important women artists part I

(1898 – 1992, English/Canadian) SPEEDWAY, 1934 colour linocut 32.5 x 23.5 cm (image) 36.5 x 27.0 cm (sheet) edition: TP 4/5 aside from an edition of 60 signed, numbered and inscribed with title lower right: “Speedway” T. P. 4 / Sybil Andrews

ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

Colour Prints, Redfern Gallery, London, 12 July – 4 August 1934, cat. 21 (another example) Exhibition of Lino Cuts from the Redfern Gallery, London, Baillieu Allard’s Gallery, Melbourne, 7 – 18 September 1937, cat. 51 (another example) Claude Flight and His Followers. Colour Linocut Movement between the Wars, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 18 April – 12 July 1992, and touring, cat. 10 (another example) Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914–1939, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 30 January – 1 June 2008 (another example) Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking, Dulwich Picture Gallery, United Kingdom, 19 June – 8 September 2019 (another example) Sybil Andrews. Art and Life, Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Canada, 19 October 2019 – 12 January 2020 (another example)

LITERATURE

White, P., Sybil Andrews: Colour Linocuts/Linogravures en couleur, Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Canada, 1982, cat. 29, pp. 37, 57 (illus., another example) Coppel, S., Linocuts of the Machine Age – Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School, Scolar Press and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1995, cat. SA 29, pp. 55, 56 (illus. front cover, another example), 114 (illus.) Durrant, N., ‘The artists who printed the modern world — Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking at Dulwich Picture Gallery’, The Times, London, 18 June 2019 (illus., another example) Samuel, G., Cutting Edge: Modernist British Print Making, Philip Wilson Publishers, London, 2019, pp. 46, 133, 140 (illus., another example)

RELATED WORK

Other examples of this print are held in the Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Canada. The four original linocut blocks are held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, partial gift of Johanna and Leslie Garfield.

(1890 – 1947) THE RAIN CLOUD, 1931 colour linocut 20.5 x 26.0 cm (image) 24.5 x 29.5 cm (sheet) edition: 13/30 signed, dated, titled and numbered below image: The Rain Cloud. 13/30. E. L. Spowers - 1931 -

ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE

Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

Exhibition of ... Progressive Art, Modern Art Centre, Sydney, 1 March – 1 April 1932, cat. 40 (another example) Exhibition of Linocuts, Everyman’s Lending Library, Melbourne, 5 – 16 April 1932, cat. 18 (another example) Gladys Owen and Ethel Spowers, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 6 December 1932, cat. 9 (another example) Exhibition of Colour Prints and Water Colours by Ethel Spowers, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 10 –25 July 1936, cat. 4 (another example)

LITERATURE

‘Gladys Owen and Ethel Spowers. Lino–cuts, Wood–cuts, and Water Colours’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 December 1932, p. 4 (as ‘The Raincloud’) Coppel, S., Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School, Scolar Press, Aldershot, in assoc. National Gallery of Australia, 1995, cat. ES16, p. 171 (illus., another example)

RELATED WORKS

Another example of this print is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

(1875 – 1963) AUSTRALIAN GUM BLOSSOMS, 1928 hand-coloured woodcut 27.5 x 26.5 cm (image) 33.0 x 27.5 cm (sheet) edition: 26th proof signed with initials in image, lower centre: M.P. signed, numbered and inscribed with title below image: 26 Proof Gumblossom Margaret Preston

ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Melbourne Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 5 November 1986, lot 1339 Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in May 2004

EXHIBITED

Christmas Exhibition of Batik and Woodcuts, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, December 1928 (as ‘Gum Blossoms’) Exhibition by Leading Members of the Australian Society of Artists, Fine Arts Salon, Wellington, New Zealand, 4 July – 2 August 1930, cat. 13 (as ‘Gum blossom’, another example) Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 December 1985 – 9 February 1986, cat. P19 (as ‘Gum blossom c.1928’, another example) Margaret Preston in Mosman, Mosman Art Gallery, 7 September – 13 October 2002 (another example, illus. in exhibition catalogue, as ‘Gum blossom’) Australian Art: Collector’s List No. 109, Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney, 26 May – 3 July 2004, cat. 84 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, as ‘Gum Blossoms’) Margaret Preston retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 29 July – 23 October 2005; and touring (another example, as ‘Gum blossom’)

LITERATURE

Art in Australia, 3rd Series, no. 26, December 1928, p. 121 (illus., another example) The Home: an Australian quarterly, Sydney, Issue 9, no. 12, December 1928, pp. 24 – 25 (illus., another example) The Home: an Australian quarterly, Sydney, Issue 13, no. 12, December 1932, p. 84 (illus., another example, as ‘Gum Blossom’) Radford, R. (ed.), Outlines of Australian Printmaking: Prints of Australian from the Last Third of the 18th Century until the Present Time, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Ballarat, 1976, n.p. Butel, E., Margaret Preston. The Art of Constant Rearrangement, Penguin Books and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1985, cat. P.19, p. 88, (illus. cover, another example) Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: a catalogue raisonné, Australian National Gallery, Canberra and Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987, cat. 124, p. 135 (illus., another example) Lebovic, J., Australian women printmakers, Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney, 1988, cat.94a, pp. 2, 12 Edwards, D., Peel, R. and Mimmocchi, D., Margaret Preston, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, pp. 88 (illus., another example), 127, 286

RELATED WORK

Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria

(1875 – 1963) AUSTRALIAN NATIVE PEAR, ETC, 1942 oil on composition board 50.0 x 40.0 cm signed and dated lower right: M. PRESTON / 1942

ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE

David Jones Gallery, Sydney Dr Lotte A Fink, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1942 Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney Estate of the above, Sydney

EXHIBITED

Contemporary Art Society, Fourth Annual Exhibition, David Jones Gallery, Sydney, 8 September 1942, cat. 92 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 (label attached verso)

LITERATURE

Edwards, D., Peel, R. and Mimmocchi, D., Margaret Preston, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, pp. 206 (illus.), 210, 284 Margaret Preston Catalogue Raisonné of paintings, monotypes and ceramics, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, CD-ROM compiled by Mimmocchi, D., with Edwards, D., and Peel, R. no. 1942.3

Australian native pear, 1942, belongs to a suite of paintings by Margaret Preston that are amongst her most challenging. These include: The brown pot, 1940 (Art Gallery of New South Wales); Still life – Australian (or Aboriginal still life), 1940 (Queensland Art Gallery), and Aboriginal landscape, 1941 (Yale University, Connecticut), all of which incorporate a ‘subdued, simple and severe’ palette drawn from Indigenous Australian art.1 Preston truly believed that an authentically Australian art could only be attained after first understanding and respecting the connection that Indigenous art has with country. In the 1920s and 30s, Preston’s fervent advocacy ‘was not only radically ahead of her time, but involved a personal evolution for the artist.’2 Her first essay on Indigenous art was published in 1925, and her appreciation deepened during 1932-39, when she lived in the bushland adjacent to Ku-ringgai Chase National Park, on Darug lands north of Sydney.3 In the early 1940s, she undertook extended journeys across northern Australia visiting galleries of rock art and paintings.

It is important to clarify, however, that no matter how passionate and sincere Preston was, she was still appropriating the source material to her own ends. This strategy fell within the legacy of European modernists’ unprecedented interest in ‘primitive’ cultures, whose art was seen as ‘synonymous with authentic experience.’4 Preston assumed, somewhat naively, that she would be able to ‘transcend cultural differences and that her values were not complicitly involved in the destruction of Aboriginal culture.’5 Conversely, her involvement as advisor to such projects as the Exhibition of Australian Aboriginal art and its application, organised by the by the Australian Museum and held at the David Jones Gallery in Sydney in 1941, demonstrated her sincere dedication to spreading a wider understanding and appreciation.

In Australian native pear, Preston has reduced her palette so dramatically that the background of table and wall are rendered solely in brown. Through this tactic, she sought to emulate the ‘above’ view of indigenous painters, as if working flat on the ground as opposed to the easel; and the flash of white to the right is the only suggestion of depth of field. Understood this way, the pear and the seed pods appear to float above an indeterminate space punctuated by ‘dot and cycle’ motifs from Central Australia.6 Preston also experimented with her own earth pigments that she had sourced in the Northern Territory, warming the yellow ochre before grinding to enrich the colour.7

1. Margaret Preston, 1945 cited in Edwards, D., ‘Margaret Preston’, Know my name, National

Gallery of Australia, 2021, p. 300 2. Edwards, D., Australian Collection Focus series no. 11: Margaret Preston, exhibition catalogue,

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002, p. 9 3. See Preston, M., ‘The Indigenous art of Australia’, Art in Australia, 3rd series, no. 11, March 1925, n.p. 4. Edwards, D., 2002, ibid., p. 3 5. Ann Stephen, 1980 cited in Edwards, D., Peel, R. and Mimmocchi, D., Margaret Preston, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, p. 10 6. See ibid., p. 210. The seed pods are from either a Queensland Bottle tree or Kurrajong. 7. See ibid., p. 187

ANDREW GAYNOR

(1911 – 2003) STILL LIFE STUDY, 1931 oil on canvas 51.0 x 61.0 cm signed and dated lower right: NORA. HEYSEN. 1931. bears inscription verso: no. 40

ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE

Stephen Robert Delmont, Adelaide, acquired directly from the artist, c.1931 Thence by descent Private collection, Adelaide Thence by descent Private collection, Adelaide

EXHIBITED

Autumn Exhibition of Paintings and Craftwork, S. A. Society of Arts, Adelaide, 23 April – 9 May 1931, cat. 64 (label attached verso, as ‘A Study’) Nora Heysen, Society of Artists Gallery, Adelaide, 6 December 1933, cat. 41

LITERATURE

‘Society of Arts’, The Advertiser and Register, Adelaide, 23 April 1931, p. 11 (as ‘A Study’) ‘Fine Still Life Studies’, The Advertiser, Adelaide, 6 December 1933, p. 12 Cameron Wilson, S., From Shadow into Light. South Australian Women Artists Since Colonisation, Pagel Production, Adelaide, 1988, pl. 80, p. 62 (illus., as ‘Still Life’)

RELATED WORK

A Study, 1931, oil on canvas, 47.5 x 53.0 cm, Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth

Painted when Nora Heysen was about twenty years old, Still Life Study, 1931 is a work of outstanding quality. Reflecting gifts inherited from her renowned father, Hans Heysen, who had a very formative influence on his talented daughter, it asserts her early rights to be honoured as one of Australia’s finest still-life artists. In a letter to Lionel Lindsay in 1927 Hans proudly announced: ‘we have another artist in the family!’1 Commenting on her ‘remarkable aptitude’, he wrote: ‘[she] can paint a very fair still life – true in tone values with a nice sense of colour in light’.2

For Nora, the thirties were a decade of extraordinary achievement. She won the South Australian Society of Arts Prize for Still Life in 1930, and the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales purchased her Petunias, 1930 from the annual exhibition of the Society of Artists, Sydney. It was her first work to enter a public collection. Two years later, Howard Hinton, the perceptive and generous art patron, gave the Sydney gallery her self portrait of 1932. His gifts to Armidale, now in the New England Regional Art Museum, included Heysen’s Still Life, 1933, gifted in 1933, and Eggs, 1927 in 1934. Moreover, the Queensland Art Gallery acquired its first Heysen in 1931, the still life A Mixed Bunch, 1930.

Aged just twenty-two, Nora held her first solo exhibition in 1933 at the South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide. A sell-out, it included thirty still lifes, our painting among them. That same year she was awarded the Melrose Prize for Portraiture with Ruth, purchased soon after by the Art Gallery of South Australia, as well as the flower piece, Scabious, 1930. After some years of further study in London, Heysen returned to Australia in 1937. To top off the decade, in 1938 she became the first women to win the Archibald Prize with her portrait of Madame Elink Schuurman.

Still Life Study, 1931 is a major work from these early years. A companion painting, A Study, 1931, is in the prestigious Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth. Both are powerfully painted in a tonal realist style. Eye-catching form is developed through tone and light, which, in turn, highlights the textures. Smooth eggshells contrast with crumbly bread and crisp lettuce (in our painting only) and shiny glass surfaces. Red seals on elegantly inclined Benedictine bottles top traditional triangular compositions. When Still Life Study, 1931 was exhibited in Heysen’s solo show of 1933, the critic for the Adelaide Advertiser praised her still lifes, especially those portraying vegetables: ‘“Onions,” “Red Cabbage,” and “Still Life Study” are perfect in draughtsmanship and colour, especially the study of an ordinary loaf of bread, a few eggs and a lettuce!’3 Brightly lit from the left, Still Life Study, 1931 has a heightened sense of reality, clarity and stillness that is arresting. Nevertheless, the everyday objects of bread, cheese and eggs evoke domesticity - familiar produce from the kitchen and grounds of the Heysen home, ‘The Cedars’, in the Adelaide Hills outside Hahndorf, where Nora spent her early years.

1. Thiele, C., Heysen of Hahndorf, David Heysen Productions, revised edition, Adelaide, 2001, p. 221 2. Ibid 3. ‘Fine Still Life Studies’, The Advertiser, Adelaide, 6 December 1933, p. 12

DAVID THOMAS

Right: Portrait of Nora Heysen at work, 9th March,1939 Photographer: Harold Cazneaux (1878 – 1953) Silver gelatin photograph National Library of Australia, Canberra

(1882 – 1968) (CARTS IN EAGLE STREET), c.1913 oil on board 39.5 x 49.5 cm signed lower right: F. V. LAHEY

ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE

Possibly: James Herbert Forrest, Charters Towers, Queensland Thence by descent The estate of Michael Forrest, Melbourne E. J. Ainger Pty Ltd, Melbourne, 1 August 2021, lot 242 (as ‘European Street Scene with Horses’) Company collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

probably: Exhibition of Paintings, Empire Chambers, Brisbane, 13 – 18 October 1924, cat. 6 (as ‘The banyan trees, Eagle street’)

RELATED WORK

The Carter’s Rest, Eagle Street, 1913, watercolour on paper, 33.0 x 42.0 cm, Exhibition of Paintings, Empire Chambers, Brisbane, 13 – 18 October 1924, cat. 12, in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane The carter’s resting place, oil on board, 20.5 x 20.5 cm, Oil and Watercolours by Vida Lahey, Athenaeum Hall, Melbourne, 29 September – 10 October 1925, cat. 31, Private collection

At the junction of Creek and Eagle streets in Brisbane, a group of horsedrawn carts take shelter from the heat of the Queensland sun. Despite the suggested tranquility, this urban island, captured by Vida Lahey in (Carts in Eagle Street), c.1913, was only fifty metres from the bustling commercial hub of wharves and warehouses located on the banks of the Brisbane River. Here, ‘draymen and cabmen ... waited at the reserve for hire (as did) waterside workers who waited at ‘The Triangle’ each morning to be hired as day-labourers.’1 Visible at the centre of the composition are wooden sheds containing public urinals for the men’s convenience (later removed in the 1970s) and to the right, just out of view, was a water fountain set up for the horses and workers which survived at the site until the Second World War. At the rear is the ‘old’ Dalgetty Building (1883 – 84), and presiding over the whole scene is a majestic Banyan fig tree and two figs planted in the 1870s by Walter Hill, superintendent of the nearby City Botanic Gardens. Due to their prominence, it is possible that this work is actually The banyan trees, Eagle Street, exhibited in the artist’s solo exhibition in 1924. Eagle Street was once Brisbane’s ‘most romantic street’, full of picturesque maritime personalities who populated the ‘shabby, friendly quays and lanes that debouch on the river.’2 In (Carts in Eagle Street), Vida Lahey set up her easel on The Triangle’s third boundary of Elizabeth Street, from which she also painted The carter’s rest, Eagle Street, 1913, now in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.3 Initially trained at the Brisbane Central Technical College under Godfrey Rivers, Lahey moved to Melbourne in 1905 to study at the National Gallery Art School under Frederick McCubbin and Bernard Hall. She attracted public notice two years later when she was awarded first prize for still life in the landmark First Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work held at the Royal Exhibition Building in 1907. She subsequently returned to Brisbane and by the time she painted (Carts in Eagle Street), Lahey was already noted for her empathetic portrayal of workers, both domestic and commercial, through such works as Monday morning, 1912, a powerful portrait of two women laboring in her family’s laundry. Gifted that same year to the Queensland Art Gallery, this life-size painting quickly became one of the most popular works in the collection. However, little of Lahey’s output prior to these years survives due to a fire which burnt her studio down in 1912 with all her paintings.4

As such, (Carts in Eagle Street) marks a renewal of practice for the artist. During the Great War, she based herself in London, and studied further in England and France. On her return, Lahey was peripatetic for some years with periods in Hobart, Melbourne and Sydney before finally re-settling in Brisbane in 1929. She would return to painting images of the rapidly changing city, particularly for a solo exhibition in 1932 (see lot 7), but the number of surviving pre-war works that have survived is few. Inevitably, the drowsy ambience of this scene is long gone, overtaken by the increasing use of motor-driven transport which eventually supplanted the ranks of horse-drawn carts. Today, only the heritage-listed Banyan tree and its White Fig companions remain.

1. East, J. W., ‘The lost heritage of Eagle Street: a case study of the commercial architecture of Brisbane 1860-1930, 2019, p. 16 at www.espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_733239 (viewed 17.09.21) 2. ‘Growing City. Romance and Adventure: Street of Adventure’, Courier-Mail, Brisbane, 26 September 1933, p. 12 3. The carter’s rest, Eagle Street is incorrectly described on the Queensland Art Gallery’s website as being on the corner of Eagle and Queen’s streets, which is approximately 100 metres further north and features the Moonie Memorial fountain (extant). 4. See Lloyd Rees, 1988, cited in MacAulay, B, Songs of Colour: The art of Vida Lahey, exhibition catalogue, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1989, p. 38

ANDREW GAYNOR

(1882 – 1968) EARLY MORNING, BRISBANE RIVER, 1932 oil on canvas on board 51.5 x 76.5 cm signed and dated lower right: V. LAHEY 32

ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE

The Canberra Gallery, Brisbane Dr Thomas Montagu Mansfield, Brisbane Thence by descent Sally, Lady Croft, Armidale, New South Wales Thence by descent Private collection, New South Wales

EXHIBITED

Exhibition of Paintings by Vida Lahey, Fine Art Society’s Gallery, Melbourne, 19 – 31 October 1932, cat. 2 Vida Lahey: Exhibition of Paintings of Brisbane and of Other Things, Union Trustee Chambers, Brisbane, 20 May – 3 June 1936, cat. 16 (as ‘Early Morning’) Exhibition of Paintings by Vida Lahey: Exhibition of Paintings, The Canberra Gallery, Canberra Hotel, Brisbane, 9 – 25 November 1944, cat. 16

LITERATURE

‘Young, B., ‘Great colourist: the art of Miss Vida Lahey’, The Herald, Melbourne, 18 October 1932, p. 1 Herbert, H., ‘A Brisbane Artist’, The Age, Melbourne, 19 October 1932, p. 11 ‘Vida Lahey’s Art’, The Brisbane Courier, Brisbane, 22 October 1932, p. 14 ‘Vida Lahey’s Art’, The Telegraph, Brisbane, 20 May 1936, p. 7 ‘Fine Work in 1-Woman Show’, The Telegraph, Brisbane, 8 November 1944, p. 8 MacAulay, B., Supplement to Songs of Colour. The Art of Vida Lahey, Works Located to 1989, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1989, pp. 9, 34, 37, 40

We are grateful to Joanna Bosse, Curator and her colleagues at Bayside Gallery for their assistance with this catalogue entry.

Vida Lahey’s exhibition at the Fine Arts Society’s Gallery in Melbourne in 1932 featured seventeen oil paintings, the second largest of which was Early morning, Brisbane River, 1932. It was an immediate hit with the critics. Harold Herbert, writing for The Age, considered the painting to be an oil of ‘high order ... an admirably painted stretch of land and blue water, spacey in conception, and simple yet convincing in treatment.’1 Blamire Young, in his review for The Herald, described Lahey as a ‘great colourist’, and that her evocation of the early morning riverscape was marked by its ‘pure light and the hush of dawn.’2 Arthur Streeton was also an admirer of the ‘fine qualities of light and air’ in her work,3 as was George Bell who considered her to be ‘an artist of consummate taste, an exquisite sense of colour, and a fine sense of composition.’4

Lahey was not only a celebrated artist; she was also a noted author, educator and arts advocate, conferred a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1958 for her services to culture and the arts in Queensland. An early talent, she was awarded first prize for landscape by the Australian Natives’ Association, Brisbane in 1903, before she moved to Melbourne to commence formal studies at the National Gallery Art School in 1905. Two years later, whilst still a student, she won first prize for still life in the landmark First Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work held at the Exhibition Building. However, it was the painting Monday morning, 1912, which really launched her career, a powerful study of two young women labouring in the Lahey family’s household laundry. It entered the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery that same year. The outbreak of war saw her travel to London and at its conclusion, she took classes in Paris in 1919, first at the Académie Calorossi, then with Ethel Carrick Fox; and in St. Ives the following year with New Zealand artist Frances Hodgkins. The 1920s saw further travels through Europe before Lahey settled permanently in Queensland in 1929.

In Early morning, Brisbane River, 1932, the artist captures a sparkling image of an urban river landscape in its heyday. To the right can be seen the old Naval Stores which still stand on the site of a former quarry, the scars of which are evident in the adjacent cliffs. Across the water lies a glimpse of the Brisbane City Botanic Gardens buttressing the former Eagle Street wharves, one of the city’s busiest locations in the 1930s (see lot 6). Characterised by its ‘picturesque personality of salt seas and sailor men’,5 Eagle Street’s row of low sheds marked the locations of Raff’s Wharf, Newton’s Wharf and Barkers Wharf. Presiding over these was a streetscape of multi-storey warehouses once described as being ‘probably, as a group, the best in Brisbane.’6 These architectural symbols of trade and prosperity included Harpers Building (1889); the Mutual Life Association of Australasia (1888); and Parbury’s (1912); with the tallest and newest being the Orient Steam Navigation Company headquarters (1930). Sadly, all were swept away by building booms in the 1960s and early 1980s.

1. Herbert, H., ‘A Brisbane artist: The art of Vida Lahey’, The Age, 19 October 1932, p. 11 2. Young, B., ‘Great colourist: the art of Miss Vida Lahey’, The Herald, Melbourne, 18 October 1932, p. 1 3. Streeton, A., ‘Miss Vida Lahey’s art: oils and watercolours. Distinguished flower painting’,

Argus, Melbourne, 19 October 1932, p. 5 4. George Bell. Quoted on catalogue for: Vida Lahey: Exhibition of Paintings of Brisbane and of Other Things, Union Trustee Chambers, Brisbane, 1936 5. ‘Growing City. Romance and Adventure: Street of Adventure’, Courier-Mail, Brisbane, 26 September 1933, p. 12 6. ‘Real Estate. Queensland Trustees: Building extensions’, The Daily Mail, Brisbane, 14 October 1924, p. 14

ANDREW GAYNOR

Vida Lahey profiled (centre front) ‘Women who are prominent in Brisbane’s Art World’, The Telegraph, 8 July 1934. John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane

(1887 – 1935) THE TAN, SOUTH YARRA, c.1925 oil on board 34.5 x 45.5 cm signed lower right: C. Beckett

ESTIMATE $80,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE

Rosalind Hollinrake Galleries, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above c.1979 Thence by descent Christie’s, Sydney, 17 August 1999, lot 4 Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 27 February – 23 May 2021

LITERATURE

Lock, T., Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2021, pp. 74, 200 (illus.)

RELATED WORK

Yellow Leaves, Alexandra Avenue, 1925, 29.0 x 39.5 cm, private collection, illus. in Hollinrake, R., Clarice Beckett: Politically Incorrect, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1999, pl. 14, cat. 10, pp. 44, 75

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

The Tan is a path that runs the circumference of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne. It was marked out in the early 1900s as a tanbark horse-riding track – hence the name – but by 1960, the rising costs of stabling and feeding horses near to the city meant that trainers went elsewhere.1 Over the next decades, it was transformed into its contemporary version resounding to the pounding feet of joggers marking time on digital clocks. In The Tan, South Yarra, c.1925, Clarice Beckett stood at a position on Linlithgow Avenue, adjacent to what is now the Myer Music Bowl, looking down the gentle incline to the curve that takes the track through to Alexandra Avenue. Painted on a commercial card support known as ’Beaver board’, the original study would have been executed on the spot, later finished into this consummate whole at the kitchen table of the Beckett family home in Beaumaris.

Beckett showed early talent and trained at the National Gallery Art School for three years from 1914. Following this, she studied for nine months under the controversial artist-theorist Max Meldrum who had developed his own ‘science of optics’ based on tonal values and proportion, which ultimately ‘facilitated an aesthetic shift in Australian art, away from a celebratory impressionist ‘glare’ to a vaporous ‘haze.’’2 Over time, however, Beckett’s subsequent life story has become shrouded in almost mythic proportions of tragedy leading to a range of misinterpretations. One error is that due to her duties as carer to elderly parents, she was only able to paint in the early morning or evening when such work was completed; but as Tracy Lock points out in her catalogue for the recent exhibition Clarice Beckett: the present moment (Art Gallery of South Australia), these restrictions only became intrusive during the last few years of her life. Prior to this, she had the relative freedom to roam in search of subjects, and the city was a favourite location.3

Beckett also had a deep understanding of Theosophy and in her paintings, the viewer is subtly aware of the artist herself, standing just out of frame, absorbing the scene in front of her and seeking its underlying spiritual pulse. The blossoming tree to the left in The Tan, South Yarra, and the long coats worn in spite of sunlit patches, indicate that she has captured an early spring day in this warmly inviting view. The painting also reveals Beckett’s skill in composition with its parallel rows of trees creating a vertical emphasis that establishes ‘a frame within a frame’. She utilised the same device in a number of works from the late 1920s, including Beach Road after the rain, c.1927 (National Gallery of Victoria), and Motorbike and sidecar, c.1928 (Warrnambool Art Gallery). After years of neglect, Beckett’s reputation has slowly been re-established in recent decades with the realisation now that she is one of the most significant Australian modernists of her day.

1. See ‘News of the Day’, The Age, Melbourne, 1 February 1960. An alternate source for the name may be an abbreviation of the BoTANical Gardens. 2. Lock, T., Clarice Beckett: The present moment, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2021, p. 158 3. Ibid., p. 138

ANDREW GAYNOR

Right: Clarice Beckett painting in the garden at Beaumaris, c. early 1930s reproduced from Clarice Beckett, the Artist and her Circle by Rosalind Hollinrake

(1887 – 1935) VIEW ACROSS THE YARRA TOWARDS GOVERNMENT HOUSE, c.1931 oil on board 25.5 x 35.5 cm signed lower left: C. Beckett framer’s label attached verso: John Thallon, Melbourne

ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 31 March 1982, lot 840 (as ‘Late Evening on the Yarra’) Private collection, Melbourne

RELATED WORKS

Across the Yarra, c.1931, oil on cardboard, 32.5 x 46.0 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

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

Clarice Beckett’s View across the Yarra to Government House, c.1931, joins other comparable pieces by the artist that reflect her ongoing fascination with the ebb and flow of life in Melbourne by the Yarra River. The exact position of this painting is easy to identity even now, clearly being captured by Beckett from near the Morrell Bridge, known then as the Anderson Street Bridge. What is even more remarkable is that the young elm tree in the foreground still stands, gnarled and majestic. Government House has towered above the Royal Botanic Gardens since its completion in 1876, but at the time of this painting, the Gardens’ boundary roads such as Alexandra Avenue were already populated by numerous cars, the lights of which can be seen dotted along the shore. Indeed, given the crepuscular light, Beckett was probably painting this work during the evening peak hour, yet such noise, movement and disruption is totally absent from this quiet meditation.

Clarice Beckett had an abiding interest in Theosophy and aspects of its philosophy permeate her paintings, such as the movement’s pursuit of the spiritual essence of the everyday. Tracey Lock, curator of the recent exhibition, Clarice Beckett: the present moment at the Art Gallery of South Australia, has further noted, ‘the technique of shrouding form [akin to Beckett’s ‘mist’] was favoured by the anthroposophist [and Theosophist] Rudolph Steiner, who suggested that luminous radiating fields of colour applied in thinned pigments could bring people to apprehend the hidden and experience a cosmic state of being.’1 Additionally, in the early decades of the twentieth century, the Pictorialist photography movement had a strong presence in Australian art with its emphasis on tonality and composition rather than simple documentation; and leading proponents included Melburnians such as Ruth Hollick, Mina Moore and John Kauffman. Likewise, John Shirlow used aquatint etching to similar ends in Melbourne at night across the Yarra, c.1910 – 20, which presents a view identical to Beckett’s View across the Yarra, c.1931, which achieved a new auction record for the artist at Deutscher and Hackett in April 2021. Max Meldrum’s influential theory of tonalism, also formulated during these years, created comparable results; however, critics derided the ‘fuzziness’ of such images. Beckett too suffered from associated negative commentary, however her art, soundly based in four years of training at the National Gallery School and one year’s study with Meldrum, fuses and transcends her influences to create paintings that are distinctly her own.

In 1931, Beckett and sixty-seven other artists were included in the First Contemporary All-Australian Art Exhibition, at the International Art Centre of the Roerich Museum, New York; and she was one of only seven artists singled out for positive comment by the critic for the New York Times. 2 Poetic, mysterious and distinctly modernist, Beckett’s paintings operate as still moments in an increasingly frenetic world. In describing the effect of her individual vision, the curator Bruce James wrote that ‘her paintings are little evocations that build like musical phrases towards a greater and more compelling whole. That’s why groups of Becketts can be so thunderous.’3

1. Rudolph Steiner cited in Lock, T., Clarice Beckett: The present moment, Art Gallery of South

Australia, Adelaide, 2021, p. 37 2. Jewell, E. A., ‘Australian Art Shown Here’, New York Times, 8 February 1931, section II, p. column 4 3. James, B., ‘Universal vision in dull suburbia’, The Age, Melbourne, 22 March 1995, p. 23

ANDREW GAYNOR

(1879 – 1965) LECTURE AU JARDIN, c.1935 oil on plywood 94.0 x 114.0 cm signed lower right: Bessie Davidson

ESTIMATE: $280,000 – 350,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Normandy, France Ornes Enchères, Alençon, France, 31 May 2014, lot 11 (as ‘La lecture au jardin’) Private collection, United Kingdom Daguerre Auctions, Paris, 27 May 2015, lot 252 (as ‘Femme à la chaise longue’) Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne Justin Miller Art, Sydney Private collection, New South Wales

EXHIBITED

Collectors’ Exhibition, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 6 August – 29 October 2016, (illus. in exhibition catalogue, pp. 46–7) Bessie Davidson & Sally Smart – Two artists and the Parisian avant–garde, Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, 20 March – 26 July 2020

LITERATURE

Curtin, P., (ed.), Bessie Davidson: An Australian Impressionist in Paris, Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, 2020, pp. 45, 64, and illus. front cover

Bessie Davidson’s paintings have an engaging French accent, Gallic in mood and sophistication. Her still lifes, such as Autumn Table at Villeneuve, c.1938 (private collection), express the pleasures of food and wine, of seasonal tables abundant with fruits and flowers. Interiors are feminine and domestic, intimately reflective of those who live in them, while figures are elegantly at ease, attired in light colours of lively of texture. In her recent essay on Davidson, Tansy Curtin wrote: ‘Davidson’s depictions of women at leisure are perhaps the most intriguing and revealing of all her works. These women appear passive, not actively engaged with the viewer’.1

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

With ever-deepening French connections, Davidson’s life-long love is reflected in her numerous activities, associations and awards. Working as a nurse during World War I, in 1931 she was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur for art and humanity. The first Australian woman so honoured, she was also the first to be elected to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. A foundation member of the Salon des Tuileries and the Société Nationale des Indépendants, in 1930 she became VicePresident of the Société Nationale de Femmes Artistes Modernes. Although she loved France, like Bunny, she never gave up her Australian citizenship.

The profiling of figures, seated indoors or in quiet, sunlit gardens, interested Davidson throughout her life in paintings characterised by the interplay of textured surfaces and pictorial illusions of depth. Fine examples include A French Interior, 1911 and Mother and Child, 1914, both in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Together with Lecture au Jardin, (Reading in the Garden), c.1935, each shares eye-catching figures and their gentle curves of relaxation. Recording the visual pleasures of the everyday with the light-filled verve of French Impressionism, Davidson later developed a more prominent sense of form and compositional structure allied to Paul Cézanne and Post Impressionism. It is this ‘Cézannesque’ style, which Davidson’s biographer, Penelope Little, describes as characterising ‘her most confident and productive years’.2 Celebrated in Lecture au Jardin, its brushwork is full of variety, with both vertical and horizontal strokes creating a fascinating picture surface. Images morph into the formal elements of painting - composition, colour, form and texture. Bathed in entrancing light, colours of subtle combination and harmonies of powerful diagonals beguile as one is drawn through the trees into the landscape beyond. Growing in self-assurance, Davidson moved more towards the semi-abstract from the 1920s onwards. A ready illustration of this transition is provided by comparing Femme au Canapé Rayé, 1919 (private collection)3 with the work on offer, and the closely related sundrenched, La Robe Jaune (The Yellow Dress), 1931 (private collection, Sydney).

Acquired by the prestigious Musée d’Art Moderne, Musée d’Orsay and the Musée du Petit Palais, in Paris, in 1999 the Australian Embassy, Paris, presented the exhibition, Bessie Davidson: Une Australienne en France, 1880-1965. And last year, the Bendigo Art Gallery staged Bessie Davidson & Sally Smart – Two artists and the Parisian avantgarde, which included Lecture au Jardin.

Many years ago, a correspondent wrote from London that Bessie Davidson holds: ‘a distinguished position in the art world, perhaps the most gifted of Australian women painters’.4

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

Australian Impressionist in Paris, Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, 2020, p. 13 2. Little, P., A Studio in Montparnasse; Bessie Davidson: An Australian in Paris, Craftsman House,

Melbourne 2003, p. 87 3. Ibid., p. 179 (illus.) 4. ‘Letter from London: Miss Davidson succeeds’, News, Adelaide, 12 March 1929, p. 6. cited in

Curtin, op. cit., p. 11

DAVID THOMAS

Right: Bessie Davidson in her Montparnasse studio, 1913 photographer unknown

(1884 – 1961) LA RÉCUREUSE (THE SCULLERY MAID), c.1914 oil on canvas 59.0 x 46.5 cm signed lower right: E H Rix

ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection, France Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 21 December 1999, lot 122 (as ‘A Woman Cleaning’) Private collection, Melbourne

In the years before World War One, a great number of Australian artists travelled to Europe to study, a large contingent of whom were women. All were determined to expand their creative possibilities beyond that provided by their home country; and Hilda Rix Nicholas was one of their most successful. By 1913, the local press hailed her as ‘one of the most brilliant hopes of our younger contemporary school ... (with) the right idea of movement and character.’1 Accepted into the 1911 and 1913 Paris Salon, her entries had been hung ‘on the line’, with the result that she was invited to join the membership of the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français, also known as the Orientalists. This was an incredible achievement for a young Australian woman, as was the purchase of her work for the French Government; and La Récureuse, c.1914, dates from this remarkable phase of the artist’s early career.

Rix Nicholas was disciplined, talented and hard-working. She studied first at the National Gallery School in Melbourne between 1902 and 1905 with Frederick McCubbin as Drawing Master.2 In 1906, Hilda, her mother Elizabeth and older sister Elsie, mounted their own shared exhibition in Melbourne and the following year, all three departed for Europe with the express intention of Hilda gaining further tuition with a variety of teachers in London and Paris. Even though these were radical days for modernism’s avant-garde, Rix Nicholas aspired instead ‘to traditional values. Her dream was to be hung in the exhibitions of the conservative institutions.’3

Between 1910 and 1914, Rix Nicholas spent significant time each year in Étaples in north-west France, and La Récureuse was most likely created there using a local model. It is also likely that Iso Rae, a gallery school colleague of Elizabeth Rix, invited them to this town where she had lived for nearly twenty years (other Australian artists had also painted there previously, including Rupert Bunny and Arthur Streeton). The Rix studio was one of four built in the gardens of the MonthuysPannier family and Hilda was delighted to discover one of the others was occupied by the venerable and highly respected Jules Adler, an artist she considered ‘one of the greatest genre painters of France’.4 Adler was celebrated for his images which focussed on the daily lives of ordinary people, particularly workers, and Rix Nicholas benefited from his camaraderie and ‘invaluable criticisms’, as had Iso Rae before her.5 In 1912, Rix Nicholas travelled to Morocco and the local market stall-holders were impressed by the sketches she made of them, plus – importantly – by her interest in them as people, not just aesthetic tropes. This empathetic compassion extends to La Récureuse. Seated in threequarter pose at yet another laborious chore, the young récureuse (‘she who scours’) wears a traditional starched cloth hat, work-clothes and wooden-soled slippers.6 Mostly subdued in palette, flourishes such as the violet hues in the shadows of the headwear give increased warmth to the composition. Three other paintings by Rix Nicholas of similarly dressed women can also be dated to 1914: Grandmère (Art Gallery of New South Wales); In Picardy (National Gallery of Victoria); and A mother of France Australian War Memorial). When viewed alongside, La Récureuse adds further depths of understanding to this powerful trio of women’s portraits.

1. Quote from Notre Gazette, Paris, c.1912 re-reprinted in Hilda Rix Nicholas 1884-1961:

Retrospective exhibition of paintings and drawings, exhibition catalogue, Joseph Brown

Gallery, Melbourne, 1971 2. Elizabeth Rix had also studied at the Gallery School between 1880 and 1883, with McCubbin as a fellow student. Other students included Arthur Streeton, Rupert Bunny and Iso Rae. 3. Travers, R., Hilda: the life of Hilda Rix Nicholas, Thames and Hudson, Melbourne, 2021, p. 38 4. Ibid., p. 47 5. Ibid., p. 48 6. The author thanks Lucie Reeves-Smith for this translation

ANDREW GAYNOR

(1862 – 1949) SELF PORTRAIT, c.1896 oil on canvas 31.0 x 19.0 cm

ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

PROVENANCE

Emil Aldor, Melbourne Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above February 1980 Thence by descent Private collection, Victoria

RELATED WORK

Self Portrait with Palette, c.1920s, oil on canvas on board, 31.0 x 24.0 cm, private collection

Josephine Muntz Adams is an artist who deserves to be better known. At the height of her career, her works commanded ‘several hundred pounds a year’ and she charged (the high price of) ‘150 pounds for a portrait.’1 In particular, Muntz Adams was acclaimed for her ‘touch of genius’ in the ability to capture the personality of her sitters through the expression in their eyes.2 She initially studied at the National Gallery Art School during the 1880s alongside Aby Altson, David Davies and Arthur Streeton, and was a peer to Clara Southern and Jane Price. At the age of twenty-eight, Muntz Adams travelled to Europe for further training and due to her youthful appearance, it is plausible that this vital self portrait was painted during this overseas sojourn, which lasted until 1896 when the artist was thirty-four.

Self Portrait shows Muntz Adams as she wanted to be seen – active, industrious, and above all, creative. A gifted pianist and the eldest of seven children, she was born in Kyneton before the family moved to Prahran, where her father was subsequently elected Mayor. Her mother was a supporter of the suffragette movement, and her younger sister became one of the earliest female science graduates of the University of Melbourne. Muntz Adams began her art training at the age of fourteen at the Prahran School of Design before enrolling at the Gallery School in 1882 under George Folingsby. Her major student painting, Care, 1887, was so acclaimed that it was purchased by the Queensland National Art Gallery, Brisbane - thereby becoming the first painting by an Australian artist to enter that collection.3 In Europe, she studied initially at the Académie Colarossi in Paris, which encouraged a greater freedom of expression than the more popular Académie Julian; and in 1892, Muntz Adams achieved the notable distinction of having a portrait ‘hung on the line’ at the Paris Salon. She then chose to study under renowned portraitist Hubert von Herkomer in the English artists’ colony of Bushey ‘where between 200 and 300 painters have settled partly out of respect for the great portrait painter and partly because Bushey has a certain fascination of colour.’4 Muntz Adams returned to Melbourne in 1896, married two years later and moved to Brisbane. However, she continued to exhibit overseas and in 1899, was awarded a gold medal for portraiture in the Greater Britain Exhibition in London.

Following her husband’s sudden death in 1903, Muntz Adams returned to Melbourne and served on the Victorian Artists’ Society council for many years. Her house in Malvern had an attic studio occupying the top floor which ‘resembled an oriental bazaar with velvet hangings, Persian carpets, couches draped with silken shawls and Muntz Adams’ paintings, which covered the walls and were stacked against them.’5 A major retrospective, held in 1943 at the Athenaeum Gallery when the artist was eighty years old, was opened by Sir Keith Murdoch. In his speech, Murdoch rightfully claimed that ‘the history of Australian art ... should be more familiar with the work of Josephine Muntz Adams. [She] has every right to a permanent position in Australian painting.’6

1. Moore, W., ‘Careers for Australian Girls’, The New Idea: a women’s home journal for Australia,

Melbourne, 6 December 1907 2. ‘Art and Artists’, Table Talk, Melbourne, 2 October 1896, p. 6 3. Subsequently re-named the Queensland Art Gallery 4. ‘Art and Artists’, op. cit., 5. Hammond, V. and Peers, J., Completing the picture: women artists and the Heidelberg era,

Heide Park and Art Gallery, Melbourne, 1992, p. 58 6. Sir Keith Murdoch, 1943, see ibid.

ANDREW GAYNOR

(1892 – 1984) STILL LIFE WITH CHAIR, 1962 oil on composition board 91.5 x 59.5 cm signed and dated lower left: G. Cossington Smith.62 signed and inscribed with title on artist’s label attached verso: Still Life with Chair / Grace Cossington Smith bears inscription verso: ALBURY ART PRIZE bears inscription on handwritten label verso: Still Life by Grace Cossington Smith / that I bought from the Albury Art Prize / and greatly treasure / Margaret Carnegie

ESTIMATE: $300,000 – 400,000

PROVENANCE

Albury Art Gallery Society, New South Wales Mr Douglas Carnegie and Mrs Margaret Carnegie, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1967 Gallery 67, Perth, 1972 (label attached verso) Allen D. Christensen, California and Perth Private collection, Perth, acquired from the above in 1981

EXHIBITED

Exhibition of Paintings: Grace Cossington Smith, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 28 October – 9 November 1964, cat. 4 The Broad Canvas, Art in Australia 1770 – 1967, Sancta Sophia College, University of Sydney, Sydney, 13 – 30 March 1967, cat. 91 Twenty–First Annual Art Exhibition, Albury Art Gallery Society, New South Wales, 7 – 17 November 1967, cat. 92 The Carnegie Private Loan Exhibition, Whitefriars College, Melbourne, 15 – 24 August 1969, and touring to; Geelong Art Gallery, Victoria, 27 August – 19 September 1969, cat. 17

Being interviewed in 1965, at the age of seventy-three, Grace Cossington Smith declared, ‘My chief interest, I think, has always been colour, but not flat crude colour, it must be colour within colour, it has to shine; light must be in it’.1 Simply and succinctly, she captured the essential elements of her approach which produced, among others, glorious landscapes, unforgettable images of the Sydney Harbour Bridge – soaring majestically above the 1920s city below – and interior views of her family home, all of which hum with a palpable pictorial energy and glow with luminous hues.

Introduced to Van Gogh’s expressive use of colour by her early teacher, Anthony Dattilo Rubbo – who later, perceptively dubbed her ‘Mrs Van Gogh’ – the young Cossington Smith painted an imaginary room for the Dutch master. In the small oil sketch on paper, Van Gogh’s Room, c.1916 (National Gallery of Australia), her striking colour choices are emphasised by handwritten notes at the bottom of the sheet: ‘the walls – violet / floor red / bed cover yellow green / furniture orange’. As Daniel Thomas noted, ‘She already felt the power of colour, in painting and in the rooms we inhabit.’2 This interest in the potential of colour to communicate more than mere visual appearances was further encouraged by an encounter with Beatrice Irwin’s book, New Science of Colour. Alongside creating her own colour wheels, Cossington Smith transcribed the treatise in its entirety during the 1920s, particularly inspired by the idea that colour has the power to stimulate the viewer in physical, intellectual and spiritual ways.3

Cossington Smith’s distinctive application of paint contributes to the polychromatic brilliance of her paintings. Mosaic-like blocks of pigment, rarely mixed on the palette,4 are laid down in rhythmic arrangements, lined up alongside each other and layered so that they shimmer and radiate with internal light. Brushstrokes of white paint add to the variegated luminosity of Still Life with Chair, 1962 and hints of a white ground are also visible, with glimpses of pencil underdrawing marking out the composition. While these ‘tessellations of paint’ are the building blocks with which she constructed each image, ironically, they also dematerialise the solidity of the objects they describe.5 Still life paintings such as this grew out of the interiors which became a major focus of Cossington Smith’s art from the mid-1950s onwards. The family home, a Federation-style house – named Cossington after her mother’s ancestral home in Leicester – was located at Turramurra, on Sydney’s Upper North Shore, and provided a rich array of subject matter. Paintings such as Interior with Wardrobe Mirror, 1955 (National Gallery of Australia) and The Window, 1956 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), combine views of the outside and surrounding garden with details of the domestic interior, while others including Interior with Blue Painting, 1956 (National Gallery of Victoria) look to the inside. The still life paintings feature familiar objects, the placement of which ‘is superficially casual but covertly precise.’ As Bruce James has observed, ‘positions and relations are weighed and fixed.’6 Here, we see jugs, bowls and glass bottles paired off in a way that enables Cossington Smith to highlight variations in form, colour and texture, transforming the everyday into a vision of calm beauty. The depiction of drapery also shows off her confident painterly prowess, inspired in part by the Old Master paintings she had seen during travels in Europe just a few years before.

While Cossington Smith produced fewer paintings during the 1950s and early 60s, they increased in scale, reflecting her confidence and the mastery borne of decades of dedicated work. This period also marked the beginning of the serious recognition of her singular contribution and place in Australian art, with academic acclaim, institutional acquisitions, successful commercial exhibitions and finally, in 1973, the first (but certainly not the last) museum retrospective of her art. Curated by Daniel Thomas, the exhibition introduced Cossington Smith’s art to a national audience, opening at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney and then touring to Brisbane, Newcastle, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra and Melbourne.

1. Interview with Hazel de Berg, Sydney, 16 August 1965, quoted in Thomas, D., Grace

Cossington Smith, exhibition catalogue, Trustees, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1973, p. 6 2. Thomas, D., ‘Colour-Worship: Grace Cossington Smith, The Lacquer Room, 1936’ in Creating

Australia: 200 Years of Art 1788-1988, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1988, quoted in Fink, H. & Miller, S. (eds.), Recent Past: Writing Australian Art, Daniel Thomas, Art Gallery of

New South Wales, Sydney, 2020, p. 120 3. See Hart, D., Grace Cossington Smith, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Australia,

Canberra, 2005, p. 28 4. Thomas, 1973, op. cit., p. 7 5. James, B., Grace Cossington Smith, Craftsman House, Roseville, 1990, p. 154 6. Ibid., p. 147

KIRSTY GRANT

Right: Grace Cossington Smith, Walking Down a Sydney Street, c.1930-40 photographer unknown Australian War Memorial, Canberra P04.563_001

(1892 – 1984) SAMUEL MARSDEN AFTER SERVICE AT ST. JOHN’S PARRAMATTA, 1937 – 38 oil on pulpboard 66.0 x 58.5 cm signed and dated lower right: G. Cossington Smith 35 bears inscription on old label verso: “Samuel Marsden after / service at St. Johns / Parramatta” / Grace Cossington Smith / McCAUGHEY PRIZE COMPETITION

ESTIMATE: $150,000 – 200,000

PROVENANCE

Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Private collection, Melbourne

EXHIBITED

Art Competitions Exhibition: Australia’s 150th Anniversary Celebrations, 1788 – 1938, Education Department’s Art Gallery, Sydney, 2 – 28 February 1938, cat. 24 Grace Cossington Smith, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 21 June – 10 July 1972, cat. 13 (dated as 1935) Grace Cossington Smith: Survey Exhibition 1919 – 1971, Painters Gallery, Sydney, 8 – 26 September 1986; Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 7 – 24 October 1987, cat. 19 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, dated as 1935) Grace Cossington Smith: Loan Exhibition, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 18 October – 18 November 1990, cat. 49

LITERATURE

James, B., Grace Cossington Smith, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990, pl. 69, p. 109 (illus.)

RELATED WORK

not titled [Sketch for ‘Samuel Marsden after service at St John’s, Parramatta’], c.1935, pencil on paper, 26.8 x 37.4 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

By the end of the 1930s, Grace Cossington Smith had hit her creative stride, producing paintings which would confirm her place among the ranks of Australia’s foremost modern artists. ‘The years from 1926 until the late 1930s’, as Deborah Hart has written, ‘were among the most important in (her) artistic life, when her potential as a painter of colour and light, structure and rhythmic pattern, was realised in work after work. It was as though the previous years of concentrated effort and inventiveness in drawing and painting blossomed into her mature vision’.1 1938 was a significant year in Cossington Smith’s life for several reasons: the death of her father propelled her to the head of the family; fellow modernist Thea Proctor highlighted her work in Art in Australia, noting her ‘personal technique, and … lovely and individual colour sense’,2 and for the first time, she was included in a museum exhibition. Shown at the National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 150 Years of Australian Art, was organised by the then Director, Will Ashton, and according to the editors of Art in Australia, ‘The hanging of the pictures (was) exceptionally well carried out – a difficult task with eight hundred works so diverse in character and

Grace Cossington Smith (right) with her sister Diddy, dog Rex (Krinkley Konks), brother Gordon, father Ernest and young niece Ann (Mills) at Cossington, in Turramurra, in 1937. courtesy of the artist’s estate. appearance’.3 The motivation for such a massive undertaking was the sesquicentenary of European settlement of Australia, an event which witnessed a flurry of special activities and celebrations to mark the significant historical milestone.

Another such activity which piqued the interest of contemporary visual artists was an art prize administered by the 150th Anniversary Celebration’s Council. In addition to an award of 250 Guineas funded by the Commonwealth Government for a large oil painting depicting an aspect of Australia’s history, smaller prizes were offered for works of various subjects and in various media.4 Beginning work in December 1937 and completing her painting in January of the following year,5 Cossington Smith entered Samuel Marsden After Service at St John’s Church, Parramatta, 1937 – 38 into the category of ‘historical subject in oils’.

While far from a household name, Marsden holds a significant place in Australian colonial history, arriving in 1794 to take up the role of assistant to the chaplain of New South Wales and later, for some years, being the only Anglican clergyman on the mainland.6 Stationed at Parramatta he was the driving force behind the construction of St John’s Church (now Cathedral) on a site which lays claim to being the oldest continuous place of Christian worship in Australia.7 In a letter home to England in late April 1803, Marsden wrote, ‘last Easter Sunday I consecrated my church at Parramatta. This building proves a great comfort to my mind as I can now perform a divine service in a manner becoming the worship of Almighty God. At Sydney there is no place for public worship and I fear will be none for a long time to come … It has been with many years labor and patience I have got a temple erected’.8

Cossington Smith’s highly personal choice of subject reflected her own life as a devout Anglican Christian. Marsden stands firmly at the centre of the image, the strong geometry of the composition leading the eye towards him and beyond, to the church which he was so instrumental in founding. Uniformed figures in the distance and the small child to the right of Marsden, symbolise the development of the settlement from a penal colony to a place where the growing and increasingly free population gathered together for regular worship. Typical of the artist,

Grace Cossington Smith [Sketch for Samuel Marsden after service at St John’s, Parramatta], c.1935 drawing in black pencil, 26.8 x 37.4 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1976 1976.705.13.8

this work was signed and dated some years after execution, most likely prior to its first commercial exhibition at Macquarie Galleries in 1972 when she was 80 years old. In the catalogue accompanying the major Cossington Smith survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney in 1973, there are numerous examples of erroneous dating by the artist and Daniel Thomas notes that she ‘never inscribed dates on early paintings’ and those ‘included in the one-man shows of 1968, 1970 and 1972 … were given dates by the artist before being, and these dates ... are sometimes as much as ten years astray’.9 A celebratory picture infused with a deeply personal meaning, this is a fascinating work which perfectly encapsulates Cossington Smith’s belief that ‘painting … (expresses) form in colour – colour vibrant with light’10 and her ability to achieve this in an image redolent with both creative and spiritual joy.

1. Hart, D., Grace Cossington Smith, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2005, p. 27 2. Proctor, T., ’Modern Art in Sydney’, Art in Australia, Sydney, 3rd series, no. 73, November 1938, p. 28 3. Ure Smith, S. & Gellert, L., ‘Editorial’, Art in Australia, Sydney, 3rd series, no. 70,

March 1938, p. 13 4. Art Competitions Exhibition: Australia’s 150th Anniversary Celebrations 1788 – 1938, exhibition catalogue, Education Department Gallery, 1938. The major prize was awarded to Ivor Hele for his dramatic depiction of Sturt’s reluctant decision to return 1937 (Art Gallery of South

Australia, Adelaide) and B.E. Minns won the historical subject in oils for The Landing at Botany

Bay, 1788. Thanks to Jin Whittington, Art Gallery of South Australia Research Library, for her research assistance. 5. James, B., Grace Cossington Smith, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990, p. 109 6. See: Yarwood, ‘A. T., Marsden, Samuel (1765-1838)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography,

National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/ biography/marsden-samuel-2433/text3237, published first in hardcopy 1967, accessed online 22 February 2018 7. http://www.discoverparramatta.com/places/heritage_and_historic_sites/st_..., accessed online 22 February 2018. Towers were added to the 1803 church in 1818 and in 1855, having fallen into disrepair, it was demolished and replaced. 8. Marsden, S., letter to Mrs John Stokes, 27 April 1803, quoted in Mackaness, G., Some Private

Correspondence of the Rev. Samuel Marsden and Family 1794-1824, Review Publications,

New South Wales, 1976, pp. 30 – 31 9. Thomas, D., Grace Cossington Smith, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales,

Sydney, 1973, p. 9 10. Grace Cossington-Smith, quoted in Modjeska, D., Stravinsky’s Lunch, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 1999, reprinted 2000, flyleaf

KIRSTY GRANT

born 1930 LINES ON THE GREY WALL, 1967 oil on plywood 121.0 x 86.0 cm signed and dated lower right: 1967 Y Audette signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: 1967 / Audette / Lines on the grey wall

ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Melbourne

LITERATURE

Heathcote, C., Adams, B., Vaughan, G., & Grant, K., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, pl. 119, p. 188 (illus.)

After fourteen years overseas, Yvonne Audette returned to Australia in 1966, bringing with her Lines on the Grey Wall, 1967 - one of many paintings which had been started in Italy, but was not yet finished. Complex, multi-layered abstractions, Audette’s works evolve over time, ‘each painting… the product of months, sometimes years, spent deliberating over how the next stage should be approached and resolved.’1 As Christopher Heathcote has outlined, her studio process is slow and considered, ‘mixing paint and applying a few strokes, then stepping back to assess the results, sometimes wiping off marks just added and attempting an alternative solution.’2

Audette’s experience in New York during the early 1950s had brought her face to face with Abstract Expressionism, as well as various alternative approaches to contemporary abstraction, and her sketchbooks from the time document these influences: ‘Architectural structure of de Kooning. Let go of all figuration – Calligraphic gesture of Kline – Today I saw Tomlin’s work – it has the structure I am seeking – Calligraphic work with free gesture has endless possibilities.’3 It was later, in 1958 – by which time Audette had established herself as part of a community of professional artists in Florence – that she met the American artist Cy Twombly, whose unique visual language would be similarly influential. Both artists shared a fascination with the random marks found on walls in ancient Italian streets and for Audette, this accumulated graffiti represented a form of ‘direct visual poetry’ which spoke to the deep history of the place and its people, and soon became a trademark of her painterly repertoire.4

Begun in the early 1960s, Lines on the Grey Wall is typical of the compositions Audette produced around this time. Delicate yet dense, the image is built up through accretions of form and colour, intuitive lines, shapes and scribbles painted with the brush, alongside passages applied with a palette knife. While some marks are decisive, those seen through the broad patches of pale-coloured paint reveal the importance of layering and erasure within Audette’s technique. The influence of Asian art and calligraphy is also apparent. In addition to undertaking classes with a Zen painting teacher in New York, Audette was exposed to the work of numerous artists who incorporated calligraphic brushwork into their take on abstraction (Franz Kline, Mark Tobey and Pierre Alechinsky, for example), and she in turn did the same. The closely related (and similarly titled) painting, The Grey Wall with Lines, 1957 (Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art) was included in the Guggenheim Museum publication, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, as an example of this influence and the significance of New York ‘as an international center for the forging and disseminating of Asian conceptions of abstraction.’5

Audette’s long-term expatriate status meant that her work was rarely seen in Australia during the 1950s and 60s, however it was exhibited in numerous solo shows in Florence, Milan, Paris, Rome and London. A rare female member of the generation of artists born in Australia between the wars, she established a successful career and has since been recognised for her singular contribution, being awarded a Member of the Order of Australia in 2020 for significant service to the visual arts as an abstract painter. Acquisitions by major public galleries were followed by a series of institutional exhibitions – Queensland Art Gallery (1999), Heide Museum of Modern Art (2000), National Gallery of Victoria (2008), Ian Potter Museum of Art (2009) and the Art Gallery of Ballarat (2016) – and the publication of a major monograph in 2003.

1. Heathcote, C., ‘Yvonne Audette: The Early Years’ in Heathcote, C., et. al., Yvonne Audette:

Paintings and Drawings 1949-2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, p. 33 2. Ibid. 3. The artist quoted in Grant, K., Yvonne Audette: Different Directions 1954-1966, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2008, n.p. 4. Artist’s notes, ‘Grey Wall with Lines’, undated, quoted ibid. 5. See Munroe, A., The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, exhibition catalogue, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009. The Grey Wall with Lines was requested for loan for the exhibition but excluded on a technicality as she had given up her

American citizenship soon after returning to Australia.

KIRSTY GRANT

Right: Yvonne Audette, Vaucluse, Sydney, 1968 (printed 2000) Photographer: David Moore gelatin silver photograph on paper National Portrait Gallery, Canberra © Lisa, Michael, Matthew and Joshua Moore

(1920 – 1960) LOVERS WITH ROSE, c.1950 watercolour, pastel, brush and Chinese ink on paper on card 54.0 x 36.5 cm signed with estate stamp lower left

ESTIMATE: $35,000 – 45,000

PROVENANCE

Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1976

EXHIBITED

Joy Hester, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 6 – 25 October 1976, cat. 91 (as ‘Lovers, c.1950’) Joy Hester: Remember Me, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 28 November 2020 – 14 February 2021, cat. 111 (as ‘Lovers with Rose, c.1950’, illus. in exhibition catalogue)

LITERATURE

Morgan, K., and Petherbridge, D., Joy Hester: Remember Me, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2020, p. 155 (illus.)

RELATED WORK

(The Embrace) from the Love Series I, c.1949, chalk, ink and wash on paper on board, 38.0 x 27.0 cm, in the collection of The University of Western Australia Art, Perth

Although Joy Hester’s art was neither strictly diaristic or autobiographical, the story of her life is so complex and familiar that connections are inevitably made between what we know (or imagine we know) of her experiences and feelings, and the images she created. This is especially so of images which focus, in Hester’s characteristically direct and psychologically charged style, on the depiction of human relationships and the expression of emotion. The theme of love is persistent in much of her work, but especially from 1947, a year which marked the beginning of a particularly turbulent period in Hester’s life. Diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease, her marriage to Albert Tucker ended and two years later her son, Sweeney, was formally adopted by John and Sunday Reed. It was a new relationship with the poet/painter, Gray Smith (also begun in 1947) which would sustain her emotionally and artistically until the end of her life, providing the backdrop to the wellknown images of lovers produced during the late 1940s and 1950s.

The head and torso of a naked male figure fills the sheet in Lovers with Rose, c.1950, his striking blue eyes staring directly out at the viewer. Slightly askew, they are the only facial features depicted, compelling and with an intensity that recalls the piercing eyes in contemporary paintings by Sidney Nolan – Hester’s friend and one of the avant-garde artists who gathered around John and Sunday Reed at Heide. His lover is out of view, but her long hair trails over his left shoulder, and opposite, her arm hangs languidly across his chest, delicate fingers seemingly pointing to the pale pink rose. Itself a symbol of love, the rose in this work is said to relate to a floral motif that Hester later designed for Sunday Reed, which was etched into the glass panels either side of the front door at Heide and remain today. In the renovation of the Reed’s farmhouse undertaken during the early 1950s, the rose also featured in the decorative wallpaper Sunday chose for the master bedroom and in Nolan’s painting¸ Rosa Mutabilis, 1945 (Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne) – a memento of her love affair with the young artist – which she displayed there,1 as well as various living specimens that grew in the garden.

Unlike her male peers, who produced their major works in oil paint, Hester worked predominantly in ink and watercolour, and the lower status of these media in the fine art hierarchy is one of the reasons why her work was so little known and appreciated during her lifetime. Although Hester’s work was unrepresented in any public collection at the time of her premature death in 1960, it is now widely collected, with major holdings in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. This work was included in the recent major exhibition, Joy Hester: Remember Me, shown at Heide during 2020.2 Hester’s distinctive way of depicting the human figure, combined with the immediacy of her chosen medium, results in a remarkable sense of intimacy that seems to transcend the inevitable distance between the artist, the artwork and the viewer. For Hester, art was a means of self-expression and communication – ‘[she] drew the way other people speak: it was as natural and as simple as that’.3

1. See Harding, L. & Morgan, K., Modern Love: The Lives of John & Sunday Reed,

The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2015, pp. 241 – 242 2. See Morgan. K. & Petherbridge, D., Joy Hester: Remember Me, exhibition catalogue,

Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2020, cat. 111, p. 155 (illus.) 3. Barrett Reid quoted in Gellatly, K., Leave no space for yearning: The Art of Joy Hester, exhibition catalogue, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2001, p. 14

KIRSTY GRANT

Right: Peace: Joy Hester Holding Sweeney, 1945 Photographer: Albert Tucker gelatin silver photograph 40.1 x 30.6 cm Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne Gift of Barbara Tucker, 2001

(1928 – 2018) SELF PORTRAITS, 1960 (also known as ‘PEOPLE’) enamel and oil on composition board 61.0 x 137.0 cm signed and dated centre right: MiRKA 60

ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

PROVENANCE

The Estate of Mirka Mora, Melbourne

EXHIBITED

Herald Outdoor Art Show, Melbourne, 4 – 12 March 1960 (as ‘People’) Where Angels Fear to Tread : 50 Years of Art 1948 – 1998, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 9 October – 28 November 1999

LITERATURE

Mora, M., Delany, M., and White, M., Mirka Mora: Where Angels Fear To Tread: 50 Years of Art 1948 – 1998, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 1999, pp. 27 (illus.) 62 Cotte, S., Mirka Mora: A Life Making Art, Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2019, p. 64 (illus., as ‘People’) ‘There was nobody, and there never will be, anyone like Mirka Mora… She was an incredible mix of wisdom, cheekiness and childhood innocence… the kind of person who could light up a room and [she] will always have a legion of fans because she had a special gift for making everyone feel special.’1

Hailed as ‘a veritable national treasure’2, Mirka Mora remains arguably one of the most beloved and original figures in Australia’s cultural life, with her delightfully eccentric, inimitable personality capturing the public imagination as much the enchanting, fantasy world immortalised in her art. Having survived the horrors of the Holocaust, the Parisianborn artist, along with her husband Georges, and infant son Philippe emigrated from post-war France to Melbourne in 1951, where they quickly settled into the local bohemian scene. From their apartmentstudio in the ‘Paris End’ of Collins street, Mirka worked initially as a dressmaker (while also making art), and Georges became an influential art dealer, adding – with his flair and entrepreneurship – Tolarno Galleries to Melbourne’s only very select number of commercial art galleries in 1967. The couple also owned and operated various landmark European style cafes and restaurants, including the Mirka Café in Exhibition Street (which was the venue for the first major solo exhibition by Joy Hester); the Café Balzac in Wellington Parade, East Melbourne; and Tolarno in Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, where Mirka created an ambitious series of sumptuously embellished, large scale murals that have since become among her most celebrated and enduring public works.

Mirka Mora and Maurice Chevalier at the Herald Outdoor Art Show, March 1960 photographer unknown William Mora Galleries, Melbourne

With their open and fearless attitude to life, generous hospitality and infectious personalities, the pair contributed immeasurably to the progressive subculture of avant-garde thought, activism, and creativity that was emerging in conservative Melbourne at the time – thus attracting a new wave of artists, writers, collectors and intellectuals, many of whom would become luminaries of Australian art, including John and Sunday Reed (founders of Heide, now Heide Museum of Modern Art); Fred Williams; Joy Hester; Sidney Nolan; Arthur Boyd and Charles Blackman. As Barbara Blackman recalls in her memoirs, ‘Georges and Mirka had come from the heart of that war wounded Europe which we, in our protected isolation, were only slowly coming to understand… They were happeners, not owners. They had lost families, home, land of birth, friendships, memorabilia of youth, and lived in the focus of the present, its possibilities… Good food and good conversation, that was their stock in hand… certainly Georges ‘grew us up’, as assuredly as Mirka never let us escape our child-hearted spontaneity.’3

A compelling example of Mirka’s distinctively naïve and richly decorative style, Self Portraits, 1960 illustrates well the artist’s love and nostalgia for the innocence of childhood. Here the large, wanting eyes of the multiple self-portraits not only betray an unmistakable likeness to images of Mirka as a child; moreover they evoke, as the artist herself elucidates, a deep emotional longing and empathy for the children of her own age killed in the holocaust. Significantly however, where earlier self-portraits of the late 1950s are characterised by a certain gravity and psychological burden – for example, Self-Portrait, 1958 featuring a lone child in ecclesiastical dress who is at once framed and constrained by a large upright chair, set against an emotionally intense, predominantly red ground – the present, with its frieze-like format, sumptuous colour and mysterious, almost Byzantine feel exudes a lighter, more playful or theatrical sense, no doubt inspired by Mirka’s enduring interest in Surrealism and the festive traditions of the Comédies Italiennes. Perhaps not surprisingly, Self Portraits, 1960 was much admired by famous French singer and actor, Maurice Chevalier, upon its inaugural exhibition in the Herald Outdoor Art Show, held in Melbourne in 1960. As Mirka recalls in her autobiography, My Life: Wicked but Virtuous: ‘… [Maurice] was staying at the Windsor Hotel and I would meet him in the Fitzroy Gardens, pushing my big pram with Tiriel in it. M. Chevalier loved a large painting I had in the Herald Art Show at the time and understood my soul. I have a picture of Maurice Chevalier and me, and he insisted that we be photographed with the painting. We had long conversations about one’s dedication to one’s art…’4

Although most modernist perceptions at the time could not quite accommodate the ‘medieval’ vocabulary, rich symbolism and ornate decoration of her achievements, today critics universally appreciate that the power of Mirka’s artistic legacy lies precisely in this magical world of beauty, love and joy which, although derived from the enormous trauma and suffering she experienced as a child, nevertheless celebrates the human condition, its resilience and the miracle of survival. As Patrick McCaughey (who would later become Director of the National Gallery of Victoria) astutely observed ahead of his generation, ‘… [Mirka’s] fantasies are not a way of escaping from the world but a way of participating in it. They redeem it from its mundanity, transforming it into a magical zone… we are fortunate that Mirka Mora has shared her experience of the world with us so intimately. It is a bright world to enter and difficult to leave…’5

1. Lesley Harding, cited in Dore, M., ‘The second-hand life lessons of artist Mirka Mora’,

Extraordinary Routines, 2. Carrillo Gantner, cited in Cotte, S., Mirka Mora: A life making art, Thames and Hudson,

Melbourne, 2019, p. 11 3. Blackman, B., ‘The Good Ship Mora, Melbourne in the fifties’, Meanjin, vol. 55, no. 2, 1996, pp. 293 – 305 4. Mora, M., My Life: Wicked But Virtuous, Penguin Random House, Australia, 2000, p. 57 5. McCaughey, P., ‘Fantasy key to the world’, The Age, 7 June 1967, p. 8

VERONICA ANGELATOS

Right: Mirka carrying her painting ‘People’, entered in the Herald Outdoor Art Show, 1960 photographer unknown William Mora Galleries, Melbourne

(1911 – 2003) FREESIAS, 1985 oil on canvas 50.0 x 61.0 cm signed and dated lower right: Nora HEYSEN / 1985

ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Sydney, acquired directly from the artist in 1986

EXHIBITED

Nora Heysen, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 25 October 2000 – 28 January 2001 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 52) Nora Heysen: Light and Life, Carrick Hill, Adelaide, 1 April – 28 June 2009; Geelong Art Gallery, Victoria, 11 July – 6 September 2009; S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 14 November 2009 – 20 December 2009 and New England Regional Art Museum, New South Wales, 15 January – 14 March 2010

LITERATURE

Klepac, L., Nora Heysen, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 1989, pp. 73 (illus.), 52 Hylton, J., Nora Heysen: Light and Life, Wakefield Press, South Australia, 2009, pp. 87, 146, 186 - 7 (illus.) ‘Life Class’, The Australian, Sydney, 23 May 2009 Willoughby, A.-L., Nora Heysen: A Portrait, Fremantle Press, Perth, 2019, p. 338

When Nora Heysen held her first solo exhibition in December 1933, the critic for the Adelaide Advertiser was full of praise: ‘One may safely say that never has there been such a wonderful collection of still life studies on the walls of the Society of Arts’ gallery as that displayed by Miss Nora Heysen, daughter of Hans Heysen …’1 Still lifes were a lifelong passion, accompanied by portraits. And, as studio artefacts or objects associated with the person portrayed, still lifes even found their way into some of her portraits and subject pictures. Self Portrait, 1932 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) is one fine example. Painted in the studio of her father, Hans Heysen, at ‘The Cedars’, it features the artist’s equipment of boards, bottles, and especially the palette, given to Nora by the internationally-famed Australian singer, Dame Nellie Melba. Another, London Breakfast, 1935 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), shows a table set with bread, milk, teapot, cut pumpkin and vase of flowers. Nora’s choice not to paint landscapes was intentional and understandable – ‘to avoid working in the same field as her father’2 – and her many still life paintings in Australia’s public collections are evidence of her extraordinary success in this regard.

The years from 1934 to 1937 which Nora spent studying in London and visiting Italy and France, not only broadened her experiences, but provided a break from the conservatism and tonal realism of her early years. Returning to Australia in 1937, she moved to Sydney the following year, where, apart from war service, she would be based for the remainder of her long life. The move had auspicious beginnings. That same year, at the age of 28, she won the prestigious Archibald portrait prize with Madame Elink Schuurman – the first woman to do so. Another first was her appointment in October 1943 as an Australian woman war artist, serving as a captain in the Australian Women’s Army Service until 1946. Many of her works are now in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. Her exceptional drawing skills continued to be recognised when she was awarded the Queensland Art Gallery’s L.J. Harvey Memorial Prize for Drawing in 1973 and again, in 1975. Wider recognition came with a series of retrospective exhibitions. First, in 1984 at the Old Clarendon Gallery in South Australia, followed by the S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney in 1989, the National Library of Australia, Canberra in 2000, and Carrick Hill, Adelaide in 2009.

Freesias, 1985 is a confident and characteristic later work. Informal in mood and presentation, although still based on the triangular composition, this highly expressive work seems to be almost drawn in paint. Engaging the same directness of her early still lifes, she adopts a higher viewpoint which, combined with the enveloping light and openness of brushwork, enhances the feeling of freedom within the privacy of one’s home. Bolder in style, colours are brighter and the composition more complex. Dominated by yellows and pinks, structure depends on the central darks, verticals and horizontals of the interior setting. Rapid execution, lively lines and gestural touches add to the friendly, conversational nature of the painting.

1. ‘Fine Still Life Studies. Nora Heysen Exhibition Open Today’, The Advertiser, Adelaide, 6 December 1933, p. 12 2. Thiele, C., Heysen of Hahndorf, David Heysen Productions, revised edition, Adelaide, 2001, p. 245

DAVID THOMAS

(1923 – 2011) STILL LIFE WITH HARBOUR VIEW, c.1995 oil on composition board 68.5 x 91.5 cm signed lower left: Olley

ESTIMATE: $70,000 – 90,000

PROVENANCE

Australian Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso, stock no. 22272) Private collection Christie’s, London, 26 September 2013, lot 74 Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

Margaret Olley, Australian Galleries, Sydney, 23 October – 22 November 1995, cat. 17

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

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

A striking example of the still-life and interior scenes for which Olley remains widely celebrated, Still Life with Harbour View encapsulates well the way in which she repeatedly turned to the quotidian for inspiration, excavating her domestic setting to uncover the beauty inherent in everyday life. While the majority of her paintings were executed in her home in Paddington where she lived from 1964 until her death in 2011, several were painted at the homes of nearby friends which offered different vantages such as the spectacular harbour view captured here. Deliberately positioning the natural border of the window frame off-centre to engender a sense of sincerity and unaffectedness, Olley further emphasises this impression of familiarity in the arrangement of the items on the table which are eminently unpretentious – apples, a glass jar, native wildflowers in an earthenware vase and a metallic teapot. Notwithstanding the apparent randomness of her arrangement however, fundamental to such compositions is the artist’s careful ‘orchestration’ to create a harmonious image which was inspired directly by her experience of the theatre in 1948 when she assisted with painting the sets for Sam Hughes’ productions of Shakespeare’s Pericles and Cocteau’s Orphée (designed by Jean Bellette and Sidney Nolan respectively). Observing the actors being instructed to enter the stage and count twenty seconds before speaking their lines, the young artist soon came to appreciate the importance of creating space for oneself; as she fondly recalls, ‘space is the secret of life… it is everything.’2 Over the ensuing decades, Olley consequently came to arrange the objects in her art as characters on a stage – objects both commonplace and beautiful, shuffled this way and that, plunged into deep shadow or transformed by lighting.

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

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

1. Gleeson, J., ‘Introduction’, Margaret Olley, The Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 1964, n.p. 2. Margaret Olley cited in Pearce, B., Margaret Olley, The Art Gallery of New South Wales,

Sydney, 1996, p. 14 3. Pearce, B., ‘Margaret Olley Retrospective’, State of the Arts, Sydney,

August – November 1996, p. 5

VERONICA ANGELATOS

Margaret Olley, 1998 Photographer: Lewis Morley gelatin silver photograph on paper National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Gift of the artist, 2003 Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program © Lewis Morley Archive LLC

born 1960 JAPANESE PRINT AND CLIVIAS, 2013 watercolour on incised woodblock 146.0 x 95.5 cm signed lower left: Cressida Campbell

ESTIMATE: $180,000 – 240,000

PROVENANCE

Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane Private collection, Queensland, acquired from the above in 2013

EXHIBITED

Cressida Campbell, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, 9 July – 3 August 2013 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, np) Margaret Olley: painter, peer, mentor, muse, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 7 January – 17 March 2017 Cressida Campbell, Hamilton Art Gallery, Victoria, 11 May – 7 July 2019 (illus. exhibition catalogue cover)

LITERATURE

Porter, R., Margaret Olley: painter, peer, mentor, National Trust of Australia, Sydney, 2017, pp. 92, 93 (illus.), 114

RELATED WORKS

Japanese Print and Clivias, 2013, unique colour woodblock print, 145.5 x 94.5 cm, Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 21 April 2021, lot 11

Accomplished print maker and painter, Cressida Campbell conjures images whose prosaic subject matter conceals their meticulous conception. These are testaments to the artist’s sophisticated visual intelligence and her humble appreciation for the small wonders of the world around her, this shared human experience delighting collectors. In this large and masterful painted woodblock, Japanese Print and Clivias, Campbell combines several elements within a view of a hallway of her house in Bronte: a detailed floral still life of clivia flowers, a view of a framed Japanese Ukiyo-e print and its reflection in an adjacent mirror. Through a delicate orchestration of the grooves and furrows of an incised plywood block, and the chalky deposits of watercolour left on its surface, the artist conveys a wide range of colours and textures: from the waxy leaves of the plants to the shining glaze of a ceramic bowl and pearlescent reflections on the beveled hallway mirror. This is Cressida Campbell at height of her technical proficiency, delighting in the intellectual game of representing pictures in pictures, in an artistic process that itself requires a mastery of reflected images.

Drawing artistic inspiration from her immediate environment, Campbell’s work is inherently autobiographical. Her interiors and still lives are filled with objects and curiosities, fragments of artworks from the artist’s own collection and other bibelots, each chosen for their aesthetic value. They lend insight into what has shaped Campbell’s harmonious decorative style and provide motifs that are carried throughout her oeuvre. As John McDonald wrote, to qualify Campbell as a decorator is no insult, despite the word’s current pejorative connotations, as ‘she is a decorator in the same manner as Matisse or Bonnard … in bringing us back to simple things, Campbell is exploring a decorative art for our times … the vital difference is that her prints almost radiate with the pleasure of their own making’.1 In certain special instances, a work of Cressida Campbell’s will contain a secret, personal story pertaining to the artist’s life, her friends and associates, and the pursuit of beauty that stimulated them all. In 2017, Japanese Print and Clivias was chosen by the artist to illustrate her enjoyment of representing ‘pictures within pictures’, a practice that she shared with her artistic mentor, Margaret Olley, in an exhibition dedicated to Olley and peers.2 The Japanese print referred to in the title of this artwork is in fact a silkscreen copy of a rare Ukioy-e print of a Japanese abalone diver.3 This facsimile was created by John Coburn’s daughter, Kristin, for Campbell’s old friend, the artist Martin Sharp, who had owned and then lost the rare print in the 1980s.4 In contrast to the cossetted courtesans and geishas of other ukiyo-e prints, the ama abalone divers were women liberated from societal expectations. In Japanese Print and Clivias, the diver inhabits many planes, travelling between the underwater world, the surface, and another, more surreal plane in the mirrored surface, her hair flowing in invisible currents. Bright and crisp, the colours of this painted woodblock are painstakingly observed and applied, from the coral pink and cream coloured blossoms to the pearlescent grey reflections in the pane of glass.

This woodblock, since its initial exhibition at Philip Bacon Galleries in 2013 where it was purchased by the current owner, has been loaned to two temporary exhibitions – at S.H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney in 2017 and then to the Hamilton Art Gallery survey show of Cressida Campbell’s work in 2019, where it was reproduced on the cover of the catalogue. Its related work, the unique print of Japanese Print and Clivias, was sold at Deutscher and Hackett in April 2021 for a record price for a work on paper by Cressida Campbell.

1. McDonald, J., ‘The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell’, in Crayford, P. (ed.), The

Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures, Sydney, 2008, pp. 17 – 19 2. The artist, 2016, cited in Porter, R., Margaret Olley: painter, peer, mentor, National Trust of

Australia, Sydney, 2017, p. 92 3. The attribution of the original artwork is disputed. While some scholars believe that this artwork was created by the master Hokusai, others relate it to Kitagawa Utamaro’s Awabi-Tori suites from c.1788 – 1790 4. Story relayed both in Martin Sharp’s biography (see Tarling, L., Sharper 1980 – 2013, ETT

Imprint, Exile Bay, NSW, 2017, pp. 96 – 97) and by Cressida Campbell in Porter, R., Margaret

Olley: painter, peer, mentor, National Trust of Australia, Sydney, 2017, p. 92

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

Right: Cressida Campbell, 1990 Photographer: Greg Weight gelatin silver photograph on paper 37.8 x 31.6 cm (image); 50.4 x 40.4 cm (sheet) National Portrait Gallery, Australia Gift of Patrick Corrigan AM 2004. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program.

born 1960 CRUCIFIX ORCHIDS, 2002 watercolour on incised woodblock 44.0 x 60.0 cm signed lower right: Cressida Campbell

ESTIMATE: $45,000 – 65,000

PROVENANCE

Nevill Keating Tollemache, London Private collection, London, acquired from the above in 2003

EXHIBITED

Cressida Campbell. Still Lifes and Interiors, Nevill Keating Tollemache, London, 3 – 18 July 2003, cat. 13 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

LITERATURE

Crayford, P., (ed.), The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures, Sydney, 2008, cat. W0210, pp. 39 (illus.), 354

RELATED WORK

Crucifix Orchids and Lemons, 2002, woodblock print on paper, 82.0 x 60.0 cm, illus. in Crayford, P. (ed.), op. cit., p. 38 Lemons with Chinese Bowl, 2002, watercolour on incised woodblock, 38.0 x 60.0 cm, illus. in Crayford, P. (ed.), op. cit., p. 41

With a tightly cropped format containing a multitude of delicate details in form and colour, Cressida Campbell’s woodblock, Crucifix Orchids, offers a window into the serene and visually stimulating environment of the artist’s airy Bronte home. The strongest element of Cressida Campbell’s work, and that which has earned her a cult-like following in recent years, is what Christopher Allen called a ‘pervasive sense of delight in the visual world’.1 The delight that the artist finds in her everyday surroundings, the chance still life arrangements of a discarded dishcloth or the patterns of shadows on her kitchen floor, is then translated into artworks of enduring appeal.

Maintaining freshness within her slow and cumulative work, Campbell’s woodblocks and prints are constantly being re-evaluated and honed with inventiveness and ruthless rigour. Crucifix Orchids is an incised woodblock, hand-painted with watercolour paint. Campbell’s unique method of creating woodblock monoprints has been described by the artist as a ‘combination of painting and printing’.2 Created in 2002, this block was originally part of a larger, vertical composition, on a plywood sheet measuring 82 x 60 cm, called Crucifix Orchids and Lemons. This work only survives as a negative impression printed on to paper, due to the fact that the artist subsequently neatly subdivided its corresponding block into two separate horizontal compositions of 44 x 60 cm (Crucifix Orchids) and 38 x 60 cm (Lemons with Chinese Bowl). These woodblocks were later exhibited together in Still Lives and Interiors, at Nevill Keating Tollemache gallery in London in 2003, where the present owner acquired Crucifix Orchids.

Cressida Campbell has lived in her timber Victorian home in Bronte for twenty years, and the various corners of its carefully renovated white and marble kitchen have resulted in many compositions that calmly resonate with personal significance. Fans of Campbell’s works will rejoice in the cohesive continuity of her oeuvre, recognizing the recurrent themes and objects that populate her blocks and prints and connect her lived experiences to ours. While many have noted the timeless quality of Campbell’s works, the artist does not shy away from including contemporaneous items in her compositions, including here a sleekly designed modern dishwasher. Following her usual practice of flattened perspective, Campbell has ordered her picture plane into a succession of superimposed compositions: the floral arrangement of the extreme foreground, then the geometric planes of her marble topped kitchen benches in the middle-ground, followed by another miniature still life on windowsill on extending beyond the left-hand side of the composition. This sill, packed with little ceramic jugs and bowls has been the subject of a series of works in 2009 – including a long panorama woodblock of over 4 metres, called The Kitchen Shelf.

While the large cylindrical glass vase with an arrangement of palm fronds dominates the left-hand side of the block, in an arrangement that the artist revisited recently for Palm Fronds and Bowls, 2017, it’s the eponymous explosion of blossoms of the Crucifix Orchid that fixes the eye towards the centre of the block. With fragile and delicate blooms, held in clusters of cross-shaped blossoms, this species of orchid was introduced from the Caribbean but is a popular feature in coastal Sydney gardens. The late Nick Waterlow, the esteemed art historian, wrote in the introduction of Cressida Campbell’s first solo exhibition at Nevill Keating Pictures in London that her distinctive artworks ‘provide constant reminders of the unique wonders of nature in this ancient continent’ and ‘a wonderfully refreshing antidote to all those forces that want to separate us from our surrounding environment’.3

1. Allen, C., ‘Happy Days’, The Australian, 31 January 2009 2. The artist, 1985, cited in Australian Perspecta ’85, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1985, p. 87 3. Waterlow, N., Cressida Campbell Recent Paintings, Nevill Keating Pictures, London, 2001

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

(1913 – 1999) TARTAN, 1998 sawn, painted and stencilled wood from cable reels on board 91.0 x 93.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Rosalie Gascoigne / 1998 / TARTAN

ESTIMATE: $90,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Queensland, acquired from the above in 1999

EXHIBITED

Rosalie Gascoigne, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 1 – 25 September 1999, cat. 13 (illus. on exhibition invitation) Rosalie Gascoigne, The Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 19 December 2008 – 15 March 2009, cat. 77

LITERATURE

Gellatly, K. (with Clark, D. and Gascoigne, M.), Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009, pp. 113 (illus.), 136 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 667, pp. 305 (illus.), 347, 353, 418

Rosalie Gascoigne, one of the most important Australian artists of the 20th century, achieved late in life accolades that no woman artist before her ever had. Her humble and frugal art was deeply informed by the geographic features of her adopted Australian homeland and followed a progression of formal and abstract distillation, moving gradually from sculptural maquettes to bold and graphic planar assemblages. Her late assemblages on board varied in format from minute colour and textural studies to massive road sign and Schweppes-crate metaphorical landscapes. These works were all anchored in their emphasis on the aesthetic qualities of her found materials and its poetic associative power. The origin and function of her found objects (transport crates, cable reels, road signs, wood, china and linoleum) was often completely obscured by the artist’s process of fragmentation and reconstitution. Instead of making the material qualities the subject of her artistic intervention, it was the palimpsestic traces on their surfaces that fascinated the artist: traces of the life it has lived in the harsh Australian landscape: bleaching, warping, bruising and cracking.

In 1998, Rosalie Gascoigne was aged 85 and despite having spent the majority of her life as an expatriate, found herself reflective on her early childhood in New Zealand, incorporating flashbacks to old experiences and places into her artworks.1 While all of Gascoigne’s works had a certain site-specific autobiographical quality, the rhythmic and noisy bricolage, Tartan, 1998, reveals in its title a cultural metonymy that linked the artist with her own ancestral roots. This work is a studio work, an intellectual puzzle on a modest scale. Using, with an astounding economy, nothing but the tonal contrast between black stencilled text and its weathered painted hardwood support, Gascoigne evokes the crisscross woven patterns of tartan fabric. Tartan is the symbolic national dress of Scotland and was used here as expression of the artist’s own origins, well-to-do Anglo-Scottish and Irish protestant, and more broadly an interrogation of colonial legacy of the English empire on the far-flung lands of Oceania where she resided.

William C Seitz likened the assemblage artist to a modern-day poet and this rings especially true for Rosalie Gascoigne, whose works were a product of the co-existence of natural and cultural processes. Arranged around the structural principle of the grid (her most Modern artistic device2), small sections of hardwood, tesserae, are cut into carefully proportioned crisp squares and equilateral triangles. Their rigorous arrangement into vertical and horizonal dominant lines emphasizes the dissonant curved printing of the text, this tension creating a dynamic quality within the square picture plane. The restriction of Gascoigne’s palette to materials that she had gathered during her rambles through the plains of the Monaro region necessarily created series of works with repeated visual strategies and materials. The titles were then added after completion and according to Mary Eagle, were ‘neither bound to, nor reflected the process of construction’.3

In 1993, some 5 years prior to the construction of Tartan, Gascoigne chanced upon some wooden cable spools, used to transport telephone powerlines and fencing wire. These large hardwood reels had several aesthetic attractions for her: curved rims painted in vibrant colours (red, yellow, orange, white and black) and were often stencilled, stamped and inscribed with letters and numbers, and punctured with uniform holes. While at first she prioritized the use of the “grubby white spools” between 1993 – 1994, Gascoigne moved quickly on to the ones for copper wire, painted red. Many of the works created with this wood used colour associations for their titles: Shabby Summer, 1994- 5, The Apple Isle 1994 – 95, Wild Strawberries, 1995, Embers I and II, 1998, Rose Hips, 1998, Ruby Rose, 1998, Western Plains, 1998, Carnival, 1998 and Fiesta, 1999.4

Tartan was included in Gascoigne’s last solo exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney, by which point the artist was too ill to travel to see and passed away a month later. Alongside Tartan were intimate works focused on textural minutiae, and her last major masterpieces: Metropolis and Great Blond Paddocks, both of which were acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales that year. Tartan was also chosen to be included in the last major retrospective exhibition to be held in Australia of Rosalie Gascoigne’s work, at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia in Melbourne, in 2008–09.

1. O’Brien, G., ‘Plain Air/Plain Song’ in Rosalie Gascoigne, Plain Air, City Gallery Wellington,

Victoria University Press, 2004, p. 47 2. Edwards, D., Rosalie Gascoigne. Material as Landscape, Art Gallery of New South Wales,

Sydney, 1998, p. 13 3. Eagle, M., ‘Rosalie Gascoigne’, From the Southern Cross: A view of world art, c.1940 – 1988,

Biennale of Sydney, 1988, p. 132 4. Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, pp. 76, 125

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

Rosalie Gascoigne in her studio, working with wood from sawn-up cable drums. The work under construction is City Block (1996). Photographer: William Yang

born 1960 SOMETHING MORE #3, 1989 Cibachrome photograph 98.0 x 127.0 cm (image) 100.0 x 131.0 cm (sheet) edition of 30

ESTIMATE: $18,000 – 25,000

PROVENANCE

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in September 2000

EXHIBITED (SELECTED)

Other examples of image have been exhibited and published in the full suite, including: Something More, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, and touring through regional galleries, 1989 Tracey Moffatt, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane and Asia Link, Melbourne, 1990 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 55) Antipodean Currents, John F. Kennedy Centre for Performing Arts, Washington D.C., USA, 9 – 16 October 1994 (and touring, another example, illus. in exhibition catalogue, pp. 86, 87) Tracey Moffatt, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 10 April – 7 June 1998 and travelling throughout Europe (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 55) Tracey Moffatt, Nassau County Museum of Art, New York, February – April 2001 Tracey Moffatt, City Gallery Wellington, Wellington, 1 February – 26 May 2002 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 26) Tracey Moffatt, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 17 December – 29 February 2004 Tracey Moffatt. Between Dreams and Reality, Spazio Oberdan, Milan, 28 June – 1 October 2006 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 120) Tracey Moffatt, Lismore Regional Gallery, New South Wales, 13 March – 25 April 2009 Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, Part 1, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 14 November 2020 – 4 July 2021 (another example)

LITERATURE

Williams, D., and Simpson, C., Art Now. Contemporary Art Post–1970, Mcgraw–Hill Book Company, Sydney, 1994, p. 141 (illus., another example) Newton, G., Tracey Moffatt: Fever Pitch, Piper Press, Sydney, 1995, pp. 13, 16, 17 (illus.), 39 (illus., another example) Martin, A., ‘Tracey Moffatt’s Australia (A Reconnaissance)’, Parkett, no .53, 1998, p. 23 (illus., another example) Riemschneider, B. and Grosenick, U. (eds), Art at the Turn of the Millennium, Taschen, Cologne, 1999, p. 348 (illus., another example) Reinhardt, B. et al., Tracey Moffatt: Laudanum, Hatje Cantze, Germany, 1999, p. 10 (illus., another example) Travis, L., ‘Mirage: Drysdale and Moffatt in the Australian Outback’, Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press, Sydney, 2000, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 548 – 555 (illus. p. 552, another example) Savage, P. and Strongman, L. (eds), Tracey Moffatt, City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, 2002, pp. 11, 19, 26 (illus., another example) Summerhayes, C., The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt, Edizioni Charta, Milan, 2007, p. 15 (illus., another example)

RELATED WORKS

Other examples of this photograph are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Murray Art Museum Albury, New South Wales, and Artbank, Sydney

(c.1910 – 1996) UNTITLED (YAM), 1996 synthetic polymer paint on linen 151.0 x 122.5 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Delmore Gallery cat. 96F052

ESTIMATE: $120,000 – 160,000

PROVENANCE

Delmore Gallery, Alice Springs, Northern Territory Private collection, Melbourne

EXHIBITED

Emily Kame Kngwarreye: My Mother Country, Kunsthaus Zug, Switzerland, October 2019 – February 2020

Renowned for her colourful, vibrant paintings based on the everchanging desert landscape in her father and grandfather’s Country of Alhalker, Emily Kngwarreye was deeply rooted in the Anmatyerr land of her ancestors to whom she paid respect through a lifetime of ceremonial song, dance and painting. Her art chronicled on canvas this triangular shaped country, where Emily was born, the youngest of three children, and where she lived in the ways of the eastern Anmatyerr. In 1926, the traditional life of the Anmatyerr and Alyawarr people was disrupted, when the borders of the Utopia pastoral lease were drawn across their lands and from there, local people including Kngwarreye found work on the emergent pastoral stations. Many years after, in 1977, she was introduced to batik as part of adult education classes on Utopia Station and ten years later, in 1988-89, painted her first work on canvas, sparking a meteoric rise to fame.

In the months before she died, Emily Kame Kngwarreye was living at Delmore Downs Station with Lily Kngwarreye and her family. Although her output had reduced markedly, the final works painted for Delmore Gallery were a small group of powerful and dynamic monochromatic canvases executed on a black ground. Before beginning each new canvas, Emily would survey the various pots of coloured paints that were stored under the wide veranda of the Delmore homestead. Selecting her chosen colour of red, blue or white acrylic paint and carrying the tin to the primed canvas, she would then sit and begin the next work.

Untitled (Yam), 1996 is one of those remarkable late paintings – a masterpiece of strength and simplicity. The single colour, in this case a bright white, is applied lightly with a translucent quality in web-like traceries spread energetically across the canvas limited only by the reach of the artist’s arm. The sweeping arcs of white paint intersecting, overlaying and crossing in a series of gestural strokes mirror the subject of her painting – the meandering rhizomatic roots of the Arlatyeye plant (the pencil yam - Vigna lanceolata) and the cracks that form in the ground when the pencil yam ripens – while at the same time highlighting the intimate process between artist and canvas.

As Janet Holt states in the accompanying certificate, ‘As a monotonal painting, our engagement with the line is captured well and we find the live energy here intoxicating. We track the path of each stroke as she confidently reaches out across her canvas surface to place her arced lines of ritual body painting practice.’1

More than two decades have passed since Emily Kngwarreye died in September 1996, yet her name remains synonymous with the best of Australian Indigenous art. An original, intuitive and often enigmatic artist, her painting career lasted less than a decade, but the critical acclaim for her prodigious output has not diminished and her reputation has been sustained both in Australia and internationally.

1. From the accompanying Delmore Gallery certificate of authenticity

CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE

Above: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, 1992 Photographer: Christopher Hodges © Utopia Art Sydney Right: Artist Sally Gabori with her work titled ‘Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda’ at the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair in Cairns, Queensland, 2012 Photographer: Brendan Francis / Newspix

(c.1924 – 2015) DIBIRDIBI COUNTRY, 2011 synthetic polymer paint on linen 151.0 x 198.0 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, title, medium and Mornington Island Arts and Crafts cat. SALLY GABORI/DIBIRDIBI COUNTRY/ SYNTHETIC POLYMER PAINT ON LINEN/736-L-SG-1011 and Alcaston Gallery cat. AK17462

ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE

Mornington Island Arts and Crafts, Queensland Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne (bears gallery stamp verso) Private collection, Melbourne

EXHIBITED

Danda nigijinda dulk, danda nigijinda malaa, danda ngad – This is my Land, this is my sea, this is who I am; A Survey Exhibition of Paintings by Sally Gabori: 2005 – 2012, Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra, 30 March – 5 May 2013

LITERATURE

Knight, B., Maloon, T., and McPhee, J., Danda nigijinda dulk, danda nigijinda malaa, danda ngad – This is my Land, this is my sea, this is who I am. A Survey Exhibition of Paintings by Sally Gabori: 2005 – 2012, Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra, 2013, pl. 23, p. 46 (illus.)

RELATED WORKS

Dibirdibi Country, 2011, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 151.0 x 198.0 cm, in the Collection of Anthony and Beverly Knight, Melbourne, illus. in Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori: dulka warngiid: Land of All, Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2016, cat. 29, p. 108 Dibirdibi Country, 2011, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 198.0 x 455.0 cm, in the collection of Rockhampton Regional Art Gallery, Rockhampton, illus. in Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori: dulka warngiid: Land of All, Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2016, cat. 26, pp. 98, 99

Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori’s paintings are a tribute to the country on Bentinck Island, a small sparsely vegetated rise of land in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria where she grew up living off the natural abundance of the surrounding ocean and estuaries in the traditions of the Kaiadilt. In 1948, following a series of natural disasters, Gabori along with the other inhabitants of Bentinck Island, were forced to relocate to Gununa on nearby Mornington Island. Almost sixty years later in 2005, Gabori, then in her early eighties, was invited to participate with other Kaiadilt in an art workshop at the Mornington Island Art Centre. After a few visits, it became clear that her early paintings – often crude abstract depictions of the myriad of fish found in the surrounding estuaries and sea – offered a unique and colourful expression of her personal and family stories spawned from the memories of her early years on Bentinck Island. Her artistic repertory consisted of six main subjects, all of them places on Bentinck Island included Mirdidingki (the place of her birth); Makarrki (her brother King Alfred’s country); Thundi (her father’s country); and Dibirdibi (her husband’s country). By painting each place over and over, she relived memories of the people and places she loved. As Cara Pinchbeck states, ‘Gabori’s works are a celebration of her homeland and illustrate a deep connection to country that has not diminished through separation. From her very earliest works, she has depicted aspects of her own beloved country as well as that of her brother, father and husband – including both geographical aspects of the landscape as well as the wildlife, specifically sea-life which is central to the landscape.’1

Dibirdibi Country, 2011 is a powerful recollection of the country of her husband, Kabarrarjingathi Bulthuku Pat Gabori, a rival of her brother King Alfred, and whose relationship with Gabori created intense friction within Kaiadilt society eventually resulting in the death of her brother.2 Dibirdibi is a subject and location painted more often by the artist than any other. Recalling the country of her husband and the Rock Cod Ancestor, this painting shows a large saltpan that covers part of her husband’s country close to the site where the liver of Dibirdibi, the Rock Cod Ancestor, was thrown into the sea, creating a permanent fresh water well. Covered with opaque layers of varied colours, combined with strong gestural mark-making, Gabori’s canvases are an expression of her love for her husband and the landscape of her country.

1. Pinchbeck, C., ‘Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori’ in unDisclosed, 2nd National

Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2012, p. 64 2. McLean, B., ‘Dulka Warngiid; The Whole World’ in Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori

Dulka Warngiid; Land of All, Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2016 p. 16

CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE

KUTUWULUMI PURAWARRUMPATU (KITTY KANTILLA)

(c.1928 – 2003) UNTITLED, 1998 natural earth pigments and synthetic binder on canvas 92.0 x 79.0 cm bears inscription and stamp verso: artist’s name Kitty Kantilla and Jilamara Arts cat. 980266

ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE

Jilamara Arts, Melville Island, Northern Territory (stamped verso) Aboriginal and Pacific Art, Sydney Private collection, Sydney Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 24 June 2002, lot 30 Private collection, New South Wales

EXHIBITED

Kitty Kantilla Kutuwalumi Purawarrumpatu, Aboriginal and Pacific Art, Sydney, 1 – 24 October 1998 Kitty Kantilla, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 27 April – 19 August 2007; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 7 December 2007 – 21 January 2008, cat. 60 (label attached verso)

LITERATURE

Ryan, J., Kitty Kantilla, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, p. 53 (illus.) Kitty Kantilla achieved much acclaim during her painting career. A pioneer of women artists from the Tiwi Islands, Kantilla first began producing intricate bark paintings and decorated carvings with a group of Tiwi women in the 1970s. Living a traditional life during her childhood at Yimpinari with her mother and father, Kantilla grew up speaking old Tiwi, eating bush foods and sleeping in paper–bark shelters during the wet season. Having undergone initiation as part of her education and witnessing her father painting jilamara (designs) for the Pukumani (funeral) ceremony, Kantilla was imbued with Tiwi rituals and the associated designs.

She began making collaborative sculpture with her third husband Larry Kantilla in 1978 and ten years later Kantilla exhibited sixteen sculptures in Carved Wooden Sculptures by Tiwi Women from Paru at Aboriginal Artists Gallery, Sydney. By the early 1990s she had ceased carving and was instead painting her traditional designs on paper and canvas, Kitty Kantilla’s Untitled 1998 is significant for being one of the earlier works to represent a fundamental shift away from her characteristic black ground by the introduction of a white ground. Kantilla’s black ground works were a more literal translation of the Tiwi body paint decoration for which she had become so well known. It was this dramatic transition to white canvas that catapulted her work into the realm of deep abstraction, as though a light had been turned on all the cultural ceremonial elements Kantilla had been taught to paint by her father. As Judith Ryan astutely observed, ‘The white surface broke the direct link between surface of object or body and two–dimensional painting and introduced stronger tonal contrasts, giving life to dramatic divisions of space, larger fields of colour and the adventurous use of squares and lines within rectangles on a white wall.’1

1. Ryan, J., ‘Dot Dot’– the Art of Kitty Kantilla’, in Meridian: Focus on Contemporary Australian

Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2002, p. 99

(1959 – 2006) LUNAR, 2001 copper on a wooden plinth 28.5 cm height inscribed with title, date and artist’s name at base: ‘Lunar’ 2001 / Bronwyn Oliver

ESTIMATE: $65,000 – 85,000

PROVENANCE

Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 26 August 2009, lot 6 Private collection, Canberra

EXHIBITED

Bronwyn Oliver, Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne, 24 November – 21 December 2001 (illus. on exhibition invitation)

RELATED WORK

Globe, 2002, copper, 300.0 cm diameter, in the collection of the University of New South Wales, Sydney

I think about sculpture as a kind of physical poetry, and I construct my sculpture like constructing sentences, in the sense that I try to exclude associations that are clouding the centre and leave in only associations that add meaning to the core.’1

As one of the country’s leading and most celebrated sculptors, Bronwyn Oliver has left behind an important legacy. Her oeuvre presents perfectly resolved, organic sculptures predominantly in patinated copper and bronze. The highly skilled and painstaking craftsmanship involved in this process conveys the unbridled passion and commitment Oliver had for her practice.

There is an inherent transparency and softness to these resilient unyielding structures. Like veins in a leaf, an intricate system of copper is woven together to form an impeccable whole. Oliver was able to successfully tame this seemingly immutable medium, melding and stylising it to form a unique sculptural lexicon; unmatched and exclusively hers. Rhythmical waves, curves, wreaths, cylindrical spheres and cell-like structures mimic forms from the sea such as shells, amoeba, driftwood, tentacles, or braided seaweed not unlike the similar influence located in the architecture and interior design of Antoni Gaudí, inspired also by the aquamarine milieu.

Furthermore, there is an undeniable reference to astronomical and cosmic macro phenomena, to forms that inhabit the great ocean of outer space. Specifically in Lunar, 2001, hundreds of connected spiralling tendril-like coils are presented in a hollow globe labyrinth leaning off-centre from its axis, thereby alluding to galactical musings. The surface has a remarkable depth as demarcated by the ellipsoid shape. Captivating shadows are cast by Oliver’s objects, such as Lunar, and are an integral part of the work. Intricate patterns become projected and warped as the interplay between light and form is enlivened.

This particular work is closely related to the major commissioned outdoor piece Globe, 2002, which is three metres in diameter and on permanent display at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Fragile yet robust, Oliver’s sculptures such as the present, are sophisticated, elegant and beautiful, embodying an incandescent clarity of vision. As Sebastian Smee recognises: ‘As well as having a bold, classical symmetry, her sculptures have a private feeling about them, as of something freshly observed on a solitary walk.’2

1. The artist cited in Fenner, F., Bronwyn Oliver, Moet et Chandon, Epernay, France, 1995, n.p. 2. Smee, S., ‘Nature of single-minded devotion’, The Australian, 14 July 2006, p. 14

(1915 – 2016) PEGASUS, 1991 polychrome steel 124.0 cm height signed at base: Inge King

ESTIMATE: $45,000 – 65,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Perth, acquired directly from the artist, November 2003

LITERATURE

Grishin, S., The Art of Inge King Sculptor, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2014, p. 373

Way back in 1966, the author, as a callow and wide-eyed student, visited Inge King’s studio-home in Melbourne’s outer suburb of Warrandyte. “The Kings”, as they were affectionately known, were a respected and dedicated couple. Even then it was clear that Grahame and Inge King’s devotion ran in two directions: one to the other and each to their own artistic practise. A rare, very fruitful and encompassing symbiosis seemed to energise their life and work. Their Robin Boyd designed home was brimming with artists’ prints, including Grahame’s, and Inge’s sculptures ran through the house, down into the studio and out in the garden. Here was a remarkable artistic life that was lived in and lived out. Everything had the warm look of being used rather than displayed; the atmosphere seemed patinaed by aesthetic activity.

Inge King’s sculptures are well-known and widely represented in various collections, especially in and around her native Melbourne. Her large Forward Surge at the Victorian Arts Centre and Sentinel on the EastLink Freeway spring immediately to mind. Then, of course, there are the major works at The University of Melbourne (Sun Ribbon), Heide Museum of Modern Art (Rings of Saturn), McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery (Island Sculpture) and the National Gallery of Victoria (Rings of Jupiter III). An exhaustive listing is published in Emeritus Professor Sasha Grishin’s magisterial study: The Art of Inge King Sculptor of 2014. King’s mature work Pegasus of 1991, created at the age of seventysix, has a direct provenance and its unusual “windvane-like” format points to its extended sculptural significance. The visually striking steel sculpture has a beacon-like structure that uses a tripod base to support a series of forms suggesting the elongated mass of a body with an outstretched set of wings. The whole sits aloft a peak whose triangular outline is suggested by three large arcs. If the sculpture’s title is any guide the abstracted upper section of the sculpture may point to a link with the Greek myth of Pegasus, the winged horse upon the mountain of Helicon, a subject much favoured by the French artist Odilon Redon (1840-1916). Whatever the original ideational source, the sculpture’s three-dimensional format of held-aloft shapes atop a tripod base points to King’s later desire to “animate” and add “lift” to her sculptures during the early years of 2000, as exemplified by her contemporaneous Angel and Dance Series. If this is the credible case, the formal elements together with the arrested dynamism and gestalt of King’s Pegasus of 1991 may be seen as related to the overall “visual language” of Sentinel of 2000, her earlier and much-admired monumental commission (13 metres) for Melbourne’s EastLink Freeway.

Each of these two distinctive sculptures echo the transmutational processes that King’s creative mind so often employed. Considered in these ways, King’s Pegasus of 1991 presents as a rare and significant indicator of her main creative preoccupations during the early years of 2000; that is, how to combine cut-out forms and collage shapes into non-volumetric compositions that convincingly coax two-dimensional planar elements into three-dimensional masses.

KEN WACH