World of Antiques & Art Teaser 84 by World of Antiques & Art

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PHOTOGRAPHY: SEEING AND VISION Photojournalism in 1950s London Man Ray’s portraits

RESEARCH Rescued from obscurity the ornithological wonders of Neville Henry Cayley OBJECTS AS ART Mediaeval unicorn tapestries Jingdezhen porcelain Bejewelled cosmetic boxes ART THROUGH TIME AND SPACE Ice Age art and the modern mind Picasso’s early figure paintings The boundaries between painting and performance art

FEBRUARY – AUGUST 2013 ISSUE 84 AUSTRALIA $16.95 NZ $20.95 SINGAPORE $20.00 UK £7.00 US $13.00 €10.50

CONTENTS 118

AROUND THE AUCTIONS

EDITORIAL

110

The transformation of La Maison Basse

Auction highlights

HERITAGE ART 30

A sense of design: the art of A.B. Webb

Caia Hagel

Dr Dorothy Erickson 113 50

Resurrecting Stirling Castle’s mediaeval

The artist and the priest: Murillo and Justino de Neve

unicorn tapestries

Their remarkable 17th century partnership on show

Will Bennett ´

at Dulwich Picture Gallery Dr Xavier Bray 62

128

Ice Age art and the modern mind: exploring our artistic heritage from the earliest time to the present day Dr Jill Cook

INDEX OF ADVERTISERS PHOTOGRAPHY

Two Australian photojournalists David Moore and David Potts and their journey through 1950s London Gael Newton

Neville Henry Cayley lauded as the consummate bird artist in the 19th century rediscovered in the 21st century Dr Mark R Cabouret

Celebrating the photographic portraits of Man Ray The first European survey at the National Portrait

104

From the Hermitage to London: One of Britain’s greatest

Gallery, London

collection of Old Masters returns to Broughton Hall

Terence Pepper

Matilda Bathurst

REVIEWS 78

ARTNEWS

Expatriate art dealer Richard Nagy achieves a new threshold in the international market

A selection of international events to diarise

Terry Ingram 127

CONTRIBUTORS 38

The boundaries between painting and performance art at Tate Modern

DECORATIVE ARTS AND DESIGN 44

Matilda Bathurst

A major gift of Harvey School pottery Timothy Roberts

Picasso’s early figure paintings at the Courtauld Gallery Elspeth Moncrieff

China’s white gold: Jingdezhen porcelain Dr Victoria Avery

Bejewelled cosmetic boxes: crafted by jewellers and goldsmiths Amanda Stücklin

COVER David Potts (Australian 1926-2012), Epstein retrospective, Tate Gallery, 1953, gelatin silver photograph, printed image 37.2 x 27.2 cm, sheet 37.2 x 27.2 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1989

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THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN

PAINTING AND PERFORMANCE ART A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance is the Tate Modern’s attempt to impose a narrative on the disparate elements of post-war performance art

Matilda Bathurst or T.S. Eliot, a poet was a person who could somehow connect ‘the noise of the typewriter’ and ‘the smell of cooking’ — someone who could ingeniously compress degrees of separation to serve their own artistic ends. We must then be glad that so many Tate

Jack Smith, Untitled, c. 1958–1962, printed 2011 © Jack Smith Archive

curators are poets, wielding an almost superhuman force of connectivity, to provide curatorial narratives worthy of the raciest melodrama. Take, for instance, the sudden blossoming of the relationship between Hockney and Pollock in the Tate Modern’s current exhibition, Painting After Performance. The exhibition is well-tuned to contemporary enthusiasms and reservations about art. In 2012, the Turner Prize announced Spartacus

NEVILLE HENRY CAYLEY AUSTRALIA’S FORGOTTEN BUT BRILLIANT BIRD ARTIST During the 1880s and 1890s, Neville Cayley was lauded as the consummate ‘bird artist of Australia’

Mark R Cabouret orn on 29 May 1854 in the city of Norwich, England, the reasons for the immigration to Australia of Neville Henry Penniston Caley (as his surname was originally spelt) may never be known; however it is known that his prodigious skills were largely self-taught. In his relatively short life and the twenty-five year period during which he became the preeminent resident ornithological draughtsman in Australia, he accomplished more than any other single artist and, arguably, more than John Gould himself, in familiarising and enhancing an appreciation of Australian avifauna. Contemporary references to Cayley made many superlative statements about his work and described him as ‘Australia’s bird painter...’ (The Richmond River Times 22 March 1822) and ‘The most celebrated living bird painter...’ (The Argus 9 May 1894) Cayley grew up in privileged circumstances and his family epitomised the accomplishments and aspirations of the wealthy middle class. Natural history and related art, popular with the gentry at that time, may initially have been an amateur interest for him. On 21 July 1867, five months after his father’s death, Cayley wrote to his mother in anticipation of returning home from his private school to

Top: This is the first publication of the studio portrait photograph of Neville Henry Cayley, c. 1890. Author’s collection Above left: Good Jack Weeping (n.d.), watercolour drawing of a laughing kookaburra signed ‘N. Cayley’. Author’s collection Left: Letter from 15 year old Neville Henry Caley to his mother dated 21 July 1869

Norwich for the summer holiday, the last before leaving school. This is the only known document in which he signed his surname using the original spelling of ‘Caley’ rather than ‘Cayley’. Having explored the beautiful gardens surrounding his home, a short walk would have brought the youth to the shops and workrooms of some of the finest exponents of Victorian taxidermy and to the game dealers in the Norwich market place. Here he would have seen braces of game hanging like trophies from nails and pegs and masses of birds strewn across the wicker baskets and tables. No doubt these experiences left an indelible impression and inspired his vocation as an artist and naturalist, for whom field sports and the collection of specimens were an integral part. Cayley arrived in Australia aged 23 with his younger brother William Herbert on 20 September 1877 at the Port of Melbourne on the iron clipper Sir Walter Raleigh. Both were described in the shipping records as having ‘no occupation’. The first known reference to his change of surname (with the ‘y’ added) and being recognised as an artist appeared in the form of an advertisement placed in The Argus in Melbourne on Saturday, 5 April 1879 requesting him to contact an ‘artists’ colourman’ in Swanston Street. At this time he lived in the Gippsland area but unable to generate sufficient income, Cayley moved to Sydney in late 1880 seeking better income opportunities, where it was reported in The Bulletin on 8 January 1881: ‘... Mr Neville Cayley, an artist, who has settled in Sydney,

whose forté is animal subjects, has exhibited some capital sketches in water colours. He gives a faithful picture of many well-known and richly-plumaged birds of Australia.’ One of these paintings was almost certainly of that depicting two wild sulphur-crested cockatoos which he titled A Bush Lecture; the subject being explained in The Sydney Morning Herald on 29 January 1881 when the painting could be viewed at the establishment of Mr Clarke, a ‘picture dealer’ in Pitt Street. The reviewer interpreted this scene as one of a domestic dispute or more specifically a ‘curtain lecture’, a term more often applied to a wife’s reprimand to her husband for infidelity, but here, presumed to indicate the agitated state of a cuckolded husband. ‘... a couple of sulphur-crested cockatoos are perched on a bough, above a sea of tree tops. Monsieur, with his beak open, his crest up, and his feathers ruffled, is evidently administering a sharp curtain lecture to Madame, whose upturned eyes and deprecating attitude show that she has no defence to make. The figures are full of life, the treatment of the foliage is delicate, and the colouring is true, so that the picture is altogether a piquant little study.’ A further painting among some private commissions he obtained in Sydney and perhaps his second whimsical study was an intimate study of a pair of Welcome Swallows at their empty nest which is sheltered beneath the

Below left: A Bush Lecture, c.1880–1881, watercolour, diam: 20 cm. The Mitchell Library, State Library NSW Below: Pair of Welcome Swallows at their vacated nest, 1881, watercolour, 20.5 x 28 cm. Author’s collection

THE EARLY YEARS

BECOMING PICASSO In 1901, twenty-year old Pablo Picasso held his first Parisian exhibition, a momentous year in the artist’s early career

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Seated Harlequin, 1901, oil on canvas, 83.2 x 61.3 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), The Mother, 1901, oil on board, 74.0 x 52.1 cm. The Saint Louis Art Museum

Elspeth Moncrieff s cameo exhibitions go, they don’t come much better than this. Twenty superb paintings from one year of Picasso’s life illustrate his transformation from adapter and imitator of the French postimpressionists to a mature artist emerging into his ‘blue period’, exploring fundamental issues of the human condition. Looking at these works, it seems as if Picasso burst onto the scene as a fully-fledged artist with no fumbling juvenile period. The list of lenders to the show includes some of the great art institutions of the world, although interestingly many of these early works are also still held in private collections. Had Picasso died in 1901, he would have been remembered as a precocious interpreter of the post-impressionist idiom who took elements of the style and made it his own, borrowing and adapting with consummate fluency. The exhibition’s curator estimates that Picasso painted about 300 paintings in a single year. One is literally dumbstruck at this extraordinary artistic outpouring and the range of works he painted. When could he have slept? Especially when his painting was combined with a hard drinking Bohemian lifestyle in the Montmartre cafés. He arrived back in Paris from Barcelona in May of that year, only two months before his first exhibition with Ambroise Vollard and painted some sixty paintings in the space of six weeks, often as many as three in a day. His subjects covered the whole of Parisian life, adapting and assimilating the work of the postimpressionists. But this was not enough for the young Picasso. Throughout his life he conquered an artistic summit only to move on into the next phase of his development, paintings like the Harlequin, The Mother or Absinthe Drinker are still considered some of the most profound and haunting works the artist ever painted, stemming from his deepest convictions. The show focuses only on the figure paintings; its starting point is the Child with a Dove, the only Picasso once owned by Samuel Courtauld

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Child With A Dove, 1901, oil on canvas, 73 x 54 cm. Courtauld Institute

FROM THE MEDIEVAL TO

THE MODERN THE ART OF TAPESTRY WEAVING It has taken twelve years to weave a new set of medieval unicorn tapestries, once the finest part of the sumptuous Renaissance furnishings of Stirling Castle in Scotland

Above: Tapestry, Stirling Castle: The Unicorn is Found, 2008, wool, cotton and gold thread, 330 x 340cm ÂŠ Crown Copyright reproduced courtesy of Historic Scotland

World of Antiques & Art 113

Will Bennett apestries played an important role in the royal courts of medieval Europe. These intricately woven wall hangings were prized for their beauty but they were fabulously expensive because of the time that they took to make and the materials used. Tapestries became a way for a monarch to demonstrate wealth and power and so it is not surprising that James V, King of Scotland from 1513–1542, ordered the best when he built the Royal Palace in Stirling Castle to mark his marriage to his second wife Mary of Guise. The Scottish monarch wanted his newest residence to be as fine as any she would have known in her much wealthier home country of France. The palace was designed to display James V’s learning and sophistication as well as asserting his right to rule and impress his new Queen. Its elaborate decorative scheme, inside and out, was inspired by the Renaissance and the interiors and exteriors were painted in bright colours decorated with plenty of gilding. Arranged around a courtyard known as the Lion’s Den, the palace had separate apartments for James and Mary, each with an outer hall, an inner hall and a bedchamber. Access to these rooms was restricted according to the importance of visitors and the degree of royal privilege accorded to them.

The Queen’s Inner Hall in the Royal Apartments at Stirling Castle © Crown Copyright, reproduced courtesy of Historic Scotland

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Above: Mary of Guise altarpiece triptych, oil and tempera on panel, 81.5 x 120 cm © Crown Copyright reproduced courtesy of Historic Scotland Left: Mary of Guise prayer table and triptych © Crown Copyright, reproduced courtesy of Historic Scotland These pieces will be among a number of other works from Stirling Castle in the exhibition

Chair of State and bed in the Queen’s Bedchamber at Stirling Castle © Crown Copyright, reproduced courtesy of Historic Scotland.

David Moore, Henry Moore in his Much Hadham studio, c. 1955 gelatin silver photograph

TWO AUSTRALIAN PHOTOJOURNALISTS

THEIR JOURNEY THROUGH 1950s LONDON The many aspirations and influences on young Australian photojournalists are exemplified in the experiences of iconic photographers David Moore and David Potts

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Above: David Moore, Sisters of Charity, Washington DC, 1956, gelatin silver photograph Above right: David Moore, Surry Hills, 1948 Right: David Potts, The Three Graces, Epstein Retrospective, Tate Gallery London, 1954, gelatin silver photograph

Gael Newton n the nineteenth century ‘Australian’ photographers were usually British immigrants or from the legion of itinerant young men circling the globe in search of camera trade. A generation of native-born photographers emerged in the 1890s and would dominate the profession by World War I. Images of Australia were, of course, exported in their hundreds of thousands from the 1850s on, often to lure immigrants and investors, but few locally-trained photographers departed to conquer the old world. Debonair Melbourne-born professional H. Walter Barnett (1862–1934) was exceptional in seeking training in American studios in the mid1880s, but more so for parlaying his success in several Australian studios into a rapid rise as a high society portraitist and socialite in London from 1897 to 1920.

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