on the beach, whose body language he registered with the impersonal and scanning gaze of a beach-goer, while their faces remained a blank. Rather than the subject, his own state of mind seems integral to the painting’s air of ease, confidence and completion. Relaxed, engaged with the scene, he has unwound to the
extent of dressing the figures in stylish bathing costumes and girl in a print dress. These touches, which bring the élan of high fashion into the image, are reminiscent of a family story about de Maistre. An aesthete and exacting composer even in childhood he made costumes for dolls styled on the dresses he saw and liked at a Sunday’s church parade. However, the best explanation of the ‘Post-Impressionist’ philosophy tucked away behind The Beach is de Maistre’s statement, written soon after he came back from France. He thought that true art expressed ‘things felt rather than seen’. From the ‘Spanish and Flemish Masters’ through to and beyond artists such as ‘Cezanne, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh’, great artists had found their subject in the ‘intimate and simple’ ‘part of … everyday life’. A commonality of feelings, arising from the ordinary experiences of life, linked people of all times and cultures. It followed that the expression of feeling was the ‘eternal’ theme of art. 2 De Maistre’s introduction to St Jean de Luz, the newest and most fashionable of France’s beach resorts – birthplace of Ravel, site of Fauve paintings by Marquet – had probably been the previous winter, as a guest of his cousin Camilla and her husband Lieutenant-General Sir Alfred Keogh, who had retired there in 1922. Attracted, he found a studio to rent and returned with a group of students in October or November 1924. The Beach was among the first works produced during the four months he spent there (until 1 April 1925). 1. Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 6 April 1926, p. 12 2. Roy de Mestre (as his name was then spelt), ‘Modern Art and the Australian Outlook’, Art in Australia, Sydney, December 1925, unpaginated.
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GRACE COSSINGTON SMITH 2 (1892 – 1984) SOFA IN THE CORNER, 1962 oil on composition board 61.0 x 55.0 cm signed and dated lower left: G. Cossington Smith 62 estimate :
$80,000 – 120,000
PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1964 EXHIBITED Exhibition of Paintings: Grace Cossington Smith, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 28 October – 9 November 1964, cat. 7 RELATED WORK Sofa in the Room, 1960, oil on composition board, 91.5 x 60.0 cm, private collection, illus. in Thomas, D., Grace Cossington Smith, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1973, cat. 74, pp. 59 (illus.), 68 Sofa in the Corner, 1963, oil on board, 33.5 x 26.5 cm, private collection ‘What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue’, said Matisse. Grace Cossington Smith provides the armchair – a sofa too – in a painting of purity and serenity. Sofa and chair were in the living-room of the artist’s Turramurra home. They were oddly placed in the spacious room, pushed into a corner and backing onto a curtain that covered the passage to the kitchen.1 There was a reason why they were in the corner. Next to the curtain was a glass door to the dining-room which, six years before, had been turned into a bedroom for the artist’s invalid sister. Whether sitting in the corner or standing at her easel Grace was positioned to hear a call from Diddy in the adjacent room. Daniel Thomas was the first to point out that Cossington Smith embarked on her late, and greatest phase, when she looked inward to her home for her subjects. The artist said, ‘I found quite enough to do at home – still life and interiors, and perhaps a local garden scene’. Answering the question of why she did not paint portraits, ‘I don’t seem to be able to get into a person like I can into lifeless things’, 2 she indicated that the home, its familiar spaces and inanimate objects provided subjects that she could access and ‘get into’ easily. In another context she reflected, ‘my later [interior] paintings have more vitality, I think, in the actual paint
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work’. 3 The viewer who sits in front of this painting in a relaxed, armchair frame of mind (as per Matisse’s advice) will see homeliness raised to vibrant life in a composition of considerable presence. Sofa in the Corner, 1962 is stabilised and anchored, as it were, by the smallest of its pictorial elements, a square yellow cushion situated (not quite) at the centre. Barely suggested within the cushion’s yellow square are other squares, squares within squares that radiate waves of energy. The smallness of the cushion belies its strength in the painting: a matter of its primary shape and the severity of its flat plane, qualities which are affirmed by the square brush-strokes, by the geometry of the architecture and above all by the board support of the painting itself, its hard surface, cut edges and solidity. The miraculous order of the quiet painting extends to the carefully chosen ‘recuperative’ and ‘stimulative’ colour scheme.4 Cossington Smith told Alan Roberts her sequence of work in the later paintings. First the subject, the idea of which had to arise, as she said, ‘with a fresh feeling’.5 ‘I see something which I like and then I just decide how much I am going to do of it. Then I have to decide on the central part … – the guide to the whole painting – and the other part [the rest of the composition] has to fit in with the first thing.’6 She began work by sketching the bare outlines of the composition in charcoal.7 After which, with ‘the enjoyment of a full brush’ 8 in square touches she painted the lightest part of the subject, 9 thereby ensuring that light itself provided the key for the tonal order of the whole work. Sofa in the Corner would have begun with the sofa, wall and one of the cushions, the artist then brightened the colours and deepened the tones (only fractionally) across the image, before concluding with an enlivening tonal leap to the darkest tone (a green cushion). Light is sustained across the whole work by a crisp white ground that shows between and behind the colours. 1. Information about the layout of the house is from Daniel Thomas’s formidable research for Grace Cossington Smith, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1973 and David Moore’s 1978 photographs of the interiors and garden of the artist’s home, Cossington, Turramurra. The corner is shown is greater detail in Sofa in the Room, 1960, illustrated in Sotheby’s, Sydney, 27 August 2001, lot 10. 2. Roberts, A., four interviews, Sydney, January—April 1970, transcripts p. 24 (kindly shown to me by Deborah Hart) 3. ibid., p. 36 4. Around 1926 the artist copied the coloured diagram that was the frontispiece to Beatrice Irwin’s The New Science of Colour (first edition 1916, many subsequent editions, Cossington Smith’s of 1923). She kept the diagram and seems ever after to have derived from it suggestions for effective colour schemes. See Bruce James’ and Deborah Hart’s monographs for a discussion of the influence on her of Irwin’s book. 5. Roberts, A., op. cit., p. 22 6. ibid., pp. 20 – 21 7. ibid., pp. 23, 37 – 38 8. ibid., p. 6 9. ibid., pp. 23 – 24
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GRACE COSSINGTON SMITH 3 (1892 – 1984) STILL LIFE IN THE WINDOW, 1959 oil on composition board 61.5 x 47.5 cm signed and dated lower left: G Cossington Smith 59 signed and inscribed with title on artist’s label verso: Still Life in the Window / Grace Cossington Smith bears inscription verso: I2 estimate :
$70,000 – 90,000
PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales EXHIBITED Contemporary Group, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 29 July – 10 August 1959, cat. 20
Grace Cossington Smith knew it was an advantage not to have to work. Unhurried by economic need, unflustered by an applauding public, she could wait until the moment was right: ‘I only paint when I want to’; ‘When I do paint it is something I want to do’.1 Still life was then a rather debased genre, which needy and untalented painters were inclined to seize upon for lacklustre productions and renowned artists too often used as an opportunity for parading their skill. For Grace Cossington Smith, however, still life and interiors (a form of still life) involved the stiff challenge of shaping the familiar world for an elemental experience. Morning light and winter appear to be the underlying, conventional notes of Still Life in the Window, 1959. A cold light plays on yellow-green winter fruits, quinces, pears and apples. Morning (after the daily chores were done) was Grace’s best time of day for concentrated spells of painting. Her practice was to paint ‘two or three hours in the morning and then perhaps an hour or two in the afternoon’. 2 Consequently, her paintings more often represent the pure light of morning than the brazen afternoon. But since the winter morning effects, as she would say, happened ‘unconsciously’, they fit into the category of the incidental. Time of day and season were not conscious factors in her art whereas she focused fiercely on transformative effects of colour-in-light and volumetric form. 3 Throughout Still Life in the Window there is both a modeller at work and a colourist. Cossington Smith, who had experimented with sculpture and could readily turn her hand to carpentry, had a sculptor’s sense of three-dimensional form. With the exception of the window in the upper right, the image is formed of layers of cloth which are so complexly and restlessly draped, folded, tugged, pouched and pushed as to completely lose the forms of wall and table. Whirlpools of cloth ridge around the fruit and push back against the drapery’s impetuous fall from above. By
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contrast to the decisively-modelled topography, the fruit is not modelled at all. This is where the modeller gave way to the colourist, who excluded cast shadows as ‘superficial’.4 Instead, here, she has encompassed each piece of fruit and the jugs with a discontinuous, fine dark line within which the colour has intense and vibrant life. The brilliant effect is more Sainte Chapelle than the traditional love apples with decay already at work within their flesh. The fruit radiates light. It is as light as air. It seems that light, for Cossington Smith, embraced qualities of air and weightlessness. Here, the pieces of fruit bounce airily on hillocks of rumpled cloth. Colour aired with light pleased her, whereas Margaret Preston’s contra-practice of offsetting bright colours against black did not. Grace described Preston’s colours as ‘heavy’, ‘dark’ and inert (or ‘hard’). 5 Critics were free to see the opposite qualities in her own paintings. Perceptive James Gleeson saw a battle between light and solidity. ‘Light for Grace Cossington Smith is the other side of the coin [from Vermeer’s calm and solid form]. It comes like a dissolvent, seeping into solid surfaces, and their substance disintegrates to crystalline fragments …Brilliant, beautiful, intense, yet cool, like frozen fire … It is at war with form. It frets at order like an irritant.’ ’So, in her best work, she presented a double image. The world, her pictures tell us, is familiar yet mysterious, stable yet dynamic, real yet illusory, permanent yet momentary. Because these opposing concepts are found together … [her still lifes and interiors] escape the normal limitations of their genre and become significant statements about the nature of reality.’6 1. Cossington Smith, G. interviewed by de Berg, H., Sydney, 16 August 1965, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 2. ibid. 3. Thomas, D., Grace Cossington Smith, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1973, p. 6 quotes Cossington Smith’s statement that it was her aspiration to paint ‘colour vibrating with light’ and ‘the relation of forms to each other’. 4. Interviewed by Alan Roberts, Sydney, January—April 1970, transcripts p. 20. Hart, D., Grace Cossington Smith, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2005, p. 90. Deborah Hart kindly discussed with me Cossington Smith’s approach to painting, and lent her copy of the transcripts of Alan Roberts’ four excellent interviews. 5. For Cossington Smith’s disparaging references to these colour effects see interviews with de Berg, H., op. cit., Roberts, A., transcripts, pp. 17, 34, 36, Thomas, D., op. cit., p. 6 and Hart, D., op. cit., p. 82 6. Gleeson, J., Sun-Herald, Sydney, 2 June 1968, p. 103
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RUSSELL DRYSDALE 4 (1912 – 1981) THE BAR – ALBURY, c.1942 – 43 pen and ink and watercolour on paper 29.5 x 39.5 cm signed and inscribed with title lower right: The Bar – Albury / Russell Drysdale estimate :
$30,000 – 40,000
PROVENANCE Rupert A. Henderson, Sydney, acquired directly from the artist Thence by descent Mrs R. A. Henderson, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1987
Russell Drysdale’s images of Australia and its inhabitants helped define our national identity, capturing the essence of the country and the character of its people. One of the bestknown artists of his generation, Drysdale’s art is on permanent display in major galleries throughout the country and he remains a household name. Drysdale is also one of a small handful of twentieth century Australian artists to have achieved significant international recognition during his lifetime. His work was acquired by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1941 and is also represented in the Tate, London, and major private collections including that of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. In 1954, he was selected alongside Sidney Nolan and William Dobell to represent Australia at the XXVII Venice Biennale – the first time Australia had participated in this pre-eminent international exhibition of contemporary art – and in 1969, his contribution to Australian art was recognised with a knighthood. Prompted by the frightening prospect of invasion following the detection of a Japanese submarine in Sydney Harbour in 1942, Drysdale and his family moved to Albury where they rented a house and he established a studio in a nearby barn. The reality of war was everpresent however, with army camps located nearby and soldiers frequently seen marching along the road, congregating in town and waiting at the railway station.1 Rejected from military service due to impaired eyesight, Drysdale wanted to do his bit and was advised to continue painting and ‘helping to record for posterity the feeling and fabric of the time’. 2 The paintings and drawings he made in the early 1940s do just that and in effect, constitute the personal effort of an unofficial war artist who recorded the experience of life at home during wartime from a rural perspective. 3 It is the presence of two soldiers drinking with their civilian friends in The Bar – Albury, c.1942–43 that links this drawing to the series of major paintings and works on paper that emerged from Drysdale’s experience in Albury, including The Station Yard, 1943 (National Gallery of Victoria) and Albury Platform, 1943 (Albury Regional Art Centre). Drysdale was a gifted draughtsman who once said that ‘drawing is as essential to an artist as practising scales to a pianist’4 and his facility is clear in this work where the figures and details of the interior are defined by quick but assured pen and ink lines, volume is added with a brush and black ink and finally, subdued tones of watercolour activate the composition. Both the setting and the relaxed camaraderie of the laconic figures make this a classic Drysdale depiction of Australian country life that is at once familiar and, almost eighty years on, also tinged with a sense of nostalgia. 1. Klepac, L., Russell Drysdale, Murdoch Books, Sydney, 2009, p. 85 2. ibid., p. 95 3. Smith, G., Russell Drysdale 1912 – 81, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1997, p. 21 4. Drysdale, R., quoted in Klepac, L., The Drawings of Russell Drysdale, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of Western Australia and The Australian Gallery Directors’ Council, Perth, 1980, p. 36
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IAN FAIRWEATHER 5 (1891 – 1974) TEMPLE, WEST LAKE, HANGCHOW, 1936 oil and pencil on cardboard 51.5 x 58.5 cm bears inscription with title verso: Temple Wash [sic] Lake / Hangchow estimate :
$250,000 – 350,000
PROVENANCE Redfern Gallery, London Hon. Jasper Ridley, London, acquired from the above in January 1937 Christie’s, Sydney, 3 October 1973, lot 517 (as ‘Temple Wash Lake, Hangchow’) The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney EXHIBITED Recent Paintings by Ian Fairweather, Redfern Gallery, London, 7 – 30 January 1937, cat. 13 (label attached verso, as ‘Temple Wash Lake, Hangchow’) LITERATURE Bail, M., ‘The Nostalgic Nomad’, Hemisphere, Canberra, vol. 27, no. 1, 1982, p. 57 Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney and London, 1981, cat. 43, pl. 21, pp. 56 (illus.), 233 Bail, M., Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Sydney and London, 2009, cat. 35, pl. 28, pp. 48, 49 (illus.), p. 247
Ian Fairweather is one of the most truly original artists to have worked in Australia in the twentieth century. Although he is claimed as an Australian and spent many years of his life here – famously living in a shack on Bribie Island from 1953 until his death in 1974 – he was born in Scotland and undertook his formal art education at London’s Slade School of Fine Art. With a restless spirit, he 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’.1 Fairweather’s first visit to China was in 1929, and he returned again to live in Beijing from 1935–36, but his interest in the art, culture and philosophy of the country began during World War I, when, held as a prisoner of war in Germany he had access to books including Ernest Fenollosa’s recently published Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art. 2 He was inspired to study Mandarin after the war and it was a book on Chinese grammar printed in Shanghai, one of the few items he took with him upon leaving England for Canada in 1928, that prompted
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Fairweather to choose Shanghai as his next destination. 3 Living there until late 1933 (when he left for Australia, making a nine month stopover in Bali on the way), Fairweather continued to study the language, worked in various jobs that earned him sufficient income to employ a servant and get around by rickshaw 4, and travelled, sketching and painting the places he visited. The city of Hangchow (the Romanised name for Hangzhou), renowned for its beautiful architecture and gardens, and historically, a favourite imperial retreat, had created an indelible impression on Fairweather and he often returned to it as a subject in his art. As Murray Bail observes, he had submitted to the Chinese proverb that, ‘In heaven there is paradise; on earth Soochow and Hangchow’ 5, joining the ranks of the many Chinese poets and painters who had been similarly inspired by the beauty and history of the area. Fairweather’s second solo exhibition, held at Redfern Galleries, London in January 1937, included two images of Hangchow that he had painted from memory in late 1936 while living on the Philippine island of Mindanao. One of these was Temple, West Lake, Hangchow, which depicts a section of West Lake in the foreground and rising up on the hillside beyond, beneath an atmospheric blue sky, a series of temple buildings and courtyards. Characteristic of Fairweather’s work at the time, the quick pencil lines with which he sketched out the structure of the composition are visible beneath terracotta paint that describes the bridge and buildings in an almost purely linear form. Daubs of subtle colour, brushed and scumbled onto the surface, and gestural swirls in the sky, create a textural richness that contrasts with the areas of the painting’s ground that are left untouched, highlighting the importance for Fairweather of the act of painting itself. 1. Bail, M., ‘The Nostalgic Nomad’, Hemisphere, Canberra, vol. 27, no. 1, 1982, p. 54 2. Capon, J., ‘The China Years’, Bail, M., et. al., Fairweather, Art & Australia Books in association with Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1994, p. 63 3. ibid. 4. ibid. 5. Bail, M., Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Sydney, revised edition 2009, p. 51
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IAN FAIRWEATHER 6 (1891 – 1974) CHRISTMAS, 1961 synthetic polymer paint and gouache on composition board 95.5 x 70.0 cm estimate :
$200,000 – 250,000
PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Private collection Rushton Fine Art, Sydney, 20 November 1984, lot 77 The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales EXHIBITED Ian Fairweather, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 14 – 23 June 1961, cat. 9 Fairweather: a retrospective exhibition, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 3 June – 4 July 1965; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 21 July – 22 August 1965; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 9 September – 10 October 1965; National Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 26 October – 21 November 1965; Western Australian Art Gallery, Perth, 9 December 1965 – 16 January 1966, and Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 10 February – 13 March 1966, cat. 48 (label attached verso) LITERATURE Smith, R., Fairweather: a retrospective exhibition, exhibition catalogue, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1965, cat. 48 (unpaginated) Bail, M., Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Sydney, revised edition, 2009, pp. 143, 173
Having settled on Bribie Island in 1953, Ian Fairweather found a place where he could work consistently and relatively undisturbed, and the last two decades of his life witnessed the production of some of his finest paintings. Living and working in a pair of thatched huts that he had built using materials found in the nearby bush, and painting by the light of a hurricane lamp, his surrounds were primitive, but offered everything that Fairweather needed. While he relished the isolation of Bribie Island and preferred not to engage with the art world in person, Fairweather exhibited regularly at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney, and his work was both seen and admired by curators, critics and fellow artists alike. The 1960s saw his work acknowledged in significant ways, with paintings being included in the landmark exhibition Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (1961), the São Paulo Biennial (1963),
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the European tour of Australian Painting Today (1964–65) and in 1965, a major travelling retrospective of his work – which included the painting on offer here – was mounted by the Queensland Art Gallery. Fairweather did not adhere to religion in a strict, ordered sense of the word but he recognised the deep spiritual connection and grounding that it could provide, likening the experience of the faithful to his own experience of artistic creativity: ‘Painting is a personal thing. It gives me the same kind of satisfaction that religion, I imagine, gives to some people’.1 In the late 1950s however, he began a series of paintings with religious subjects, or at least, as Murray Bail has observed, titles drawn from the history and well-known stories of Christianity, 2 including Last Supper, 1958, Annunciation, 1958, both in the collection of Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Alliluja, 1958, in the collection of National Gallery of Victoria. The ambition of many of these paintings is reflected in their increased scale and Fairweather’s confidence as a mature painter who had hit his artistic stride is clearly evident. Moving easily between his distinctive calligraphic abstraction and more representational depictions, these works seamlessly combine muted colour with layered and richly textured surfaces. The power of these works was recognised at the time by those with a developed and sophisticated eye and in 1966, Monastery, 1961, in the collection of National Gallery of Australia, was awarded the John McCaughey Prize in Sydney. Comprising a dense series of linear strokes of black, grey, brown and white paint, the overall surface pattern of Christmas, 1961 recedes after a time and the subject emerges – five figures standing closely together, the central one holding a baby. The presence of the baby and the title of the work identify this as a nativity scene with the figures representing the Holy Family, Mary in the centre with her head slightly bowed, looking down at the baby in her arms, Joseph and the three Wise Men. There are clues to the diverse influences that shaped Fairweather’s art here, from Cubism, to Chinese calligraphy and the art of Indigenous Australia, but above all else works such as this exemplify the unique nature of his visual language and the singular contribution he made to the development of twentieth century Australian art. 1. Fairweather, I., quoted in Bail, M., Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Sydney, revised edition, 2009, p. 172 2. Bail, M., op. cit., p. 143
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JOHN OLSEN 7 born 1928 THE BICYCLE BOYS REJOICE, 1955 oil on canvas 60.0 x 75.5 cm signed and dated upper right: John Olsen 55 bears inscription verso: S.A. estimate :
$70,000 – 90,000
PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Mrs Brodie Knight, Sydney by 1960 The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales EXHIBITED Sydney Painting 1955, Macquarie Galleries for the Victorian Artists Society, Melbourne, 31 May – 11 June 1955; Royal Society of Artists, Adelaide, August 1955, cat. 39 Christmas Selection 2, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 7 – 22 December 1955, cat. 15 Galleria Espresso, Sydney, 1956 Contemporary Australian Art, Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand, May 1960, pl.2, cat. 54 (illus. in exhibition catalogue), (lent by Mrs Brodie Knight) Looking at People, Perception in Australian Art, Sancta Sophia College, University of Sydney, Sydney, 9 – 11 August 1968, cat. 115 Heide Park and Art Gallery, Victoria, 1987, cat. 45 New Directions 1952 – 1962, Penrith Regional Art Gallery and The Lewers Bequest, New South Wales, 16 August – 29 September 1991, cat. 18 John Olsen Retrospective, National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne, 1 November 1991 – 2 February 1992; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 8 May – 28 June 1992, cat. 7 (label attached verso) John Olsen: The You Beaut Country, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 16 September 2016 – 12 February 2017; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 10 March – 12 June 2017, cat. 2
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LITERATURE Spate, V., John Olsen, Georgian House, Melbourne, 1963, pl. 10, pp. 4, 6, 17 (illus.) Hughes, R., The Art of Australia, Penguin Books, Melbourne, revised edition 1970, fig. 107, pp. 15, 262, 263 (illus.) Hart, D., John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1991, p. 40 Van den Bosch, A., ‘The Market for Australian Art. The Formative Years’, Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 29, no. 3, Autumn 1992, pp. 271 (illus. and front cover), 316 Hurlston, D., and Edwards, D. (eds.), John Olsen: The You Beaut Country, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2016, pp. 36, 37, 40 (illus.), 206 RELATED WORK The Bicycle Boys, 1955, oil on canvas, 92.5 x 77.2 cm, collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, illus. in Art and Australia, Sam Ure Smith and The Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 14, No. 3 – 4, Summer 1977, p. 340
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SITTING ROOM, RETFORD PARK WITH JOHN OLSEN’S THE BICYCLE BOYS REJOICE, 1955
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JOHN OLSEN THE BICYCLE BOYS REJOICE, 1955
It is a privilege to contemplate with hindsight the early work of an artist embracing formative ideas that would travel into the future without ever losing the élan of their genesis. The Bicycle Boys Rejoice, painted by John Olsen in 1955 at the age of twenty-seven, contains such freight. It tells much about where the shape of his vision came from, with a constituency of gesture, intuitive energy, and form birthing form across the entire picture plane that would remain basic to his language for the rest of his life. At the Julian Ashton School in Sydney Olsen loved his teacher John Passmore, but it can be seen in Olsen’s preparatory drawings of 195455 for this theme he was at once anxious to shake himself free from his master’s dependence on Cézanne whilst preserving a structural approach to the human figure that signified a new kind of expression. In his brush and ink drawings Passmore imbued a mysterious, marionettelike connectivity between the planes and joints, no doubt skillfully deployed as an illustrative draftsman with Lintas. These figure studies gave Olsen a basis to work forward with, although he had never, apart from the odd cartoon, succumbed to working as a commercial artist. Along with fellow students at Ashton’s during the early 1950s, Olsen was determined to find a fresh approach to interpreting the world. Gestural abstraction from abroad began to come hard at this emerging generation, though evidenced by the influential exhibition of contemporary French art brought to Australia in 1953, figuration was not yet abandoned completely. An exhibition of contemporary Italian art three years later underlined a similar drift and mix.
Marini’s influence is clear in Olsen’s painting Memory of the Wild Colonial Boy, 1954, where a horse stretches its neck down to drink and a male figure sits precariously aloft with an outstretched foot that would be, in Marini’s equivalent, a phallic protrusion. The following year, Olsen morphed the horse into a bicycle, with especial articulation in The Bicycle Boys Rejoice. The idea for it came mainly from his observation of racers in Centennial Park: ‘They had a lot of bicycles and I was rather fascinated by the difference in human body weight and the lightness of the bicycle. It had a kind of airiness about it … I guess it stands as a disparity of the airiness of human rejoicing, with the perilousness of the bicycle shapes themselves’.1 Vittorio de Sica’s film Ladri di biciclette, considered at the time perhaps the greatest film ever made, was released in Australia in 1950. The artist may not have given the sentiment of that film too much thought beyond a subliminal influence. But the desperate search by a father and son through chaotic post-war Rome trying to locate a stolen bicycle has an almost Olsen-esque sense of a beckoning life odyssey; and an inevitable push-pull between potential joy and disappointment reflected through the body language of the figures in this quintessential early painting. 1. Olsen, J., quoted in Hart, D., John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1991, p. 19
BARRY PEARCE
The latter included one particular artist Olsen had already responded to whilst combing through art books and magazines. Marino Marini, whose drawings and sculptures on the horse and rider theme made an instant impact. There was a strangely Etruscan classicism in his sculpture, yet potential instability at the same time.
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RALPH BALSON 8 (1890 – 1964) CONSTRUCTIVE PAINTING, 1953 oil on composition board 84.0 x 109.0 cm signed and dated lower right: R Balson. 53. estimate :
$120,000 – 160,000
PROVENANCE Gallery A, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1968 EXHIBITED Ralph Balson Second Memorial Exhibition, Gallery A, Sydney, 18 July 1968, cat. 25 Ralph Balson: A Retrospective, 15 August – 24 September 1989, Heide Park and Art Gallery, Victoria; and then touring to Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle, 6 October – 19 November 1989; Wollongong City Gallery, Wollongong, 1 December 1989 – 28 January 1990; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 14 February – 1 April 1990 and University Art Museum, University of Queensland, Brisbane, 12 April – 24 May 1990, cat. 25 (as ‘Painting, 1953’) LITERATURE Adams, B., Ralph Balson: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Heide Park and Art Gallery, Victoria, 1989, cat. 25, pp. 24, 49 (illus.), 80
In July 1941 Ralph Balson held his second solo exhibition at Anthony Hordern’s Fine Art Galleries in Sydney. Comprising a suite of lively abstract geometric compositions painted in arresting combinations of colour (and unusually, including metallic paint in silver, gold and bronze), the exhibition was a landmark event within the history of Australian art, representing the first ever display of non-objective painting. As Deborah Edwards has noted, ‘in the arena of Australian war-time modernism … [these paintings] constituted the uncompromising claim that representational modes could no longer be part of a mission to poetically embody the modern condition and universal values’.1 Focusing on the influence of Constructivism on local artists, a significant new contribution to the study of modernism in Australia similarly acknowledges Balson’s pioneering role, noting that in their ‘harmonious integration of colour with form, geometry and dynamism’ the 1941 paintings hold ‘a composure and conviction that must have seemed revelatory at their first showing’. 2 These radical works and the ideas that inspired them – from developments in contemporary science to diverse artistic influences – would form the basis of Balson’s practice for the next fifteen years. As he saw it, these ‘constructive paintings’ presented ‘a new expression of reality apposite to modern conditions through constructed relationships of colour and shape’. 3
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Balson was a self-employed house-painter by trade and until his retirement at the age of 65, weekends were the only time available for making art. The practiced skills of his profession – colour mixing and the careful application of paint – must have helped the development of his art rather than hindered it and perhaps the limited time he had available encouraged Balson’s keen focus on his creative direction. Balson had come to art late, his first formal studies being part-time evening classes at Julian Ashton’s school in the early 1920s. By the mid-1930s however, he was part of a dynamic group of Sydney artists including Grace Crowley, Rah Fizelle, Frank and Margel Hinder, who had knowledge and (sometimes firsthand) experience of progressive international art. Well-read and connected to expatriate Australians working overseas who kept them up to date with new developments, this group was at the vanguard of modernism in Australia.4 While some of Balson’s constructive paintings follow the right-angled geometry of Mondrian, who he once described as his ‘greatest single influence’, this work from 1953 breaks away from the order of verticals and horizontals, juxtaposing a series of less regular shapes that playfully jostle for prominence. There is an energetic movement across the painting’s surface in the complex layering of forms and the push-pull between positive and negative space. Striking colour relationships play a key role too, as oranges and vivid watermelon pink sit atop rich blues and purples, olive green and to the right, paler shades of mauve and grey. While at first glance, some colours appear to have been painted over others to create a darker tone, each colour has been applied individually, independent of those immediately adjacent, emphasising Balson’s understanding of colour and virtuoso skill with the chromatic possibilities of his medium. One of the larger scale works painted towards the end of his constructive series, this painting reflects Balson’s confidence and mastery of abstract form and colour. 1. Edwards, D., ‘A New Realm of Visual Experience’, Ralph Balson -/41 – Anthony Horderns’ Fine Art Galleries, exhibition catalogue, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2008, p. 36 2. Harding, L., ‘Part One: 1920–1970’, Harding, L. and Cramer, S., Call of the Avant-Garde: Constructivism and Australian Art, exhibition catalogue, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2017, p. 43. The exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art, on display from 5 July – 8 October 2017, features numerous ‘constructive’ paintings by Balson. 3. Badham, H., A Study of Australian Art, Currawong Publishing Co., Sydney, 1949, p. 146 4. James, B., Ralph Balson, A Restrospective, exhibition catalogue, Heide Park and Art Gallery, Melbourne, 1989 and Taylor, E., Grace Crowley: Being Modern, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2006
KIRSTY GRANT
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TONY TUCKSON 9 (1921 – 1973) RED COLLAGE, c.1960 oil, collage and synthetic polymer paint on composition board 122.0 x 91.5 cm estimate :
$40,000 – 60,000
PROVENANCE Watters Gallery, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1970 EXHIBITED Tony Tuckson Stock Exhibition, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 19 August – 7 September 1970, cat. 17 Painting Forever: Tony Tuckson, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 4 November 2000 – 4 February 2001; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 23 March – 20 May 2001; Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Ballarat, 7 September – 21 October 2001; Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, Sydney, 15 December 2001 – 10 February 2002; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 23 February – 21 April 2002, cat. 29 LITERATURE Thomas, D., Free, R. and Legge, G., Tony Tuckson, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1989, pl. 71, pp. 78 (illus.), 181 Maloon, T., and Fisher, T., Painting Forever: Tony Tuckson, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2000, pp. 28 (illus.), 61
Red Collage, c.1960 was included in the 1970 exhibition of Tony Tuckson’s work at Watters Gallery, Sydney, his first solo exhibition – and one of only two held during his lifetime – that included a selection of 65 paintings made since the late 1950s. Although he described himself as a ‘Sunday painter’ who only made art in his spare time, Tuckson painted throughout much of his life and was a prolific draughtsman. His reluctance to exhibit his work publicly and even to show it to more than a handful of intimates, was due to his role at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where from 1950 until his death in 1973 he was assistant and then deputy director, and the conflict he perceived between his professional responsibilities and his art practice.
Tuckson’s distinctive visual language emerged from various sources. An academic art education in London was followed by post-war studies at the East Sydney Technical College that included what he described as his most influential lessons with pioneering abstract artists Grace Crowley and Ralph Balson. His work at the Art Gallery of New South Wales also brought Tuckson into direct contact with an extraordinary range of art, from the gallery’s collection and international travelling exhibitions, to contemporary art encountered during visits to artists’ studios and commercial exhibitions that he made in his professional capacity. Tuckson established the gallery’s collections of Aboriginal and Melanesian art and his deep knowledge of the Indigenous art of Australia was another influence that according to his wife Margaret, ‘first interested him for its casual way of filling an area, the lack of worry about shapes spilling over outlines.’1 Painted around 1960, Red Collage was made at the time that Tuckson was leaving figuration behind and moving confidently and decisively into pure abstraction. A richly textured field of grey, black and white paint, with highlights of burgundy and the darkened brown of collaged newspaper breaking up the painted surface, is overlaid with an energetic tracery of black lines. These calligraphic marks are a distinctive feature of Tuckson’s work of the period and reflect both the energy and physicality with which he painted. As a student, Tuckson stated that ‘when you start worrying about the position of a mark, you cease to paint’, 2 and the free, intuitive nature of his mark-making is a distinctive and satisfying element that runs throughout his oeuvre. Following a second solo exhibition in 1973 Sandra McGrath wrote in Art and Australia that ‘Tuckson was recognised almost overnight for what he was – the best Action Painter in Australia and one of the country’s most important artists’. 3 In the years since, a series of important exhibitions, the publication of a major monograph and the collecting of his art by public galleries and private individuals alike has confirmed the quality, individuality and beauty of Tuckson’s work and its significance as the most authentic example of abstract expressionism to emerge in Australia. 1. Thomas, D., Free, R., Legge, G., Tony Tuckson, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1989, p. 39 2. McGrath, S., ‘Tony Tuckson’, Art and Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 12, no. 2, 1974, p. 156 3. ibid., p. 166
KIRSTY GRANT
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EUGENE VON GUÉRARD 10 (1811 – 1901) MR JOHN KING’S STATION, 1861 oil on canvas 40.0 x 84.0 cm originally signed lower left (no longer visible) estimate :
$800,000 – 1,200,000
PROVENANCE John King of Snake Ridge Station, Gippsland, Victoria Thence by descent Clune Galleries, Sydney, 1972 Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 17 April 1989, lot 323 Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1991 EXHIBITED Selected Australian Art: Colonial to Modern, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 17 September – 12 October 1991, cat. 3 (illus. cover of exhibition catalogue) Gippsland Excursions 1846 – 1979, Latrobe Valley Arts Centre, Morwell, Victoria, 6 December 1992 – 24 January 1993, cat. 19 Eugene Von Guérard: Nature Revealed, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 16 April – 7 August 2011; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 3 September – 15 November 2011; Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 17 December 2011 – 25 March 2012; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 27 April 2012 – 15 July 2012 (label attached verso)
LITERATURE Cameron, R., Australia: History and Horizons, Columbia University Press, Melbourne, 1971, pp. 238 – 9 (illus. and cover, dustjacket) Bruce, C., Comstock, E., and McDonald, F., Eugene von Guérard: A German Romantic in the Antipodes 1811 – 1901, Alister Taylor, Martinborough, 1982, cat. 66, p. 216 Clegg, H., ‘Mr John King’s Station 1861’, in Pullin, R. (ed.), Eugene Von Guérard: Nature Revealed, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2011, pp. 190, 191 (illus.), 291 Pullin, R., A Hidden Story: Eugene Von Guérard’s Mr John King ’s Station, 1861, published online, Melbourne Art Network, 1 November 2012 [http://melbourneartnetwork.com.au/2012/11/01/ what-are-you-looking-at-ruth-pullin-eugene-von-guerard%E2%80% 99s-mr-john-king%E2%80%99s-station/] accessed 23/05/2017 Brown, M., ‘Eugene Von Guérard: Nature Revealed’, Arts Hub, 14 June 2011 McDonald, J., ‘Earthly Pleasures: Eugene Von Guérard, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 23 July 2011 ‘Peak Romanticism’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 26 May 2012 Fox, P., ‘Exhibition Review: Eugene Von Guérard Nature Revealed’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 43, issue 2, 2012, pp. 303 – 311 Skerlj, L., ‘Georgia MacGuire: Healing Dresses’, Trouble Mag, 3 February 2014 [http://www.troublemag.com/georgia-macguirehealing-dresses/] accessed 23/05/17 RELATED WORK La Trobe River Gippsland, Mr. J. King ’s Station, 19 – 20 November 1860, pencil on paper, 32.2 x 52.5 cm, in the collection of Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, cat. E. 337. 3 From Mr John Kings Snake Ridge Gippsland, 19 – 20 November 1860, pencil on paper, 32.8 x 52.6 cm, in the collection of Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, cat. E. 337. 4 Snake Ridge, Gippsland, Mr J. Kings Station, Monday 19 November 1860, pencil on paper, 32.5 x 52.8 cm, collection of Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, cat. A. 337. 2 Road to Crooked River Diggings, 1862, pen and ink on paper, 36.9 x 65.4 cm, signed and dated lower left Eugene von Guerard 1862, collection of Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, cat. DGB24
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EUGENE VON GUÉRARD 10 (1811 – 1901) MR JOHN KING’S STATION, 1861
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(fig 1) EUGENE VON GUÉRARD From Mr. John Kings Snake Ridge, Gippsland, 19 and 20 November, 1860, 1860 (Folio 4 in Australian Sketches, 1861) pencil on paper 32.8 x 52.6 cm courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, cat. E. 337. 4
(fig 2) EUGENE VON GUÉRARD Nabran (From Sketchbook XXXII, Gippsland, 1860 – 61) courtesy of Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, cat. DGB16, v. 11, f. 44
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LOT 10 • EUGENE VON GUÉRARD MR JOHN KING’S STATION, 1861
An entry in John King’s daybook for Sunday 18 November 1860 records Eugene von Guérard’s arrival at his Gippsland property, Snake Ridge. To reach King’s property, situated on the La Trobe River between Traralgon and Rosedale and extending in a northeasterly direction towards Angus McMillan’s property, Bushy Park, near Stratford, von Guérard had skirted around the upper perimeter of the barrier presented by the Koo Wee Rup Swamp, probably, his sketches suggest, on horseback. He spent the next two days, 19 and 20 November, capturing the breathtaking views from Snake Ridge: the view to the northwest, towards Mt Baw Baw, was set down across two pages in his small sketchbook and, on larger sheets of paper, the prospects to the north and then to the northeast, towards Ben Cruachan and the Gippsland Alps (fig.1). This last, meticulously detailed and extensively annotated drawing, on which he worked over both days, provided him with all the information required to realise this painting, Mr John King’s Station, in his Melbourne studio in 1861. Mr John King’s Station was painted at the peak of von Guérard’s career, at a time when the leading art critic of the day, James Smith, championed him as ‘decidedly the landscape painter of Australia’. Today he is again regarded as one of, if not the, greatest landscape painters to have worked in Australia in the nineteenth century. This work exemplifies the qualities on which that reputation is founded, notably his singular ability to portray the minutiae of the natural world within the context of a vision of great breadth and grandeur. It is a highly resolved and sophisticated composition that nevertheless speaks of the specificity and depth of von Guérard’s response to this beautiful Gippsland landscape, including its luxuriant grasslands and the fall of light and shadow over the distant mountains. It is also one of von Guérard’s most enigmatic pictures. John King, for whom Mr John King’s Station was painted, was born in Parramatta in 1820, the grandson of Philip Gidley King, Governor of New South Wales from 1800 – 1806. In 1842 he travelled overland from the Monaro Plains to Gippsland, following the route discovered by Angas McMillan (assisted by an Aboriginal guide, Jimmy Gibber) in the previous year, to become one of the first Europeans to settle on Gunaikurnai country. He managed the Snake Ridge run, then leased by John Reeve, until 1851, when, under the aegis of John King and Co., he purchased it. By 1860 he was well established on a run that, as von Guérard recorded, covered ‘100 square miles’ – one of the largest in Gippsland. Not only could his achievements, and his status, be appropriately celebrated in
such a painting but, in the context of the Land Sales Act of 1860, it was an expression of an established claim to the land. Mr John King’s Station is a property portrait, a genre in which von Guérard had established himself in the 1850s with his highly successful Western District homestead pictures. And yet the homestead itself, which was described by a contemporary as ‘a beautiful old place on the point of a hill overlooking the Glengarry (now Latrobe) River, welltimbered with a lovely view of the surrounding country’, does not appear.1 From an elevated position we look out from the homestead garden, across the grassy foreground to what was then known as the great plain of the La Trobe, dotted with grazing cattle – the Snake Ridge run, which, by implication, extended as far the eye can see. To convey the panoramic breadth of the landscape von Guérard chose a canvas twice the width of its height; the effect is amplified by the horizontal directionality of the mid-ground tiers of trees, the successive bands of light and shadow, and the configuration of the clouds. At the same time the eye is drawn deeply into the distance, to the violet-blues of the mountain range, the southern end of what is now the Australian Alpine National Park. Except for the figures, which were not observed on the day, von Guérard remained largely faithful to his on-site drawing when he painted Mr John King’s Station in his studio: the forms of the mountains and the fall of light and shadow over them, the location of individual trees, and their specific configuration remain as they were recorded in his drawing. In his notes, and in keeping with his concern for geographical accuracy he identified the peaks of Ben Cruachan and Mt Buller and recorded that snow was still present on certain peaks in mid-November; he also observed the native Boobialla, described the ‘soft, dark English roses’, the ‘flesh-coloured blooms’ of the honeysuckle, the ‘yellow’ of the ‘meadows’ with their ‘herds of cattle’, the reddish green of the trees at the foot of the mountains and the ‘very fine violet blue tones of the mountains’. His reference to the ‘grass in the foreground’ was translated into what must amount to thousands of brush strokes that describe its luxuriance, blade by blade. On the day, as was typical, he chose his vantage point with care, with consideration for the compositional geometry of his painting: the mountain range rises to its highest peak in the centre of the composition, and it is aligned with the expressive, and centrally placed, eucalypt; the hedge of roses on the left and the vegetation on the right, identified on the drawing as a rose and ‘Bubilla’ (Boobialla), frame the view. In the shift to the more panoramic
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(fig 3) EUGENE VON GUÉRARD Carolin (From Sketchbook XXIV, South Australia, 1855) courtesy of Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, cat. DGB16, v. 3, f. 84
(fig 4) EUGENE VON GUÉRARD Road to Crooked River Diggings, 1862 pen and ink on paper 36.9 x 65.4 cm signed and dated lower left: Eugene von Guerard 1862 courtesy of Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, cat. DGB24, f. 13
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dimensions of the canvas he extended his field of vision beyond that of the drawing, to encompass more of the view to the west (the left of the composition). The figures that von Guérard introduced to his painting have generated, and will continue to generate, much speculation as to their meaning. Two groups of figures appear in the painting, each apparently oblivious to the presence of the other. The two Europeans, presumably John King, standing, and his gardener, attending to the roses being cultivated along the picket fence, are bathed in full light. King’s position as the owner of the property is belied by the scale of the Europeans and their placement in the middle ground, King with his back to the viewer. By contrast the Gunaikurnai man, woman and child take centre stage in the immediate foreground. Their presence, albeit in shadow, is commanding. The portrayal of the Europeans as actively engaged in the cultivation of the land (gardening) may, as Paul Fox suggests, reflect contemporary nineteenth century views of progress, which included the belief that the cultivation of the land, here emphasised by the watering can and rake in the foreground, justified the acquisition of it. The now debunked belief that Aboriginal people did not manage or cultivate country is, ironically, contradicted by the evidence of the painting. The ‘necks’ of grassland screened by promontories of bushland that are visible in the middle ground were the result of a system of controlled burning practiced by the local Brayakaulung clan, to encourage fresh growth and attract game. Von Guérard’s por trayal of the Gunaikurnai family suggests his cognizance of, and sensitivity to, the actual realities faced by their people in mid-nineteenth century Gippsland. As Nicholas Thomas observed of the Aboriginal people portrayed in von Guérard’s View of the Gippsland Alps from Bushy Park on the River Avon, 1861, they are depicted as both on their land, yet dispossessed of it – and subject to the paternalism of the very men who had been involved in the massacres of their people. Their anomalous situation is expressed in their contradictory apparel: the standing man holding two boomerangs, a club and a spear wears a possum skin cloak and a white feathered headdress; the seated woman and child are each draped in government-issue blankets, identifiable by the blue line on the woman’s blanket. Von Guérard did not see this Gunaikurnai family at Snake Ridge, but he did see and sketch other Gunaikurnai on his Gippsland expedition. The seated woman was possibly adapted from a sketch, in his Gippsland
sketchbook, of ‘Nabran’, an Aboriginal woman (fig. 2). The figure of the kneeling child was imported from a drawing made in 1855 near Adelaide, of a ‘native child’ named ‘Carolin’ (fig.3). In front of her sits an empty satchel and she reaches out to pick up a dead parrot – perhaps presented by the dog, one of the thousands of European descent that quickly became attached to Aboriginal groups. The parrot, its wings splayed open to reveal its brilliant colours, is a detail not readily discernible to the naked eye but revealed under magnification – an example of the extraordinary detail von Guérard brought to his paintings. Von Guérard’s visit to John King’s station was made en route – via Angas McMillan’s Bushy Park – to the junction of the Wonnangatta and Crooked rivers where he was to join Alfred Howitt on the government-sponsored gold prospecting expedition led by the explorer into Gippsland’s alpine region. It was both one of the most challenging and exhilarating expeditions of von Guérard’s career, one that took him through terrain that had never been seen, let alone portrayed, by a European artist. On von Guérard’s arrival, eight days after he left John King’s station, Howitt reported that ‘de Guérard, the celebrated Australian painter’, was ‘delighted with the mountain scenery – he had no idea that Australia had such country’. 2 In 1862 von Guérard selected the landscape he had portrayed in Mr John King’s Station as the subject of one of sixteen highly finished pen and ink presentation drawings executed for the Governor of Victoria, Sir Henry Barkly. Titled Road to the Crooked River Diggings, Gippsland (fig.4), it depicts two travelers (and their dog) who have stopped in their tracks to take in the magnificent view. Mr John King’s Station sits alongside the National Gallery of Australia’s View of the Gippsland Alps from Bushy Park on the River Avon, 1861 as one of only two Gippsland property portraits painted by von Guérard. It is one of the most important works in von Guérard’s oeuvre to remain in private hands. 1. Mrs Elizabeth Montgomery, who lived at Snake Ridge between 1872 and 1878. 2. A. W. Howitt, letter to his mother, Mary Howitt, November 1860. Howitt Papers, State Library of Victoria, Ms 9356, Box 1045/39.
Thank you to Tom Darragh for his assistance with the transcription of von Guérard’s Old German notes. DR RUTH PULLIN
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TOM ROBERTS 11 (1856 – 1931) LADY WITH A PARASOL, c.1889 oil on canvas 42.5 x 27.0 cm estimate :
$300,000 – 500,000
PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne Neville Healy, Melbourne Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne David Bremer, Melbourne A.G.C Melbourne Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1993 EXHIBITED Selected Australian Works of Art, Lauraine Diggins Gallery, Melbourne, vol. 9, June 1986, cat. 3 (illus. on exhibition catalogue cover, as ‘Portrait of a Young Girl with Parasol’) The Australian Impressionists: Their Origins and Influences, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 15 – 20 August 1988; The Westpac Gallery, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, 22 – 30 August 1988; St Neots, New South Wales, 9 – 16 September 1988, cat. 3 (as ‘Portrait of a Young Girl with Parasol’, illus. in exhibition catalogue) In Gallery, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 1 November 1993, cat. 3, as (‘Portrait of a Young Girl With a Parasol, c.1886’) Tom Roberts: Retrospective, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 4 October – 17 November 1996; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 29 November 1996 – 27 January 1997; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 11 February – 6 April 1997; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 18 April – 1 June 1997; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 11 June – 27 July 1997, cat. 52 (dated as early 1890s, label attached verso)
LITERATURE Topliss, H., Tom Roberts 1856 – 1931: A Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, cat. 67, vol. I, p. 94; vol. II, pl. 24 (illus.) Radford, R., Tom Roberts, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1996, pp. 134, 135 (illus.), 207 Cotter, J., Tom Roberts and The Art of Portraiture, Thames and Hudson, Melbourne, 2015, fig. 5.10, pp. 206, 212 (illus., dated as early 1890s)
The immediate appeal of Tom Roberts’ Lady with a Parasol, c.1889 comes from its masterly handling, subject and colour. Painted en plein air, the fresh, lively atmosphere is enhanced by the combined look of self-assurance and informality of pose, the slight angle of the head adding a quizzical touch as sunlight plays sensuously across form and fabric. It also provides a strong fashion statement in both dress – loose necktie and the jacket’s wide lapels – and social commentary in the growing independence of women. Inviting of appearance and modishly dressed in white (better suited to the Australian climate), touches of pure black in tie and shoes afford further enlivening contrasts. This is extended in the cropped left edge of the composition, suggesting modernist influences of photography, and spontaneity of realisation characterising the best of French Impressionism. The influence of James McNeil Whistler is present in the captivating elegance and simplicity of presentation, echoes of aestheticism and Japanese art. Whistler’s own painterly journeys in white include the magnificent Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, 1862 in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington. In Lady with a Parasol Roberts introduced a subtle elongation, giving a gentle sophistication to the informality of his figure, the casual moment captured with an engaging vivacity of realisation. The most striking accent is, of course, the red – of parasol, hatband, and touches on the right hand and nearby bush. They not only provide bold contrasts against the blue-green of the background, but also offset the brilliance of the white accents on sleeve, shoulder, arm and cuff. While red and white is not entirely new to Roberts’ art, tracing the journey of their appearances in his work, however, helps throw new light on the dating of this painting. Variously given as c.1886 and early 1890s, Helen Topliss in her 1985 catalogue raisonné of Roberts’ work, proposed a date of c.1886. She wrote: ‘The frontal pose and the bush
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setting would seem to suggest a date in the mid-1880s. Most of the portraits painted in the mid-1880s are frontal or three-quarter views. The handling of the background landscape resembles work done in the 1880s’.1 Later, in 1996, the catalogue to the Roberts’ exhibition under Ron Radford’s aegis, stated: ‘The front facing pose and bush setting’ are given as reasons for dating the painting ‘in the early 1890s, as [is] the handling of the bright background landscape’. 2 The new date of c.1889, when Charles Conder’s influence was considerable, is proposed for the reasons that follow. In 1886, when Roberts painted A Summer Morning Tiff, 1886 (Art Gallery of Ballarat), the centre of attention was the young woman dressed in white. The model was Harriet McCubbin, sister of Roberts’ friend, Frederick McCubbin and student at the National Gallery School, Melbourne. Roberts wrote that she stood ‘… in sunlight, among some exquisite young firm saplings…’. 3 A Summer Morning Tiff and Lady with a Parasol share a bush setting of young saplings, the realism of one and the breadth of handling and colour of the other mark the differences. In Reconciliation, c.1887 (Castlemaine Art Museum), the companion painting to A Summer Morning Tiff, the figure in white continues to dominate. And in Slumbering Sea, Mentone, 1887 (National Gallery of Victoria) the white dresses have an added touch of red accents in the cap of one and flowers in the hat of another.
TOM ROBERTS photograph by G.V.F. Talma courtesy of State Library of New South Wales
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Roberts met Conder in Sydney in early 1888. In April they painted together en plein air at Coogee, Roberts’ Holiday Sketch at Coogee, 1888 is in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Conder’s Coogee Bay, 1888 in the National Gallery of Victoria. The foreground of Conder’s painting shows a woman and child in white, the former holding a folded red parasol. Both Virginia Spate and Ann Galbally noted the change in Robert’s painting. Spate described Holiday Sketch at Coogee as ‘Roberts’ most brilliantly coloured painting’ and referred to his ‘new adventurousness in the use of paint and colour’, offering ‘excitement at the intensity of Sydney’s light and colour’ as a possible explanation. Another was the ‘Sydney painters who were already more strongly influenced by the Aesthetic movement than were their colleagues in Melbourne’. She concluded, ‘… the colours in Roberts’ painting are warmer and more expressive than in earlier works and this may partly have been due to Conder’s example’. 4 Galbally observed that painting with Conder ‘… may have left Roberts at something of a
turning point. Should he persist with his realist vision and palette and continue to seek that which he felt characterised Australia, or should he change style, embrace the new fluidity of painting on wood panel and make a serious study of colour and light effects in nature … ?’ 5 Lady with a Parasol shows evidence of Conder’s influence in the more daring composition of lively angles and verticals, and exploration of the naturalistic and decorative use of colour. The decorative use of red, especially for parasols, featured in a number of Conder’s paintings in the year he met Roberts, All on a Summer’s Day, 1888 (Art Gallery of South Australia) and A Taste for Literature, 1888 (Art Gallery of Ballarat) being but two. This fascination continued to feature in his Melbourne works, especially A Holiday at Mentone, 1888 (Art Gallery of South Australia). For a time Roberts and Conder shared a studio in Collins Street. The year 1889 is memorable in Australian art for The 9 By 5 Impression Exhibition of oil sketches and studies by Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Conder, Frederick McCubbin and others. Conder included a portrait of Roberts, An Impressionist, 1889 (Art Gallery of New South Wales). The catalogue’s notice ‘To The Public’, stated that ‘An effect is only momentary: so an impressionist tries to find his place. … in these works, it has been the object of the artists to render faithfully, and thus obtain first records of effects widely differing, and often of very fleeting character’. 6 Roberts’ paintings included the lively handled portraits Cream and Black, 1889 (private collection), Harpers Weekly, c.1899 (National Gallery of Victoria), and La Favorita dominated by the brilliance of the red dress. All have the painterly freedom of a momentary effect. During these years Roberts also excelled in painting the formal portrait, an elegant example being Madame Pfund, c.1887 (National Gallery of Victoria). And his engagement with children reached a new height in Miss Lilly Stirling, c.1888 (National Gallery of Victoria), its dazzling whites against a greenish background, informality and quizzical look recalling Lady with a Parasol. Another, Head Study of a Young Woman, 1889 (private collection), though much smaller in scale, likewise shows an affinity through the same direct, wide-eyed look, inclination of the head, prominent, black eye lashes, a momentary engagement captured in paint. Moreover, the red parasol continued to make its statement in later paintings by Roberts as in Christmas Flowers and Christmas Belles, c.1899 (Manly Art Gallery and Museum).
TOM ROBERTS (SEATED) IN HIS STUDIO AT GROSVENOR CHAMBERS WITH ARTHUR STREETON
Painter of the fashionable and famous, pastoralists, politicians and professors, actors and artists, Tom Roberts was Australia’s leading portraitist of his time. He also created the grand, national narrative. From the brush of the same master, Lady with a Parasol provides a brilliant momentary effect. Sitting happily between portraiture and subject picture, it embraces the sketch and the more finished composition, as Roberts reveals his considerable gifts as a painter of the figure and the Australian bush. 1. Topliss, H., op. cit., vol. 1, cat. 67, p. 94 2. Radford, R., op. cit., p. 207 3. Tom Roberts letter to Lillie Williamson, 15 April 1886, Roberts Papers, MLMSS A2480, State Library of New South Wales, quoted in Gray, A., et al, Tom Roberts, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2015, p. 138 4. Spate, V., Tom Roberts, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1978, p. 52 5. Galbally, A., in Gray, A., op. cit., p. 162 6. ‘To The Public’, The 9 By 5 Impression Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, Melbourne, August 1889
DAVID THOMAS
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TOM ROBERTS 12 (1856 – 1931) PORTRAIT IN THE GARDEN, 1896 oil on wood panel 60.5 x 29.0 cm signed and dated lower left: 1896. Tom Roberts. estimate :
$120,000 – 160,000
PROVENANCE Darlinghurst Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney EXHIBITED Looking at People, Perception in Australian Art, Sancta Sophia College, University of Sydney, Sydney, 9 – 11 August 1968, cat. 128 LITERATURE Topliss, H., Tom Roberts 1856 – 1931: A Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, cat. 273, vol. I, p. 149; vol. II, pl. 122 (illus.)
Tom Roberts’ portraits of women are striking in their elegance and beauty, whether they be the more formal Madame Pfund, c.1887 in the National Gallery of Victoria, or informal as in this charming Portrait in the Garden, 1896. His response to feeling and fashion, as illustrated in the National Gallery of Australia’s beautiful An Australian Native, 1888, is unrivalled among his contemporaries. Profiled and hatted in style, as in Portrait of Florence, c.1898, in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the sensuous feel for flesh and fabric plays lightly over all. Paintings of inviting refinement, they reveal Roberts’ singular perception and mastery in painting the female figure and personality. Portrait in the Garden has the added attraction of an engaging informality and casual relaxation, its elegance heightened by the elongation of the panel on which it is painted. The 1890s saw Roberts involved in a series of portraits, ‘Familiar faces and figures’, twenty-three being exhibited in the Society of Artists’ rooms, Sydney in late 1900. Of theatrical entrepreneur George Coppin (National Portrait Gallery, Canberra), violinist Johann Kruse (private collection), politician Andrew Garran (private collection), and Professor G. W. L. Marshall-Hall (Performing Arts Museum, Melbourne), among other like celebrities, they are all men.1 Nevertheless, they share with Portrait in the Garden the casual moment captured on unpainted panel, highlighting the singleness of the figure set within a rich, warm background. The textural contrasts between grained wood and paint provide further interest. Portraits of women among this group are special, that of the artist’s model Ada Furlong, c.1895 (Art Gallery of Western Australia) being another rare example.
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Roberts’ use of the unprimed wood panel probably grew out of painting on cigar box lids for The 9 By 5 Impression Exhibition of 1889. His La Favorita, c.1889 took the name from the Manila Cigars stamp ‘La Favorita’ on the verso. While the influences of Whistler are apparent in Portrait in the Garden, much additional pleasure can be found in the spontaneous Impressionist moment combined with a delight in Japonaiserie and Aestheticism. The decorative is tinged with poetic nostalgia, as the reflective look on the sitter’s face is seemingly realised in the ‘thought bubble’ of the upper right. Here, a younger and much younger girl dance, holding hands, around a boy, to the scattering of other blossoms – redolent of the transience of youth, spring and flowers. It is said that the playground song of ‘Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses’ first appeared in print in 1881. It was certainly known to Roberts, who produced the etching Ring O’Roses, c.1891–93 now in the National Gallery of Australia. His interest was such that he returned to the subject in London, painting Australian Pastoral, 1904–05 (National Gallery of Australia), the composition being based on the previously mentioned etching. While idyllic days of beauty, innocence and romance are paramount, Roberts was alive to contemporary fashion. As dresses reduced in volume with the narrowing of skirts, leg-o’-mutton sleeves reached their height by 1896. And crownless hats maintained their height with extravagant plumage and other effects. Gems of informality, these and other works illuminate this most successful time in Roberts’ career. 1. Topliss, H., op. cit., vol. 1, p. 21: ‘In the [exhibition] catalogue Roberts expressed his desire that they should be kept together as a group since they were of historical importance as a gallery of Australian ‘familiar faces and figures”’.
DAVID THOMAS
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CHARLES CONDER 13 (1868 – 1909) RAINY DAY, 1888 oil on cedar cigar box lid 12.0 x 19.0 cm signed lower left: C. CONDER signed, dated and inscribed with title lower right: (Rainy Day) 14 Feb. 1888 Chinamans Garden. Randwick / C. E. Conder bears cigar maker’s label verso: Heinrich Peemoller, Hamburg estimate :
$200,000 – 300,000
PROVENANCE Alfred S. McMichael, Melbourne (label attached verso) Mrs K. Lyttleton Taylor, New South Wales Christie’s, Sydney, 3 October 1989, lot 547 James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales Thence by descent Private collection, New South Wales EXHIBITED Loan exhibition of Australian art: collection of paintings and drawings by Australian artists executed during the last 25 to 35 Years, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 4 April 1918, cat. 7 Loan exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1925, cat. 295 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1926 (no catalogue available) Mixed Spring Exhibition, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, September 1946 Exhibition of Nine By Five Impressions, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 5 December 1950 Charles Conder: 1868–1909, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 9 August – 4 September 1966; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 9 November – 4 December 1966; and touring other state galleries, cat. 15 loaned to the National Gallery of Victoria for the opening exhibition of Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, October 2002 (label attached verso)
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LITERATURE Hoff, U., Charles Conder, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1972, [c13], p. 99 Eagle, M., The Oil Paintings of Charles Conder in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997, p. 37 (illus. in installation) Lane, T., ‘The 9 By 5 Impression Exhibition – The Challenge of the Sketch’, Australian Impressionism, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, fig. 2, pp. 158 – 159 (illus.)
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CHARLES CONDER IN HIS STUDIO, c. 1904 photograph by Baron de Meyer courtesy of Barry Humphries
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LOT 13 • CHARLES CONDER RAINY DAY, 1888
Rain! Who was painting rain in sunny Australia in the late 1880s? This was the land celebrated for its strong clear light sought out by artists from the northern hemisphere as well as the locally born, all of whom celebrated an aesthetic of sunny optimism. Yet here we see the twentyyear-old Sydney artist Charles Conder invoking something quite different; a nondescript landscape and a weather event that has nothing to do with the nascent nationalism currently dominating landscape painting. Instead Conder’s small cedar panel celebrates one of nature’s subtler moods – the beauty of a watery world. The view appears to be a spontaneous moment rather than a constructed landscape and is inscribed ‘Rainy Day 14 Feb. 1888. Chinamans Garden. Randwick’. His palette is tonal and restrained, lit up by the intense ultramarine blues of the costumes worn by the Chinese market gardeners. Rainy Day, 1888 marks the moment when the young artist broke with the highly-coloured, illustrative mode of plein air landscape painting as practised by his teachers Alfred J. Daplyn and Julian Ashton, and established his artistic independence. For Rainy Day is virtually subjectless. It tells no story and describes no incident. Its meaning lies in its aesthetic: the exquisitely crafted brushwork leading the eye into the pictorial space via a variety of brushstrokes. Why did he choose to paint something so different from his usual practice? The answer lies in the contact he had recently made with Italian artist Girolamo Nerli who exhibited his ‘macchiaioli’ inspired work at the December 1887 exhibition of the Art Society of New South Wales. Nerli had studied in Florence, the home of the Macchiaioli school in the early 1880s, and had come to Melbourne in 1885, then Sydney in 1887. Conder visited his studio to see more of his work and his collection of Macchiaioli works.
in their own right. Conder’s previous painterly practice of graphically outlining forms before adding colour, grounded as it was in his work for the Illustrated Sydney News, Sydney was challenged by Nerli’s apparently spontaneous application of brushstrokes and blobs. Echoes of the Italian’s A Wet Evening, 1888 – a bold study of a wet street with an approaching steam train and reflected figures crossing the roadway1 – can be seen in Conder’s The Gray and Gold, 1888, 2 depicting a couple walking down a rain soaked street at sunset silhouetted by cloud-like daubs of gold and pink; and six months after Rainy Day the ambitious, rain drenched Departure of the Orient – Circular Quay, 1888 3 which won acclaim when exhibited with the Art Society of New South Wales in September that year and was acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The proceeds enabled Conder to leave for Melbourne in October taking Rainy Day with him, where it was purchased by local collector Alfred S. McMichael. While Conder’s primary focus was the moody atmosphere of the scene, the subject itself is of significant historical interest. As the inscription notes, it was painted at Randwick, a short distance from Sydney to the south, in an area where sandy, alluvial soils saw the establishment of extensive market gardens from the 1830s. Contributing to the supply of fresh food for the growing settlements of New South Wales, the market gardens were originally tended by Europeans, however the influx of Chinese settlers during the gold rush gradually saw this change so that by the 1880s, when Conder painted this work, they were predominantly run by Chinese immigrants. Important signifiers of the rich cultural diversity of Australia’s history, several market gardens still operating in La Perouse, within the city of Randwick, have recently been listed on the State Heritage Register. 1. oil on board, 32.2 x 40.3 cm, New England Regional Art Museum, New South Wales
They proved a revelation. Here was a different approach – privileging the expressive power of the effects of natural light and shadow, and a new way of painting, with dabs and dabs of paint, ‘macchi’, rapidly applied with a limited palette. Mood, and weather conditions were subjects
2. oil on wood panel, 40.7 x 28.7 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 3. oil on canvas, 45.1 x 50.0 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
ANN GALBALLY
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WALTER WITHERS 14 (1854 – 1914) YARRA RIVER COTTAGE, c.1898 oil on canvas 22.5 x 31.0 cm signed lower right: Walter Withers estimate :
$20,000 – 30,000
PROVENANCE Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne Rod Ellison, Sydney, acquired from the above in c.1984 Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1991 EXHIBITED Australian Colonial and Impressionist Paintings, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 22 March – 9 April 1982, cat. 26 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 1991
In 1897, Walter Withers won the inaugural Wynne Prize for Australian landscape painting with The Storm, 1896. He won in competition with Tom Roberts’ masterly A Break Away!, 1891, Sydney Long and W. C. Piguenit being among the other finalists. The Storm was acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and subsequently included in the Exhibition of Australian Art in London, which opened at the Grafton Galleries, in April 1898. Roberts’ A Break Away! was also there, together with the best of Australian paintings assembled by the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales ‘to obtain a more extended attention to Australian Art beyond the Colonies…’.1 Tranquil Winter, 1895, another of Withers’ landscapes included in the exhibition, had been purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria the year it was painted. It moved the art critic of London’s Pall Mall Gazette, R.A.M. Stevenson, to declare: ‘This is, perhaps, the most beautiful canvas in the show’. 2 Success followed success with Withers’ Early Morning, Heidelberg, 1898, also from the London exhibition, being purchased by the Art Gallery of South Australia through the Elder Bequest Fund in 1899. To top this off, Withers won the Wynne Prize of 1900 for the second time with Still Autumn. And that same painting was awarded a silver medal for the best landscape at Bendigo’s Victorian Gold Jubilee Exhibition of 1901. Withers was living at Heidelberg, near Melbourne, during this time. The years 1894 to 1900 are, with good reason, generally regarded as his most successful.
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According to his wife, Fanny, ‘Nature was his great teacher’. 3 Working as a jackaroo for eighteen months after arriving in Australia in 1882, gave him a deep understanding and love of the Australian countryside, especially the peopled, domesticated scenes of farms and grazing animals. While peaceful moments and the quieter moods of nature had great appeal, he also liked to paint her garbed in the best of seasonal dresses. Summer heat and gathering storms attracted his brush. He titled one painting 110 ° in the Shade; another, Country Road, c.1898, in the National Gallery of Victoria, is similarly drenched in sunlight. 4 Withers once wrote to his daughter Gladys: ‘The drought is very severe but the country looks very beautiful, in its garb of blue and gold;…’. 5 Yarra River Cottage, c.1898, from the very time Withers was at the height of his creative powers, captures the shimmering heat and sparkling colours of summer with a freshness derived from being painted en plein air. The feeling of immediacy and sense of stillness are palpable. The characteristic foreground stretch of water reflects the cliff banks, the woman drawing water highlighted in touches of pure red, white and black. Withers occasionally capped his figures in red, the accented contrasts providing a central focus around which nature thrives in abundance. The Last of Summer, 1898, in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ballarat, gives another example close in time, the woman’s red shawl over white being the centre around which the changing weather storms. By contrast, Yarra River Cottage is high keyed, celebrating a moment of brilliant summer light with Impressionist verve in strokes of broken colour. 1. ‘Catalogue introduction’, Exhibition of Australian Art in London, Grafton Galleries, London, 1898. Tom Roberts’ A Break Away! was purchased by the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1899. 2. Stevenson, R., Pall Mall Gazette, London, 1898, quoted in Mackenzie, A., Walter Withers: The Forgotten Manuscripts, Mannagum Press, Victoria, 1987, p. 96 3. Withers, F., The Life and Art of Walter Withers, Alexander McCubbin, Melbourne, 1920, p. 7 4. ibid., p. 17 5. Undated letter, quoted in Mackenzie, A., op. cit., p. 28
DAVID THOMAS
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ARTHUR STREETON 15 (1867 – 1943) MINARETS, CAIRO, 1897 oil on board 102.0 x 33.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title lower right: Arthur STREETON - / CAIRO 97 estimate :
PROVENANCE Rose Carson (Mrs William Carson), London, c.1897 until her death 5 February 1948 Thence by descent John Hyam Aarons, London, until his death 28 May 1948 Private collection, United Kingdom Sotheby’s, London, 7 June 1989, lot 91 (as ‘Gateway in Cairo, 1897’) Thirty Victoria Street Gallery, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1990 LITERATURE Streeton, A., The Arthur Streeton Catalogue, Melbourne, 1935, cat. 210
$300,000 – 500,000
The significance of Arthur Streeton’s Cairo paintings is out of all proportion to the small number of works. On the strength of a two-month stop-over in Egypt on the way to Europe in 1897 he made Cairo the subject of his first paintings in London. Lifted high by a wave of artistic ambition he hoped that the sight of them might in a twinkling convince the English art world that a talented and original artist had arrived on their shores. Minarets, Cairo, 1897, the tallest and most exalted of the Cairo pictures, gives an insight into the stylistic adventure that was involved. The artist hinted in written accounts of Cairo that he found sketching there well-nigh impossible.1 Wherever he went – certainly in places he wanted to paint – people crowded around, children dogged his footsteps, men, women and children persistently jogged his elbow, begging his attention: in no place could he work unhindered. Some of his pencil drawings of Cairo look as if they may have been memory drawings, ditto some of the watercolours; and all the oils were produced in London. He took away a collection of commercially produced photographs and some of his own photographs, but very few sketches. The question that arose for him was how was he to use the material? The solution he found catapulted him into a way of painting with which he had previously only toyed. Of the few visitors to his studio during the first lonely year in London, Walter Barnett and his wife had been on the same boat from Australia and in Cairo with him for a week. Seeing his artist friend’s dilemma, Barnett, on leaving Cairo, handed over a camera to use in lieu of a sketchbook. 2 In London, Barnett for a while replaced Tom Roberts as Smike’s mentor, providing advice and contacts from the position of one who was rapidly rising into prominence as a fashionable portrait photographer. Barnett suggested (evidently from his own practice) that it might be an idea to consider the ensemble of picture-and-frame when planning a work. He sent Streeton some green oak frames to experiment with. The idea was ‘like a tonic’, wrote Streeton: ‘[I]t strikes me that if I become known in London it will be by a series of decorations within these frames … what I wish to do will be different to anything they’ve had here … I may cause a demand and have an Exhibition entirely of decorations.’ 3 (The word ‘decoration’, needless to say, was not used disparagingly; artists had recently adopted it for the non-pictorial, formal requirements of design and colour. Formalism or ‘decoration’ was the new direction in art, as evidenced by the French magazine Art et Decoration that commenced publication in 1897.)
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Few of the Cairo paintings trace an actual scene. 4 Minarets, Cairo wilfully disregards the conventions of a tourist memento, indeed, its confusion of the facts was bound to irritate any Orientalist who put a premium on accuracy. Whereas some details are broadly characteristic of Cairene architecture, others identify a well-known tourist site. Thus the relief within the arch to the left of the gateway is specific to one of the three main gateways in the walls of the old city: the Bab Zuweila. The minaret on the right of the picture could be one of the pair that rise above that gateway yet its partner is conspicuously absent from the image. The triple-storeyed tenement above the gateway did not belong to Bab Zuweila at the time of Streeton’s visit: some of his drawings showed the gateway as it then was, yet he chose to ignore what he knew to be fact. Likewise, the forms and detailing of the picture’s three other minarets and the domes are not from the vicinity of Bab Zuweila. The ridged pattern on one of the domes (‘borrowed’ from the madresa-mausoleum Amir Iljay al-Yusufi in another part of the city) was perhaps introduced by Streeton because its swirling lines assisted the upward movement he sought to convey in the painting.
ARTHUR STREETON, c.1890 photograph by Walter Barnett collection of National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
If there was any moment in Streeton’s career when he stood for an art of memory it was in 1897 in London. Insofar as Minarets, Cairo is a selective montage of separate impressions rather than a direct transcript of nature, we see the artist diverging from the reliance on plein-air reportage that had previously (though never entirely) underpinned his art. Recollection and evocation always had been the core of his sensibility, as we know from paintings produced as early as Golden Summer, Eaglemont, 1889 and from passages in letters where he yearns over remembered sensations. The power of memory was to remain a preoccupation. At the end of his life, drafting and re-drafting his memoirs, he philosophised quite in Marcel Proust’s vein: ‘The mind of man resembles in some ways the shop of the Arab merchant, for a man may also sit within the centre of his mind, and direct his attention to any of the innumerable drawers or secret compartments of his Knowledge, which surround his mental core… these receptacles of personal experience may, upon review, revive sensations….’ 5 Of the memories Streeton cherished to the end of his life, his sense impressions of Heidelberg and the camp at Sirius Cove had been central to his visualisation of those places. Cairo, too, held for him the luxury of an immersive experience. Minarets, Cairo is a potpourri of sense-impressions. The brushwork, gathering impressions, has the performative rhythm of an act of recall. By touch it animated, alike, the heavy ashlar foundations of Cairo and the flickering motion of birds in a blue blaze of sky. Stroke by stroke Cairo’s vertiginous street architecture was rebuilt in terms of colour, light and texture. From a ground teeming with people the scene lifts and circles into light via the round arch of a vast oriental gateway and successive upward steps of flimsy tenement houses, the curves of white domes, arrowing lines of tall minarets and impossibly tall palm trees. The life of the picture is in the cumulative brushstrokes, each distinct, square, and as palpable to the eyes as an actual touch: the memory here may be the constant touching of his person
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by Egyptians which had so jangled his nerves and oppressed his mind in Cairo! Without relinquishing illustration, the painting steered towards expressive abstraction. Movement and the overall direction of the people in the street is suggested partly through a simple repeated element of blue-clad figures and partly by a scrawled line of white paint in the direction of the gateway. Cloth awnings strung over the street have been tailored to resemble the lateral mark of a slashing stroke of the brush. Dots and dashes of colour describe palm branches, fruit, and birds. Minarets, Cairo was premature. The Australian artist’s hopes for his pictures of Cairo were not fulfilled: he offered a first batch to some Bond Street dealers but no exhibition eventuated and, disappointed, he fell back on Australia for their sale. The “decorative” concept was opaque to English and Australian critics alike, who found the paintings ‘hard’ (non-atmospheric), sketchy, and thought that one or two were ‘apparently unfinished’ — even as sketches. It must have galled Streeton considerably when two watercolours of Cairo streets – faithful tourist images, soft-focussed and dull-coloured – by Walter Spong (who had joined him in Cairo half way through his stay) were accepted and prominently displayed by the Royal Academy; and found buyers.6 One well-tuned Australian observer, alone of all the critics, saw that Streeton, ‘like the artist he is, … has gone for the local atmosphere rather than a transcript of any particular spot.’ 7
1. The accounts nearest in date are letters written from London 1897 and 1898; he wrote a coloured impression for the red page of the Bulletin, Sydney, 21 October 1899; the last, and possibly the truest to his experience, are threaded through the notes he made towards a personal narrative in the early 1940s (Oliver Streeton estate). 2. Streeton mentioned that he owed Barnett for the camera in an undated [summer 1897] letter from his first studio in London (WH Barnett papers, in WH Gill papers ML MSS 285/14). 3. Letter to Barnett, 6 October 1897 (Barnett papers, op. cit.) 4. I am indebted to Emma Kindred who lent me her doctoral thesis ‘Passages through the Orient: Arthur Streeton in Cairo’ (2012). In addressing the subject of what Streeton did, and did not, represent of Cairo, Dr Kindred has opened a key subject for this artist, which is where he, at any moment, positioned his art in relation to straightforward factuality. Minarets, Cairo was not yet available for her to discuss. 5. Quoted by Emma Kindred, op. cit. p. 1. Streeton wrote similarly in another draft, which I quote from my hastily written notes of the 1980s: ‘The human brain is remarkable in its conscious and unconscious activity. It may resemble a man seated with many books or closed drawers within arms’ reach, [when one puts out a hand to one of these,] thought opens up instantly, … each .. may be closed at will and fresh ones reviewed, and each enclosed memory frequently leads on to another’. It says something for the strong impression Cairo made on the adult Streeton that, recognising as he did that a child was a far more powerful receptor of impressions than an adult, he should describe himself, at his ‘first sight of Cairo’ looking ‘with the wondering eyes of a child’. 6. Letter to Tom Roberts, 28 June 1898. Spong sailed from Sydney on SS Massilia on 27 February 1898 (Sydney Mail, Sydney, 6 March 1897, 489). Spong’s success was mentioned British Australasian, London, 28 April 1898, 897 – the scenes were ‘Off the Waght el-birket’ and ‘The Mosque El Mu’yierd’ (i.e., the mosque at Bab Zuweila). An idea of those paintings may be had from two watercolours of Cairo street scenes in Christie’s Travel and Natural History sale, South Kensington, London, 3 October 2006, Lots 110, 111. 7. Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 8 September 1898 (clippings book AGNSW) 8. As it happens, Streeton was to succeed even in the matter of bread and butter. His wife, a violinist who had managed her own string quartet, simply required him to apply himself in the same business-like way she had. 9. McDonald papers, Art Gallery of New South Wales archive, researched for me by Hannah Steinbauer.
DR MARY EAGLE
Yet the artist’s initial belief in himself as an artist whose ability the English would recognise proved true. His talent was very quickly recognised and although opportunities for showing his work, and sales, lagged well behind recognition in the English art press, that was (and is) the norm for artists. 8 Frank McDonald, showed the painting to James Fairfax in early February 1990 and wrote down his response: ‘as you know I don’t buy much Australian art [nowadays], but [this is] something remarkable. It’s a lovely thing. I’m very taken’.9 Minarets Cairo’s first owner had been Rose Carson, wife of William Carson, a Sydney wool-broker. The daughter of a wealthy stockbroker, she was living with her parents in London during Streeton’s first years there. At a guess, she bought the painting through Walter Barnett soon after it was painted. Within a few years Streeton had a direct connection with her parents, Lewis and Esther Aarons, in whose country house, The Hayes, Hayes Lane, Kenley, Surrey, he spent a week in mid-summer 1904. Rose was visiting her husband in Sydney at the time.
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FREDERICK McCUBBIN 16
(1855 – 1917) LITTLE DOCK, MELBOURNE, c.1914 oil on wood panel 24.5 x 35.0 cm signed lower left: F. McCubbin bears inscription verso: “Little Dock: Melburne [sic]” / by Fred McCubbin / Painted / about 1914 / Final manner estimate :
$25,000 – 35,000
PROVENANCE Probably: Sedon Galleries, Melbourne Private collection The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales EXHIBITED Probably: Exhibition of Oils by the Late Frederick McCubbin, Sedon Galleries, Melbourne, 9 September 1941, opened by Sir Keith Murdoch, cat. 17 (as ‘Little Dock’)
The docklands of the Yarra River fascinated Frederick McCubbin throughout his life. Born in west Melbourne, not far from the docks, he grew to know them well when on his bread rounds for the McCubbin bakery. From an early age he was drawn to scenes of shipping, surrounded by the life of the growing city. One of his earliest paintings, View of the New Dock, 1880 was shown in the Tenth Exhibition of the Victorian Academy of Arts, Melbourne, the ships and their tall masts evoking, for the young artist, tales of adventure and the romance of faraway places. A few years later, in 1887, McCubbin painted The City’s Toil, a shipping scene at Smith’s Wharf on the Yarra where funnels and masts compete. This was followed by Melbourne 1888, a large painting now surviving in two parts, one half being in the National Gallery of Victoria. McCubbin’s single trip abroad to London in 1907 provided many opportunities, realised in such paintings as At Colombo, c.1907, The Pool of London, 1907, and View of Naples, 1908. Then came Williamstown and its abundance of maritime life, inspiring such works as Harmony in Blue, Williamstown, c.1909, and the masterly Williamstown, 1915, once in the collection of the Traill family.
During these later years, McCubbin made plentiful use of Winsor and Newton ‘oil sketching tablets’ to create lively scenes of Melbourne, the city and its docklands. Although small in size and broad in handling, their very quality commands the status of paintings rather than sketches. Painted to capture the moment in all its transient, atmospheric beauty, McCubbin’s later style grew richer in colour as it became more impressionistic. In Shipping on the Yarra, c.1910 and Little Dock, Yarra River, Melbourne, c.1910 McCubbin returned to South Wharf and the docklands with the city’s buildings rising in the background.1 The city itself, of busy trams and people, is the focus of his imaginative attention in Princes Bridge, 1910. And several brilliant views of Collins Street, c.1915 are in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Geelong Gallery and a private collection. 2 Like the late works of J. M. W. Turner, whom he admired greatly, these paintings transcend technique through their unrivalled freedom of touch, creating images of ineffable beauty. Little Dock, Melbourne, c.1914 belongs to these late gems, sparkling with light and colour. Writing to his friend Tom Roberts, in January of 1909, McCubbin said he had been down to Williamstown making a few sketches: ‘…just like Venice, lovely colour. Water, sky and an old ship … the older I get the wider my interest grows in all life, colour, charm … in our past work we have been too timid.’ 3 Timidity now banished, McCubbin painted Little Dock, Melbourne with such freedom and boldness of technique that it eclipses figuration, touching on abstraction. The enthralling freshness and immediacy of Little Dock, Melbourne comes from the way in which it was realised – painted in the open air with rapid strokes of knife and brush directly from the motif. The broad strokes of colour suggest that most were applied with the palette knife, so favoured in his later works. High-keyed and cool touches of colour add a jewel like quality, McCubbin’s favoured atmosphere of late afternoon heralding twilight with golden colours among the growing shades of mauve and blue. 1. Shipping on the Yarra was included in the exhibition, McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907 – 17, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2009, cat. 29. For Little Dock, Yarra River, Melbourne, see Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 20 November 2012, lot 56 2. Unless mentioned otherwise, all these paintings are in private collections 3. Frederick McCubbin letter of 27 January 1909 to Tom Roberts, Letters to Tom Roberts, MS A2478, vol. 2, no. 18, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
DAVID THOMAS
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RUPERT BUNNY 17 (1864 – 1947) AT THE PUMP, c.1908 oil on canvas 60.0 x 73.0 cm signed lower left: Rupert C. W. Bunny inscribed with title on stretcher verso: At the pump estimate :
$180,000 – 240,000
PROVENANCE Anthony Hordern and Sons, Sydney Private collection The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney EXHIBITED Exposition Rupert C. W. Bunny, Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, 10 – 31 March 1917, cat. 22 (as ‘La Pompe’) Exhibition of Paintings by Rupert C. W. Bunny, The Fine Art Society Gallery, Melbourne, 15 – 27 November 1922, cat. 36 Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Rupert C. W. Bunny, Anthony Hordern and Sons, Sydney, 2 – 31 May 1923, cat. 36 Rupert Bunny Retrospective, Newcastle City Art Gallery, Newcastle, 31 July – 3 September 1968, cat. 8 (dated as c.1912) LITERATURE Gleeson, J., ‘The Art Collectors 3. James O. Fairfax’, Art and Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 3, no. 3, December 1965, pp. 174, 181 (illus., dated as c.1912) Newcastle Morning Herald, Newcastle, 1 August 1968 Thomas, D., Rupert Bunny 1864 – 1947, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1970, cat. 0155, p. 115 (dated as c.1913) Thomas, D., The Life and Art of Rupert Bunny: A Catalogue Raisonné, Thames and Hudson, Melbourne, 2017, cat. O268, vol. II, p. 41
The year 1908 introduces a period of special brilliance in Rupert Bunny’s art embracing such masterpieces as A Summer Morning, c.1908, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the more personally sized Last Fine Days, Royan, c.1908, in the Newcastle Art Gallery. Paintings of enticing beauty such as At the Beach, c.1908 (private collection); Le Bel Après Midi, Royan, c.1908 (private collection); Shrimp Fishers at Saint-Georges, c.1908 (National Gallery of Victoria, Felton Bequest); and La Chenille Verte, c.1908 (once in the collection of Sir Reginald Marcus Clark), followed close upon each other. Bunny was at the height of his creativity, his beautiful wife Jeanne his muse and his model.
sketches for La Chenille Verte (The Green Caterpillar), The Cliff Path, and Oyster Gathering (St Georges).1 Jeanne and her lady companion feature throughout in sunny outdoor and interior scenes, or on a shaded balcony. The vivacity of handling increased in each successive painting to achieve the light-filled freedom characterised by The Swing, c.1913 (private collection). At the Pump, c.1908, together with a number of later paintings, was shown in Bunny’s exhibition at Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, in March 1917. According to the writer for the British-Australasian, the exhibition was ‘one of the biggest successes of the season’. 2 Paintings were acquired by the French State for the Luxembourg Museum, and the exhibition was well reviewed by the Parisian critics. Arsène Alexandre wrote in Le Figaro: ‘never has this excellent painter displayed in his works such delicious colour, design, composition, meaning, imagination’. 3 Gustave Geffroy, the noted French art critic, wrote the catalogue introduction.4 The appeal of Bunny’s paintings inspired him to comment: ‘These paintings are studies in colour and light and are also true and charming portraits of the actual presence of women whom the painter has observed in their homes and outside’. Commenting on Bunny’s ability to discover the ‘poetry of everyday things found in daily life’, Geffroy praised him for his presentation of images of adorned women ‘as quite natural’. He continued: ‘we are not surprised to see these creatures dressed in such splendour giving themselves up to modest occupations: drawing water, pruning roses, embroidering handkerchiefs or knitting stockings’. Geffroy lauded Bunny as ‘a realist and a visionary, an observer of truth and a poet of the world of dreams’. 5 Bunny is a painter of sunlight, sensuously caressing the flesh and fabric, and filling the canvas with a sparkling atmosphere of warmth and pleasure, an interest reflected in his oft used title, ‘Sun Bath’. At the Pump celebrates this delight as a transient moment of the everyday captured in paint. As Jeanne watches her companion pump water to fill watering cans for the garden, the prosaic is transformed into the poetic by dancing touches of the brush, full of light and colour. 1. Villa Lili, St Georges Sketchbook II, c.1908, formerly in the collection of Dr Ewan Murray-Will, Sydney, since broken up. 2. ‘Australian Artists in Paris’, British-Australasian, London, 11 March 1920, p. 12 3. Alexandre, A., ‘Informations – Aux Galeries Georges Petit’, Le Figaro, Paris, 24 March 1917, p. 3
The evolution of some of these paintings is recorded in Bunny’s Villa Lili, St Georges sketchbook – figure studies of Jeanne patting a dog, feeding pet rabbits, or plucking a flower, together with compositional
4. A champion of Claude Monet, Geffroy was one of the first to write on Impressionism. Paul Cézanne painted his portrait in 1895. 5. Geffroy, G., ‘Rupert Bunny’, Exposition Rupert C. W. Bunny, Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, 1917
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SIDNEY NOLAN 18 (1917 – 1992) GLENROWAN, 1955 Ripolin on composition board 60.5 x 75.5 cm signed with initial lower right: N inscribed with date verso: 7-9-55 estimate :
$600,000 – 800,000
PROVENANCE Private collection, United Kingdom, acquired directly from the artist Sotheby’s, London, 19 June 1996, lot 80 Thomas Agnew and Sons, London The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1997 EXHIBITED Nolan’s Nolans: A Reputation Reassessed – an exhibition of paintings from the estate of Sir Sidney Nolan, Thomas Agnew and Sons, London, 11 June – 25 July 1997, cat. 51 (label attached verso) LITERATURE Rosenthal, T.G., Sidney Nolan, Thames and Hudson, London, 2002, pp. 90 (illus.), 91 Nolan’s Nolans: A Reputation Reassessed – an exhibition of paintings from the estate of Sir Sidney Nolan, exhibition catalogue, Thomas Agnew and Sons, London, cat. 51 (illus.) Unmasked: Sidney Nolan and Ned Kelly 1950 – 1990, exhibition catalogue, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2006, p. 61 RELATED WORK The Glenrowan Siege, 1955, oil on composition board, 91.5 x 71.0 cm, Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth, formerly ICI Collection of Australian Art, Melbourne, illus. in Eagle, M., and Jones, J., The Story of Australian Painting, MacMillan Australia, Sydney, 1994, p. 123
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The legend of Ned Kelly looms large for all Australians, and it was especially familiar to those who grew up in the first decades of the twentieth century, hearing stories of the Kelly gang’s notorious exploits in north-eastern Victoria, the dramatic siege at Glenrowan, Ned’s eventual capture, trial and sentencing to death, all of which had occurred less than a generation before. Kelly’s famously philosophical last words – ‘Such is life’ – have also gone down in history. The son of a Melbourne tram driver, Sidney Nolan would have been familiar with the Melbourne gaol where Kelly was hanged, and had no doubt seen his startling handforged armour fashioned from pieces of farm machinery which was on public display. Nolan also had a more direct connection to the story of Ned Kelly. His grandfather, a policeman in north-eastern Victoria, had been involved in tracking the bushranger and his gang, and Nolan was also familiar with ‘Kelly Country’, having visited relatives who lived in the lower Goulburn valley from a young age, developing a love of the surrounding landscape. Nolan’s first studies depicting Ned Kelly date to early 1945 and later that year he and Max Harris, a poet and co-editor of the Angry Penguins journal, travelled together to the site of the Kelly gang’s last stand at Glenrowan. Whenever he embarked on a new series Nolan undertook extensive research, immersing himself in the subject. In this case, he not only travelled to significant sites, tracking down Kelly’s younger brother – who perhaps not surprisingly, was not enthusiastic about discussing his infamous sibling with the young artist – but also read everything he could, including first-hand accounts, contemporary newspaper coverage and the Royal Commission Report on the pursuit of Kelly and his gang.1 Nolan’s fascination with the subject was so great at the time that his friend, the artist Albert Tucker, nicknamed him ‘Ned’. 2 The resulting first Kelly series – now on permanent display at the National Gallery of Australia – was famously painted on the dining table at Heide, 3 the home of John and Sunday Reed, between March 1946 and July 1947. Nolan had met the Reeds in 1938 and in them found informed supporters of modern art who would actively encourage and sustain his early practice. In Nolan, the Reeds found a young protégé, believing strongly in the quality and potential of his work. Deep emotional connections also developed and by the early 1940s Nolan was engaged in an intimate and thoroughly modern relationship with the married couple.4
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Nolan’s familiarity with the Kelly story is evident in the series which, when first exhibited in 1948 at the Velasquez Gallery, Melbourne, was captioned with quotations from various sources that provided an historical base for the imagery.5 Although Nolan once said, ‘It is only in myth that the truth about any country can be found’ 6, it was not simply the true-crime drama and subsequent mythologising of the story that compelled him to paint these pictures. The formal challenge of developing his pictorial language and devising specific forms with which to communicate the story held a particular interest for Nolan: ‘No matter what the story, one hunts the forms with the same persistence. There are after all not so many durable stories in the world but the variety of forms is infinite’.7 The depiction of Kelly’s armoured mask as a severe black square interrupted by a horizontal slit through which his eyes stare out, now an iconic and immediately recognisable symbol, was a case in point. As Nolan explained:
SIDNEY NOLAN (1917 – 1992) The Glenrowan siege, 1955 synthetic polymer paint on hardboard 91.5 x 71.0 cm courtesy of the Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth © The Sidney Nolan Trust / Bridgeman Images
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‘I’ve been asked sometimes why … Kelly’s mask is always square … I’ve used it really because I’m a painter, and this latent shape of the square in the painting has been implicit in my earlier abstract paintings … This black square has been hanging around in modern art for quite some years, after Malevich … Max Ernst … a kind of underlying motif that preoccupied a lot of modern artists before I was born, and I’m a much more formal painter and much less anecdotal than is probably realised … the black mask was used by me in a formal sense to establish a framework … for doing a system of paintings … that were united by a given formal motif. The fact that there’s supposed to be a man beneath the mask, and he’s supposed to be Ned Kelly … a hero or a … criminal, in one sense is secondary to my general pursuit of some formal things which are inside my soul’. 8 The depiction of the landscape in these paintings was equally important and in some works the figures are almost reduced to being staffage as Nolan’s interest in describing the structure and atmosphere of the country comes to the fore. Conscripted into the Army in 1942, Nolan was posted to Dimboola where he guarded a supply store, but rather than curtailing his artistic development this experience provided him with the opportunity to come to grips with the Australian landscape. Sunday Reed had encouraged Nolan to address the landscape in his work and to seek a modern interpretation of it, and in his paintings of the Wimmera he did just that. Compressing space and distorting perspective in images of dry, open country marked with silos and vernacular rural buildings, he developed a radical and distinctive style that ‘was an intelligent mixture of
faux-naif, Cézanne, Van Gogh, chaotic scale, objects devoid of gravity, and the exaggerated shadows of Surrealism, pulled together by the replicated magic of a child’s view of the world; all superbly enhanced by the luminosity of Ripolin enamel paint which he began to use at the beginning of 1943.’ 9 John Reed identified the significance of the landscape element within the Kelly paintings at the time, writing in the Velasquez Gallery exhibition catalogue that ‘Australia has not been an easy country to paint … we have waited many years for a mature statement to cover both the landscape and man in relation to the landscape [and] in my opinion this has now been achieved … and it is a remarkable achievement indeed, necessitating as it has the most sensitive and profound harmony between symbol, legend and visual impact.’10 Nolan embarked on a second major series of Kelly paintings in the mid1950s, by which time he had settled in England. The theme had lost none of its power during the preceding decade and Nolan produced an inspired series of paintings that showed him as a confident, innovative and highly accomplished artist. The critical response to paintings exhibited at London’s Redfern Gallery in May 1955 was unanimously positive and institutional recognition soon followed with the purchase of After Glenrowan Siege, 1955 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Two years later, the Tate, London, acquired Glenrowan, 1956 – 57 from Nolan’s first large-scale survey exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. Organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain this exhibition subsequently toured the country attracting huge crowds and in conjunction with the Tate acquisition, consolidated Nolan’s standing in England as well as adding to his growing international reputation.11 Paintings from the second series are also represented in numerous important public and private collections in Australia including: Kelly Crossing the Bridge, 1955 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), Ned Kelly, 1955 and Kelly, 1956 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney), Kelly with Horse, 1955 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) and After Glenrowan Siege no. 2, 1956 (TarraWarra Museum of Art Collection, Victoria). In Glenrowan, painted in September 1955, we see Nolan’s reprise on The Glenrowan Siege, 1955 (Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth), a work he had included in the successful Redfern exhibition four months earlier. The Glenrowan Siege depicts Ned Kelly mounted on horseback looking at the burnt-out hotel at Glenrowan, the site of the final battle where several of his party were killed and he was finally apprehended and arrested.
Surveying the destruction, Kelly is part of a complex scene, varied in colour and visual detail, in which the presence and activity of humans and the natural environment are equally weighted. The familiar narrative also seems close by. Glenrowan, by comparison, uses a limited palette and minimises pictorial detail, emphasising the landscape in a taut and yet poetic depiction. Dominating the composition, a vast grey sky painted with turbulent brushstrokes and highlights of blue and white, pushes down on the scene below, while a green treed hillside on the right leads the eye into the far distance across bare flat ground. The scene is framed on the left by the ruins of the hotel and in front of a horizontal band of trees, two prone armour-clad figures punctuate the central and far-right foreground. Despite the rifle of the central figure being firmly raised, he appears to have begun to merge with the landscape, the black metal of his mask and armour a stark reminder of his once vital presence. In this painting Nolan is less interested in telling a story, wanting instead to say something about man’s place in the world. A lyrical expression of what Patrick McCaughey describes as the ‘tragic grandeur’ of the 1950s Kelly paintings, Glenrowan, 1955, presents Kelly as more human and less heroic, a reflection perhaps of the mature artist who admitted that he used the figure of the bushranger as a ‘shorthand’ for his own emotional state. Combining Kelly, one of Nolan’s most important and enduring subjects, with a representation of the landscape, timeless and sublime, this painting is a beautiful and enigmatic statement by one of Australia’s most significant twentieth century artists. 1. Pearce, B., ‘Nolan’s Parallel Universe’ in Pearce, B. (ed.), Sidney Nolan, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2008, p. 32 2. Reeder, W., ‘Nolan at Heide’, Reeder, W. (ed.), The Ned Kelly Paintings: Nolan at Heide 1946–47, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne, 1997, p. 11 3. Of the 27 paintings that comprise the first Kelly series, the exception to this is First-class Marksman, 1946 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) that was painted at Stonygrad, the Warrandyte home of Danila Vassilieff. See Pearce, B., op. cit., p. 35. Sunday Reed gifted the paintings made at Heide to the Australian National Gallery, Canberra (now National Gallery of Australia) in 1977. 4. Harding, L. and Morgan, K., Modern Love: The Lives of John & Sunday Reed, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2015 5. Sayers, A., ‘Kelly’s words, Rousseau, and sunlight’, Reeder, W., op. cit., pp. 18 – 19 6. Nolan, S., quoted in Underhill, N. (ed.), Nolan on Nolan: Sidney Nolan in his own Words, Viking, Melbourne, 2007, p. 236 7. Pearce, B., op. cit., p. 32 8. ibid. 9. ibid., p. 28 10. Reed, J., ‘Statement’, Reeder, W., op. cit., p. 16 11. Pearce, B., op. cit., p. 245 KIRSTY GRANT
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SIDNEY NOLAN 19 (1917 – 1992) GIRAFFE, 1963 oil on composition board 151.0 x 121.0 cm signed with initial lower left: N. signed and dated verso: 20/1/63 / Nolan estimate :
$60,000 – 80,000
PROVENANCE R. H. Allen Clune Galleries, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1968 EXHIBITED Sidney Nolan, Witte Memorial Museum, San Antonio, United States of America, January – February 1967, cat. 1 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)
It is fair to say that Sidney Nolan was the most travelled of all Australian artists. He explored every continent, including Antarctica, with the eyes of an artist and until 1976 was aided in this pursuit by his literaryminded wife Cynthia who published a number of illuminating books based on their shared experiences. Giraffe, 1963 is one of the earlier paintings in a sequence Nolan created inspired by the couple’s threemonth odyssey through Africa between September and November 1962, an often-fraught adventure captured vividly by Cynthia in One Traveller’s Africa (1965). It was also the first collection of paintings by Nolan in which he abandoned his long-term use of Ripolin enamel in favour of pure oil paint. The offer of the sponsored journey to Africa came from Lilian Somerville, Director of the Fine Arts Department of the British Council, who contacted Nolan ‘after she had been approached by a wealthy Kenyan named Malin Sorsbie, who wanted to know if there was a prominent artist in England who would accept a commission to interpret some of the frontier aspects of Africa.’1 On their arrival in Kenya, Sorsbie proved to be a belligerent game-hunter, ‘a great bull of a man with a scarred face’, 2 and an immediate, reciprocal dislike occurred. In spite of this inauspicious beginning, the Nolans flew to the 14,500 square kilometre Serengeti National Park for their first encounter with wild animals. Cynthia quickly recognised that ‘the best time of day here as elsewhere was between five-thirty and seven p.m., for it was then
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that one had the chance of entering the miraculous hour, or two hours, of painter’s light – a time when the sun’s rays slant, illuminating and revealing the world.’ 3 Indeed, as that first dusk approached ‘(t)he sky at last became sufficiently dark to show up the paring of a new moon; but an early star over the flattened acacias was a giraffe’s eye, which had caught the reflection from the car’s headlights.’4 Judging from this description, it would appear that Giraffe was Nolan’s painterly attempt to catch this particular spectral vision as it had first appeared to him on that Serengeti evening. Nolan started the painting with a dramatic cross scoring of white, brown, yellow and black to capture the pattern of the giraffe’s pelt. He then built up the background with a combination of dilute and pure oil paint applied with a broader brush, ‘scuffed and polished with a cloth’;5 and employed other tools such as his fingers to articulate the hooves. Nolan described the visual sensation he was after as one of attempting ‘to see the animals as they see one another. As blurred and menacing’; 6 and Giraffe displays an equivalent mood of haze, wariness and flickering movement. At the first exhibition of the series at Marlborough Fine Art, London, the paintings ‘sold like hotcakes’,7 and buyers included Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Sir Kenneth Clarke, American philanthropist Edwin Jaffe, and Colin Tennant, 3rd Baron Glenconner, the aristocrat owner of the island of Mustique. With such public acclaim and patronage, it is not surprising that six months later, Nolan was awarded the Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE). 1. Adams, B., Sidney Nolan: Such is Life, Century Hutchinson, Melbourne, 1987, p. 160 2. ibid., p. 160 3. Nolan, C., One Traveller’s Africa, Methuen and Co., London, 1965, pp. 18 – 19 4. ibid., p. 21 5. Clarke, J., Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 144 6. Nolan, S., 1963, quoted in Boys, L., ‘Roving Reporter of Art: Africa in vivid Nolancolour’, The Bulletin, Sydney, 24 August 1963, p. 32 7. Boys, L., op cit., p. 32 ANDREW GAYNOR
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JEFFREY SMART 20 (1921 – 2013) MISS AMHURST’S FIRST VISIT TO ROME, 1968 – 69 oil on canvas 50.0 x 99.0 cm signed lower right: JEFFREY SMART inscribed with title verso: MISS AMHURST estimate :
$300,000 – 400,000
PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1969 EXHIBITED Jeffrey Smart, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 17 – 29 September 1969, cat. 13 LITERATURE Quartermaine, P., Jeffrey Smart, Gryphon Books, Melbourne, 1983, cat. 514, p. 110
Jeffrey Smart occasionally introduced fictional characters into his painting titles, whilst issuing caveats against attaching excessive symbolic significance to them. In this case however, the appellation Miss Amhurst to the single female figure in an architectural setting in Rome has an irresistible anecdotal connection with the artist’s essential ambition. Smart claimed this work was inspired by a short story written by a close friend from his Adelaide years Fayette Gosse: I must remember Miss Amhurst.1 Unfortunately no published short story of this title has come to light. Perhaps Gosse showed it to Smart in manuscript form, recalling a novel by nineteenth century Scottish-Canadian writer Robert Barr centred around a heroine, Miss Dorothy Amhurst, who at the end of the story sets off from America, eloping to Europe. 2 This chimes with Smart’s admiration for American novelists Henry James and his protégé Edith Wharton and their own dreams of crossing from the New World to the Old. Hence, in this little-known painting, we could actually be looking at a representation of Smart’s alter-ego, reflecting on his own fortune of finally settling substantially in a place where he had so long yearned to live; an Italian city with a glorious past confronted by a still uncertain post-war present.
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An unadorned dome and its peculiar minimalist apex peeks above a modern parapet bridging the two vertical sides of the picture. Stasis is disturbed only by the slight lean of a tense cable slicing the composition in two at the point of the Golden Mean. Two worlds thus face each other in a pivotal moment of boldness from Smart’s pictorial repertoire. The moment seems to signify something, but we can only speculate to what extent. Miss Amhurst’s First Trip to Rome, 1968–69 was in fact painted during a period of exceptional importance for Smart. He had, from late 1964, led a fairly peripatetic life in Rome without a proper studio. Then in October 1968 he rented a dilapidated flat at the top of Via Mantellate with spectacular views of the city from a terrace, creating an exclusive, separate studio for the first time since leaving Adelaide permanently almost two decades earlier. Here, in a conscious modernist construct with supreme control of his language, he repeated an enduring obsession for walls, fences, hoardings or building facades, brought forward occasionally with challenging frontality to obscure zooming perspectives, or at least counteract any push into deep space. Indeed, from late 1968 in his studio at Via Mantellate until his move to Tuscany in 1971, he was to produce some of his most memorable masterpieces annihilating distant horizons, utilising textures, stripes and modular architectural patterns for locking one’s gaze into a state of resolute stillness on the picture plane. They include The Water Tower, 1968, Approach to a City III, 1968–69, Morning Practice, Baia, 1969– 70 and Housing Project No. 84, 1970. To such enterprising geometric visions of its period we may now add Miss Amhurst’s First Trip to Rome. 1. Smart, J., et al., Jeffrey Smart/drawings and studies 1942 – 2001, Australian Galleries, 2001, cat. 95, figure study for Miss Amhurst’s first visit to Rome, 1968 – 69, p. 83. Note typographical error: Gosse mistakenly spelt Grasse. 2. Barr, R., A rock in the Baltic, Authors and Newspapers Association, New York and London, 1906
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TOP: JAMES FAIRFAX IN ROME BOTTOM: ERMES DE ZAN, JAMES FAIRFAX AND JEFFREY SMART
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TOP: JAMES FAIRFAX WITH JEFFREY SMART, TUSCANY BOTTOM: JEFFREY SMART AND OTHERS, DINING ROOM, RETFORD PARK
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JUSTIN O’BRIEN 21 (1917 – 1996) STILL LIFE WITH ANGEL FRESCO, 1972 oil on composition board 73.5 x 54.5 cm signed lower right: O’BRIEN bears inscription verso: 18 estimate :
PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1972 EXHIBITED Recent Works by Justin O ’Brien, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 11 – 23 October 1972, cat. 3 Cranbrook School Art Exhibition, Cranbrook School, Sydney, 14 – 17 October 1976, cat. 83 Merioola and After, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 12 July – 17 August 1986; Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle, 28 August – 5 October 1986, and Geelong Art Gallery, Geelong, 16 October – 16 November 1986, cat. 77 Justin O ’Brien: A Birthday Tribute, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 31 July – 13 September 1987, cat. 15 (label attached verso) Justin O ’Brien, The Sacred Music of Colour, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 18 December 2010 – 27 February 2011, cat. 71 Margaret Olley – Painter, Peer, Mentor, Muse, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 7 January – 26 March 2017 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, pp. 72 – 73)
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$100,000 – 150,000
LITERATURE Bradley, A., The Art of Justin O ’Brien, The Craftsman’s Press, Sydney, 1982, pl. 19, pp. 24, 66, 67 (illus.), 105 Grishin, S., ‘An Australian Painter in Rome: Justin O’Brien’, Art and Australia, Sam Ure Smith at the Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 21, no. 4, Winter 1984, pp. 493, 494 (illus.) France, C., Merioola and After, National Trust, Sydney, 1986, p. 27 France, C., Justin O ’Brien: Image and Icon, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1987, pl.18, pp. 25, 68, 69 (illus. and front cover) 126 France, C., Justin O ’Brien: Image and Icon, Craftsman House, Sydney, revised edition, 1997, pl. 18, pp. 25, 76, 77 (illus.), 168 Pearce, B. and Wilson, N., Justin O ’Brien. The Sacred Music of Colour, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2010, pl. 71, pp. 111, 114 (illus.), 160
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TOP: JAMES FAIRFAX, LESLIE WALFORD AND JUSTIN O’BRIEN BOTTOM: JAMES FAIRFAX AND JUSTIN O’BRIEN AT AUSTRALIAN GALLERIES
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LOT 21 • JUSTIN O’BRIEN STILL LIFE WITH ANGEL FRESCO, 1972
From the vantage point of his fisherman’s cottage by the sea, Justin O’Brien delighted in painting the changing effects of light and colour on the simplest of objects in his Grecian home. Still Life with Angel Fresco, 1972 shimmers with heat and expectant stillness. The soft velvety finish of O’Brien’s oil paint carefully translates the surface textures of each object in his field of vision, from the delicate petals of chrysanthemums in a bouquet, to the skins of green grapes, the worn and cracked leather of sandals in the doorway, and the crumbling plastered surface of the fresco. Every object presented here is imbued with timeless simplicity, of ancient modes of interaction with the landscape, unchanged for millennia – yet interpreted by O’Brien in a blaze of modernist colour and flat rendition of form. Still Life with Angel Fresco, purchased directly by James Fairfax from O’Brien’s exhibition at Sydney’s Macquarie Galleries in 1972, was exhibited along with Still Life Against a Landscape – a smaller work, a variation on the same theme. Still Life with Angel Fresco depicts the same view of the wooden table, identical down to the precise recreation of the arrangement of fruit and flowers, but placed against an open doorway and frescoed wall instead of a window. Here, the eponymous angel gestures towards an enticing sliver of landscape visible through the doorway, blessing the view with a raised hand. The rocky, arid landscape beyond was the artist’s own paradis terrestre, a place where a simple existence could reveal hidden spiritual forces.
Still Life with Angel Fresco is a joyful expression of O’Brien’s visual awareness and appreciation of his immediate environment, with all the gaiety and verve that modernism allowed. Having shed the static and heavy religious symbolism of his earlier works, O’Brien’s still lives of the 1970s and 1980s exude a joyous luxuriance – an almost baroque exaltation of life’s blessings and fruits. O’Brien’s early religious works bore much in common with early Sienese and Byzantine styles of representation, and in this respect, Sasha Grishin identifies the fresco in this picture as an ‘emotional counterfoil’, a lingering stylistic memento of earlier artistic endeavours. 3 Justin O’Brien was a contemporary of James Fairfax, an artist-friend who benefited from his direct patronage and with whom the collector socialised. Fairfax purchased Still Life with Angel Fresco from its first exhibition at Macquarie Galleries, even before it had opened to the public, having enjoyed exclusive previews of exhibitions there from his early teenage years. 1. France, C., Justin O’Brien. Image and Icon, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1987, p. 24 2. Correspondence between Martin Sharp and Justin O’Brien, dated 19 Jan 1967, cited in Pearce, B. and Wilson, N., Justin O’Brien. The Sacred Music of Colour, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2010, p. 104 3. Grishin, S., ‘An Australian Painter in Rome: Justin O’Brien’, Art and Australia, Sam Ure Smith at the Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 21, no. 4, Winter 1984, p. 493
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
In 1967, Justin O’Brien resigned from his teaching position at Cranbrook School and left Sydney, returning to the Greek island of Skyros where he had holidayed some years previously. A decade later, he explained to Christine France, who was writing a monograph on his work, that despite much criticism from his peers he found his work to be especially stimulated by the peaceful beauty of the Aegean.1 He wrote to his friend Martin Sharp in London, expressing a desire to ‘get away from this rat race and bury my Irish mug in some Aegean sand. If this is living I’d rather be dead!’. 2 In the tense socio-political context of the late 1960s, O’Brien was not alone in seeking an unspoiled natural environment, away from the threat of an impending war in Vietnam, and the claustrophobia of exponential urban sprawl and capitalist consumption.
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JUSTIN O’BRIEN 22 (1917 – 1996) SKYROS EVENING I, 1968 oil on canvas on composition board 53.0 x 60.0 cm signed upper right: O’BRIEN bears inscription verso: 11 estimate :
$ 30,000 – 50,000
PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1968 EXHIBITED Recent Paintings and Drawings by Justin O ’Brien, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 16 – 28 October 1968, cat. 6 Merioola and after, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 12 July – 17 August 1986; Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle, 28 August – 5 October 1986; Geelong Art Gallery, Geelong, 16 October – 16 November 1986, cat. 75 (dated as c.1967) Justin O ’Brien and Friends: a birthday celebration, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 6 – 30 August 1987, cat. 24 (illus., dated as c.1967, exhibition catalogue and back cover) Justin O ’Brien: The Sacred Music of Colour, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 18 December 2010 – 27 February 2011, cat. 61 LITERATURE ‘Exhibition Commentary’, Art and Australia, Sydney, vol. 6, no. 3, December 1968, p. 195 (illus.) France, C., Merioola and After, National Trust, Sydney, 1986, p. 26 France, C., Justin O ’Brien: Image and Icon, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1987, pl. 14, pp. 24, 60, 61 (illus.), 128 Bradley, A., ‘Painter with Deep Religious Sensibility’, The Australian, Canberra, 25 January 1996, p. 17 France, C., Justin O ’Brien: Image and Icon, Craftsman House, Sydney, revised edition, 1997, pl. 14, pp. 24, 68, 69 (illus.), 168 Pearce, B., and Wilson, N., Justin O ’Brien: The Sacred Music of Colour, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2010, pl. 61, pp. 117 (illus.), 159
Justin O’Brien’s departure from Sydney in the late 1960s heralded a new style of work, characterised not only by an increasing naturalism but also a more immediate and direct interaction with source material, a tendency to paint more often en plein air. Skyros Evening I, 1968 is a key work from O’Brien’s period of transition between narrative biblical painting and increasingly secular visions of interiors and landscapes. The painting was exhibited in a sell-out show at Sydney’s Macquarie Galleries along with a few other works straddling both genres: simple landscapes if it weren’t for diminutive figures in the foreground – including Visitation II, private collection.1
O’Brien felt a deep spiritual connection to the Greek island of Skyros, appreciating in turn the piousness of the villagers within their Orthodox Christian religion. Having turned away from both his strong Irish Catholic faith and the narrative scenes of his early career, for example the inaugural Blake prize-winning painting, Virgin Enthroned, 1950–51, O’Brien increasingly painted genre scenes, all the while retaining the sumptuous detail and rich colour of his religious works. In this scorched landscape, the Monastery of Saint George and white Skyrian houses cling to the steep sides of the mountain at Chora, a view that would appear many times in O’Brien’s oeuvre. A detailed pen and ink sketch of the same vista even graced the cover of the 1968 Macquarie Galleries exhibition catalogue in which this painting was first exhibited. While glimpses of the view are revealed through open windows and doorframes of the artist’s fisherman’s hut, schematic sketches of it make up the modern-day backdrop of religious processions and narrative scenes – none of them have the unwavering attention to colour and form present in Skyros Evening I. Using the physical depth of field that the landscape provided, O’Brien systematically built upon planes of green, red and brilliant white paint, creating peaks that reached up to the heavens. The feathery brushstrokes of the foreground provided a counterbalance to the silvery leaves of olive groves and the dusty scrub on the edge of a beaten mountain track. At first glance, this work is a simple landscape painting, an expression of the enduring beauty of the Greek countryside. Closer attention will reveal the silhouette of a hooded figure atop a donkey in the foreground, the viewer’s eye drawn down to its presence by a stark jutting edge of the mountain in the lower right hand corner. Those well versed in Christian iconography will identify this figure as a solitary Virgin Mary on her flight into Egypt. The story of the Flight into Egypt was a subject favoured by early Baroque painters, as it gave them considerable artistic license to paint large vistas of landscape whilst staying true to the religious constraints of their commissions. The resulting works are often amusing to modern day viewers in their anachronistic and geographically incongruous views of an ancient middle-eastern setting. However, in addition to being faithful to his geographical and temporal setting, O’Brien avoided clear reference to this scene as a Biblical episode, leaving interpretation of the painting open to each viewer – a design made all the more clear in the artist’s choice of title for this work. 1. The exhibition Justin O’Brien at Sydney’s Macquarie Galleries in 1968 featured 41 works, mostly inspired by the artist’s stay on Skyros. Pre-dawn queues formed at the gallery and by 10.30 that morning, all of the works had sold. Pearce, B., and Wilson, N., Justin O’Brien. The Sacred Music of Colour, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2010, p. 167
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
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JUSTIN O’BRIEN 23 (1917 – 1996) STILL LIFE ON A WINDOW LEDGE, 1993 oil on paper on board 48.0 x 33.0 cm signed lower right: O’BRIEN estimate :
$30,000 – 50,000
PROVENANCE Australian Galleries, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1993
against a Window, 1993, Summer Afternoon, 1993, and Young Girl in a Mantilla, 1995. In his last interview with Christine France, published in the revised edition of her monograph, O’Brien expressed his enjoyment of the ‘much better view… which has beautiful trees in the courtyard and from the back I look onto the Nigerian Embassy’. 2
EXHIBITED Paintings by Justin O’Brien, Australian Galleries, Sydney, 26 – 31 July 1993, cat. 18 (label attached verso) Justin O ’Brien: The Sacred Music of Colour, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 18 December 2010 – 27 February 2011, cat. 94
The arrangement of an offering of fruit on the windowsill, the still life subject of this painting, is simple and evocative and brings the work of Cézanne to mind. The velvety surfaces of the fruit are immediately apparent against the coarse texture of the window frame and sill. Presenting a convincing facsimile of a physical window frame, O’Brien’s execution of this vision is a near flawless trompe l’oeil. Still Life on a Window Ledge seems to radiate the warmth and fragrance of an Italian summer – one can almost hear the chirping of cicadas. In this calm abundance, O’Brien has captured the serenity of a spiritual life and invites its quiet contemplation.
LITERATURE France, C., Justin O ’Brien: Image and Icon, Craftsman House, Sydney, revised edition, 1997, pl. 37, pp. 36, 114, 115 (illus.), 168 Pearce, B. and Wilson, N., Justin O ’Brien: The Sacred Music of Colour, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2010, pl. 64, pp. 144, 153 (illus.), 160
Still Life on a Window Ledge, 1993 is a superb example of Justin O’Brien’s late series of ‘window paintings’. By 1993, O’Brien was residing permanently in the Papal city, undertaking daily trips to the Vatican and visiting the Vatican Museums in which one of his paintings now hangs. The epitome of O’Brien’s naturalism, this still life is an exercise in mimesis and challenges the very purpose of pictorial representation. Remaining steadfast to his resolve to paint physical, terrestrial beauty, O’Brien worked tirelessly into his eighth decade, through the last years of his life in Italy. Still Life on a Window Ledge is a carefully considered study, delicately detailed and vibrantly coloured. The vision is of the window of his apartment close to Via Alberico II, within the old city center of the Italian capital, a stone’s throw from the roman Castel Sant’Angelo on the banks of the river Tiber.1 Whilst it is similar in composition to other ‘window paintings’ by the artist – in particular The Window No. 2, 1978, formerly of the David Clark AO Collection – the world beyond the window frame is undeniably Roman, populated by towering cedar trees and date palms heavy with fruit. The rich terracotta and cream colouring of the façade of the neighbouring building, along with its colonnade crown, also point to its carefully recorded geographical setting. The same verdant view appears in several of O’Brien’s paintings of the period, including Woman
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O’Brien was an artist who was always in close stylistic discussion with the great artists of Western art history. The strong emphasis on tight linear composition, a smooth and flat finish and vibrant pure colours are all aspects that he gleaned not from his antipodean peers but from key figures of the Italian Renaissance. The polished restraint that pervades his pictures can be likened to the passionless exactitude of these Italian masters, in particular Piero della Francesca, who used colour and light to translate divine providence in his compositions. For a collector who had turned his attention to the Old Masters, Still Life on a Window Ledge was a contemporary acquisition in perfect harmony with the final iteration of the Fairfax collection. Purchased from O’Brien’s second last solo commercial exhibition, Still Life on a Window Ledge is the last painting by the artist that James Fairfax bought. Throughout their respective lives, Fairfax remained fast friends with the artist, meeting him regularly during his trips to Rome and Greece. Carefully set aside in an album at Retford Park is a photograph taken at the opening of O’Brien’s show at Australian Galleries, the artist and the collector in deep conversation on either side of this painting, freshly resplendent on the wall of the gallery. 1. Grishin, S., ‘An Australian Painter in Rome: Justin O’Brien’, Art and Australia, Sam Ure Smith at the Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 21, no. 4, Winter 1984, p. 493 2. France, C., Justin O’Brien: Image and Icon, Craftsman House, Sydney, revised edition, 1997, p. 36
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
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FRED WILLIAMS 24 (1927 – 1982) LANDSCAPE (THE CHARCOAL BURNER), 1959 oil on composition board 61.0 x 71.0 cm signed lower left: Fred Williams bears inscription verso: 6 estimate :
$80,000 – 120,000
PROVENANCE Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney Jim McDonald, Melbourne, acquired from the above in June 1964 Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1988 EXHIBITED Recent Landscape and Still Life Paintings – Fred Williams, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 12 – 21 May 1959, cat. 6 (as ‘Landscape’) Australian Art: 1790s – 1970s, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 24 November – 9 December 1988, cat. 74 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) RELATED WORK The Charcoal Burner, 1959, oil on composition board, 86.3 × 91.4 cm, collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, illus. in McCaughey, P., Fred Williams, Bay Books, Sydney, 1980, pl. 39, fig. 127, p. 139 This work was painted during a trip to Echuca with Arthur Boyd, at the junction of the Goulburn and Murray Rivers (Barmah Forest). Deutscher and Hackett gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Lyn Williams in cataloguing this work.
Motivated by the characteristic desire of young antipodean artists to see the great art of Europe, Fred Williams spent five years between 1952–56 in London, learning from the masters, practicing his craft and maturing. Returning to Australia on a ship scheduled to take visitors to the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games back to England, Williams first docked at Fremantle where he saw the landscape of his own country through new eyes. Struck by the vast featureless spaces and harsh light of his homeland, and the distinct contrast this presented to the picturesque English countryside with which he had become familiar, Williams recognised the potential and resolved to make the landscape the primary subject of his art. This decision was momentous for Williams and for the history of Australian art. In addition to bringing forth a unique vision which would influence the way Australians saw and imagined their own country, it provided Williams with a subject that would sustain his interest and artistic development throughout his career. Williams took advantage of all opportunities to paint and the landscapes of the late 1950s depict places he holidayed, including Mittagong in New South Wales, as well as areas that were closer to home and the destination of outdoor painting excursions such as Sherbrooke Forest in the Dandenong Ranges on the outskirts of Melbourne and the coastal town of Lorne. In 1959 Williams and his artist friend, Arthur Boyd, went to Echuca, visiting the Barmah Forest at the junction of the Goulburn and Murray Rivers, and Landscape (The Charcoal Burner), 1959 was painted during that trip. Depicting a group of braziers fashioned from oil drums in a small clearing in the bush, thick white smoke filling the canopy of the tall background trees, the painting uses lyrical and unexpected colour, incorporating painterly strokes of purple and orange paint with the deep greens and blue tones of the bush. Several years earlier in London Williams had seen a retrospective exhibition of Georges Braque at the Tate and the influence of his structured Cubist vision is evident in a small group of paintings from the late 1950s and early 60s, including Landscape (The Charcoal Burner), which show Williams looking at the landscape through a Cubist lens. While it is located at the more naturalistic end of the spectrum than The Charcoal Burner, 1959, a related painting purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria from Williams’ exhibition at Australian Galleries, Melbourne, that same year – Patrick McCaughey’s comments about this work are equally relevant: ‘Already looking at the bones of the landscape, Williams was drawn to the early phase of Cubism, as it gave structure to the unspectacular landscape … Just as Braque … eschewed view painting and disdained the picturesque, so Williams in turn generalised the landscape, constructing it and rendering it taut, modern and vivid’.1 1. McCaughey, P., ‘Fred Williams – The charcoal burner 1959’, Harding, L., and Cramer, S., Cubism and Australian Art, exhibition catalogue, Heide Museum of Modern Art and Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2009, p. 217
KIRSTY GRANT
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FRED WILLIAMS 25 (1927 – 1982) LANDSCAPE, 1970 gouache on paper 19.5 x 73.5 cm signed lower right: Fred Williams estimate :
$30,000 – 40,000
PROVENANCE Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1976 Deutscher and Hackett gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Lyn Williams in cataloguing this work.
Fred Williams is one of the most important artists of his generation and one whose contribution to the tradition of landscape painting in Australia was arguably the most significant of the twentieth century. His unique vision of the natural environment – from areas of scrubby bush on the edges of suburbia, to pristine coastal views and the vast dry inland country – captured its essence, creating archetypal images that have since become part of our collective visual memory. From the beginning of his career Williams drew on his experience of the surrounding world as the source of subject matter for his art and a natural extension of this practice was to work in the landscape directly from nature, something he did on a regular basis throughout most of his adult life. Fascinated by the landscape and the variation he found within it, Williams recorded his response to his surroundings and documented their essential characteristics. Gouache, a quick-drying medium composed of watercolour that has been mixed with a white pigment to render it opaque, was Williams’ primary medium for painting en plein air, although in the late 1960s he also began to make small outdoor oil sketches and added acrylic paint to his repertoire of outdoor materials in 1971. Williams’ gouaches were an important part of his working method and while many of the works made on outdoor sketching trips were finished works of art, others provided the basis for further work in the studio where they were reworked and refined – often becoming more abstract in the process – or translated into different media. It was in the late 1960s that Williams happened upon the compositional device of a narrow horizontal strip for images of the landscape, a format that would enable him to eliminate unnecessary details in the foreground and distance and thereby focus on the aspects of the scene that most interested him.1 These strips, masked with tape and sometimes prepared in advance with a toned ground, also offered the possibility of depicting various views on a single sheet, illustrating the same subject from different perspectives or at different times of the day. In Landscape, 1970, the strip format emphasises the long flat horizon line of the subject which is interrupted only by a series of delicate trees described in Williams’ signature shorthand calligraphy of fine dots and dashes. In this image he is also interested in the hillside and the transformation of its smooth surface that has been eroded and shaped over time so that it meets the water at an irregular rocky juncture. While the colours of this landscape are predominantly the ochres and browns of the earth, Williams was a master colourist and close inspection reveals traces of bright colour including yellow, blue and green, that are deftly applied to highlight elements of the composition and enliven the surface of the work. 1. Mollison, J., A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams, Australian National Gallery and Oxford University Press, Canberra, 1989, p. 141
KIRSTY GRANT
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JOHN BRACK 26 (1920 – 1999) NUDE WITH PURPLE RUG, 1985 watercolour, pastel and crayon on paper 75.0 x 80.5 cm signed and dated lower right: John Brack 1985 estimate :
$50,000 – 70,000
PROVENANCE Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney (label attached verso) The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1993 EXHIBITED John Brack: Recent Painting, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 23 May – 13 June 1987 John Brack Paintings and Drawings, DC-Art, Sydney, 19 September – 15 October 1988 Works on Paper, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 23 March – 8 April 1993, cat. 7 The Nude in the Art of John Brack, McClelland Gallery + Sculpture Park, Victoria, 17 December 2006 – 25 March 2007, cat. 35 LITERATURE Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. II, cat. P295, pp. 73, 244 (illus.)
John Brack was an acute observer of the world around him. While he is probably best known for his now iconic depictions of suburban life as it was lived in Australia during the 1950s, what most interested him and motivated his creativity was the desire to understand and illuminate people and the human condition.1 The history of art remained an essential touchstone and important source of inspiration for Brack throughout his career. Alongside references to significant works of art – from Boucher, to Seurat and Manet – in his paintings, he also worked within traditional genres of Western art including the still-life, portraiture and the nude. Brack’s first sustained focus on the theme of the nude occurred in the mid-1950s when he hired a life model and realising that ‘there is absolutely nothing whatsoever erotic in an artist’s model unclothed in a suburban empty room’ 2, attempted to de-eroticise his depictions and subvert one of the primary expectations of the genre. The nude returned as a major subject within his oeuvre during the 1970s and 80s and while a certain sensuality and pleasure in depicting the female form is evident, in these works he also attempted to reveal things that are not visible to the naked eye. Helen Brack has described the recurring focus on the nude as ‘John’s need for discipline in seeing and depicting, and his constant effort to define how women are’. 3 Brack’s own statement further clarifies his ambition: ‘When I paint a woman … I am not interested in how she looks sitting in the studio, but in how she looks at all times, in all lights, what she looked like before and what she is going to look like, what she thinks, hopes, believes, and dreams. The way the light falls and casts its shadows is merely … a hindrance unless it helps me to show these things.’4 Combining watercolour with pastel and crayon, Nude with Purple Rug, 1985 brings together many of the characteristic elements of Brack’s late nudes: a spare, unadorned room; selected props – here a chair with the model’s robe draped over it, a rug and patterned cushion (taking the place of the Persian carpets he often used) – and the model, her gaze downcast, seated in a thoughtful, reflective pose with her head resting in her hand. Strong diagonals lead the eye from the base of the picture towards the centre where the texture of the rug and the model’s curly hair contrast with the crisp lines that define the walls and floorboards. In turn, these are echoed by the outlines of the chair, rug and cushion, as well as the model’s long angular limbs – making this drawing a study in texture and form. A talented draughtsman, Brack enjoyed the formal challenges of drawing from life and works such as this attest to his skills of observation and ability to describe the nuances and idiosyncrasies of his subject, as well as his mastery of pictorial composition. 1. Grant, K., John Brack, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009, p. 87 2. Brack, J. interviewed in Australian Contemporary Art Archive, no. 1, Deakin University Media Production, 1980, transcript, p. 3 3. Brack, H., ‘This Oeuvre – The Work Itself’, Grant, K., op. cit., p. 16 4. Brack, J., quoted in Grishin, S., ‘The nudes of John Brack’, John Brack (1920 – 1999): A Tribute Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, Rex Irwin, Sydney, 1999, unpaginated
KIRSTY GRANT
98
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LLOYD REES 27 (1895 – 1988) FARM HOUSES AT PENNANT HILLS, 1932 pencil on paper 15.0 x 22.0 cm signed and dated lower left: L. REES 1932 estimate :
$20,000 – 30,000
PROVENANCE Sir Lionel Lindsay, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales EXHIBITED Society of Artists Annual Exhibition, The Education Department’s Art Gallery, Sydney, 2 – 30 September 1932, cat. 96 Exhibition of Pencil Drawings by Lloyd Rees, The Fine Art Society’s Gallery, Melbourne, 22 – 31 March 1933, cat. 7 (as ‘Farmhouse at Pennant Hills’) Lloyd Rees Loan Exhibition, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1 – 30 August 1942, cat. 60 (label attached verso)
In the life of Lloyd Rees, the decade between 1926 and 1936 remains bookended by tragedy on one hand and a profound development in the artist’s practice on the other. The late 1920s had been a very difficult time for Rees personally. The death of his first wife, Dulcie, was followed by a period of deep depression. However, in 1930 the artist again found love and it was on a bus trip to visit his fiancé Marjory, who became his wife of 57 years, that a major development in his working method occurred. As Rees explained in his 1985 autobiography, Peaks and Valleys: ‘It was at Pennant Hills that a new movement in my work began. It was a rolling open landscape then and could be reached by bus from Parramatta and it was there that I tried to seriously resume painting. Physical tiredness was still affecting me and one day I tired early and was faced with a long wait for a Parramatta bus. I took a book of drawing paper from my satchel, unused because of an absurd hangover from my student days that pencil was a soft medium which must only be used on softer papers. The paper in this book was ivory smooth – the type recommended for commercial pen drawing, ensuring very black, very clean lines. Almost thoughtlessly, I began working, content in my tired state to merely outline the contour of hills and fences and trees of several varieties, with houses and sheds nestling among them or standing clear’.1 This discovery marked the beginning of an inspired period in which Rees committed himself solely to drawing, a marathon which extended well into the mid 1930s. Many of the drawings from this time depict scenes around Sydney Harbour, but it is the road side studies of buildings and trees that convey the artist’s attraction and feeling for the contrast between architecture and nature. Similar views to Farm Houses at Pennant Hills, 1932, identify the location as Thompson’s Corner. This title, with its colloquial overtone, evokes a familiarity that suggests a generally known meeting point or perhaps even a bus stop. The delicate detail in Rees’ drawings of this period is simply staggering; by any measure they are as close as any Australian artist has ever come to the achievements of the Italian masters he so much admired. Rees’ nuanced and inspired drawing is heightened by the virtuosity of his techniques. Surprisingly, Rees’ breadth of tone and line is not achieved by a range of differing lead pencils – but by using only one. His technique of sharpening the pencil against the tooth of the paper while using it horizontality to shade, meant that his shift from tone to line was seamless and in no small way helped Lloyd Rees to achieve the fluid nature of these masterful drawings. 1. Rees, L., Peaks and Valleys, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1985, p. 189
HENRY MULHOLLAND
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LLOYD REES 28 (1895 – 1988) PANORAMIC VIEW FROM MT. CAMBEWARRA, NEAR WOLLONGONG, 1964 – 65 watercolour and pencil on paper 35.0 x 50.5 cm signed and dated lower right: L. REES 1964 – 65 bears inscription on old label verso: LF REES DREW THIS FROM MT. CAMBEWARRA / on the South Coast just past WOLLONGONG / giving a magnificent panoramic view / of the coastline estimate :
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$20,000 – 30,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 30 July 1986, lot 75 (as ‘Panoramic View from Mount Cambekwarra [sic.], Near Wollongong’) The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney
LAWRENCE DAWS 29 born 1927 SUMMER, 1993 oil on canvas on board 172.0 x 180.5 cm signed lower right: DAWS estimate :
$20,000 – 30,000
PROVENANCE Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1993 EXHIBITED Lawrence Daws: recent paintings, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, 4 August – 4 September 1993, cat. 18 (illus. on exhibition postcard, catalogue)
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WILLIAM ROBINSON 30 born 1936 MORNING SPRINGBROOK AND WEST, 1995 oil on canvas 137.0 x 183.0 cm signed and dated lower right: William Robinson 95 estimate :
$160,000 – 220,000
PROVENANCE Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1996 EXHIBITED William Robinson, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney, 28 June – 24 July 1996, cat. 1 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) William Robinson – A Retrospective, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 31 August – 11 November 2001; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 14 December 2001 – 10 March 2002 (label attached verso) LITERATURE Seear, L. (ed.), Darkness and Light, The Art of William Robinson, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2001, pl. 68, p. 125 (illus.)
In the early 1990s, William Robinson paintings were hot property indeed. His regular exhibitions at the Ray Hughes Gallery sold out quickly; so much so that Ray broke with convention and rather than have red dots to indicate sold works he would have no dots at all, and took great delight in answering queries from prospective buyers with a ‘no you can’t, they are all sold’. At around this time I was talking to James Fairfax about Robinson’s work and asked him why he had not acquired one of his paintings. He responded that he had simply not yet found the right picture. The hype around Robinson and leap-frogging prices were not a concern to the connoisseur. Patience prevailed and in Robinson’s 1996 exhibition James Fairfax finally found ‘the right picture’. In 1995, James Fairfax gifted John Olsen’s magnificent painting, We are all but Toys of the Mind, 1965 to the National Gallery of Australia. Robinson’s similarly sized Morning Springbrook and West, 1995 took its place and has hung in the hall stairway at Retford Park ever since. It is by any measure an outstanding example of Robinson’s work. The view that Robinson depicts is a panoramic vision which spans millennia. The title of the picture directs the viewer from Springbrook in the north of the Gold Coast hinterland, over granite cliffs toward the west. The breadth of the subject allows the artist to flaunt his skills as a colourist and again he uses his distinctive device of multiple view points within the one picture plain. He also employs vastly different techniques when applying the paint in the major passages of the painting. The meditative application of deep greens and granite greys in much of the composition is used by the artist specifically to depict the ancient features of the landscape and evoke its timeless quality. In the lower half of the painting, Robinson deploys upbeat staccato brushwork, which brings a present day contemporary feel to the picture. The forest of Antarctic beech trees depicted, within the time frame and context of the painting, amount to new growth and the floating clouds passing amongst the hills introduce an ephemeral element to the work, which further presses the notion of time passing. In relation to a sense of place, Robinson has made a unique contribution to the Australian landscape tradition, moving beyond conventional notions of ‘landscape’ to encompass a fluctuating environment; of rainforest and ocean, ground and sky, day and night, elemental forces of wind, lightning, rain and fire. His multidimensional grasp of time and space also suggests metaphors for states of mind and being, life and death, continuity and transcendence... The profound spiritual resonances in Robinson’s art remind us of the need to preserve an ancient natural world in the present; ‘to keep the faith’, as Simon Schama wrote in Landscape and Memory ‘with a future on this tough, lovely old planet’.1 1. Hart, D., William Robinson’s artistic development: An intimate and expansive journey: in William Robinson, A Transfigured Landscape, Queensland University of Technology and Piper Press, Brisbane, 2011, p. 38
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KEN WHISSON 31 born 1927 SIX HOUSES AND ONE SHED, 2002 – 04 oil on linen 70.0 x 80.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: TITLE: “Six “Houses” One Shed” / Artist: / Ken Whisson / Title: “Six Houses, One Shed” / Painting: 7/9/2002 & 1/1/03 / & 27/8/04 / … estimate :
$20,000 – 30,000
PROVENANCE Watters Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 2005 EXHIBITED Ken Whisson – Paintings and Drawings, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 4 – 29 October 2005, cat. 12 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, and on invitation)
Ken Whisson has been exhibiting annually in Australia for decades. The consistency of his output in these exhibitions is unmatched and his often perplexing images are unique in Australian art. His 2012 retrospective exhibition at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne was testament to the high regard in which he is held by collectors, critics and curators alike. Contrary to convention, Whisson creates his images without any plan or notion of where the picture will go. As the artist explains: ‘I just prepare a piece of canvas, a stretched canvas, white, clean. Sit down in front of it for half or three quarters of an hour till I haven’t the faintest idea of what I am going to do, and then I start painting. Sometimes with a considerable effort of will, of course. When you have a blank canvas in front of you, you have deliberately driven all thoughts and ideas out of your mind, it isn’t easy to make the first move into a painting – and sometimes the result is total chaos, sometimes semi-total chaos ... but through all of this one arrives at moments (and sometimes these moments persist for several weeks) – in which everything goes right, and in which a quite complex painting, complex on every level, can be completed within a couple of hours’.1 Six Houses and One Shed, 2002 – 04, presents Whisson’s familiar repertoire of motifs such as trees, buildings and fields of colour, and each compete for space within the picture. The composition is made up of several pictures which come together to form the overall impression. The six houses referred to in the title are possibly the same house, and each image evolves as the artist recalls aspects of the house and surrounds at that time. Using recollections of a place or event as the core subject, the artist constructs his images in a way which aims to
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reflect the thought process; he distils layers of complex visual memories into essential triggers for past experience. His work is so deeply rooted in memory, he has suggested that his paintings reveal things that he himself cannot remember – ‘Certainly my paintings have a much better memory than I do for the things I’ve seen’. 2 Whisson’s use of bright secondary colour is most important, enabling him to present the forms in a layered, matter of fact and almost simplistic manner. His basic colour combinations are not dissimilar to those of a sign writer and he uses them with similar intent; to arrest the viewer’s attention, and lead the eye through the narrative in an almost subliminal manner. There is a profound clarity about Whisson’s painting. Apart from several early works where the influence of Danila Vassilieff and Sidney Nolan is evident, the majority are totally original images. The artist used his early influences as a springboard into his imagination, applied his own ideas about painting and never looked back. They are direct and uncompromising pictures in every way. Perhaps it is Whisson’s choice to live a life devoid of the usual excesses which has enabled him to create such an unparalleled and even body of work over so many decades of dedicated practice. 1. Whisson, K., quoted in Ken Whisson Paintings 1957 – 1985, Broken Hill City Art Gallery, New South Wales, 1985, p. 19 2. ibid.
HENRY MULHOLLAND
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ROY DE MAISTRE 32 (1894 – 1968) LANDSCAPE, SUTTON FOREST, 1927 oil on plywood 33.0 x 43.5 cm signed and dated lower right: R. de Maistre / 1927 inscribed on artist’s label verso: Landscape. Sutton Forest / by Roi de M … / Burdekin House / Macquarie St / Sydney / … estimate :
$25,000 – 35,000
PROVENANCE Mrs K. S. Hungerford, Greenwich Christie’s, Melbourne, 28 April 1992, lot 8 Private collection Lawrences Auctioneers, Crewkerne, United Kingdom, 25 May 2000, lot 503 The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney EXHIBITED Artists Society of Canberra, Canberra [as stated in Christie’s, Melbourne, 28 April 1992 catalogue entry] LITERATURE Antiques Trade Gazette, London, 13 May 2000, p. 35 (illus.)
The art of Roy de Maistre first came to prominence in the 1919 exhibition, Colour in Art, that was jointly presented with Roland Wakelin at Gayfield Shaw’s Art Salon in Sydney. Combining his dual interests in art and music, the small paintings displayed were based on a theory of colour-music developed by de Maistre and included the first abstract painting to be produced in Australia.1 In 1923 de Maistre was awarded the Society of Artists Travelling Scholarship, receiving an annual stipend of £250 for two years study in Europe. Moving between London and Paris, as well as travelling further afield, de Maistre’s paintings from these years reveal a young artist absorbing and learning from what he saw, experimenting with various styles and techniques to develop his own personal language. 2 He exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1924 and showed work in the 1926 Venice Biennale, his paintings showing the marked influence of modern British art with his subjects depicted in a realistic if stylised manner. Having returned to Australia the previous year, de Maistre held an exhibition of new paintings at Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, in 1926 and it was the landscapes that were singled out by the critic Basil Burdett as ‘the most interesting things shown. They had almost the value of a new vision … [and] hinted at what may be an interesting development in Australian landscape painting’. 3 In September of that year Art in Australia published a special edition that heralded a ‘new vision in Australian landscape’ and featured paintings by de Maistre, Kenneth Macqueen, Elioth Gruner and Daryl Lindsay, among others, who, using ‘simplification and reduction to essentials’ are ‘endeavouring to translate Australian landscape into the art of … the present day’.4 Sutton Forest, a small town near Moss Vale in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales was the subject of some of the paintings exhibited at Macquarie Galleries. Having spent his childhood in the area, de Maistre was familiar with the local landscape that is distinguished by its extensive plantings of introduced trees and temperate climate. A short distance from Bowral where James Fairfax lived at Retford Park, it is a landscape that he would have also known well. In this 1927 depiction of Sutton Forest de Maistre uses muted tones to describe a picturesque rural scene of houses and outbuildings framed on the left by a large tree in the foreground and offering a glimpse of low blue hills in the distance. The application of paint is lively and the clearly visible brushstrokes give the painting a sense of freshness and immediacy, suggesting that it may have been painted on one of the outdoor painting excursions to the area that de Maistre often took during these years. 1. Waterlow, N. and Pegus, A., Colour in Art – Revisiting 1919, exhibition catalogue, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, 2008 2. Johnson, H., Roy de Maistre: The Australian Years 1894 – 1930, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, p. 49 3. Burdett, B., quoted in Johnson, H., ibid., p. 62 4. Editorial, Art in Australia, Sydney, 3rd series, no. 17, September 1926, pp. 5 – 6
KIRSTY GRANT
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ROLAND WAKELIN 33 (1887 – 1971) EDWARD STREET, NORTH SYDNEY, 1927 STILL LIFE (VERSO) oil on plywood 54.5 x 41.5 cm signed and dated lower left: R. Wakelin 1927 estimate :
$20,000 – 30,000
PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Aeneas J.L. McDonnell, Sydney and London Macquarie Galleries, Sydney John Lowe Macquarie Galleries, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1971 EXHIBITED Roland Wakelin, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 22 August – 1 September 1928, cat. 9 McDonnell Collection at Macquarie Galleries, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 25 August 1966 (as ‘Suburban Landscape’) Roland Wakelin Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 8 – 30 April 1967, then travelling to Newcastle City Art Gallery, cat. 35 (lent by Mr John Lowe) Easter Exhibition. Pictures for Collectors, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 31 March – 19 April 1971, cat. 14
Roland Wakelin will forever be recognised as one of the pioneers of modernist art in Australia. With colleague Roy de Maistre, their Colour in Art exhibition of 1919 was ground-breaking and featured Australia’s first ever abstracts amongst high-coloured scenes of the streets and buildings around Sydney’s lower north shore. Whereas de Maistre moved permanently to Europe in 1930, Wakelin, a dedicated family man, stayed put and his imagery became increasingly personal. Edward Street, North Sydney, 1927 is a view from the house the family occupied at 50 Edward Street from 1927, until they moved next door two years later; and the view from its upper windows is still essentially the same. Following the 1919 exhibition, Wakelin and de Maistre studied with the Melbourne tonalist Max Meldrum before the young New Zealander1 travelled to London in 1922, visiting galleries and viewing first-hand the details of original artworks he had otherwise known only through reproduction. He had previously absorbed the theories of artist Paul Cézanne but seeing actual paintings by the Frenchman reinforced Wakelin’s understanding of Cézanne’s maxim: ‘Penetrate what is before you and persevere in expressing yourself as logically as possible.’ 2 Whilst other artists such as de Maistre pursued the Cubist aesthetic (which Cézanne also influenced), Wakelin chose ‘a less radical path (which)
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reaffirmed an early 20th-century idealism founded on formal principles of art. His beliefs were a kind of painterly truth, art as a reflection of natural order.’ 3 The resultant paintings are clear expressions of these ideas, less showy but imbued with quiet dignity and fidelity. One of Wakelin’s closest friends was the gallerist John Young who was also in London whilst the artist was there, and the two socialised regularly. On his return, Young went into partnership with Basil Burdett to open the renowned Macquarie Galleries in 1925, choosing Wakelin for their inaugural exhibition. In 1928, Wakelin held his second exhibition there and Edward Street, North Sydney was included, probably purchased by Aeneas McDonnell who had recently joined Young in running the gallery following the departure of Burdett. Over time, McDonnell amassed an important collection of Australian art, and became one of the renowned ‘Monuments Men’ who helped track looted Nazi artworks. From 1947, he also served as an advisor to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne for the Felton Bequest until his death in 1964. The Wakelin family home at 50 Edward Street still stands, a two storey double-fronted house whose upper windows survey the street below. The houses opposite are also extant and their distinguishing fences feature in a related painting from the period, Cat in the Window, sold through Deutscher and Hackett in 2010.4 Critically, Cat in the Window shows the distinctive arched window which remains at number 55, thus confirming the location for the painting on offer here. In a letter to John Young, Wakelin explained his painterly approach as being securely based on definitive preliminary drawing. He would then “‘colour-in’ the outline in a most deliberate and summary fashion striving always to rely on the feeling and fighting shy of the enemies: accuracy, finish, superficial resemblance, scientific formulae… the bugbears and the damnation of painters.”5 Wakelin’s use of the recently invented plywood as a base was also a clear statement of intent, one which firmly proclaimed his continuing connection to the modern world. 1. Wakelin arrived in Australia in 1912. 2. Cézanne, P., quoted in Hetherington, J., ‘Roland Wakelin: Echoes of Battle’, Australian Painters: Forty profiles, F.W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1963, p. 31 3. Adams, B., ‘Wakelin’s search for the aesthetics of nature’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 25 April 1987 4. Cat in the Window, c.1929, 43.0 x 35.0 cm, oil on board, Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 28 April 2010, lot 180 5. Wakelin, R., letter to John Young, 1924, quoted in Campbell, J., Early Sydney Moderns: John Young and the Macquarie Galleries 1916 – 1946, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, p. 73
ANDREW GAYNOR
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MARGARET PRESTON: PRINTMAKER In 1915 Margaret McPherson’s work – which had recently changed and would have appeared strikingly modern in Adelaide – was condescendingly dismissed in England as ‘bringing nothing new into art’.1 Preston later described her despondent state of mind at the time: ‘She feels that her art does not suit the times, that her mentality has changed and that her work is not following her mind’. 2
MARGARET PRESTON AT HER HOME IN MOSMAN, 1924 photograph by Harold Cazneaux courtesy of State Library of New South Wales
Back in Australia on the dawn of a new decade Miss McPherson put what she later referred to as her ‘first life’ as an artist behind her, married Bill Preston, and changed her working name. 3 In full possession of herself, happily married and with a newfound freedom of financial security, she set about asserting her originality. The twenties felt like a period of fast growth and change, particularly in urban centers such as Sydney, where she and Bill now lived. Stepping up to an equally fast pace, and addressing as wide a public as she could reach, Preston pushed a concept of a uniquely Australian aesthetic of which Aboriginal art (which she saw initially in terms of flat design and solid colour) was the cue. Craft-oriented from way back, she was likely introduced to woodcut printing in her art school days at the Adelaide School of Design, Painting and Technical Arts in 1898 – the school had a strong alliance with England’s Arts and Crafts movement – and she now found her stride with woodcut prints. These went onto the covers and into the pages of popular magazines and journals, fulfilling her wish to reach people outside the art world.4 By 1927 her paintings had taken a stark cue from her prints. The restraint of paintings such as Implement Blue, 1927 and Western Australian Gum Blossom, 1928 arose from the rigors of emulating Aboriginal designs and the restrictions of wood-cutting. She told Gavin Long in 1935, ‘In my search for forms which will suggest Australia I prefer wood-blocking to painting, for the wood hinders facility and compels the worker to keep forms in his composition severe’. 5 The 1920s in general saw a closing of the gap between art and craft. This was particularly true for Preston who sheared off the fiddly aspects of late impressionism that had been residual in her oil paintings. In 1950 she looked back, ‘Whenever I thought I was slipping in my art, I went into crafts’.6 In articles for The Home and Art in Australia Preston advocated the role of crafts in developing a truly Australian art. In 1925 she explained, ‘I have studied the aboriginal’s art and have applied their designs to the simple things of life, hoping that the craftsman will succeed where,
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until now, the artist has certainly failed’.7 For Preston the decorative arts and crafts, with their practical and aesthetic values, would ensure that Indigenous design remained alive and relevant to a modern and cosmopolitan Australia; additionally, a national aesthetic based on craft would have women as its spearhead. She gave lessons in woodcutprinting to women in Sydney, among them the artist Thea Proctor with whom, in Sydney and Melbourne in 1925, she held a joint exhibition of illustrations and woodcut prints that received rave reviews. 8 A hand-coloured woodcut from that year entitled Circular Quay, Sydney was included in the exhibition. From behind the iconic Anglo-Dutch tower of the Australian Steam Navigation Company the artist looks over the ferry wharfs towards the city. Recognisable landmarks are two large and blocky buildings just beyond the wharfs, the Farmers and Graziers building and Customs House; beyond those the dome of the Chief Secretary’s Department; to its left the fashionable Hotel Metropole, a clean white shape that stands solidly before the clock tower of the General Post Office, painted a vibrant red; on the left, stretching up to a clear blue sky, the springing green foliage of pine and palm trees in the Royal Botanic Gardens; on the right the boxes of the city. Sydney’s modern artists preferred urban subjects, especially those that celebrated the public life of a city rapidly emerging as the modern core of Australian culture. Preston made regular use of ferries to travel to Circular Quay from her Mosman flat. The monographed boat ferrying into view in the bottom left corner of the woodcut nods to her day-to-day familiarity with that very ‘Sydney’ activity. Roger Butler has suggested that Preston developed a love of water from her father, a marine engineer. 9 Her appreciation is evident in prints such as Mosman Bridge, c.1927 that treks along a suspended walkway across the upper reaches of Mosman Bay. The elegantly cut calligraphy employed for the wooden bridge, the shapeliness of pictorial segmentation encompassing whole groups of flat, coloured objects within firm black lines, and the slightly foreshortened perspective declare Preston’s knowledge of Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e). The embrace of Japonisme by European, and later Australian artists and designers has been well documented. It was, for instance, the subject of an exhibition organised by the National Gallery of Australia in 2011, where prints by Preston were some of the most convincing instances of local printmakers adopting Japanese techniques to Australian ends.10
In this, her ‘second life’, Preston found native flowers fitting subjects for an Australian aesthetic. Moreover, their Aboriginal ‘severity of form’ suited wood-cutting. The Home declared in 1929: ‘we have in Australia a very remarkable artist, one who can take her place with the world’s painters of Still Life. Her show [at the Grosvenor Galleries] promises to be historical in the art world of Australia’.11 Wheel Flower, 1929, the star of the show (selling nine impressions and appearing on the cover of Art in Australia the following month), was a perfect yet unforced slice of nature showing branches of a Fire Wheel tree growing blithely upwards and out the top of the image. Preston considered it one of her finest prints.12 Its design had been achieved ‘as simply as to all appearances my country is,’13 and its other qualities of sharp flatness, clever use of negative space to suggest the ‘solid light’ of Australia,14 abandonment of superfluous props, and simplification of colour and form, not only represented all that Preston set out to achieve at the beginning of that decade but heralded what she would go on to achieve in the decades that followed. Preston’s ability to ‘craft’ her art took her from a painter ‘bringing nothing new into art’ to an artist who, in the words of Daniel Thomas, ‘was, without a doubt, the best painter working anywhere in Australia between the wars’.15 1. Athenaeum, London, 20 February 1915, p. 172, quoted in Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987, p. 41 2. Preston, M., ‘From Eggs to Electrolux’, Art in Australia, Sydney, 3rd series, no. 22, December 1927, pp. 25 – 47 3. Preston, M., quoted in, ‘Margaret Preston’s Two Artistic “Lives”’, Sunday Herald, Sydney, 3 September 1950, p. 11 4. Preston’s prints were printed in publications such as Women’s World, Wentworth Magazine, Manuscript, and Sydney Ure Smith’s The Home, Art in Australia, and Australia National Journal 5. Preston, M., quoted in Long, G., ‘Some Recent Paintings by Margaret Preston’, Art in Australia, Sydney, 3rd series, no. 59, May 1935, p. 18 6. Preston, M., quoted in, ‘Margaret Preston’s Two Artistic “Lives”’, op. cit., p. 11 7. Preston, M., ‘The Indigenous Art of Australia’, Art in Australia, Sydney, 3rd series, no. 11, March 1925, p. 52 8. Thea Proctor and Margaret Preston Exhibition, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 18 November – 2 December 1925; The New Gallery, Melbourne, 24 November – 5 December 1925 9. Butler, R., op. cit., p. 1 10. In the Japanese manner: Australian prints 1900 –1940, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 20 May – 14 August 2011 11. ‘Art Notes’, The Home, Sydney, vol. 10, no. 8, August 1929, p. 15 12. Butler, R., op. cit., p. 16 13. Preston, M., quoted in Long, G., op. cit., p. 18 14. ibid., p. 18 15. Thomas, D., Sunday Telegraph, Sydney, 2 June 1963, p. 43
HESTER GASCOIGNE
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MARGARET PRESTON 34
(1875 – 1963) CIRCULAR QUAY, SYDNEY, 1925 hand-coloured woodcut 24.0 x 24.5 cm signed with initials in image lower left: M.P. signed, dated, numbered and inscribed with title under image lower left: Circular Quay Sydney - N S W Margaret Preston / 1st Proof 1925 estimate :
$20,000 – 30,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Christie’s, Sydney, 14 November 1988, lot 125 The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales EXHIBITED Thea Proctor and Margaret Preston Exhibition, The New Gallery, Melbourne 24 November – 5 December 1925, cat. 9 (another example) Exhibition of Woodcuts by Margaret Preston, Dunster Galleries, Adelaide, September 1926, cat. 57 (another example) Australian Painter – Etcher’s Society Annual Exhibition, Education Department’s Art Gallery, Sydney, 8 – 23 June 1928, cat. 233 (another example) Sydney Harbour Bridge Celebrations, Education Department’s Art Gallery, Sydney, 21 March – 3 April 1932, cat. 143 (another example) Work by Four Artists, 52a Collins St, Melbourne, November 1932, cat. 12 (another example) Exhibition of Etchings, Woodcuts etc. by Margaret Preston [and others], The Sedon Galleries, Melbourne, 12 September 1933, cat. 17 (another example) Exhibition of Etchings, pencil drawing and woodcuts, The Sedon Galleries, Melbourne, May 1934, cat. cat. 256 (another example) The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980 and touring, cat. 10 (another example) The Prints of Margaret Preston, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 8 August – 18 October 1987, cat. 19 (another example) Margaret Preston in Mosman, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney, 7 September – 13 October 2002 (another example, illus. in exhibition catalogue) Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 29 July – 23 October 2005 and touring in 2006 to, Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (another example) Destination Sydney, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 11 December 2015 – 21 February 2016 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, another example) O ’Keefe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 12 October 2016 – 11 February 2017; Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 11 March – 11 June 2017; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1 July – 2 October, cat. 35 (another example)
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LITERATURE Art in Australia, 3rd series, no.17, 1926, p. 48 (illus., as ‘Circular Quay, Sydney’, another example) Australia Beautiful, (The Home Easter Pictorial), Sydney, 1928, (illus. cover, another example) Draffin, N., Australian Woodcuts and Linocuts of the 1920s and 1930s, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1976, p. 50 (dated as c.1925) North, I. (ed.), The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980, cat. P.10, pp. 19 (illus., another example), 53 Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1987, cat. 84, p. 105 (illus., another example) Butel, E., Margaret Preston, Editions Tom Thompson, Sydney, 1995, pl.11, p. 31 (illus., another example), 87 Edwards, D., Peel, R. and Mimmocchi, D., Margaret Preston Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, pp. 80, 92 (illus. another example), 285 Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, revised edition 2005, cat. 84, p. 117 (illus. another example) Harding, L., and Mimmocchi, D., (eds), O ’Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2016, cat. 35, pp. 126 (illus.), 194 RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
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MARGARET PRESTON 35 (1875 – 1963) MOSMAN BRIDGE, c.1927 hand-coloured woodcut 25.0 x 18.5 cm signed with initials in image lower right: MP signed, numbered and inscribed with title below image: 20th print Mosman Bay Margaret Preston estimate :
$15,000 – 25,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Lawsons, Sydney, 12 September 1989, lot 186 The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales EXHIBITED A Survey of Australian Relief Prints, Deutscher Galleries, Melbourne, 13 April – 5 May 1978, cat. 28 (another example, dated as c.1926) The Alan Renshaw Bequest, S.H. Ervin Museum and Art Gallery, Sydney, 9 January – 25 February 1979, cat. 47 (another example, illus. on exhibition catalogue cover) The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980 and touring, cat. 13 (another example, dated as c.1925) Margaret Preston: the art of constant rearrangement, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 December 1985 –9 February 1986, cat. 14 (another example) The Prints of Margaret Preston, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 8 August – 18 October 1987, cat. 36 (another example) A Selection of 19th & 20th Century Australian Art, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 23 November – 8 December 1989, cat. 34 (another example) Margaret Preston in Mosman, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney, 7 September – 13 October 2002 (another example, illus. in exhibition catalogue) Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 29 July – 23 October 2005 and touring in 2006 to, Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (another example)
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LITERATURE Draffin, N., Australian Woodcuts and Linocuts of the 1920s and 1930s, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1976, p. 35 (illus. another example, as ‘Mosman Bridge (large) N.S.W., c.1926’) Deutscher, C., and Butler, R., A Survey of Australian Relief Prints, Deutscher Galleries, Melbourne, 1978, cat. 28, p. 21 (illus., another example, dated as c.1926) North, I. (ed.), The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980 and touring, cat. P.13, pp. 36 (illus. another example, dated as c.1925), 53 Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National Gallery, Canberra and Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987, cat. 113, p. 127 (illus., another example) Edwards, D., Peel, R. and Mimmocchi, D., Margaret Preston, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, pp. 82 (illus., another example), 286 RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
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MARGARET PRESTON 36 (1875 – 1963) WHEEL FLOWER, c.1929 hand-coloured woodcut 44.0 x 44.0 cm signed with initials in image lower left: MP signed, numbered and inscribed with title below image: No 1 copy ‘wheel flower’ Margaret Preston estimate :
$30,000 – 40,000
PROVENANCE Private collection The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney EXHIBITED Margaret Preston, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 7 – 31 August 1929, cat. 35 (another example) Exhibition of Etchings, Woodcuts etc. by Margaret Preston [and others], The Sedon Galleries, Melbourne, 12 September 1933, cat. 4 (another example) Exhibition of Etchings, Woodcuts and Pencil Drawings, The Sedon Galleries, Melbourne, 12 – 24 December 1933, cat. 175 (another example) Exhibition of Etchings, Pencil drawing and Woodcuts, The Sedon Galleries, Melbourne, May 1934, cat. 251 (another example) 150 Years of Australian Art, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 January – 25 April 1938, cat. 507 (another example) Margaret Preston and William Dobell Loan Exhibition, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 19 March – 16 April 1942 cat. 5 (another example) The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, 1980 and touring, cat. 18 (another example, dated as 1928) Margaret Preston: the art of constant rearrangement, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 December 1985 – 9 February 1986, cat. 21 (another example) The Prints of Margaret Preston, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 8 August – 18 October 1987, cat. 145 (another example) Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 29 July – 23 October 2005 and touring in 2006 to, Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (another example) O ’Keefe, Preston, Cossington Smith. Making Modernism, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 12 October 2016 – 11 February 2017; Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 11 March – 11 June 2017; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1 July – 2 October, cat. 47 (another example)
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LITERATURE Art in Australia, Sydney, 3rd series, no. 29, 1 September 1929 (illus. front cover, another example) Moore, W., The Story of Australian Art, Angus and Robinson, Sydney, 1934, p. 124 (illus. another example, as ‘Stenocarpus’) Draffin, N., Australian Woodcuts and Linocuts of the 1920s and 1930s, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1976, p. 36 (illus., another example) Quarterly / The Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Gallery, Sydney, vol. 5, no. 2, January 1964 (illus. front cover) Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston – A Catalogue Raisonné, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1987, cat. 140, pp. 144, 145 (illus.) North, I. (ed.) The Art of Margaret Preston, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980, cat. P.18, pp. 22 (illus., dated as 1928, and cover, another example) 54 Butel, E., Margaret Preston, Editions Tom Thompson, Sydney, 1995, pl.21, pp. 32, 36 (illus., another example), 88 Grant, K., In Relief: Australian Wood Engravings, Woodcuts and Linocuts, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1997, p. 30, another impression illustrated p. 31. Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston – A Catalogue Raisonné, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, revised edition 2005, cat. 140, p. 154 (illus.) Humphries, B., Sayers, A. and Engledow, S., The World of Thea Proctor, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 2005, p. 41 Edwards, D., Peel, R. and Mimmocchi, D., Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, pp. 94, 95 (illus. another example), 286 Harding, L., and Mimmocchi, D., (eds), O’Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith. Making Modernism, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Heide Museum of Modern Art, Sydney and Melbourne, 2016, cat. 47, pp. 126 (illus.), 195 RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
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DORRIT BLACK 37 (1891 – 1951) DUTCH HOUSES, c.1929 colour linocut edition unknown 27.0 x 20.5 cm estimate :
$15,000 – 25,000
PROVENANCE Private collection, Adelaide Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1999 EXHIBITED British Linocuts, Redfern Gallery, London, 1930, cat. 78 (another example) Paintings by Dorrit Black, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 10 September 1930, cat. 30 (another example) British Lino-cuts, Shanghai Art Club, Shanghai, 1931, cat. 60 (another example) Dorrit Black (retrospective), Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide, 1945, cat. 60 (another example) 25th Anniversary Exhibition, Hahndorf Academy Gallery, Adelaide, 1981, cat. 17 (another example) Claude Flight and his Followers: The Colour Linocut Movement between the Wars, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 16 December 1982 – 1 March 1983; Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 18 April – 12 July 1992; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 14 October – 29 November 1992; Museum of New Zealand, Wellington, 19 March – 16 May 1993 and Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki, Auckland, 3 June – 18 July 1993, cat. 20 (another example) The Dorrit Black Collection, Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney, 17 April – 29 May 1999, cat. 7 (label attached verso) Dorrit Black: Unseen Forces, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 14 June – 7 September 2014 (another example)
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LITERATURE North, I., The Art of Dorrit Black, MacMillan and Art Gallery of South Australia, 1979, cat. L10, pl. 9, pp. 39 (illus.) 41, 131 Coppel, S., Lino Cuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School, Scholar Press, Leicester, United Kingdom, in association with National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1995, cat. DB8, p. 154 (illus.) Lock-Weir, T., Dorrit Black. Unseen Forces, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2014, pp. 52, 55 (illus.), 200
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THEA PROCTOR 38 (1879 – 1966) THE TAME BIRD, 1916 lithograph 30.0 x 28.0 cm edition of 50 signed and inscribed with title below image: The Tame Bird Thea Proctor PROVENANCE Joshua McClelland Print Room, Melbourne The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales, acquired from the above in c.1987 estimate :
122
$2,000 – 3,000
EXHIBITED New English Art Club, London, 1917, cat. 39 (another example) Fine Art Gallery Society, Melbourne, April 1919, cat. 4 (another example) Woodcuts, Linocuts, Etching, Drawings etc. 1912 – 1977, Joshua McClelland Print Room, Melbourne, 7 – 18 December 1987, cat. 35 The World of Thea Proctor, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 8 April – 19 June 2005 (another example) LITERATURE Holme, G., and Salaman, M., Modern Woodcuts and Lithographs by British and French Artists, The Studio Ltd, London, 1919, p. 170 (illus., another example) Butler, R., Thea Proctor: The Prints, Resolution Press, Sydney, 1980, pl. 2, pp. 26 – 27 (illus., another example) Humphries, B., Sayers, A., and Engledow, S., The World of Thea Proctor, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 2005, pp. 40, 105 (illus., another example), 175
WEAVER HAWKINS 39 (1893 – 1977) THROWN, 1960 oil on composition board 59.0 x 77.0 cm signed and dated lower left: Raokin 60 signed and inscribed with title verso: WEAVER HAWKINS / 260 ALFRED ST / N. SYDNEY / N.S.W. / ‘THROWN’ / 29-31 estimate :
$15,000 – 20,000
PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 9 May 1989, lot 362 The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales EXHIBITED H. F. Weaver-Hawkins, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 17 – 29 March 1976, cat. 27 (label attached verso)
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TONY TUCKSON 40 (1921 – 1973) ARTISTS’ BALL, NO. 1, c.1949 oil on canvas 71.0 x 91.0 cm estimate :
124
$12,000 – 18,000
PROVENANCE Watters Gallery, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1986 EXHIBITED Tony Tuckson, Twenty Paintings on Canvas: 1947? – 1957? Watters Gallery, Sydney, 5 – 22 November 1986, cat. 12 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)
JOHN PASSMORE 41 (1904 – 1984) THE ARGUMENT, c.1953 oil on composition board 29.0 x 36.5 cm signed and inscribed with title on label verso: The Argument / J. Passmore PROVENANCE Terry Clune Galleries, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales estimate :
$12,000 – 18,000
LITERATURE Thomas, D., ‘The Art Collectors 3: James O. Fairfax’, Art and Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 3, no. 4, March 1966, p. 255 RELATED WORK The Argument, 1953, oil on hardboard, 28.6 x 73.7 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, illus. in Pearce, B., John Passmore 1904–84: Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1984, cat. 34, p. 61 The Argument, 1953, oil on hardboard, 30.5 x 54.5 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, illus. in Pearce, B., John Passmore 1904–84: Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1984, cat. 35, p. 62
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JOHN PERCEVAL 42 (1923 – 2000) CELLO PLAYER, c.1958 – 59 glazed earthenware 40.0 cm height estimate :
$30,000 – 40,000
PROVENANCE Terry Clune Galleries, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales LITERATURE Thomas, D., ‘The Art Collectors 3: James O. Fairfax’, Art and Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 3, no. 4, March 1966, pp. 256 (illus.), 257 EXHIBITED Possibly: The Angels of John Perceval, Terry Clune Galleries, Sydney, May 1959, cat. 13 (as ‘Cello Player’) RELATED WORK Angel with Cello, 1957, earthenware with copper oxide glaze, 30.3 cm height, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
John Perceval’s ceramic Angels are highly sought-after items whenever they appear on the market. Such was the impact of their first exhibition in 1958 at John Reed’s Museum of Modern Art that Bernard Smith pronounced it to be ‘one of the most important one-man shows held in Australia since the war … (which) revealed him as an artist with an observant eye and keen wit.’1 Apart from displaying a compelling and mischievous spirit, the Angels are also marvellous examples of technical skill and prowess, reflective of the previous decade Perceval spent in partnership with his brother-in-law Arthur Boyd at their Murrumbeena business, AMB Pottery. Whilst earlier examples tended to lack fine detail, pieces from the second series (of which Cello Player, c.1958–59 is one) feature finely articulated fingers and delicately curled hair. A photo of Perceval and his children from 1958 shows one work in progress ‘balanced atop three small balls of clay, which were subsequently removed before firing … The hair, according to his then wife Mary, was spun (around chopsticks) by the artist like fine Chinese noodles.’ 2 The richly coloured glaze is worth noting too, the result of the artist’s pursuit of an elusive ancient Chinese recipe known as sang-de-boeuf, a green glaze that turns red and gold as the heat within the kiln is lowered.
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Perceval worked on the Angels over a number of years and exhibited one selection as part of the historically significant exhibition The Antipodeans in 1959. It is well known that friends such as Barry Humphries, Mirka Mora and Charles Blackman inspired some of the figures, as did Perceval’s children and his memories of his own childhood. Given this, they veer between innocence and delinquency, yet there is also an attitude of frank, bacchanalian joy and excess about them, as if they were unruly sprites hanging around a tavern. In this, Helen Brack, whose husband John was a key member of the Antipodean group, gives a salutary reminder that Bohemia was also Perceval’s subject and ‘a statement against middle-class morality and bourgeois respectability, such as Barry Humphries did for the word ‘nice’. The Angels were imps, something like Shakespeare’s ‘Puck’. Perceval also delighted at snubbing officialdom (and wanted to be) funny, incongruous… to go outside respectability. He would have had no difficulty in seeing the cello as Female and related to Sex, by visual analogy, not by anything intellectual.’ 3 Many of the Angels series are now held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, and the State galleries of South Australia, New South Wales and Western Australia; and as prized items within important corporate and private collections. As a result, few appear on the open market with only eight examples appearing since 2000. The most recent of these was Acrobat Angel, c.1958 from The Gould Collection, which sold for $97,600 through Deutscher and Hackett in March 2017. Many thanks to Helen Brack for her assistance with this essay. 1. Smith, B., ‘The Antipodean Artists’, The Critic as Advocate: selected essays 1948 – 1988, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p. 146 2. Smith, D., Delinquent Angel: John Perceval’s Ceramic Angels, Shepparton Art Museum, Victoria, 2014, p. 11 3. Brack, H., e-mail to the author, 20 June 2017
ANDREW GAYNOR
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DONALD FRIEND 43 (1915 – 1989) FLIGHT TO EGYPT I, 1964 copper and wood 59.5 cm height stamped with initials and date at base: DF / 1964 estimate :
$10,000 – 15,000
PROVENANCE Clune Galleries, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales EXHIBITED Donald Friend. Sculpture With Mitty Lee Brown, Clune Galleries, Sydney, 15 April – 8 May 1964, cat. 4 LITERATURE Gleeson, J., ‘The Art Collectors 3. James O. Fairfax’, Art and Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 3, no. 3, December 1965, pp. 176 (illus.) Hughes, R., Donald Friend, Edwards and Shaw, Sydney, 1965, p. 76 Hetherington, P., The Diaries of Donald Friend Vol. 3, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 2005, p. 560
The five years Donald Friend spent in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from the late 1950s had a profound effect on his art. Always fascinated by non-Western cultures, he had already experienced time living within indigenous communities in Africa and Australia, and between 1957 and 1962, Friend based himself outside Colombo at the home of the plantationowner Bevis Bawa. Here he occupied his time studying ‘Indian frescoes and sculpture with as much concentration as, eight years before, he had spent on the Renaissance’.1 Apart from creating copious drawings and paintings, Friend started fashioning his own sculptural pieces from sheet aluminium and also experimented with other media, making ‘small fountain statues in brass and copper with the aid of Plastic Metal. … The first ‘fountain’ (Rape of the Sabine Women) was only a qualified success’. 2 Friend subsequently held an exhibition of these works in Colombo in 1962. That same year, the artist returned to Sydney and purchased a small house in Paddington. Due to its cramped size, his colleague Mitty Lee-Brown offered him the use of the old stable at the rear of her nearby property. He also met the young art critic Robert Hughes who would often stop by to ‘(waste) a few hours with his good talk and enthusiasm’. 3 Now working with sheets of copper, Friend dedicated himself to a new group of figurative sculptures. In late 1963 Lee-Brown suddenly sold her home and moved to a country property at Nimmitabel close to the Snowy Mountains, forcing Friend to travel there to complete his work. By this stage, Hughes had started writing a monograph on the artist and would often travel down to study the sculptures’ progress. Lee-Brown and Friend held a two-person show of their artwork in April 1964 and Hughes perceptively described his pieces as being ‘not so much sculptures … as three-dimensional drawings made with copper lines in the air. Some, like Flight into Egypt, 1964 have a truly plastic quality’.4 Whilst most of the companion pieces were inspired by Greek mythology, the two exhibited versions of Flight into Egypt were the only ones based on the bible, no doubt mindful of Friend’s success in winning the Blake Prize for Religious Art in 1955.5 With a beaten surface animated by alphabetical letter-punchers, Joseph’s noble profile contrasts with the rounded halo shapes of his wife and the Holy Child, astride their mount which strains with latent energy reminiscent of Marino Marini’s equestrian statues. Friend’s long-time associate James Fairfax purchased this first version of Flight into Egypt and proudly displayed it on an antique sideboard in the entrance hall to his Bowral home Retford Park under Ian Fairweather’s painting Meeting Donkey. He would later commission Friend to create a suite of ambitious murals for the same property. 1. Hughes, R., Donald Friend, Edwards and Shaw, Sydney, 1965, p. 68 2. Friend, D., diary entry 24 December 1959, quoted in Hetherington, P. (ed.), The Diaries of Donald Friend (Volume 3), National Library of Australia, Canberra, 2005, pp. 480 – 481. Fountains, murals and other artworks by Friend are still located at the Bawa estate. 3. Friend, D., diary entry 30 January 1963, quoted in Hetherington, P. (ed.), op cit., p. 546 4. Hughes, R., op cit., pp. 74, 76 5. Both versions were made between late February and early March 1964.
ANDREW GAYNOR
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COLIN LANCELEY 44 (1938 – 2015) ATLAS, 1965 oil on carved wood and metal 241.0 cm height estimate :
$20,000 – 30,000
PROVENANCE Gallery A, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1965 EXHIBITED Colin Lanceley ’65, Gallery A, Sydney, 18 March – 20 April 1965 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) Colin Lanceley – A Survey Exhibition 1961 – 1987, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 24 July – 15 September 1987 LITERATURE Gleeson, J., ‘The Art Collectors 3. James O. Fairfax’, Art and Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 3, no. 3, December 1965, pp. 174, 177 (illus.) Colin Lanceley, Relief tondos & ‘Wasteland’ drawings, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 9 September – 19 October 1975 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) Wright, W., and Hughes, R., Colin Lanceley, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1987, fig. 9, pp. 110 (illus.), 131 Fairfax, J., My Regards to Broadway. A Memoir, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1991, p. 314 Wright, W., and Hughes, R., Colin Lanceley, Craftsman House, Sydney, revised edition, 1993, fig. 9, pp. 134, 156
As a student at the East Sydney Technical College in 1959 – 60, Colin Lanceley and his friends would play a game called Aesthetic Chess, making ephemeral table-top compositions using bus tickets, coins, lipstick, cigarettes and whatever they had in their pockets. With two of these friends, Mike Brown and New Zealand-born Ross Crothall, Lanceley formed the Annandale Imitation Realists in the early 1960s and together they produced a provocative body of assemblages that drew on sources as diverse as the irrational spirit of Dada, contemporary popular culture, kitsch and their fascination with tribal art, that astounded and confounded audiences when they were exhibited in 1962. Working independently by 1963, Lanceley recalled that ‘collage was becoming more and more important to me. It became more than just a working process – it became a philosophy of life … and it seemed to me that the kinds of things I was interested in picking up, the objects and the bits and scraps and flotsam and jetsam, all had clinging to them a poignant history that evoked a whole other existence … bringing life into art’.1 A significant moment in the development of his practice occurred in 1963 when, scouring the streets of Balmain for materials with his friend, the sculptor Robert Klippel, they discovered a cache of wooden patterns that had been used for sand-casting maritime machine parts in the abandoned basement of an engineering workshop. 2 Wonderfully coloured and to the untrained eye, presenting a series of varied sculptural forms in their own right rather than being functional objects with a distinct use, these patterns became the basis of new work by both artists, who ‘ransacked the store, carrying off patterns by the vanload’. 3 Lanceley used the wooden patterns, adding other found elements and sometimes painted colour, to produce a series of ambitious freestanding works that combined collage and sculpture on a large scale, and it was with some of these dynamic and utterly original works that he won the prestigious Helena Rubinstein Travelling Scholarship in 1964. Before leaving for Europe the following year he showed a group of these sculptures in a solo exhibition at Gallery A in Sydney. Atlas, 1965 was included in the exhibition and like other works from the period such as Icarus, 1965 (National Gallery of Australia) and Phoenix Among the Stars, 1965 (Private collection, Melbourne), took its title from Greek mythology, making reference to the Titan, Atlas, who, as a punishment from Zeus was forced to hold up the heavens for eternity. Perhaps alluding to the never-ending nature of his fate, Atlas is reminiscent of a clock, its face composed of a series of coloured dials and hands that have gone slightly awry, and the inner mechanics exposed within an elegantly curved body. Standing on the carved legs of a chair or small side table, Atlas is also a whimsical study of contrasts – solidity and air, order and chaos, the unfamiliar rendered familiar – that speaks to the pleasure Lanceley took in these materials and his joy of making. 1. Lanceley, C., quoted in Hughes, R. and Wright, W., Colin Lanceley, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1987, p. 22 2. Hughes, R., ‘Introduction’, ibid., pp. 11 – 12 3. ibid., p. 12
JAMES FAIRFAX, COLIN LANCELEY AND PAUL KEATING, SHERMAN GALLERIES
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KIRSTY GRANT
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INGE KING 45 (1915 – 2016) DERVISH (MAQUETTE II), 1991 polychrome steel 70.0 cm height estimate :
$15,000 – 20,000
PROVENANCE Australian Galleries, Melbourne The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1991 EXHIBITED Joie De Vivre: An Exhibition of Recent Sculptures by Inge King, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, September – October 1991 RELATED WORK Dervish, 1991, painted bronze, 167.0 x 132.0 x 100.0 cm, exhibited in Inge King: Large and Small Bronze Sculptures, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 26 April – 22 May 1993
Teetering precariously with joyful and flamboyant expression, Inge King’s second maquette of Dervish is imbued with a sense of movement that contradicts the solidity of its assemblage. Although directly descended from her geometric totemic sculptures, King’s dancing silhouettes were the most figurative artworks of her later career. They retained the planar quality of her abstract works, becoming three-dimensional collages of sheet metal. Inspired by Henri Matisse’s iconic découpages,1 Dervish and its accompanying dancers interact with the space around them – the intersecting planes of their construction playing with depth and shadow, extending their outermost limits beyond the physical boundaries that confine them. The surprising addition of small elements of colour assisted the creation of ‘not only significance and shape, but also extremity, distance, and advancing and receding planes’. 2 While the seventies and eighties were characterised by the realisation of King’s abstract maquettes into large scale public sculptures, the decade that followed showed a radical reframing of the artist’s vision: smaller, autonomous objects, introduction of colour and clearer representational forms. Perhaps a product of her confidence as a mature sculptor, this new direction was joyful and showed a greater connection to her European artistic heritage. King was not alone in adopting a more figurative and object-based approach to sculpture in the latter half of the eighties, as Maudie Palmer noted in her review of Australian Sculpture Now, the Second Australian Sculpture Triennial at the National Gallery of Victoria in the summer of 1984 – 85. 3 James Fairfax acquired this maquette from the Joie de Vivre solo exhibition the artist held at Australian Galleries in Sydney, complementing her larger sculpture he already had installed in the gardens at Retford Park. Celebrating the joy of life, the sculptures of this exhibition synthesised human movement into single stylised static pose, embodying the pregnant moment, theorised by 18th century philosopher Gotthold Lessing, linking form to a temporal background. While the dancers are stylised, they are not idealised. The awkward poses they adopt evoke the recognisable movements of human expression, both performative and anodyne. King has also attempted to introduce a further sensory element – sound. Poised to stamp his foot on the ground, the dervish is suspended in action, his centre of gravity dangerously off-kilter. Critics at the time applauded the grace, ease and gaiety of the works in the exhibition at Australian Galleries, one even noted their musicality. King herself considered Joie de Vivre to have been her most important exhibition.4 1. Inge King had a print of Henri Matisse’s Icarus hanging in her house. 2. Trimble, J., Inge King. Sculptor, Art and Australia and Craftsman House, Sydney, 1996, p. 141 3. Palmer, M., quoted in Trimble, J., op cit., p. 143 4. Trimble, J., op cit., pp. 148 – 149
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MARGEL HINDER 46 (1906 – 1995) MODEL FOR CANBERRA REVOLVE, 1961 steel wire 35.0 x 39.0 cm PROVENANCE Private collection The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales estimate :
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$4,000 – 6,000
EXHIBITED Frank and Margel Hinder 1930–1980, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 12 June – 13 July 1980, cat. M77 LITERATURE Free, R., Frank and Margel Hinder 1930–1980, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1980, cat. M77, p. 60 RELATED WORK Revolving Sphere, 1962–63, stainless steel and motor, installed 1963 in the Monaro Mall, Civic Centre, Canberra (later destroyed).
ROBERT KLIPPEL 47 (1920 – 2001) NO. 211, 1967 unique bronze cast 41.0 cm height (including base) signed with initials, dated and inscribed with title at base: RK 211 / 1967 inscribed with title on base: 211 PROVENANCE Bonython Gallery, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1968 estimate :
$12,000 – 18,000
EXHIBITED Robert Klippel: sculptures, Bonython Gallery, Sydney, 26 February – 13 March 1968, cat. 7 Robert Klippel: a tribute exhibition, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 9 August 2002 – 13 October 2002 LITERATURE Gleeson, J., Robert Klippel, Bay Books, Sydney, 1983, pl. 199, pp. 290, 292 (illus.), 471 Edwards, D., Robert Klippel, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002, pp. 125 (illus.), 248 Edwards, D., Robert Klippel: Catalogue Raisonné of Sculptures, (CD-ROM) Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002, No. 211 (illus.)
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ROY DE MAISTRE 48 (1894 – 1968) STUDY OF A NUDE pen, ink and wash on paper 31.0 x 40.0 cm signed with initials lower left: RdM PROVENANCE The Redfern Gallery, London The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales estimate :
$2,500 – 4,000
WILLIAM DOBELL 49 (1899 – 1970) COCKNEY FAMILY, c.1937 pencil on paper 34.0 x 24.0 cm signed lower right: Dobell PROVENANCE Clune Galleries, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales estimate :
$3,000 – 5,000
WILLIAM DOBELL 50 (1899 – 1970) STUDY FOR BATHERS, 1935 pencil on paper 29.5 x 24.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title lower centre: Dobell / Study for Bathers / 1935 PROVENANCE Clune Galleries, Sydney The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales estimate :
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$2,500 – 3,500
LITERATURE Gleeson, J., ‘The Art Collectors 3. James O. Fairfax’, Art and Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 3, no. 3, December 1965, pp. 181, 183 RELATED WORK Cockney Mother, 1937, oil on plywood, 47.6 x 19.3 cm, private collection, formerly Norman Schureck Collection, illus. in Gleeson, J., William Dobell, Thames and Hudson, London, revised edition 1969, pl. 32, p. 61
ERIC WILSON 51 (1911 – 1946) HOSPITAL THEME, INTERIOR, c.1942 pencil and coloured pencil on paper 23.5 x 19.0 cm PROVENANCE Artarmon Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1986 EXHIBITED Artarmon Galleries (Artlovers), Sydney, March 1986, cat. 112 estimate :
$1,000 – 2,000
JOHN PERCEVAL 52 (1923 – 2000) MARKET GARDEN WITH PLOUGH, 1946 pencil on paper 24.5 x 29.0 cm signed lower right: Perceval dated lower left: July 46 PROVENANCE Australian Galleries, Melbourne The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1987 EXHIBITED Early drawings of John Perceval 1944 – 1962, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, March 1987, cat. 80 estimate :
$3,000 – 5,000
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WALTER ISAAC JENNER 53 (1837 – 1902) COASTAL SCENE WITH CLIFFS, ROWBOATS AND ARCHED ROCK, 1894 oil on board 23.5 x 40.0 cm signed and dated lower right: W. Jenner. / 1894. inscribed verso: … / Water / near Mr J B Stephens estimate :
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$4,000 – 6,000
PROVENANCE Private collection The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales and Bridgestar Pty Ltd, Sydney
MORTIMER MENPES 54 (1855 – 1938) ONE OF OUR NEW ALLIES, JAPAN, c.1901 – 02 oil, gouache and pencil on board 41.0 x 32.5 cm signed lower right: Mortimer Menpes PROVENANCE Private collection Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne The Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1991 estimate :
$10,000 – 15,000
EXHIBITED Original Paintings Executed for Japan, World Pictures, Durbar, War Impressions and World’s Children, A. & C. Black, London, November 1903, cat. 58 The World of Mortimer Menpes: Painter, Etcher, Raconteur, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 13 June – 7 September 2014 LITERATURE Menpes, D., World’s Children, Adam and Charles Black, London, 1904, pl. 90, p. 218 (illus.) Robinson, J., The World of Mortimer Menpes: Painter, Etcher, Raconteur, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2014, pp. 170, 171 (illus.), 172, 198
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RESERVES The reserve is the minimum price including GST (if any) that the vendor will accept for a lot and below which the lot will not normally be sold. PRE-AUCTION VIEWINGS In both Sydney and Melbourne pre-auction viewings are scheduled for several days in advance of each auction. Deutscher and Hackett specialists are available to give obligation free advice at viewings or by appointment and prospective buyers are strongly encouraged to thoroughly examine and request condition reports for potential purchases. Pre-auction viewings are open to the public and are free to attend. SYMBOL KEY ▲ Unless ownership is clearly stated in the provenance, this symbol is used where a lot is offered which Deutscher and Hackett owns in whole or in part. In these instances, Deutscher and Hackett has a direct financial interest in the property or means that Deutscher and Hackett has guaranteed a minimum price. ● Used to indicate lots for sale without a reserve. EXPLANATION OF CATALOGUING PRACTICE AND TERMS All information published in Deutscher and Hackett catalogues represent statements of opinion and should not be relied upon as fact. All dimensions are listed in centimetres, height before width and are approximate. All prices are in Australian dollars. ARTIST’S NAMES All reference to artists make use of common and not full names in accordance with the standards outlined in the National Gallery of Australia reference publication Australian Art: Artist’s working names authority list. For instance, John Brack rather than Cecil John Brack; Roy de Maistre rather than Leroy Leveson Laurent De Maistre; Rosalie Gascoigne rather than Rosalie Norah Gascoigne. Terms used in this catalogue have the meanings ascribed to them below: a. NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work by the artist. b. Attributed to NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, probably a work by the artist, in whole or in part. c. Circle of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work showing the influence and style of the artist and of the artist’s period. d. Studio/Workshop of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work possibly executed under the supervision of the artist. e. School of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work by a follower or student of the artist. f. Manner of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work created in the style, but not necessarily in the period, of the artist. g. After NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a copy of a work by the artist. h. “signed” / “dated” in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, the work has been signed/dated by the artist. i. “bears signature” / “bears date” in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, the work has possibly been signed/dated by someone other than the artist.
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PROVENANCE Where appropriate, Deutscher and Hackett will include the known provenance, or history of ownership of lots. Non disclosure may indicate that prior owners are unknown or that the seller wishes to maintain confidentiality. 2. THE AUCTION Auctions are open to the public and are free to attend. Deutscher and Hackett may exclude any person at any time in its discretion. REGISTRATION Bidders must register to bid prior to the commencement of an auction. Deutscher and Hackett may impose other obligations on the registration of bidders in its discretion. CONDUCT OF AUCTION Lots are offered for sale on a consecutive basis. Deutscher and Hackett will determine the conduct of the auction in its absolute discretion, including the regulation of bidding. Consecutive or responsive bids may be placed by the auctioneer on behalf of the vendor up to the reserve. ABSENTEE OR COMMISSION BIDS AND TELEPHONE BIDS As a courtesy service, Deutscher and Hackett will make reasonable efforts to place bids for prospective buyers in absentia provided written or verbal instructions (as indicated on absentee bid forms included at the back of this catalogue or online) are received 24 hours prior to auction. Where successful, lots will be purchased at the lowest possible bid and in the event of identical absentee bids, the bid received earliest will take precedence. Deutscher and Hackett accepts no responsibility for errors and omissions in relation to this courtesy service and reserves the right to record telephone bids. RESERVE Unless indicated otherwise, all lots are subject to a confidential reserve price determined by the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett or the auctioneer may place any number of bids on behalf of the vendor below the reserve price and is not obliged to identify that the bids are being placed on behalf of the vendor. BIDDING INCREMENTS Bidding usually opens below the listed pre-sale estimate and proceeds in the following increments (the auctioneer may vary the bidding increments at his or her discretion): $500 – 1,000 by $50 $1,000 – 2,000 by $100 $2,000 – 3,000 by $200 $3,000 – 5,000 by $200 / $500 / $800 $5,000 – 10,000 by $500 $10,000 – 20,000 by $1,000 $20,000 – 30,000 by $2,000 $30,000 – 50,000 by $2,000 / $5,000 / $8,000 $50,000 – 100,000 by $5,000 $100,000 – 200,000 by $10,000 $200,000 – 300,000 by $20,000 $300,000 – 500,000 by $20,000 / $50,000 / $80,000 $500,000 – 1,000,000 by $50,000 $1,000,000+ by $100,000 SUCCESSFUL BIDS The fall of the auctioneer’s hammer indicates the final bid and the buyer assumes full responsibility for the lot from this time. UNSOLD LOTS Where a lot is unsold, the auctioneer will announce that the lot is “bought in”, “passed”, “withdrawn” or “returned to owner”.
3. AFTER THE AUCTION PAYMENTS Payment must be made within seven days of the date of sale in Australian dollars by cash, cheque, direct deposit, approved credit cards or electronic funds transfer. If payment is made by credit card the price will increase by any merchant fees payable by Deutscher and Hackett (1.15% (including GST) for Visa and Mastercard and 3.10% (including GST) for American Express). In certain circumstances, extension of payment may be granted at the discretion of Deutscher and Hackett. Cleared funds will be held in an interest bearing trust account by Deutscher and Hackett until remitted to the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett will be entitled to retain any interest earned during this period. Payment by the vendor of any charge to Deutscher and Hackett is to be made within fourteen days of invoice. PURCHASE PRICE AND BUYER’S PREMIUM The purchase price will be the sum of the final bid price (including any GST) plus a buyer’s premium set at 22% (plus GST) of the final bid price. Buyers may be liable for other charges reasonably incurred once ownership has passed. GOODS AND SERVICES TAX Buyers are required to pay a 10% G.S.T which sum is: a. included in the final bid prices where buying from a GST registered vendor; and b. included in any additional fees charged by Deutscher and Hackett; and c. added to the buyer’s premium. Where GST applies to some lots the final bid price will be inclusive of the applicable GST. A list of those lots is set out in the catalogue on page 158. If a buyer is classified as a “non-resident” for the purpose of GST, the buyer may be able to recover GST paid on the final purchase price if certain conditions are met. COLLECTION Lots paid for in full may be collected from Deutscher and Hackett premises the day after the auction occurs but lots paid for by cheque may not be collected until all funds have cleared. Proof of identification is required upon collection and lots not collected within seven days of the sale may incur costs associated with external storage and freight. LOSS OR DAMAGE Risk in the lot, including risk of loss or damage, will pass to the buyer on either the date payment is due, whether or not it has been made, or on collection by the buyer, whichever is earlier. The buyer is therefore encouraged to make arrangements to ensure comprehensive cover is maintained from the payment due date. TRANSPORT AND SHIPPING Deutscher and Hackett directly offers services including storage, hanging and display, appraisals and valuations, collection management and research and in all instances will endeavour to coordinate or advise upon shipping and handling, insurance, transport, framing and conservation at the request and expense of the client. Deutscher and Hackett does not accept liability for the acts or omissions of contracted third parties. EXPORT Prospective bidders are advised to enquire about export licences — including endangered species licences and cultural heritage permits, where relevant — prior to bidding at auction. Telephone the Cultural Property and Gifts Section, Museums Section, Ministry for the Arts, on 1800 819 461 for further information. The delay or denial of such a licence will not be grounds for a rescission of sale. COPYRIGHT The copyright in the images and illustrations contained in this catalogue may be owned by third parties and used under licence by Deutscher and Hackett. As between Deutscher and Hackett and the buyer, Deutscher and Hackett retains all rights in the images and illustrations. Deutscher and Hackett retains copyright in the text contained in this catalogue. The buyer must not reproduce or otherwise use the images, illustrations or text without prior written consent.
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The terms and conditions of business set forth below are subject to amendment by verbal or written notice prior to and during the auction and sale. They constitute the entire contractual agreement with the buyer in respect to any lot offered at auction. By bidding at auction in any manner compliant with bidding procedures, the buyer and all bidders agree to be bound by these terms and conditions and the terms of the prospective buyers and sellers guide contained in this catalogue, as amended. To the extent that an agent acts on behalf of the buyer, liability for obligations arising from these conditions of business will pass to the buyer. Multiple buyers are jointly and severally liable for obligations arising from this agreement. DEFINITIONS 1.
conditions of auction and sale ALL PARTIES ARE STRONGLY URGED TO READ THE CONDITIONS OF AUCTION AND SALE INCLUDED IN THIS CATALOGUE
Definition of terms: a. The ‘buyer’ refers to the party with the highest accepted bid for any lot at auction and/or such party’s principal where bidding as agent. b. The ‘vendor’ refers to the party consigning property for sale and/or such party’s principal where acting as agent. c. ‘Deutscher and Hackett’ refers to Deutscher and Hackett Pty Ltd ACN 123 119 022, its subsidiaries, officers, employees and agents. d. The ‘hammer price’ refers to the final bid price (including any GST) accepted by the auctioneer, or in the case of a post-auction sale, the agreed sale price (including any GST). e. The ‘buyer’s premium’ refers to the 22% charge (plus GST) payable by the buyer calculated as a percentage of the hammer price. f. ‘GST’ refers to the goods and services tax imposed by the A New Tax System (Goods and Services) Act 1999 as amended. g. The ‘lot’ refers to the item(s) described against any lot number in the catalogue. h. The ‘reserve’ refers to the minimum price (including any GST) the consignor will accept for a lot.
PRELIMINARY CONDITIONS AND DISCLAIMER 2. Agency: Deutscher and Hackett acts as agent for the vendor and the contract of sale for the lot will be between the buyer and the vendor. 3.
Property is sold ‘as is’: To the extent permitted by law: a. no guarantees, warranties or representations are made (express or implied) by Deutscher and Hackett or the vendor in relation to the nature and condition of any lot; and b. Deutscher and Hackett disclaims liability for any misrepresentations, errors or omissions, whether verbal or in writing, in the catalogue or any supplemental material. All factual information provided by the vendor is merely passed on by Deutscher and Hackett from the vendor or other source. Deutscher and Hackett has made no attempt to verify this information. All additional statements of opinion represent the specialist opinions of Deutscher and Hackett employees and should not be relied upon as statements of fact. 4. Responsibility to inspect: Responsibility remains with the buyer to satisfy its, his or her self by inspection and evaluation prior to purchase as to the nature and condition of any property. CONDITIONS AT AUCTION 5. Registration: Bidders must register to bid and obtain a bidder’s paddle prior to the commencement of the auction. Registration requires that bidders provide proof of identity and Deutscher and Hackett may impose other obligations on the registration of bidders in its discretion. 6. Auctioneer’s discretion: Deutscher and Hackett reserves the right to absolute discretion over the conduct of the auction including the regulation of bidding and its increments. This discretion extends to the challenge or rejection of any bid, the right to withdraw any lot and the right to determine the successful bidder or reoffer a lot in the event of a dispute. The prospective buyers and sellers guide details an indicative process for the conduct of auctions. All parties are strongly urged to read the prospective buyers and sellers guide included in this catalogue.
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7. Bidding: Deutscher and Hackett may sell each lot to the highest bidder at auction provided the reserve price has been met or where the net amount accounted to the vendor is at least equivalent to the net amount that would have been achieved for a sale at the reserve price. The fall of the auctioneer’s hammer marks the acceptance of the highest bid and the conclusion of a contract for sale between the vendor and the buyer. Unless otherwise agreed in writing with Deutscher and Hackett, the individual physically present at the auction who signals the bid accepts personal liability to pay the purchase price, including the buyer’s premium and all additional fees, taxes and charges. GOODS AND SERVICES TAX 8. Amounts inclusive of GST: Unless otherwise specified, all amounts specified in this section as payable by the buyer, or otherwise used to calculate payment to Deutscher and Hackett, are inclusive of any GST component. Deutscher and Hackett will provide buyers with a tax invoice that meets the requirements of the Australian Taxation Office. 9. Application of GST to buyers: Buyers are required to pay a 10% GST which sum is: a. included in the final bid prices where buying from a GST registered vendor (a list of lots consigned by GST Registered Entities is set out on page 158 of the catalogue); and b. included in any additional fees charged by Deutscher and Hackett; and c. added to the buyer’s premium. If a buyer is classified as a “non-resident” for the purpose of GST, the buyer may be able to recover GST paid on the final purchase price if certain conditions are met. POST-SALE CONDITONS 10. Post auction private sale: Should the lot fail to sell at auction, Deutscher and Hackett is authorised to sell the lot privately for a period of seven days in which event this agreement shall apply to the relevant buyer to the full extent of its provisions. 11. Payment: The buyer will not acquire title until payment has cleared in full. Interest at a rate of 17.5% p.a. will be charged over outstanding accounts where no extension of terms has been granted. Interest will be payable from the payment due date. With respect to each lot purchased, the buyer agrees to make the following payments within seven days from the date of sale: a. The hammer price. b. In exchange for ser vices rendered by Deutscher and Hacket t, a buyer’s premium calculated at 22% (plus GST) of the hammer price. c. Post sale packing, handling, shipping and storage where applicable. d. If payment is made via Visa, Mastercard or American Express, any merchant fees payable by Deutscher and Hackett on the transaction as indicated in the prospective buyers and sellers guide. Payment must be made within seven days of the date of sale in Australian dollars by cash, cheque, direct deposit, approved credit cards or electronic funds transfer using the form and/or trust account details provided at the back of this catalogue. In certain circumstances, extension of payment may be granted at the discretion of Deutscher and Hackett. Once funds have cleared, the proceeds of the sale less the buyer’s Premium, GST and any commission or costs charged as agreed will be remitted to the vendor within thirty-five days of the date of sale provided payment has been received in full. Funds will be held in an interest bearing account by Deutscher and Hackett until remitted to the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett will be entitled to any interest earned during this period. Application for a cultural heritage export licence or any other licence in no way affects the buyer’s obligation to make payment or collection within the periods specified in sections 10 and 13a. 12. Risk and Title: Risk in the lot, including risk of loss or damage, will pass to the buyer on the earlier of: a. the date payment is due, whether or not it has been made; and b. collection by the buyer. The buyer assumes risk for the property in all respects from this date and neither Deutscher and Hackett nor the vendor will be liable for loss or damage occurring after the payment due date. The buyer is encouraged to make arrangements to ensure comprehensive cover is maintained from this date. Title in the lot does not pass to the buyer, even if the lot is released to the buyer, until the buyer has paid all sums owing to Deutscher and Hackett. If a buyer makes a claim against Deutscher and Hackett for damage or loss after sale, the buyer’s premium and the final bid price shall be payable notwithstanding.
13. Freight: a. The buyer may only remove a lot from the Deutscher and Hackett premises once payment has been cleared in full and must be removed no later than seven days after the date of sale. Should items not be removed by this time, storage and insurance costs may be charged to the buyer. If a lot has not been collected within 30 days after the date of sale and alternative arrangements have not been with Deutscher and Hackett, the lot may be re-sold by Deutscher and Hackett without reserve at the next auction and Deutscher and Hackett may set off any amounts owed for storage and insurance costs and its standard commission before remitting the proceeds to the buyer. b. Buyers are required to make their own arrangements for packing, handling, shipping and transit insurance for their property. Deutscher and Hackett does not accept responsibility or liability for the acts or omissions of any third party, such as a shipping agent, whether or not such a party has been recommended or suggested by Deutscher and Hackett. 14. Limited Warranty of Authorship: If a buyer is able to establish that a lot is a forgery in accordance with these conditions for sale within five years of the date of sale, the buyer shall be entitled to rescind the sale and obtain a refund of the hammer price from the vendor. The buyer must return the lot in the state in which it was sold within fourteen days of notifying Deutscher and Hackett of the forgery allegations. For a lot to be established as a forgery, the following conditions must be satisfied: a. the buyer must supply two independent expert testimonies attesting to the forgery. Deutscher and Hackett is entitled to request further expert evidence where it deems the evidence provided to be unsatisfactory; b. there must be no conflict of opinion among accepted experts in the field; and c. the forgery must be able to be proven through means that at the time of publication of the catalogue were commonly employed and that will not damage or otherwise put the lot in jeopardy. The limited warranty and the right to rescind the sale is not assignable and the buyer must have retained title to the lot without disposing of any interest in it up until the buyer notifies Deutscher and Hackett of the forgery allegations. The buyer acknowledges that it has no rights directly against Deutscher and Hackett if a lot is established to be a forgery. 15. Termination, Breach and Legalities: a. Deutscher and Hackett breach: To the extent permitted by law, the sole and maximum remedy to a buyer for breach of warranty is a refund of original purchase price, including buyer’s premium. In such an event the sale contract shall be rescinded and all costs associated with returning the property (in the state in which it was sold) to the premises of Deutscher and Hackett are to be borne by the buyer. Deutscher and Hackett is not liable for any indirect or consequential loss or damage for any matter arising directly or indirectly as a result of the sale. b. Buyer breach: Deutscher and Hackett may, in addition to other remedies available by law, exercise one or more of the following rights or remedies for breach: i. Cancel the sale and retain any payment or property in Deutscher and Hackett custody as collateral or liquidated damages. ii. Charge the buyer interest at the rate of 2% above the rate fixed under section 2 of the Penalty Interest Rates Act 1984 (Vic). iii. Resell the property without reserve at the next auction or privately on five days notice. Any disparity between sale and resale prices, including associated costs such as, but not limited to, legal, storage and sale expenses, will be to the account of the defaulting buyer. iv. Apply any part payment received from the buyer in respect of any lots at its discretion. v. Retain any of the buyer’s property held by Deutscher and Hackett until the buyer has satisfied its obligations to Deutscher and Hackett. vi. Take any other action Deutscher and Hackett deems necessary or appropriate. vii. Refuse to permit the buyer to participate in future auctions. viii. Provide the vendor with the buyer’s details to permit the vendor to take action against the buyer to recover the money. 16. Governing law and jurisdiction: These terms and conditions and any matters concerned with the foregoing fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of the state in which the auction is held. 17. Severability: In the event that any provisions of this agreement should be found unenforceable in a court of law, that part shall be discounted and the remaining conditions shall continue in full force and effect to the extent permitted by law.
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COOL CLIMATE ART IN A BOTTLE. With its dramatic, cool climate, the breathtaking Tasmanian landscape is an artist’s dream and a sparkling winemaker’s paradise. This is Méthode Tasmanoise.
144 kwp!JAN10153
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Fine Art (Single issue) $45* Aboriginal Art single issue (Single issue) $45* Annual Fine Art Auctions (3 issues) $120* Annual Fine Art & Aboriginal Art Auctions (4 issues) $160*
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SALE CODE: FAIRFAX SALE NO.: 050 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN WORKS OF ART FROM THE ESTATE OF THE LATE JAMES O. FAIRFAX AC
(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)
Business name
Address
SYDNEY AUCTION 30 AUGUST, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 54 CELL BLOCK THEATRE NATIONAL ART SCHOOL, SYDNEY FORBES STREET DARLINGHURST NSW 2010
please email, post or fax this completed form to: DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 16 GOODHOPE STREET PADDINGTON NSW 2021
tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611
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ATTENDEE PRE-REGISTRATION FORM SALE CODE: FAIRFAX SALE NO.: 050 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN WORKS OF ART FROM THE ESTATE OF THE LATE JAMES O. FAIRFAX AC
(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)
Business name
Address
City
Telephone/Mobile
State
Post Code
SYDNEY AUCTION 30 AUGUST, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 54 CELL BLOCK THEATRE NATIONAL ART SCHOOL, SYDNEY FORBES STREET DARLINGHURST NSW 2010
please email, post or fax this completed form to: DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 16 GOODHOPE STREET PADDINGTON NSW 2021
tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611 info@deutscherandhackett.com we must receive buyer pre-registration forms at least 24 hours prior to the auction
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TELEPHONE BID FORM SALE CODE: FAIRFAX SALE NO.: 050 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN WORKS OF ART FROM THE ESTATE OF THE LATE JAMES O. FAIRFAX AC SYDNEY AUCTION 30 AUGUST, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 54 CELL BLOCK THEATRE NATIONAL ART SCHOOL, SYDNEY FORBES STREET DARLINGHURST NSW 2010
(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)
Billing address (PO Box insufficient)
Address
City
State
Post Code
1. 2. Telephone numbers for auction date in order of preference
Facsimile
Signature (required)
please email, post or fax this completed form to:
LOT NO.
Date
ARTIST/TITLE
COVER BID*
1.
DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 16 GOODHOPE STREET PADDINGTON NSW 2021
2.
tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611
4.
info@deutscherandhackett.com
5.
we must receive buyer pre-registration forms at least 24 hours prior to the auction
6.
3.
7. 8. 9. 10. *Not including buyer’s premium or GST (where applicable). Bids are made in Australian dollars INTERNAL USE ONLY RECEIVED BY
DATE
TIME
Please refer to the Guidelines for Potential Purchasers and Buyer’s Conditions in this catalogue for information regarding sales. By completing this form, I authorise DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT to contact me by telephone on the contact number(s) nominated. I understand it is my responsibility to enquire whether any Sale-Room Notices relate to any lot on which I intend to bid. I also understand that should my bid(s) be successful, a buyer’s premium of 22% (plus GST), as described in the Guide to Potential Purchasers and Buyer’s Conditions printed in this catalogue, will be added to the final hammer price. I accept that DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT provides this complimentary service as a courtesy to its clients, that there are inherent risks to telephone bidding, and I will not hold DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT responsible for any error.
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ABSENTEE BID FORM SALE CODE: FAIRFAX SALE NO.: 050 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN WORKS OF ART FROM THE ESTATE OF THE LATE JAMES O. FAIRFAX AC
(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)
Billing address (PO Box insufficient)
Address
City
State
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Facsimile
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Signature (required)
LOT NO.
Post Code
SYDNEY AUCTION 30 AUGUST, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 54 CELL BLOCK THEATRE NATIONAL ART SCHOOL, SYDNEY FORBES STREET DARLINGHURST NSW 2010
Date
ARTIST/TITLE
MAXIMUM BID*
1. 2. 3.
please email, post or fax this completed form to: DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 16 GOODHOPE STREET PADDINGTON NSW 2021
4.
tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611
5.
info@deutscherandhackett.com
6.
we must receive buyer pre-registration forms at least 24 hours prior to the auction
7. 8. 9. 10. *Not including buyer’s premium or GST (where applicable). Bids are made in Australian dollars 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 Guidelines for Potential Purchasers and Buyer’s Conditions in this catalogue for information regarding sales. By completing this form, absentee bidders request and authorise DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT to place the following bids acting as agent on their behalf up to and including the maximum bid specified. Lots will be bought at the lowest possible bid authorised by a bidder in absentia. Should the bid be successful, the buyer will be obliged to pay the final bid price plus buyer’s premium of 22% (plus GST) of the final bid price. DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT provides this complimentary service as a courtesy to clients and does not accept liability for errors and omissions in the execution of absentee bids.
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INTERNAL USE ONLY RECEIVED BY
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TIME
consigning now important australian + international fine art auction • november 2017 for appraisals please contact melbourne • 03 9865 6333 sydney • 02 9287 0600 info@deutscherandhackett.com www.deutscherandhackett.com
ARTHUR STREETON SETTLER'S CAMP, 1888 (detail) oil on canvas 86.5 x 112.5 cm EST: $1,000,000 – 1,500,000 Sold for $2,520,000 (inc. BP) May 2012, Sydney
DONORS ARE THE VERY LIFE BLOOD OF THE GALLERY
When you become a donor to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, you are keeping our collection alive with new and significant acquisitions. It is the loyalty and generosity of our donors that enable the Gallery to be consistently fresh and relevant. Donations are also tax deductible. If you are a lover of art, could there be anything more satisfying than giving to the Gallery? It’s a gesture that brings vitality to the heart of our arts culture, and reaches every part of the Gallery’s dynamic functioning body. Your contribution could assist in the restoration of an artwork, in the cost of a publication, the acquisition of a work or the development of an entire department. Supporting the Gallery is also an ideal way to mix with fellow art lovers. Donors are included in Gallery events and can choose to have their generosity publicly acknowledged or remain anonymous. Why not contact us for further information or to discuss your bequest in confidence, by phoning Jane Wynter, the Head of philanthropy on 02 9225 1818 or email jane.wynter@ag.nsw.gov.au
John Nixon Black and orange cross 1992, enamel on chipboard. Purchased with funds provided by the Rudy Komon Memorial Fund
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Christian Dior, Paris (fashion house) | Christian Dior (designer) Aventure ensemble, spring-summer 1948 haute couture collection Photo © Patrick Demarchelier/Licensed by Art+Commerce | Model: Sasha Pivovarova, IMG Models
PIPILOTTI RIST Sip my Ocean
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Muda Mathis & Pipilotti Rist, Japsen, 1988, video (still), image courtesy the artists, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine © Muda Mathis, Pipilotti Rist
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1 Nov — 18 Feb 2018
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ART GALLERY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA ADELAIDE
Immerse yourself in the epic saga of the Seven Sisters — a journey into the heart of Australia. Intrigue, desire, drama, passion and beauty ... connect with the songlines of the Seven Sisters. This Aboriginal-led exhibition shares an ancient way of holding culture and telling stories written in the land. See the stories embedded in rock art inside a state-of-the-art digital dome, or visit our vibrant art centre hub where artists create works you can take home. Don’t miss out — this exhibition is a journey like no other.
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15 SEPTEMBER 2017 TO 25 FEBRUARY 2018 National Museum of Australia, Canberra. Book now (costs apply). Visit nma.gov.au/songlines IMAGE Sarah Kenderdine, Peter Morse and Paul Bourke. Seven Sisters rock art with permission of Walinynga (Cave Hill) custodians. DomeLab is a research infrastructure project led by Professor Sarah Kenderdine, University of New South Wales, supported by the Australian Research Council. niea.unsw.edu.au/research/projects/domelab. Research for the Songlines project was partially funded by the Australian Research Council.
COPYRIGHT CREDITS Lot 5 Lot 6 Lot 7 Lot 9 Lot 18 Lot 19 Lot 20 Lot 24 Lot 25 Lot 26 Lot 27 Lot 28 Lot 31 Lot 34 Lot 35 Lot 36 Lot 40 Lot 42 Lot 43 Lot 44 Lot 47 Lot 49 Lot 50 Lot 52
© reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © The Sidney Nolan Trust / Bridgeman Images © The Sidney Nolan Trust / Bridgeman Images © courtesy of The Estate of Jeffrey Smart © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © courtesy of Helen Brack © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © Ken Whisson © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd © reproduced with the permission of VISCOPY Ltd
LOTS CONSIGNED BY GST REGISTERED ENTITIES Lot 2 Lot 5 Lot 10 Lot 11 Lot 12 Lot 14 Lot 15 Lot 17 Lot 18 Lot 19 Lot 23 Lot 24 Lot 25 Lot 26 Lot 28 Lot 29 Lot 32 Lot 33 Lot 36 Lot 37 Lot 53
Grace Cossington Smith Ian Fairweather Eugene von Guérard Tom Roberts Tom Roberts Walter Withers Arthur Streeton Rupert Bunny Sidney Nolan Sidney Nolan Justin O’Brien Fred Williams Fred Williams John Brack Lloyd Rees Lawrence Daws Roy de Maistre Roland Wakelin Margaret Preston Dorrit Black Walter Isaac Jenner
RESALE ROYALTY Some lots consigned for this sale may be subject to the Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Act 2009 (Cth). Any payments due under the obligations of the Act will be paid by the vendor.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Photography: Graham Baring Design: Sevenpoint Design © Published by Deutscher and Hackett Pty Ltd 2017 978-0-9953817-4-2
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index B BALSON, R. BLACK, D. BRACK, J. BUNNY, R. C CONDER, C. D DAWS, L. DE MAISTRE, R. DOBELL, W. DRYSDALE, R. F FAIRWEATHER, I. FRIEND, D.
8 37 26 17
13
29 1, 32, 48 49 – 50 4
5–6 43
H HAWKINS, W. HINDER, M.
39 46
J JENNER, W.I.
53
K KING, I. KLIPPEL, R.
45 47
L LANCELEY, C.
44
M McCUBBIN, F. MENPES, M. N NOLAN, S. O O’BRIEN, J. OLSEN, J. P PASSMORE, J. PERCEVAL, J. PRESTON, M. PROCTOR, T.
16 54
R REES, L. ROBERTS, T. ROBINSON, W.
27 – 28 11 – 12 30
S SMART, J. SMITH, G.C. STREETON, A.
20 2–3 15
T TUCKSON, T.
9, 40
18 – 19 V VON GUÉRARD, E. 21 – 23 7
41 42, 52 34 – 36 38
W WAKELIN, R. WHISSON, K. WILLIAMS, F. WILSON, E. WITHERS, W.
10
33 31 24 – 25 51 14
159
160