various vendors

HORACE PAYNE ELLIS

(1808 – 1890) WOOLLOOMOOLOO BAY, c.1838 oil on cedar panel 30.0 x 40.5 cm housed in its original ornate, gilt timber frame bearing a plaque “Wooloomooloo Bay [sic.] / 1838 / by H.P. Ellis / HEICS”

ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

29

PROVENANCE

Possibly the Rev. Thomas Hassall (1794-1866) of ‘Denbigh’, Cobbitty, NSW Possibly Charles McIntosh (1805-1875) who leased and then purchased ‘Denbigh’, Cobbitty, NSW Possibly Charles McIntosh Jnr (1845-1938), ‘Denbigh’, Cobbitty, NSW Estate of Mrs Lorna Mary Inglis (née McIntosh, widow of Mr Richard Reginald Inglis), formerly of properties ‘Applewood’, Cobbitty, NSW and ‘Denbigh’, Cobbitty, NSW (the latter built by Charles Hook in 1822, purchased by the Reverend Thomas Hassall in 1827 and purchased by Charles McIntosh in 1867) Raffan Kelaher & Thomas, Sydney, 12 April 2021, lot 11 Company collection, Sydney The recent discovery of Woolloomooloo Bay, 1838 has brought to light an almost entirely forgotten but highly significant Australian colonial artist - Horace Payne Ellis.

Very few works by Ellis appear to have survived. Two watercolours of Sydney are in the State Library of New South Wales. A lithograph of Sydney was published in the New South Wales Magazine in 1843.1 Two other lithographs, Port Jackson from Vaucluse and Fort Macquarie from the Harbour, were published separately, probably as a pair, in the same year.2 The Sydney newspaper, The Australasian Chronical, under the heading ‘News and rumours of the day’, praised both lithographs, the writer adding: ‘We hope the artist will meet sufficient encouragement to enable him to continue his Views, and thus cultivate a taste for the fine arts amidst our colonial youth.’3 Unfortunately, no other ‘views’ by Ellis appear to have been printed.

The scarcity, both of art works by Ellis and information about him, may well be due to the fact that, by mid-life, mental difficulties had brought about long-term incarceration and truncated his career. He died at the Parramatta Hospital for the Insane in 1890.

Horace Payne Ellis, the eldest child of Horace Ellis (1782 – 1830) and Mrs Philly Ellis, née Payne, was born4 and christened in Horsham, Sussex, in 1808.5 Ellis was born into a family of successful solicitors. His father Horace ran a legal practice in Horsham, Sussex and his grandfather William Ellis (1745 – 1809) had been an attorney of His Majesty’s Court of King’s Bench at Westminster.6

Little is known of Horace Payne Ellis’ early years or education in England, though his level of skill is clearly indicative of some sort of formal art training. Certainly, he claimed to have been occupied as an artist and portrait painter in his youth. For reasons that remain mysterious, Ellis joined the Honourable East India Company’s Madras Artillery Service at an entry rank of Acting Corporal in Westminster on 10 April 1829. On his attestation papers he described his former occupation as artist. He sailed from England to British India aboard the ship Minerva, arriving in Madras on 13 August 1829.7

If a military career was in fact his family’s idea of a corrective measure to address early signs of behavioural problems, then the measure backfired. There is much to suggest that the military career of Ellis was an abject failure. By 1836, his rank had slipped to that of gunner in the 2nd Artillery Battalion. In September of that year, he faced his first East India Company court-martial at St Thomas Mount, Madras, for the alleged crime of ‘refusing to attend divine service’. Found guilty, Ellis was sentenced to twelve months’ solitary confinement.8 In mid-October 1837, he faced a second court-martial, this time for ‘disobedience and mutinous conduct’. The military court at St Thomas Mount again found him guilty, but this time he was sentenced to be executed by gunshot. His death sentence was later commuted to seven years’ transportation.9

Ellis was one of eighteen ‘European prisoners of the Crown’ transported from Madras aboard Captain Thomas Symers’ ship Caledonia on 20 August 1838. The Caledonia arrived into Port Jackson, or Sydney, on 17 December 1838. The ship’s records recorded that Ellis was thirty years-old, Protestant, single, a labourer and a soldier in the horse artillery, and that he had received multiple prison terms and hundreds of lashes as punishment during the course of his career with the Honourable East India Company.10 The ship’s records also documented his prior occupation as ‘portrait painter’ and included a judgment by his military employer of his general character as ‘bad’.11

It is not known to which master Ellis was assigned during the first years of his sentence in New South Wales. However, the fact that it was the Parramatta Bench that granted him his first Ticket of Leave Passport on 9 June 1842 and that an 1843 newspaper list of unclaimed letters gives his address as Parramatta, suggests that he had been located in or in the vicinity of Parramatta for some time.12 His first Ticket of Leave permitted Ellis to ‘travel between Sydney and Parramatta for 12 months’.13 Ellis likely made use of his earliest opportunity to travel to Sydney to make contacts in Sydney’s artistic circles. When he married freewoman Maria Sophia Ballantyne Bailey at the Scots Church in Sydney on 28 January 1843,14 his witness was Mr Raphael Clint (1797 – 1849), a surveyor, lithographer, printer and engraver of controversial reputation. At that time, Clint maintained premises in Hunter Street, Sydney.15 The exact nature of the association between Ellis and Clint is uncertain. Nevertheless, their connection indicates that Ellis intended to return to his youthful occupation as an artist.

By the time a second Ticket of Leave Passport was granted to Ellis on 10 June 1843, he had clearly expressed his professional intentions to authorities, with the result that the Parramatta magistrate formally permitted him to ‘travel though the counties of Cumberland, Camden, Cook and Bathurst following the profession of an artist for 12 months.’’16 His third and final Ticket of Leave Passport, granted by the Parramatta Bench in June 1844, intriguingly permitted him to ‘travel through the counties of Camden, Cook Bathurst and Cumberland but not through the Sydney District, following his profession of an artist for 12 months’. Why Ellis was barred from practising as an artist in Sydney at that time is not known, but perhaps behavioural issues had once again emerged as a limiting factor in his life.17

The years of the mid-1840s appear to have been artistically productive for Ellis. He shipped a case of paintings home to England in December 1845, though sadly the ultimate destination of those paintings remains unknown.18 In 1847, his painting Rocky Scenery was hung at the Australian Library in Bent Street, Sydney in the Exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts, the first exhibition of its kind to be held in the colony.19 Two years later, in 1849, two Ellis paintings, North Rocks20 and Landscape21 were hung in a second Exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts, an exhibition to which Raphael Clint also contributed with two classical intaglios of the heads of Lord Byron and von Weber.22 Other exhibitors in these exhibitions included Conrad Martens, John Skinner Prout, George Edwards Peacock, Joseph Fowles and William Nicholas.

The 1840s was, however, a time of economic depression in the colony. Raphael Clint was one of its many casualties. His engraving business was declared insolvent in 1847.23 By 1850, the pressure on Ellis to make a living from his painting must have been intense and difficult and all the more necessary because by then he and his wife Maria had three small children to feed.24

There is evidence that by 1851 all was not well with Ellis. On 23 October 1851 he was arrested and imprisoned in Darlinghurst Gaol for an undocumented offence, before being discharged on bail two weeks later.25 Then on 3 January 1852 from an address in Crown Street, Surry Hills, Ellis placed a newspaper advertisement, declaring ‘The person I have married having threatened to borrow money, I hereby caution everyone against trusting her, as I will not be answerable for anything she may do.’26 Two weeks later he placed another advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald that read ‘I hereby caution all persons against harbouring or concealing either of my children, and shipmasters, owners etc., against taking them away from the colony without my consent.’27 On January 31, 1852 Ellis was again arrested and imprisoned in Darlinghurst Gaol, but this time, no discharge on bail was made available to him. He was examined and found to be suffering from ‘mania and delusions’ and on 16 February 1852 he was transferred from Darlinghurst Gaol to Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum.28

Horace Payne Ellis died at the Parramatta Hospital for the Insane on 29 June 1890 and was buried at the Church of England Cemetery in Rookwood.29 His widow, Maria Ellis died in Leichhardt seven years later on 7 April 1897. Incredibly, given the disaster that was her husband’s military career, her death notice in the Sydney Morning Herald described her as the ‘relict of the late Horace Payne Ellis, HEICS’. His family evidently continued to maintain a pride in their father’s association with the Honourable East India Company Service.30

Horace Payne Ellis lived in an age when neither behavioural therapy nor pharmacological treatment was available to address what ailed him. His mental illness ultimately deprived him of his family, his career as an artist and his humanity. On his death certificate, the informants at the Parramatta Hospital for the Insane did not even bother to verify basic details such as the names of his parents, where he had married or how long he had been in the colony. Horace Payne Ellis, the man, had been well and truly consigned to the scrapheap. But despite all that he had suffered, the artistic talent of Horace Payne Ellis cannot be denied. In Woolloomooloo Bay, 1838, Ellis has provided a unique vision of Sydney at the time. Woolloomooloo Bay was one of the areas where Aboriginal people continued to live, despite dispossession, dispersal and decimation from disease. Keith Vincent Smith in The Dictionary of Sydney has written: ‘Remnants of different clans banded together in mixed groups, ignoring old enmities and origins. With official encouragement, they could obtain some of the benefits of ‘civilisation’, such as blankets, clothing, iron hatchets and fishhooks, and bread, flour, sugar, tea, tobacco and alcohol, to which they quickly became accustomed. Their resulting lifestyle was a mixture of tradition and adaptation… [T]hese family groups searched for campsites close to the shore and near a creek or other source of fresh water [and with] access to harbour fishing… Around their fires, they could still sit naked, collect bush foods, fish and swim, tell stories and sing songs as before. When they went into the settlements to barter fish or seek supplies, they were required to put on European clothing.’31

It is interesting to speculate who the people depicted in the painting might be. The family of Bungaree (who had died in 1830) stayed in the Woolloomooloo Bay area, as did people from the Shoalhaven and other areas. The central figure bears a similarity to the Shoalhaven woman Morirang, as she is depicted in Charles Rodius’ 1834 lithograph that was made when Morirang was visiting friends in the Woolloomooloo Bay area.

Whoever Ellis has depicted in the painting, he has painted them with respect. He has also posed the group in such a formal manner that he may have been more interested in making a classical allusion rather than in documenting individuals.

Ellis’s only other known oil painting, a large copy of Nicolas Poussin’s The Triumph of Flora, 32 clearly indicates Ellis’ classical training and outlook. He was no doubt wanting to paint works that would appeal to aspirational free settlers and emancipists in Sydney in the 1840s. At the Society of Fine Arts exhibitions in Sydney in the 1840s, works by local artists (including Ellis) were hung alongside works ascribed to Poussin himself, and to other old masters, from Rembrandt to Rubens. These were almost certainly imported copies but were, nevertheless, designed to reflect the sophistication and status of their owners.

In Horace Payne Ellis’s Woolloomooloo Bay, 1838, the artist manages to capture the two, oppositional, societal views in Sydney at the time, making it a remarkable and important Australian painting that enhances our knowledge of colonial history.

1. New South Wales Magazine, Sydney, James Reading, 1843. A copy of this lithograph by Ellis is in the National Gallery of Australia. 2. A copy of each lithograph is in ‘Portraits of the Aborigines of New South Wales Sydney’, 1843, a volume compiled with the intention of publication and presented to Sir Thomas Michell –

No. 6. Port Jackson. Form Vaucluse. No.1/drawn by I. Ellis, printed by T. Liley. Lithograph & No. 12. Fort Macquarie. From the Harbour. No. 2/drawn by I. Ellis, printed by T. Liley, the volume bequeathed by D.D. Mitchell, 1907, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South

Wales. NB: The lithographs have ‘I’ or ‘J’ Ellis printed beneath the images. The Mitchell Library refers to I. Ellis and to J. Ellis in relation to the lithographs. Ellis preferred to be known as

John and regularly interchanged John or J. Ellis with Horace Payne or H.P. Ellis. A variety of documentation confirms that these were the names of the one artist. 3. Australasian Chronical, Sydney, 18 April 1843, p. 2 (under heading ‘News and rumours of the day’. 4. Horace Ellis (1782 – 1830) and Philly Payne (1787 – 1854) were married at the Church of St

John the Baptist in Lewes, Sussex in 1807. Source: England, Select Marriages, 1538 – 1973,

Ancestry.com, Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., published 2014, Provo, UT, USA 5. Ancestry.com. England, Select Births and Christenings, 1538-1975 [database on-line].

Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014. Original data: England, Births and

Christenings, 1538 – 1975. Salt Lake City, Utah: FamilySearch, 2013 6. The National Archives of the UK (TNA); Kew, Surrey, England; Court of King’s Bench: Plea

Side: Affidavits of Due Execution of Articles of Clerkship, Series I; Class: KB 105; Piece: 6,

UK, Articles of Clerkship, 1756 – 1874, Ancestry.com, published by Ancestry.com Operation,

Inc. 2012, Provo UT, USA 7. Families in British India Society (FIBIS) Database, Embarkation Lists of EIC Recruits to India, transcribed from IOR ref: L/MIL/9/100 8. Families in British India Society (FIBIS) Database, General Orders by Commander-in-Chief

Transcription of Court Martial Proceedings, IOR reference L/MIL/17/417 page 273 9. Families in British India Society (FIBIS) Database, General Orders by Commander-in-Chief

Transcription of Court Martial Proceedings, IOR reference L/MIL/17/3/417, page 298 10. State Archives NSW; Series: NRS 12189; item [X641]; Microfiche:735, New South Wales,

Australia, Convict Indents, 1788-1842, Ancestry.com, published by Ancestry.com Operations,

Inc., published 2011, Provo, UT, USA 11. New South Wales, Australia Convict Ship Muster Rolls and Related Records, 1790-1849,

Ancestry.com, Ancestry.com Operations Inc., published 2008, Provo, UT, USA 12. Trove, New South Wales Government Gazette, Sydney, NSW: 1832-1900/Friday 12 May 1843 (Issue No. 40), page 651, List of Unclaimed letters for the month of April, 1843 13. State Archives NSW; Series: NRS 12204, New South Wales, Australia, Tickets of Leave, 1810-1869, Ancestry.com, published by Ancestry.com Operations, Inc, Provo, UT, USA 14. Early Church Records Marriages held at NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages,

Number 3716 V74B 15. Design & Art Australia Online database and e-research tool for art and design researchers, daao.org.au, Raphael Clint Biography 16. State Archives NSW; Series: NRS 12204, New South Wales, Australia, Tickets of Leave, 1810-1869, Ancestry.com, published by Ancestry.com Operations, Inc, Provo, UT, USA 17. Ibid. 18. The Australian Journal, December 9, 1845 19. Exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia, 1847, held at The

Australian Library, Bent Street, catalogue printed by Kemp and Fairfax, 1847, (24pp.): Exhibit 330. Rocky Scenery, the property of Mr T.S. Mort (at SLNSW1847-1857 MRB/706/S , 706/S ,

FM4/9612) 20. Exhibition of the Society for the promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia. Sydney, 1849, catalogue printed by Kemp and Fairfax: Exhibit 227. North Rocks, the property of Captain

McLean (at SLNSW 1847-1857 MRB/706/S , 706/S , FM4/9612) 21. Exhibition of the Society for the promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia. Sydney, 1849, catalogue printed by Kemp and Fairfax: Exhibit 381. ‘Landscape’ became the property of Mr O’Keefe (at SLNSW 1847-1857 MRB/706/S , 706/S , FM4/9612) 22. Australian Jewellery – 19th and Early 20th Century by Anne Schofield and Kevin Fahy, published by Antique Collectors Club Ltd, 1992, page 166: Clint, Raphael (1797-1849) 23. Australian Dictionary of Biography: adb.anu.edu.au/biography/clint-raphael-1904 24. Amelia Ellis (1845-1920), Alfred Livesay Ellis (1848-1916) and Horace Payne Ellis (1850-1917) 25. State Archives NSW; Kingswood, New South Wales; Gaol Description and Entrance Books, 1818-1930; Series: 2523; Item 4/6304; Roll: 858, Ancestry.com, published by Ancestry.com

Operations, Inc, 2012 26. Trove - The People’s Advocate and New South Wales Vindicator (Sydney, NS: 1848-1856),

Monday 5 Jan 1852, page 15, Advertising 27. Trove – The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW: 1842 – 1954), Monday 26 January 1852, page 3, Advertising 28. State Archives NSW; Kingswood, New South Wales; Gaol Description and Entrance Books, 1818-1930; Item:1891; Roll:265, Ancestry.com, published by Ancestry.com Operations, Inc, 2012 & The State Records Authority of New South Wales; Kingswood, New South Wales,

Australia; Returns and Reports 1845-55, 1857, 1859-1861; Series Number: 906; Reel: 746, New South wales, Australia, Hospital & Asylum Records, 1840 – 1913, Ancestry.com, published by Ancestry.com Operations, Inc. 2014, Provo, UT, USA. NB: Tarban Creek Lunatic

Asylum later became known as The Gladesville Mental Hospital. 29. England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1858-1995 for Horace Payne Ellis, 1893 & Death Transcription from NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and

Marriages: Horace Payne Ellis 30. Trove, Sydney Morning Herald, Feb 25-Jul 6, 1897, Deaths. NB: Ellis’ marriage certificate of 1843 refers to him as John Ellis, as do his military records and convict records. However, his death certificate, probate records and his wife’s death notice leave no doubt that John Ellis who married Maria Sophia Ballantyne Bailey was the same man as artist Horace Payne Ellis. 31. ‘Aboriginal life around Port Jackson after 1822’, by Keith Vincent Smith in The Dictionary of

Sydney, https://dictionaryofsydney.org 32. Ellis’ recently discovered copy of Nicolas Poussin’s The Triumph of Flora (oil on canvas, 60.4 x 88.8 cm, signed ‘H P. Ellis’ lower left) has the same provenance as Woolloomooloo Bay, 1838. It is now in a private collection.

SARAH STAVELEY AND STEPHEN SCHEDING

Port Jackson. From Vaucluse. No. 1, c.1843, 1846–1849, drawn by I. Ellis, printed by T. Liley Courtesy: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Fort Macquarie. From the Harbour. No. 2, c.1843, 1846–1849, drawn by I. Ellis, printed by T. Liley Courtesy: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

(1868 – 1909) THE THREE COWS, 1889 oil on cedar panel 23.0 x 10.5 cm (irreg.) signed and inscribed with title lower left: RIDDLE’S CREEK [sic] / Chas Conder

ESTIMATE: $350,000 – 450,000

PROVENANCE

Auction of paintings by Conder, Roberts, Streeton and Others, Shevill and Co., Melbourne, 24 October 1889 Dr Douglas Stewart, Melbourne Fine Private Collection of Water–Colour Drawings and Oil Paintings by Well–Known Artists, Gemmell, Tuckett and Co., Melbourne, 30 April 1920, lot 91 Dr U. Harper Bell, Melbourne, by 1938 Sir Reginald Marcus Clark, Sydney James R. Lawson, Sydney, 15 June 1954, cat. 29 (as ‘Riddle’s Creek’) Mrs Agnes Buchanan, Sydney Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

The 9 by 5 Impressionism Exhibition, Buxton’s Rooms, Melbourne, 17 August 1889, cat. 146 (as ‘The Three Cows’) Australian Impressionism, The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne, 31 March – 8 July 2008, cat. 9.14

LITERATURE

Osmond, S., Table Talk, Melbourne, Friday 2 August 1889, p. 7 Gibson, F., Charles Conder: His Life and Work, John Lane, The Bodley Head, London, 1914, p. 94 (as ‘The Three Cows’) Rothstein, J., The Life and Death of Conder, Dent, London, 1938, pp. 29, 285 (as ‘Riddle’s Creek’, coll. of U. Harper Bell) Hoff, U., Charles Conder. His Australian Years, National Gallery Society of Victoria, Melbourne, 1960, cat. 35, pp. 22 – 23 (as ‘Riddle’s Creek’) Hoff, U., “Charles Conder”, Art and Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 2, no. 1, May 1964, pp. 34, 36 (illus., as ‘Riddles Creek’) Hoff, U., Charles Conder, Lansdowne, Melbourne, 1972, cat. C49, no. 10, pp. 11, 32, 37 (illus., as ‘Riddle’s Creek’), 101 Lane, T., Australian Impressionism, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, cat. 9.14, pp. 166 (illus., as ‘The Three Cows’), 329

RELATED WORK

Riddells Creek, 1889, oil on wood panel on paper on two layers of cardboard, 24.4 x 11.2 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

The 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition, held in August 1889 at Buxton’s Rooms on Melbourne’s busy Swanston Street, is one of the most celebrated in this country’s history. Surviving works show it was full of artistic gems. Directed by Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder, the event was well staged. A publicity agent, Sophie Osmond of Melbourne’s Table Talk, was engaged to set the scene with a series of articles, as the exhibition itself provocatively promoted Impressionism and Aestheticism to challenge the conservative tastes of the time.1 In the catalogue announcement ‘To The Public’ the artists stated:

‘An effect is only momentary: so an impressionist tries to find his place. Two half-hours are never alike, and he who tries to paint a sunset on two successive evenings, must be more or less painting from memory. So, in these works, it has been the object of the artists to render faithfully, and thus obtain first records of effects widely differing, and often of very fleeting character.’2 Conder designed the catalogue cover in bold, beguiling line. The perplexed figure of art, bound by the bands of convention, is being stripped free. And Buxton’s gallery was specially decorated in Liberty silks and dry flowers of Aesthetic inclination. Special musical recitals were held on Wednesday afternoons. The desired publicity, or notoriety, was achieved through the stinging attack launched by James Smith, the highly influential art critic for The Argus. His hostile review included the words: ‘…something like four-fifths are a pain to the eye’.3 Controversy raged. Smith did, nevertheless, select some artists and their works for favourable comment: ‘These and a few others afford something agreeable for the eye to rest upon…’. Conder’s Myosotis (whereabouts unknown) was one of them.

Of the 182 small-scaled works exhibited, 60 were by Roberts, 41 by Streeton, 46 by Conder and four by Frederick McCubbin, including one titled Still Glides the Stream (whereabouts unknown).4 A select number are now among the treasured holdings of our national, state and regional art galleries. Twelve are by Conder. They include Impressionists’ Camp, 1889; Herrick’s Blossoms, c.1888; and Riddells Creek, 1889 (all in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra); Sketch Portrait, c.1889 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne); An Impressionist (portrait of Tom Roberts), 1889, (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney); How We Lost Poor Flossie, 1889 and Dandenong from Heidelberg, 1889 (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide); and Dusk, 1889 (Art Gallery of Ballarat). Of these, the most interesting from the point of view of our painting, is the companion piece, Riddells Creek in the National Gallery of Australia. For many years both were in the collection of Dr Douglas Stuart, having been purchased by him from the Auction of paintings by Conder, Roberts, Streeton and Others at Shevill and Co., Melbourne, on 24 October 1889. They are illustrated side by side in Ursula Hoff’s article on Conder in Art and Australia in May 1964, misleadingly carrying the same title of ‘Riddles Creek’.5 This confusion is no doubt due to both paintings having been inscribed ‘RIDDLES CREEK’ by Conder.

The township of Riddells Creek, in the southern foothills of the Macedon Ranges, is about an hour’s drive northwest of Melbourne. Conder visited there not long before the opening of The 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition. Journalist Sophie Osmond noted in Table Talk of 2 August 1889 that Conder had visited Riddells Creek, ‘to study the scenery of the district’.6 This is supported by Conder’s letter to his cousin Maggie,

Charles Conder Riddells Creek, 1889 oil on wood panel on paper on two layers of cardboard 24.4 x 11.2 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1972

Charles Edward Conder, 1902 – 1904 Photographer: Frederick Henry Evans National Portrait Gallery, London

in which he wrote: ‘I have been staying at Riddels [sic.] Creek for a few days with Mrs Caffyn’.7 (During his Melbourne years, Conder had a close friendship with the novelist Kathleen Caffyn, who became his muse and his model. She, in turn, based one of the characters in her novel, A Yellow Aster, on Conder.8)

While our painting and the one in the National Gallery of Australia are inscribed ‘RIDDLES [sic] CREEK’, when exhibited in The 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition, the National Gallery’s painting was given the title ‘Riddell’s [sic.] Creek’ and our painting, ‘The Three Cows’. As noted by Mary Eagle in her book on Conder’s works in the National Gallery, both paintings have three cows, although they are more prominent in the latter. She also suggests that they ‘may have been painted on the same day’.9 If so, The Three Cows would have been first, as indicated by the light and other signs of the times of day. The absence of shadows suggests noontide and the cows graze happily in ordered line. The mood of pastoral peace continues through other images of settlement. Bright sunlight shines from the white-roofed, pink-walled homestead and dissipates the rain-bearing touches of grey on the cumulus clouds. Capturing the transient in paint, joy is characteristically touched by melancholy as sensuous pinks cohabit with fields of pale greens, all enlivened by the engaging movements of the brush and general upward movement. The fence line, reinforced by the distant hills of the horizon, divides the composition in two, almost equal, parts. All is balanced as quietude reigns in this vision of the poetic dreamer. The foreground is largely devoid of imagery, filled instead by subtle colour harmonies and the play of brushstrokes that speak of the visual pleasures found in abstract art.

The National Gallery of Australia’s Riddell Creek, 1889, almost identical in size and likewise vertical in format, provides an aerial view of a different direction. Looking into the now dimmed light as the cows rest from eating, Conder confirms the Impressionist credo – ‘Two halfhours are never alike’.10 A special cluster of colourful twists of paint translated into spring blossoms adds Oriental asymmetry, heightening the imaginative interpretation of the landscape so characteristic of Conder. Flatness is balanced by depth.

In the decorative use of colour, both paintings share directness, sophisticated simplicity, and a striking open-air feeling, blended with the lyricism for which Conder’s Australian works are so admired. As Ursula Hoff pointed out: ‘In most of these works, however, the strongly decorative trend inherent in Conder’s nature holds his realism in balance. He uses his arrangement and colour to create harmony, to express feeling’.11 Some paintings, especially those which are felt as much as seen, are engagingly ephemeral, enveloped in a poetic atmosphere. Others are permeated with an aqueous feel, the remarkable fluidity of his oil paint showing a likeness to watercolour technique. In her study of Conder’s paintings in the National Gallery of Australia, Mary Eagle commented on his ‘watercolour style of applying oil paint’ and its ‘transparency’. Referring to Bronte Beach, 1888, she also observed

that Conder ‘pioneered various other stylish conceits such as the Japanese style twigs on the lower left of Bronte Beach’.12 A similar such touch of plants is provided in the very forefront of The Three Cows. Other Japanese-inspired elements include its narrow format, flatness, individuality of design and exact placement of objects.

A number of influences contributed to the development of Conder’s style. In Sydney, he drew freelance for the Illustrated Sydney News, attended the outdoor art classes conducted by A.J. Daplyn and, in 1888, joined Julian Ashton’s evening sketch club. That same year saw a concentration of activities and achievements. At Easter, he painted at Coogee with Tom Roberts – their sunny paintings, Coogee Bay, 1888 by Conder, and Holiday Sketch at Coogee, 1888 by Tom Roberts, are now in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales respectively. In July – August, Conder joined Ashton, A.H. Fullwood and others, sketching at Griffith’s Farm, Richmond, in New South Wales. Several classics followed – Herrick’s Blossoms, 1888, now in the National Gallery of Australia, and Springtime, 1888 in the National Gallery of Victoria, through the Felton Bequest in 1941. His triumph of the year was the Departure of the Orient – Circular Quay, 1888, which was snapped up by the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales from the Annual Exhibition of the Art Society of New South Wales. Embracing plein air painting and Impressionist verve, its wet effects reveal Conder’s recent debt to Girolamo Nerli, who had arrived in Sydney the year before. In May of 1888, Conder and Nerli painted together at Bronte Beach. Conder’s Bronte Beach, 1888 (National Gallery of Australia) is imbued with his characteristic inventive approach to plein airism. In October, Conder left Sydney for Melbourne, painting Holiday at Mentone, 1888 (Art Gallery of South Australia), soon after. It was his second Australian masterpiece within the year. Later works showed the growing influence of Streeton. But it is in his sketch portrait of Tom Roberts, An Impressionist, 1889 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), shown in The 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition, that Conder pays special tribute to Roberts, acknowledging him and the leading role he played in his art.

In The Three Cows and paintings of the peopled Australian landscape, Conder enlivened the staid realism of plein air painting with invention, imaginative composition, sensuous colour and handling.

The Artistic Stationery Company’s (Buxton’s) new premises, Swanston Street, October 21, 1885 printed and published by Alfred Martin Ebsworth State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Buxton’s rooms hosted The 9 x 5 Impression Exhibition in 1889

1. McDonald, J., Art of Australia: Exploration to Federation, vol. I, Pan Macmillan, Sydney 2008, p. 470 2. he 9 By 5 Impression Exhibition, Buxton’s Rooms, Melbourne, 1889 3. Smith, J., ‘An Impressionist Exhibition’, The Argus, 17 August 1889, p. 10 4. he 9 By 5 Impression Exhibition, Buxton’s Rooms, Melbourne, 1889, cat. 177 5. Hoff, U., ‘Charles Conder’, Art and Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 2, 1 May 1964, p. 36 6. Osmond, S., Table Talk, Melbourne, 2 August 1889, p. 7 7. Conder to Maggie Conder [August 1889], Mitchell Library AC134, State Library of New South

Wales, Sydney, quoted in Eagle, op. cit., p. 46 8. A Yellow Aster was published in London in 1894 under the pseudonym ‘Iota’. 9. Eagle, M., The Oil Paintings of Charles Conder in the National Gallery of Australia, National

Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997, p. 46 10. The 9 By 5 Impression Exhibition, Buxton’s Rooms, Melbourne, 1889 11. Hoff, U., Charles Conder: His Australian Years, National Gallery Society of Victoria, Melbourne, 1960, p. 14 12. Eagle, op. cit., p. 20

DAVID THOMAS

Catalogue cover of ‘The 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition’, 1889 Designer: Charles Conder Printer: Fergusson and Mitchell, Melbourne National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

(1856 – 1931) A MODERN ANDROMEDA, 1891 – 92 oil on wood panel 45.0 x 10.8 cm signed and dated lower left: Tom Roberts . / 1892 Henry W Callan, Sydney, framers label attached verso

ESTIMATE: $400,000 – 600,000

PROVENANCE

Henri Kowalski (1841 – 1916), Sydney and Plouër-sur-Rance, France Thence by descent Louise Kowalski (née Éloy, AKA Louise Ferraris, 1844 – 1922, m.1869), Château du Chêne-Vert, Plouër-sur-Rance, France Thence by descent Madame Lemonnier, niece of the above, Château du Chêne-Vert, Plouër-sur-Rance, France Mr Roland Brouard, France, 1924, along with purchase of the Château du Chêne-Vert, Plouër-sur-Rance, France Thence by descent Louise Brouard (née Louët), France, wife of the above, in 1934 Thence by descent Marie-Thérèse Rouxel (née Brouard), Nantes, daughter of the above, in 1969 Jack-Philippe Ruellan S.A.R.L., Vannes, France, 27 February 2021, lot 99 (as ‘Jeune Fille à l’ombrelle, assise sur un rocher’) Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

Spring Exhibition, Art Society of New South Wales, Sydney, 1892, cat. 50

LITERATURE

Eagle, M., The Oil Paintings of Tom Roberts in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997, p. 61 n. 6

Recently rediscovered and repatriated from a private collection in France, Tom Roberts’ A Modern Andromeda, 1891-92 is, although modest in scale, a painting of considerable art historical significance. Not only is it a fine example of the artist’s simultaneously crisp and fluent Naturalist style, completed at a high point in his career1, but it also carries a rich freight of associations and information – revealing much about the life (and loves?) of the artist; painting in Melbourne and Sydney at the time; and the close links between various branches of the arts in the late 19th century.

In ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, financial capital of the Australian colonies, a collapse in property prices in 1889 and associated building society failures the following year created wider economic anxieties. The market for contemporary art had never been particularly secure, and Victoria’s painters had long contested the National Gallery of Victoria’s acquisition policies, which did not favour local artists. These factors, together with a desire to explore landscapes and pastoral industry ‘national subjects’ further afield, took Tom Roberts away from the city. In 1890 – 91, he was only sporadically to be found at his Melbourne studio, having gone ‘on the wallaby’ to Tasmania, East Gippsland and the Central Highlands, as well as back to Corowa on the Murray, where he had begun painting Shearing the Rams in 1889. Eventually – possibly in immediate pursuit of the prospect of a £75 acquisition from a competition for ‘watercolour drawings illustrating what is most picturesque in the scenery of New South Wales, especially in the remoter districts of the colony,’2 – Roberts and his friend and Heidelberg School colleague, Arthur Streeton (together with Streeton’s mother), took ship for Sydney in the Massilia in early September.

Roberts went straight to Curlew Camp, a cheap-rent single men’s tent village on the North Shore at Little Sirius Cove, Mosman Bay. Apart from a brief visit to the Hunter River in pursuit of a watercolour subject (one of his entries in the National Gallery’s watercolour exhibition in 1891 was Coaling at Newcastle), he would remain there throughout the spring and summer, until he returned to Melbourne for a month in February 1892.3 The camp was an initiative of Reuben Brasch, Sydney clothing manufacturer and retailer and an acquaintance of the artist.4 Just as Roberts’ good friend and fellow Box Hill plein-airiste artist, Louis Abrahams, had provided the cedar cigar box lids used for many of Roberts’, Streeton’s and Conder’s ‘9 by 5 Impressions’, it appears that so did Reuben Brasch supply the long, narrow ‘drapers’ panel’ supports that became a feature of the Australian Naturalists’ (and particularly Streeton’s) images of Sydney Harbour. A Modern Andromeda would appear to be the first work to employ this striking format, pre-dating both Streeton’s horizontal Harbours of 1893 and his vertical Sirius Cove ‘keyholes’ of 1895.

Reuben Brasch’s sister Golda had married Louis Abrahams in March 1888, and Roberts was a witness at the wedding, held in the Brasch family home in Sydney. It was probably on that occasion that Roberts first met Reuben and Golda’s little sister, the teenage Selena Venus. When he returned to Sydney and settled at Curlew camp, Roberts renewed his connection with the young woman, almost immediately enlisting her to pose in the coastal landscape. The rocks on which the figure in the present work is sitting look very much like the tumble of sandstone boulders on the eastern side of Sirius Cove, while the wattle blossom at the top of the composition clearly implies a springtime sitting.

This latter assumption is reinforced by correspondence from Streeton, who visited the camp probably late September, before heading up to Glenbrook to paint Fire’s On, 1891 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney). In letters written from Melbourne the following January, Streeton enquires ‘How also dear Mossmans + your pretty sitter with abundant hair fanned by the afternoon breeze at the point,’5 and also specifically references a small painting of ‘Miss_____ on the rocks,’ advising Roberts not to let the work sell cheaply: ‘it is so charming – keep it as a memento of the place.’6 Is Streeton’s discretion with regard to the sitter’s identity a bit of a tease, a suggestion that Roberts may have harboured some amorous intent in relation to the young Miss Brasch? There is something admiring, even worshipful in the low da sotto in sù viewpoint, with the blue dress seen against the blue Sydney

Right: Lena Brasch, c.1901 Photographer: H. Walter Barnett signed and inscribed by Lena Brasch: To Smike gelatin silver photograph printed image 19.2 x 10.5 cm sheet 19.2 x 10.5 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1993

The Sydney Art Society’s Exhibition – “Varnishing Day” artist unknown Published in: ‘The Art Society’s Exhibition’, Sydney News, 3 September 1892, p. 4

sky making the figure of the girl somehow ethereal, heavenly. The limpid cerulean of the subtropical sky seems to have been just what Roberts craved after a grey winter down south; we see that colour again in the extravagant bows of another of his entries in the 1892 Art Society exhibition, The Paris Hat, 1892 (New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale). In the present picture there is even a tiny shard of summer, a triangle of blue sky, visible through the rocks.

In any event, Roberts was certainly very taken with Lena as a model; she appears in no fewer than half a dozen pictures over the ensuing decade.7 The interest is perfectly understandable. Lena Brasch was an attractive, vivacious, talented young woman, who would later make something of a name for herself on the London stage. Not surprisingly, given her family’s piano-importing business background, she was also ‘a pianiste of no mean ability,’8 and Roberts is known to have been particularly fond of music.9

This musical connection also explains the present work’s ‘disappearance’ for more than a century. Before its recent return to Australia, the painting passed by descent and estate purchase from the family of pianist, composer and teacher Henri Kowalski. Of Polish heritage but Breton-born and Paris-trained, Kowalski performed in Brussels, London, the United States and Canada before coming to Australia both as a judge for the Fine Arts section of the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition, and to give concert performances. During this visit he enthusiastically embraced the local culture; he collaborated with Victorian novelist and poet Marcus Clarke on a comic opera, Queen Venus, and even composed a waltz entitled The Belles of Melbourne. Returning to Australia in 1885, Kowalski lived and worked in Sydney for twelve years, during which time he ‘conducted choirs, orchestras and operas, set up music societies, and had an extensive private teaching practice and a major public profile as a performer. He also set up a public examination board and worked as a music critic.’10

Kowalski was definitely known to Tom Roberts; a portrait was included in the artist’s extensive and wide-ranging 1900 exhibition and sale.11 Given Sydney’s relatively small musical community, he is also likely to have been familiar with the piano-retailing Brasch family, including young Lena: she may have been one of the 45 pupils who signed an illuminated address presented to him by the Mayor of Sydney in October 1892, while a couple of years later an advertisement for her first published composition, The Olga Waltz, includes a personal testimonial

Henri Kowalski, pianist and composer, 1893 Photographer: H. Walter Barnett gelatin silver photograph 20.4 × 15.3 cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Rex Duckett, 1973

from the maestro. 12 What is beyond doubt is that Kowalski was familiar with the present painting; he and his violinist compatriot Horace Poussard performed a duet at a conversazione held in association with the 1892 Art Society exhibition at which the work was first shown.13

But what is the meaning of the curious title? In ancient Greek mythology, Andromeda was the daughter of Cepheus, king of Aethiopia. Andromeda’s mother, Cassiopeia, boasted that her daughter was more beautiful than the Nereids, sea-sprite companions of the ocean god Poseidon, and in revenge for this hubristic affront, Poseidon sent a tidal wave and the sea-monster Cetus to ravage the Aethiopian coast. Having been told by an oracle that in order to placate the god he must sacrifice his daughter, King Cepheus had Andromeda chained to a rock at the edge of the sea to await her doom. Happily, the hero Perseus, flying home after having slain the Gorgon, saw the girl, killed the monster and (naturally) claimed Andromeda in marriage.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the image of the naked, constrained and vulnerable Andromeda appealed to patriarchal sensibilities, with Andromeda in chains becoming a familiar trope through the writings of the Greek playwrights Sophocles and Euripides and the Roman poet Ovid, and accordingly, a persistent focus of the male gaze in European art – from Pompeiian wall painting to the Renaissance Piero di Cosimo, from Titian and Vasari to Rubens and Rembrandt.14 The popularity

of the subject persisted through the 19th century and into Roberts’ time, as can be seen in works by (inter alia) Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Doré and Gustave Moreau.15 In the British tradition with which Roberts was most familiar, the Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones developed (though never completed) a full cycle of Perseus pictures for the Music Room of young Conservative politician Arthur Balfour’s house in Carlton Gardens, London; a preparatory painting for this series depicting the Andromeda episode is now held by the Art Gallery of South Australia.16

In relation to the present picture, however, there is a more concrete and plausible link to a specific work by Sir Frederic (later Lord) Leighton. A member of the Royal Academy since 1868, its President since 1878, created a baronet in 1886, an officer of the Légion d’honneur and a member of the Institut de France, in 1891 Leighton’s reputation was at its height, even as far from London as the Australian colonies. That year the Victorian National Gallery purchased his The Garden of the Hesperides, and its Sydney counterpart a photograph of The Bath of Psyche, while in an article on the New South Wales collection written for the Melbourne Argus, Roberts specifically mentioned both Leighton’s classical-domestic fantasy Wedded (purchased 1882), and watercolours for the Arts of industry… frescoes at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert).17 In 1891, Leighton painted his version of the Andromeda myth, with the sea-monster depicted more as a dragon than as a whale or crocodile. Perseus and Andromeda was shown in the RA’s summer exhibition, and was reproduced in the London Art Journal for June.

1. 1891-2 was something of an annus mirabilis for Tom Roberts. He completed the large, ambitious A Break Away! 1891 (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide), while the Art Society of New South Wales show in which the present work was first shown included the formal triptych of ‘Church, State and the Law’ portraits (Cardinal Moran, Sir Henry Parkes and Sir

William Windeyer); the sensitive Eileen, 1892 and the powerful Aboriginal Head - Charlie

Turner, 1892 (both Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney). 1892 was also the year he travelled north to Queensland and the Torres Strait, a journey that generated some memorable images, particularly of First Nations Australians. 2. The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 February 1891, p. 7. 3. Curlew Camp would remain the artist’s main residence until his marriage to Lillie Williamson in April 1896. 4. Marcus Brasch and his brother Wolfe were Prussian Jews who had migrated to London in 1848, then to Melbourne in 1866; Wolfe and his extensive family later moved to Sydney. The family music store (employing the persuasive slogan ‘A home is not a home without a piano’) eventually expanded to become (with the Germanic ‘c’ dropped during the Great War) the national music and electronics chain Brashs. 5. Letter, Arthur Streeton to Tom Roberts, 17 January 1892, Roberts Papers, ML A2428, State

Library of New South Wales, Sydney. 6. Letter, Arthur Streeton to Tom Roberts, 16 January 1892, Roberts Papers, ML A2478, State

Library of New South Wales, Sydney. Mary Eagle, formerly Senior Curator of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia, first proposed that the work to which Streeton is referring in this letter is A Modern Andromeda (then untraced). See Mary Eagle, The oil paintings of Tom

Roberts in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997, p. 61 n. 6. 7. (profile portrait sketch of Lena Brasch) c. 1892, private collection; sold Christie’s Australia

November 1992); (unfinished portrait study) 1893, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra;

An eastern princess 1893, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Plink a plong 1893, Art

Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; and possibly the later A study of Jephthah’s daughter 1899, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. The profile sketch also has a press cutting pasted on the reverse (‘Australians in England’, Sydney Morning Herald, 28 January 1905, p. 5) which mentions another, still later portrait of Lena, from 1904. By this time Lena was evidently sufficiently intimate with the Heidelberg School artists to have known and used their nicknames. A 1901 portrait photograph by Walter Barnett that she gave to Streeton (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) is inscribed ’To Smike.’ 8. ‘The theatre: musical and dramatic notes’, The Star (Christchurch), 26 September 1904, p. 4. 9. The painter’s devotion to the Euterpean muse is amply attested not only in letters, records of attendance at concerts, and the various musical activities of the clubs and societies with which he was associated, but also in his personal relationships: with Prof. G.W.L. Marshall-

Hall, Melbourne’s musical colossus of the 1890s and early 1900s, with life-long friend S.W. Pring, an amateur flautist, and with Duncan Anderson of ‘Newstead’ station, a keen cornetist.

Roberts’ oeuvre includes numerous musical subjects: portraits of musicians Nellie Billings (1900), Alice Bryant (1899), Daddy Hallawell (late 1890s), Alfred Hill (1897), Johann Kruse (1895), Marshall-Hall, of course, and Nellie Melba (c.1902), as well as subject pictures such as The violin lesson, c. 1889 (National Gallery of Victoria); Andante, 1889 (Art Gallery of South

Australia, Adelaide); The troubadour of Scott’s, c.1889 (Westpac Corporate Art Collection,

Sydney); and Adagio, c.1893 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney). See Kertesz, E.,

‘Music and the Australian Impressionists’, in Gray, A. and Hesson, A. (eds), She-Oak and

Sunlight: Australian Impressionism, Thames & Hudson, in association with the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne p. 229). Kertesz believes the violinist in this last to be ‘probably Lena

Brasch’; it is here suggested that the subject is more likely to be Bessie Doyle, one of whose signature performance pieces was the Adagio from Spohr’s 9th concerto in D minor. Miss

Doyle performed extensively in Sydney and country New South Wales between June and

November 1892, and she and Henri Kowalski headlined a concert in Sydney on 5 November (The Daily Telegraph, 2 November 1892, p. 2). 10. Murphy, K., ‘Henri Kowalski (1841-1916): a French musician in colonial Australia’, Australian

Historical Studies, vol. 48 no. 3, August 2017, pp. 358 – 9. 11. ‘Sale of Mr Roberts’s paintings’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 November 1900, p. 5 12. ‘The Olga Waltz by Lena V. Brasch’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 June 1894, p. 2.

Kowalski’s encomium reads: ‘I like the Strauss character of the Olga Waltz, and the first musical steps of Miss Lena V. Brasch deserve good commendation from both dilettanti and choreograph [sic]’ The waltz, written for piano, was named in honour of the actress

Olga Nethersole. 13. ‘Art Society’, The Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, 10 September 1892, p. 581. 14. Unknown artist, Perseus freeing Andromeda, c. 50-75 BCE, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples; Piero di Cosimo, Andromeda freed by Perseus, c. 1510-15, Galleria degli

Uffizi, Florence; Tiziano Vecelli, Perseus and Andromeda, 1553-59, Wallace Collection,

London; Giorgio Vasari, Perseus and Andromeda, 1570-72, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence;

Peter Paul Rubens, Perseus and Andromeda, c. 1622, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg;

Rembrandt van Rijn, Andromeda chained to the rocks, c.1630, Mauritshuis, The Hague. 15. Eugène Delacroix, Perseus and Andromeda, c. 1853, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; Gustave Doré,

Andromeda, 1869, private collection; Gustave Moreau, Perseus and Andromeda, 1870,

Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery. 16. Edward Burne-Jones, Perseus and Andromeda (‘The rock of doom’ and ‘The doom fulfilled’) 1876, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. 17. ‘Art’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 31 December 1891, p. 4; Tom Roberts, ‘The National Art

Gallery of New South Wales’, The Argus, 31 October 1891, p. 4.

The present work may be considered an oblique, perhaps slightly comic homage to the master’s work. Most obviously, the dragon bat-wings that overshadow the princess in Leighton’s picture have a marked formal resemblance to the spread-ribbed parasol above Roberts’ sitter. There might also be a further visual pun in the golden wattle in painting’s top left corner: an antipodean answer to the glowing aureole that surrounds Leighton’s flying Perseus-on-Pegasus. Whether or not such a direct reference to Leighton is intended, characterising a girl in a frock on a rock as Andromeda is sufficient to indicate both Roberts’ literacy in classical iconography and his droll humour, the fruitful tension between his strong RA-instilled, feeling for history and tradition and his keen awareness of and participation in bourgeois-industrial colonial modernity.

David Hansen is most grateful to Dr Leigh Astbury and to Dr Keren Hammerschlag, Lecturer in Art History and Art Theory, Australian National University, for their assistance in preparing this catalogue essay.

DR DAVID HANSEN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, CENTRE FOR ART HISTORY & ART THEORY, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Frederic Leighton Perseus and Andromeda, 1891 oil on canvas 235.0 x 129.2 cm Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK

(1868 – 1909) DOROTHY – DAUGHTER OF JOHN STEVENS, ESQ., 1890 oil on canvas 35.5 x 18.5 cm signed and dated lower right: Chas. Conder / 1890

ESTIMATE: $150,000 – 200,000

PROVENANCE

John Stevens, Melbourne, commissioned from the artist in 1890 Dorothy Purbrick (née Stevens), Victoria, by descent from the above Eric Stevens Purbrick, Victoria, by descent from the above Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 20 February 1970, lot 30 (as ‘Portrait of a Young Girl, Dorothy Stevens’) Max Carter, Adelaide Thirty Victoria Street, Sydney Private collection, Sydney Private collection, New South Wales Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

Private View: Pictures by Mr. Arthur Streeton, Mr. C. Douglas Richardson, Mr. Charles Conder, Gordon Chambers, Melbourne, 13 – 15 March 1890 (as ‘Miss. Dorothy Stevens’) Winter Exhibition, Victorian Artists’ Society, Melbourne, 29 March 1890, cat. 103

LITERATURE

Table Talk, Melbourne, 7 March 1890, p. 6 ‘The Victorian Artists’ Society Annual Exhibition’, The Age, Melbourne, 29 March 1890, p. 15 ‘Victorian Artists’ Society. Winter Exhibition. Final Notice’, The Argus, Melbourne, 5 April 1890, p. 6 Punch, Melbourne, 10 April 1890, p. 224 Hoff, U., Charles Conder: His Australian Years, National Gallery Society of Victoria, Melbourne, 1960, cat. 52, p. 24 (as ‘Portrait of Dorothy Stevens’) Hoff, U., Charles Conder, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1972, cat. C70, p. 102

The visual wit of Charles Conder’s painting is unique in Australian art. From brilliant colour to figuration and composition, it ranges from the subtle to the blatant, couched in terms of aesthetic delight. Red plays a major role in a number of works of the time, especially in That Fatal Colour, 1888 (private collection, Sydney) where the red parasol of the lady dressed in white attracts the unwelcome attention of a cow - or perhaps bull. In A Holiday at Mentone, 1888 (Art Gallery of South Australia), red continues to attract attention – hats, an upturned parasol and the red page of a newspaper, while the two, suited male figures, supine and erect, harmonise with the horizontals and verticals of the pier, shadows included. Rickett’s Point, 1890 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) again shows Conder’s delight in the red parasol as a focal point - here rolled, in keeping with the painting’s narrow format, it reflects the length and breadth of the beach. Each painting shows the striking individuality of Conder’s art during this golden period. Moreover, his portraits, especially those painted in Australia, have a particular appeal, fascinating both for the likenesses they preserve and their aesthetic appeal. Two classic examples are Sketch Portrait, c.1889, (National Gallery of Victoria) and An Impressionist (Tom Roberts), 1889, (Art Gallery of New South Wales) – both of which were featured in The 9 By 5 Impression Exhibition, Melbourne of 1889.

The following year, Conder showed six works in the Victorian Artists’ Society’s Winter Exhibition. They included Dorothy – Daughter of John Stevens Esq., 1890, and two major landscapes, the aforementioned Ricketts Point, 1890 and The Yarra, Heidelberg, 1890 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra). The exhibition is also memorable for major works by others too, especially Arthur Streeton’s ‘Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide’, 1890 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) and Frederick McCubbin’s A Bush Burial, 1890 (Geelong Gallery). In early March, prior to the Victorian Artists’ Society show, Conder, together with C. D. Richardson and Arthur Streeton, held a private view in their studios at Gordon Chambers, Flinders Lane. Reviewed by Melbourne’s Table Talk, it was noted that:

‘Mr. Conder has painted a small portrait (a commission) of Miss Dorothy Stevens, daughter of Mr. John Stevens, and is commencing work on a second commission – a panel portrait of Miss Janet Achurch (Mrs. Chas. Carrington). The first-mentioned evidences Mr. Conder’s fine sense of colour – a characteristic that is perceptible in a number of smaller studies’.1

The portrait’s colour continued to receive the critics’ approval later in the month when featured in the Society’s exhibition. The Argus observed ‘Mr. Charles Conder contributes a harmony in red’, 2 while Melbourne’s Punch described the work as ‘A charming little study, quite Japanese in its decorative effect of red and blue background. The frame blends with the colour scheme.’3 The influence of Japanese art, especially colour, composition and format, on Conder’s work at this time was pronounced. The narrowness found in some Japanese colour prints, for example, is repeated in the bold vertically of our portrait, seen famously in Conder’s How We Lost Poor Flossie, 1889 (Art Gallery of South Australia) and horizontally in Rickett’s Point, 1890 (National Gallery of Victoria).4

English-born, Dorothy was to marry Reginald Purbrick, the Purbrick family being of Chateau Tahbilk winery fame established on the Goulburn River, Victoria in 1860.

1. ‘Art and Artists: Mr. Charles Conder’, Table Talk, Melbourne, 7 March 1890, p. 6 2. ‘Victorian Artists’ Society, Winter Exhibition. Final Notice’, The Argus, Melbourne, 5 April 1890, p. 6 3. Punch, Melbourne, 10 April 1890, p. 224 4. Hoff, U., Charles Conder: His Australian Years, National Gallery Society of Victoria, Melbourne, 1960, p. 15

(1867 – 1943) CAIRO, STREET SCENE, 1898 watercolour on paper 47.0 x 20.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title lower left: Arthur STREETON. / CAIRO 98 bears inscription with title on label attached verso: CAIRO, STREET SCENE

ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE

Anthony Hordern & Sons Ltd, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection Private collection, Melbourne, acquired 1970s Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne

EXHIBITED

An Exhibition of the Early Work of Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Others, Anthony Hordern and Sons Ltd., Sydney, 2 – 24 December 1925, cat. 14

LITERATURE

Streeton, A., The Arthur Streeton Catalogue, Melbourne, 1935, no. 218 (in possession of Anthony Hordern)

(1864 – 1947) THE ARTIST’S SISTER ANNETTE, 1890 oil on panel 25.0 x 16.0 cm signed and dated lower left: RUPERT BUNNY / 90

ESTIMATE: $35,000 – 45,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection, United Kingdom Christie’s, London, 29 May 1984, lot 142 (as ‘A Young Lady Reading at a Table’) Tom Silver Fine Art, Sydney Gould Galleries, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1999 69 John Street, Sydney Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

Collectors Exhibition: Important Australian Artists 1830 – 1940, Tom Silver Fine Art, Melbourne, 31 March – 21 April 1985, cat. 35 (illus., as ‘Portrait of a Young Woman Reading’) Traditional, Modern and Contemporary Fine Art, 69 John St, Sydney, 11 April – 2 May 2014, cat. 5 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, as ‘The Artist’s Sister Hilda Reading’, label attached verso)

LITERATURE

Thomas, D., The Life and Art of Rupert Bunny, A Catalogue Raisonné in Two Volumes, Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2017, Volume 1: p.16, Volume 2: cat. O25, pp. 52 (illus.), 53, 286

Annette Bunny (1862-1949), known as ‘Nettie’, was Rupert Bunny’s closest sister and a favourite model during his early years. Possibly his first portrait, Portrait of a Lady, c.1885 (private collection, Sydney) is of Annette. Others followed, including those of her daughters Ethel and Hilda. His finest group portrait, Portrait of Mrs Herbert Jones and Her Daughters, c.1904 (private collection, Sydney) was painted at her home, ‘The Priory’, Huntington, England, where Bunny was a frequent visitor. The Artist’s Sister Annette, 1890 is also thought to have been painted there during a visit from Paris. The occasion was important. Joined by their mother, Marie Bunny and youngest sister Hilda, they were visiting from Australia following the tragically early death of Annette’s husband Walter Coote. Significantly, it is one of a very few paintings Bunny dated, most having family connections.

Of the seven Bunny sons and daughters, Annette was born on 26 January 1862 and Rupert on 29 September 1864. Their Australian home was ‘Eckerberg’ in the Melbourne suburb of St. Kilda until Annette married the Englishman Walter Coote in1881 and settled in England. Later, when Rupert travelled to Europe with his father, Brice Bunny, and stayed on in England to study art, the Cootes kept a friendly family watch, giving Rupert much support. A joint Annette-Rupert sketchbook of c.1884-6 bears witness to their mutual interest, sketching together outdoors as they did in those years.1

Coote gained international fame through his travels, having twice ventured around the world and exploring in particular, Melanesia. His subsequent books were highly acclaimed, for example, The Western Pacific: Being Descriptive of the Groups of Islands of the North and East of the Australian Continent, published in London in 1883 and illustrated with engravings from the author’s sketches. A member of the Royal Geographical Society, Coote eventually gave his collection of native weapons and ornaments to the British Museum.2

Support for Bunny continued throughout Annette’s second marriage to the wealthy brewer Herbert Jones in August 1892. His wedding present was Bunny’s painting, Les Roses de Sainte-Dorothée, 1892 (Bunny’s mother’s third name was ‘Dorothea’). Jones took an active role in the political life of the county; and when mayor of Huntington in 1901, he commissioned Bunny to paint a portrait of Edward George Henry, 8th Earl of Sandwich, which he presented to the Corporation of Huntington. A keen sportsman, Jones was a regular follower of the Fitzwilliam Hounds, Annette being a fearless huntswoman who relished the thrill of the jump.3

The Artist’s Sister Annette, 1890 presents a striking image of Nettie profiled against heavy, dark curtains. Emphasis is given to what she is doing through the highlighting of hands and document. What she is reading is tantalisingly unknown. Strong in character, the composition shows Bunny’s early mastery of the play of light across dress and figure. Within a year he painted another dated work of Annette, the bust Portrait of Mrs Walter Coote, 1891 (private collection, London). Profiled in the Italian Quattrocento tradition, her face line is even more effectively rendered set against the plainest of backgrounds. And again, a lively Mrs Herbert Jones in Sketch was probably painted in 1892, the year of her second marriage. Bunny, warmly acknowledged in the academies and salons of London, Paris, Budapest and elsewhere, became one of Australia’s most internationally distinguished artists of his age. His brilliant portraits of the great and gifted include Madame Melba, c.1902 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) and Percy Grainger, c.1902 (Grainger Museum, The University of Melbourne).

1. Nanette Coote/Rupert Bunny Sketchbook, The University of Melbourne Art Collection (1948.36) 2. ‘Walter Coote obituary’, The Hunts County Guardian, 29 March 1890, p. 8 3. ‘H. C. Jones obituary’, The Huntingdonshire Post, 21 November 1935, p. 9

(1873 – 1930) DOÑA SOL, 1910 oil on canvas 127.5 x 102.0 cm signed and dated lower left: G. W. LAMBERT / 1910

ESTIMATE: $150,000 – 250,000

PROVENANCE

The Fine Art Society, London Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 14 March 1974, lot 435 (as ‘Portrait of a Woman with a Terrier’) Clune Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Jack Manton, Queensland Thence by descent Jennifer Manton, Sydney Estate of the above, Sydney

EXHIBITED

Third Exhibition of Fair Women, ISSPG, Grafton Galleries, London, 26 May – 31 July 1910, cat. 69

LITERATURE

Birmingham Post, 30 May 1910 Henry, P., Art News, London, 2 June 1910 Onlooker, London, 4 June 1910 p. 9 (as ‘Doña Sol’) P.G. Konody, Observer, London, 5 June 1910 Ingram, T., A Matter of Taste, Collins, Sydney, 1976, pp. 46, 134 (illus., as ‘Portrait of a Woman with a Terrier’) Gray, A., George Lambert 1873 – 1930, Catalogue Raisonné, Bonamy Press in association with Sotheby’s and Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1993, cat. P116, p. 36

In London’s Edwardian age, sophisticated beauties of fashionable inclination happily indulged themselves in hats of outrageous size. Society portrait painters responded with alacrity; two exceptional three-quarter length works of this time by George Washington Lambert were Mrs Henry Dutton of South Australia (Guy Morrison Collection, London) and our painting, Doña Sol. Both were painted in 1910. Aristocratic and gracious, Emily Dutton’s low-cut black dress enhanced her beauty. The dress of the more theatrically inclined Doña Sol was likewise low cut, accompanied by blue shawl and blue ostrich feathers peeking cheekily around the edge of a black hat. Lambert silhouetted his ladies beguilingly against romantic landscapes. The ‘trepidation’ of Henry Dutton, Emily’s husband, who commissioned the portrait during a visit to London, was such that he made watchful attendance at the studio sittings.1

In this quintessential age of feminism, Lambert endowed these belle époque pictorial moments with poise, elegance and eye-catching gestures. For Mrs Dutton the look is direct; for Doña Sol it is haughty. The latter has sensuality in abundance, heightened by bravura. Detachment and a sense of the unobtainable adds a new edge. Andrew Motion, writing on Lambert’s portrait, Miss Thea Proctor, 1903 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney), observed that: ‘Its potency depends greatly on its restraint’, adding, the handling of the paint ‘is intensely sensuous’,2 a characteristic shared with Doña Sol and others. Naked flesh, liberally revealed, and underlying eroticism are celebrated in elongated neck and arms. Doña Sol is identified by Anne Gray as ‘An exhibition piece, not a commissioned portrait’3 – the dog giving a clue to the otherwise enigmatic nature of the painting.

Animals appear in portraits of all kinds and for all kind of reasons. The horse ennobles the conquering emperor in Jacques-Louis David’s equestrian portrait of Napoleon (Musée du Louvre). The pugnacious nature of William Hogarth is emphasised by the presence of his pug dog in the very British self-portrait (Tate Gallery, London). And in Rupert Bunny’s pair, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, c.1896 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) and Jeanne with Her Terrier, c.1896 (private collection), fidelity is enshrined in embrace. The difference between Bunny’s two paintings and Doña Sol could not be more stark. In Lambert’s painting, the relationship between woman and dog is detached and teasingly distant. Using the entire person for expression of character, as was his manner, Lambert’s Doña Sol typically draws attention to her hands – elegantly idle. Here is the quizzical coquette, acting her flirtatious part by provocatively drawing attention to herself.

When Doña Sol was exhibited in London in mid-1910, critical opinion was divided. The Birmingham Post praised its ‘admirable colour arrangement’4, while Paul Henry in Art News thought it ‘too intentionally clever’5 and P.G. Konody of The Observer stung with ‘superficial slickness’, failing to acknowledge that Lambert’s slick usages were part of his characterisation of fickleness.6 For Lambert, it was a period of great achievement through many works of outstanding merit. The exquisitely beautiful Portrait of Annie, Wife of John Proctor Esqr, Barrister at Law, 1907 was hailed by the same P.G. Konody of The Observer: ‘It is in this portrait of Mrs Proctor that Mr Lambert proves his right to be counted among the leading portrait painters’.7 When The Blue Hat, 1909 (Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth) was exhibited in the Paris New Salon, it was judged ‘The Picture of the Year’.8 The unconventional Chesham Street, 1910 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), provided a bold psychological approach to medical examination. And as if to crown these years of achievement, in 1910 Lambert was commissioned by London’s Imperial Colonial Club to paint a grand equestrian portrait of King Edward VII.

1. Their son Geoffrey Dutton, quoted in a letter: see Gray, A., George Lambert 1873-1930,

Catalogue Raisonné, Bonamy Press in association with Sotheby’s and Australian War

Memorial, Canberra, Canberra, 1993, p. 36 2. Motion, A., The Lamberts: George, Constant & Kit, Chatto & Windus, London, 1986, p. 45 3. Gray, op. cit., p. 36 4. Birmingham Post, 30 May 1910 5. Henry, P., Art News, 2 June 1910 6. Konody, P.G., Observer, 5 June 1910 7. Ibid, 9 February 1908, p. 5 8. Motion, op. cit., p. 46

DAVID THOMAS

George W Lambert The artist and his wife, 1904 oil on canvas 81.2 x 81.5cm Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

(1867 – 1943) THE CENTRE OF THE EMPIRE, 1902 oil on canvas 122.5 x 122.5 cm signed and dated lower left: ArthuR STREETON / 1902

ESTIMATE: $1,200,000 – 1,600,000

PROVENANCE

Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer, Melbourne, by 1907 The Baldwin Spencer Collection of Australian Pictures and Works of Art, Fine Art Society, Melbourne, 19 May 1919, lot 30 Acquired from the above by Mr A.T. Creswick, Melbourne, until 1939 Thence by descent Sir Alexander Reid Creswick, Melbourne, until 1982 Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

Salon de la Société des Artistes Français, Grand Palais, Paris, 1 May 1902, cat. 1527 (as ‘Gelée du matin, Londres’) Arthur Streeton, Ryder Gallery, London, 2 May 1903, cat. 22 (as ‘Trafalgar Square’) An Exhibition of Pictures by Arthur Streeton Prior to his Return to Europe, Upper Hibernian Hall, Melbourne, 20 April 1907, cat. 67 (illus., as ‘The Centre of the Empire’) Sir W. Baldwin Spencer’s Collection, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1 December 1916, cat. 6 Loan Exhibition, Collection of Paintings and Drawings by Australian Artists executed during the last 25 to 30 Years, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, April 1918, cat. 13 (illus. p.7 of exhibition catalogue, as ‘Centre of the Empire’) Arthur Streeton Memorial Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 5 September – 7 October 1944, cat. 68 (as ‘The Heart of the Empire’, lent by Mrs Alexander Creswick) Arthur Streeton 1867–1943, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 8 December 1995 – 3 November 1996, cat. 59 Streeton, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 7 November 2020 – 14 February 2021 (as ‘The Centre of the Empire’)

LITERATURE

Joel, G., ‘Australian Artists in London: A reminiscence’, Art and Architecture, William Brooks and Co., Sydney, vol. 3, no. 3, May – June 1906, p. 101 (as ‘the Trafalgar Square picture’) The Lone Hand, Sydney, 1 July 1907, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 309, 310 (illus., as ‘The Centre of the Empire’) Lindsay, L., ‘Arthur Streeton’s place in Australian Art’, Art in Australia, Angus and Robertson Ltd., Sydney, no. 2, 1917, n.p. (as ‘The Centre of the Empire’) ‘The Loan Exhibition’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 4 April 1918, p. 4 ‘Australian Pictures: The Spencer Collection’, The Argus, Melbourne, 3 May 1919, p. 9 (as ‘The Centre of the Empire’) Lloyd Jones, C., Stevens, B., & Smith, U., The Art of Arthur Streeton, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1919, pl. 25 (illus.) ‘Art Notes: Mr Arthur Streeton Among the Grampians’, The Age, Melbourne, 2 November 1920, p. 8 (as ‘The Centre of the Empire’) McDonald, J.S., ‘Australian Artists. No. 6. Arthur Streeton’, The Herald, Melbourne, 12 September 1924, p. 6 (as ‘Centre of the Empire’) Lindsay, L.,’ Arthur Streeton’, Art in Australia, Third Series, no. 40, Art in Australia Ltd., Sydney, October 1931, p. 10 (as ‘The Centre of Empire’) Streeton, A., The Arthur Streeton Catalogue, Osboldstone & Co., Melbourne, 1935, cat. 258B (as ‘Trafalgar Square’ (Mr. A. T. Creswick)) Galbally, A., Arthur Streeton, Lansdowne, Melbourne, 1969, cat. 94 Wray, C., Arthur Streeton: Painter of Light, Jacaranda Wiley, Milton, 1993, pp. 97, 100, 102 Eagle, M., The Oil Paintings of Arthur Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, p.140 (dated as c.1901) Smith, G., Arthur Streeton 1867–1943, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1995, cat. 59, pp.140–141 (illus.) Tunnicliffe, W., Streeton, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Thames & Hudson, Sydney, 2020, pp. 174 – 75, 183 (illus.), 197, 284 – 285, 336, 371

RELATED WORK

Frosty Noon, 1901, oil on canvas, 122.5 x 122.5 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

We are grateful to Dr Anne Gray, curator and former Head of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, for her permission to reproduce the following excerpt from her essay featured in the catalogue accompanying the recent Streeton retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 7 November 2020 – 14 February 2021.

‘London & England what a mighty thing it all is ... London seems even too large & almost beyond the management of the capable men now directing it - the rate of its growth increases each day - its wealth stupendous.’1

Arthur Streeton wrote this in London in January 1901. Queen Victoria was ill and dying, and the city, England and the British Commonwealth were on the brink of change. London had become the largest city in Europe,2 and its energy attracted artists, musicians and writers from all over the western world. Streeton arrived in early May 1897, having departed Australia on 27 January.

In England, over more than fifteen years, Streeton began to paint differently. The reasons for this were fourfold.

First, what he saw was not the same: the softer English light and London fog were so different from the bright, sharp light and strong colours of Australia. Also, as he reported to Tom Roberts in June 1898, ‘I feel convinced that my work hereafter will contain a larger idea & quality than before - After seeing Constable Turner Titian Watts & all the masters’.3 He saw, too, the works of a wide range of artists of the day. In 1898 he wrote that he preferred the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers exhibition to the staid presentation of British art at the Royal Academy. The former included works by Charles Conder, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and the Scottish School (the Glasgow Boys), as well as Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet and the French-based Norwegian artist Frits Thaulow.4 Fourthly, successful artists need a network of advisers and supporters, friends and challengers - even rivals. In Streeton’s first years in London, he was adrift without the camaraderie of his mentor Roberts and ‘sparring partner, Conder’, who lived in England but frequently travelled. His loneliness, poverty and experience of bitter winter led to depression. He was in contact with the photographer H. Walter Barnett, now residing in London,5 but Barnett could not provide relevant advice. It may be that one of Streeton’s mistakes was not following an Australian critic’s advice to study in Paris.6 He certainly would have met fellow artists, as did Conder (Will Rothenstein and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec) and John Russell (Vincent van Gogh), and found a circle of friends to provide support and guidance.

Untitled (Portrait of Arthur Streeton), 1907 Photographer: Alice Mills (Australia, 1870 – 1929) platinotype gelatin silver photograph, 13.9 x 10 cm Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Purchased 1983 188.1983

Arthur Streeton Frosty Noon, 1901 oil on canvas 122.5 x 122.5 cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Streeton did meet up with Conder, who was willing to help his old friend and even share his studio with him, but Conder had established himself in France and England, and the balance of the relationship had changed. Following Conder’s marriage to Stella Maris Belford in December 1901, Streeton felt more comfortable in his company, and in 1902 spent Christmas with the couple. When Roberts arrived in London in April 1903, Streeton eagerly resumed their friendship. He also encountered a number of former Australian acquaintances, such as the artists E. Phillips Fox and A. Henry Fullwood, and gradually met British artists like Philip Wilson Steer (who in January 1903 supported Streeton’s nomination to become a member of the Chelsea Arts Club, where he met further British contemporaries).7

Importantly, by 1899 Streeton had met his future wife, the Canadian violinist Nora Clench. He reported to Roberts that she was ‘wise (advises me as you often used to - to spur me into energy & better things)’.8 She was interested in the arts - in poetry and painting - as well as being a highly talented musician, with her own quartet. She had contacts, people who could offer Streeton commissions, such as Walter Russell Rea, who commissioned him in 1905 to depict shipping and dockland scenes at Southampton and Liverpool, and the Mond family, to paint landscapes in Kent in 1913.9

In the summer of 1898, Streeton travelled to Sussex, where he painted his first English landscape, Sussex harvest 1898. To some extent, he adopted a format he had used in Australia, in works such as ‘What thou among the leaves hast never known’ (also known as A bush idyll), 1896, depicting a scene framed by overarching trees; here, however, he depicted a sunny landscape rather than a poetic moonlit one. By this time, he would have had the opportunity to view John Constable’s The cornfield, 1826 (National Gallery, London), which is also a view through trees towards a cornfield, under sunlit clouds. Streeton was dissatisfied with his own painting, writing to Roberts in 1902: ‘The first & only chance I’ve had yet at English landscape was Sussex soon after my arrival - all too new, & fresh - now - I see more clearly what I can do for myself.’10

It was a ‘good enough’ first attempt at an English pastoral scene, but he needed more time to assimilate the new landscape, the new light and the ideas of earlier artists. Nonetheless, the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in June 1899 and with the Society of Artists in Australia later that year.

By 1901, Streeton had become accustomed to London’s frosty, foggy winter atmosphere. He responded to the muted light in The centre of the Empire (also known as Foggy morning), one of two large square (122.5 x 122.5 cm) images of Trafalgar Square, painted in 1901-02; the other is Frosty noon, 1901 (National Gallery of Victoria). Streeton was not only using a canvas of a similar size and shape to those used by Monet,11 but also, like Monet, painting a similar scene at different times of day. Streeton was also adopting the urban subject often depicted by the French artists. (He had viewed the work of French artists in 1898 in the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers exhibition and in the Loan collection of pictures by painters of the French school

Arthur Streeton with Nora Streeton (née Clench), with Pat, the dog, at their Hill Road Home, London, c.1909 Photographer: Walter Barnett National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

at the Guildhall. He had also spent a week in Paris in 1901. And in May 1902, he travelled to France and Belgium with E. Phillips Fox and Fox may have discussed the ideas of ‘broken colour’ with Streeton.)12

Streeton regarded his two images of Trafalgar Square as the finest paintings he had produced since arriving in England. He wrote to Roberts in February 1902: ‘Trafalgar Square 4 feet square - Best I’ve done yet in England - from top of St Martins’ Church in Dec. a tough job - drawn in 1 day & painted in 4 days - I’ll try it at the R. A. But I get accepted there and never hung - during past week I made a swift copy of it, & it goes tomorrow to the Salon.’13

The ‘swift copy’ was not so much a copy as a full-scale second version at a different time of day; nothing less would have been appropriate to send to the Société des Artistes Français. Despite Streeton’s doubts, one painting was accepted by the Royal Academy and the other by the Société.

In Australia, he had painted atmospheric scenes of the modern city, seen from above, such as The railway station, Redfern, 1893, and Fireman’s funeral, George Street, 1894, but this London pair are larger, more ambitious works.14 He showed the beauty of the wintry city under a veiled light, with Trafalgar Square lively and luminous, enveloped in a silvery mist. The reflections gleam on the wet street and in the pond, the line of traffic enlivens the scene, and the ephemeral buildings hover in the background. As a critic wrote in 1909, the image is full of ‘tenderness, mystery and harmony of tones’.15

1. Arthur Streeton letter to Tom Roberts, 8 Jan 1901, in Galbally, A. & Gray, A., (eds), Letters from Smike: the letters of Arthur Streeton 1890-1943, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p. 85 2. London at that time had a population of around 6,480, 000 - almost double that of Paris. 3. Arthur Streeton letter to Tom Roberts, 28 Jun 1898, in Galbally & Gray, op. cit., p. 78 4. Streeton later owned a work by Frits Thaulow, In Dieppe (private collection). He may have obtained it through Conder, who was a friend of Thaulow. 5. Barnett, with his wife, had travelled with Streeton to Cairo, and had lent Streeton his camera to use in Cairo. 6. Australasian Critic, 1 Jul 1891, p. 240. This critic wrote that ‘the one thing that is essential to his future reputation is to seek, as soon as possible, the best Parisian instruction’. 7. Streeton was formally elected to membership of the Chelsea Arts Club on 5 Jan 1903: proposed by Francis Derwent Wood; seconded by Norman Hardy; and supported by Philip

Wilson Steer, AS Haynes and Alfred Hayward. 8. Arthur Streeton letter to Tom Roberts, 22 Jun 1899, in Galbally & Gray, op. cit., p. 80 9. Eagle, M., The oil paintings of Arthur Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia, National

Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, pp. 124-25, 203-04. In 1905, Streeton was commissioned to paint shipping and dockyard scenes by Walter Russell Rea, Liberal MP (1873-1943). He was heir to the firm of R. & J.H. Rea Shipowners and Merchants, which was founded in Liverpool in the 1870s, and by the early 1900s, had branches in Cardiff,

Southampton, Bristol and Newcastle-on-Tyne. In 1896, Rea married Evelyn Muirhead. Nora

Clench’s sister had married Evelyn’s brother, Findlay, in 1892, hence the connection. 10. Arthur Streeton letter to Tom Roberts, 7 Aug 1902, in Galbally & Gray, pp. 92-93 11. Streeton had first used a square canvas this size in 1896, just before he left Australia, for

‘The purple noon’s transparent might’. The painting was purchased by the National Gallery of

Victoria that year, and Streeton may have believed that the size and scale had contributed to its success. He used it again for his two large Trafalgar Square paintings of 1901 and 1902, and in 1907 for Sydney Harbour, which was purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria in 1910, a few years after he painted it. 12. The visit to Paris in 1901 is recorded in Eagle, op. cit., p. 202, and the May 1902 trip to

France and Belgium with E Phillips Fox in Eagle, op. cit, p. 203 13. Arthur Streeton letter to Tom Roberts, 14 Feb 1902, in Galbally & Gray, p. 91 14. In Mar 1906, GWL Marshall-Hall saw a number of Streeton’s recent canvases at Herbert

Streeton’s home and directed Walter Baldwin Spencer towards Trafalgar Square, 1901.

Spencer acquired the painting for £100 (and apparently convinced Streeton to call it The centre of the Empire). See Mulvaney, D.J. & Calaby, J.H., So much that is new: Baldwin

Spencer 1860-1929: a biography, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1985, pp. 338-39 and note 18 15. MacDonald, M. Irwin, ‘Arthur Streeton: an Australian painter who has solved the problems art in his own way’, The Craftsman, vol. 16-17, no. 2, Nov 1909, p. 163

DR ANNE GRAY

(1856 – 1931) SUMMER AFTERNOON, c.1919 oil on cedar panel 20.5 x 12.0 cm signed lower left: Tom Roberts

ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE

Miss Emily M. Giddy, Melbourne Thence by descent Mrs H.W. Giddy, Melbourne Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Jack Manton, Queensland Thence by descent Jennifer Manton, Sydney Estate of the above, Sydney

EXHIBITED

possibly Catalogue of Paintings (English and Australian) by Tom Roberts, Anthony Hordern & Sons Ltd, Sydney, 16 August 1920, cat. 26 Winter Exhibitions 1976, Recent Acquisitions, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 7 – 18 June 1976, cat. 19 (as ‘A lady and gentleman seated under an umbrella on the esplanade, c.1920’, illus. in exhibition catalogue)

LITERATURE

Spate, V., ‘Tom Roberts’ Catalogue’, in Tom Roberts and Australian Impressionism, 1869 to 1903’, MA thesis, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1962, cat. 446 (as ‘Two Women Seated in Conversation’) Topliss, H., Tom Roberts, 1856-1931: A Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, vol. I, p. 193, cat. 484 (as ‘Untitled. A Lady and a Gentleman Seated Under an Umbrella, c.1919’); vol. II, pl. 202 (illus.)

Summer Afternoon, c.1919, is of one of the most individual works in Tom Roberts’ oeuvre. It is also one of the most elusive. In the past, it has resisted identification. Virginia Spate, in her 1962 pioneering study of Roberts, possibly gave it the title ‘Two Women Seated in Conversation’. The model for the woman she said was Roberts’ friend Emily Giddy, sister of Sir Harold Giddy.1 In her catalogue raisonné of 1985, Helen Topliss listed it as ‘Untitled. A Lady and a Gentleman Seated Under an Umbrella’.2 Our title of ‘Summer Afternoon’ is taken from the painting of the same size Roberts exhibited in 1920 at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Hall in March and Anthony Hordern & Sons, Sydney in August.3 Further, it is known that Roberts was painting landscapes in Cornwall during the spring of 1919,4 although the painting offers no clue to its location.

The seasons had a special appeal for Roberts, particularly the sunny ones. This is apparent in the early paintings of the bushlands and beaches of Melbourne and Sydney. Significant early examples include A Summer Morning Tiff, 1886 (Art Gallery of Ballarat), painted at Houston’s farm, Box Hill, and the sparkling Holiday Sketch at Coogee, 1888 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) painted in company with Charles Conder during an Easter visit to Coogee. Returning to England in 1903, Roberts quickly came to terms with the engaging atmospheric and cultural differences, witnessed in such works of Whistlerian subtlety as The Towpath, Putney, c.1904 (Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth) and Putney Bridge, London, c.1905 (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, M.J.M. Carter Collection). Later there are warmer days, as in Springtime in Sussex, 1921 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), described by Anne Gray, as ‘quintessentially English’.5

Our painting, Summer Afternoon, c.1919, is of quite a different kind, although its roots derive from that past. The enigmatic can be found in the Venetian Woman on a Balcony, 1884 (private collection), and the chic woman seated out-of-doors in Lady with a Parasol, c.1889 (sold by Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 30 August 2017, lot 11). To each, with the wonderful atmosphere that comes from having been painted en plein air, Roberts adds characteristic individual subtleties of light and colour.

Summer Afternoon has an intriguing anonymity. The two figures, seen from the side, turn their faces away from the viewer, the anonymity of the couple extended to the unidentified location. Absence of narrative heightens curiosity. At midday, when life stands still in startling clarity, Roberts evokes feelings of tantalising expectancy, the brevity of the noonday shadows countered by the imaginative shade cast by the umbrella. Bathed in the bright, white light of a summer’s day, the beach chair and its occupant are the most clearly defined features - the cast iron work nearby providing a touch of decorative invention.

By translating actuality into poetic invention, Summer Afternoon, c.1919 is filled with creativity and individuality. Overflowing with enveloping atmosphere and lively brushstrokes, the restricted palette is masterfully handled.

1. See Topliss, H., Tom Roberts, 1856-1931: A Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press,

Melbourne, 1985, vol. 1, p. 193, and Spate, V., ‘Tom Roberts’ Catalogue’, in Tom Roberts and

Australian Impressionism, 1869 to 1903’, MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1962, cat. 446. 2. Emily Giddy also sat for Roberts’ portrait, The Elusive Louisa, c. 1910-14, (Topliss, ibid., cat. 427), once in the famed Jack Manton collection of Heidelberg School artists. 3. Exhibition of Paintings by Tom Roberts, Athenaeum Hall, Melbourne, 30 March – 17 April 1920, cat. 67, and Tom Roberts, Anthony Hordern & Sons, Sydney 16 August 1920, cat. 26 4. Topliss, H., op. cit., vol. 1, p. 76 5. Gray, A., Tom Roberts, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2015, p. 291

DAVID THOMAS

(1856 – 1931) WINTER, ENGLAND, c.1920 oil on canvas on plywood 43.5 x 34.5 cm signed lower left: Tom Roberts bears framers’ label verso: Dicksee & Co., Bradford, 1911

ESTIMATE: $70,000 – 90,000

PROVENANCE

Mr and Mrs Oswald Syme, Melbourne, 1920 Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne Christie’s, Melbourne, 28 April 1992, lot 159 (as ‘Autumn, England’) Company collection, Sydney Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

Possibly: Souvenir Exhibition of Paintings by Tom Roberts, Athenaeum Hall, Melbourne, 1920, cat. 11 (as ‘Ham Common’) Tom Roberts: Retrospective, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 4 October – 17 November 1996; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 29 November 1996 – 27 January 1997; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 11 February – 6 April 1997; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 18 April – 1 June 1997; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 11 June – 27 July 1997, cat. 74 (label attached verso)

LITERATURE

Topliss, H., Tom Roberts 1856 – 1931: A Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, cat. 512, vol. I, p. 197; vol. II, pl. 209 (illus., as ‘Autumn, England’) Radford, R., Tom Roberts: Retrospective, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1996, p. 213 (illus., as ‘Winter, England’)

RELATED WORK

The Copse in Winter, c.1910, oil on canvas on plywood, 33.5 x 43.5 cm, private collection, illus., in Gray, A., Tom Roberts, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 2015, cat. 109, pp. 276, 277

By August 1909, Tom Roberts and his family had moved to the London suburb of Hampstead Garden, within easy reach of Hampstead Heath and all the landscape opportunities it offered. Winter, England, c.1911 appears to be one so inspired. This is supported by other paintings related in subject, style and date, particularly The Copse in Winter, c.1910 (private collection). In her catalogue book to the National Gallery of Australia’s Tom Roberts exhibition of 2015, Anne Gray comments on its ‘bare skeletons of trees scoring the cloudy blue sky’ and the ‘whispery atmosphere, suggesting perhaps a touch of wind among the stiffened branches’.1 Open skies dominate The Copse in Winter, whereas Winter, England is enclosed, dominated by grey trees, pale yellows and blues. Yet, both paintings are filled with the atmosphere of winter, sharing cool sunlight and skeletal branches of trees stripped of their leaves. Moreover, a framer’s label on the verso of Winter, England, c.1911 carries both Robert’s new address, ‘Bigwood Road, Hampstead Garden Suburb’ and the date ‘1911’.

Further support for the identification of Winter, England as a Hampstead Heath subject comes from the Roberts’ scholars Virginia Spate and Helen Topliss. Topliss, in her catalogue raisonné of Roberts works, lists our painting, (catalogue number 512), as Autumn England of c.1920. She also noted that Spate suggested it was ‘Supposedly purchased by the original owner at the Athenaeum in 1920 – the present title probably given to it by the owners as it doesn’t correspond with anything in the catalogue of 1920.’ She added: ‘It could possibly be Ham Common, No. 11’.2

Harrow on the Hill, c.1910-12 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) is another significant work related to this engaging group of English landscapes. Here, Anne Gray noted the influence of John Constable, renowned for his views of Hampstead, adding ‘it is possible that Constable’s Hampstead landscapes and cloud studies inspired Roberts to paint this view’.3 For Roberts, the previous years had been a time of renewal and enrichment. From the vast Turneresque skies and seas of Storm at Sea, 1907 and the Whistlerian tones and mists of Thames Barges, c.1909 (both in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales), together with Constable’s arching heavens of Harrow on the Hill, c.1910-12, Roberts developed his distinctive English style of painting.

Roberts’ Australian and English landscapes show a great love of trees, honouring their nobility and exploiting their compositional value. This is reflected in many paintings, especially in titles such as Joy o’ Gums c.1920s and A Queen of Gums, 1926 (private collection). Trunks upright, often close to the picture plane, as in Winter, England, c.1911, dominate. The classic balance between vertical and horizontal was a feature of Roberts’ work from Bailed Up, 1895-1927 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney), through Winter, England, c.1911, to Sherbrooke Forest, 1924 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney). Although dubbed ‘the father of Australian landscape painting’,4 Roberts spent a large part of his creative life in England, the country of his birth. Sharing his lifetime and artistic achievements between England and Australia, each greatly enriched the other.

1. Gray, A., Tom Roberts, Australian National Gallery, Canberra 2015, p. 276 2. Quoted in Topliss, op. cit., p. 197, cat. 512. See under ‘Literature’ for details of the 1920 catalogue. 3. Gray, op. cit., p. 279 4. Croll, R.H., Tom Roberts: Father of Australian Landscape Painting, Robertson & Mullens,

Melbourne 1935

DAVID THOMAS

(1864 – 1947) RENCONTRE DANS LE PARC or DANS L’ALLÉE , c.1912 – 1913 oil on canvas 73.0 x 60.0 cm signed lower left: Rupert C W Bunny inscribed with title on stretcher bar verso: Dans l’Allée inscribed on label attached verso: 12 RENCONTRE / DANS LE PARC.

ESTIMATE: $120,000 – 160,000

PROVENANCE

Mr F E Trigg, Sydney, acquired c.1950s Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

possibly: Exposition Rupert C. W. Bunny, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 16 – 31 March 1917, cat. 15 (as ‘Dans l’Allée’) possibly: Exhibition of Paintings by Rupert C. W. Bunny, Fine Art Society’s Gallery, Melbourne, 15 – 27 November 1922, cat. 39 (as ‘Dans l’Ailée [sic.]) possibly: An Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Drawings by Rupert C. W. Bunny, Anthony Hordern and Sons Ltd Galleries, Sydney, 2 – 31 May 1923, cat. 39 (as ‘Dans l’Ailée’ [sic.])

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

While Bunny continued to evoke an opulent, often indolent elegance in his works produced around the fin-de-siècle and early twentieth century, by the first years of World War I his paintings were ‘…evolving slowly towards a modern notion of a busy woman’s life, as she sewed, worked in the garden or chatted to a friend.’1 As Mary Eagle elucidates, ‘Bunny modified his imagery just sufficiently to hint at the change. His women were still softly pretty… but their clothes were less hampering and their expressions slightly more alert.’2 Featuring the artist’s wife, the ravishing Jeanne Heloise Morel (on the left), chatting with two female companions in the sunshine on their promenade through one of the city’s newly-renovated public parks, Rencontre dans le Parc (Dans l’Allée) captures brilliantly the spirit and élan of Parisian society during these wartime years – and the subtle shift in Bunny’s art accordingly. Like the closely related Two Ladies in a Garden, c.1913-16 (which depicts Madame Bunny seated and similarly dressed in a loose ‘tea gown’ and shading herself with a lace parasol while conversing with the same female companion as that depicted centre here wearing a very informal kimono gown),3 the present work betrays a noticeable absence of artifice, imbued rather with the artist’s genuine love of his subject and indeed, of the art of making pictures itself. With its emphasis on Parisian outdoor leisure (‘la chasse au bonheur’) and its softly Impressionistic rendering of fleeting light and lyrical colour, Rencontre dans le Parc (Dans l’Allée) attests, moreover, to the way in which Bunny created an art appropriate to his time and the conditions of modernity – assimilating avant-garde modes into establishment practice.

Transforming the prosaic into the poetic through his mastery of figure composition and feminine charm, and his exquisitely light and airy palette, thus Bunny offered contemporary audiences a vision of the everyday exuding joie de vivre and ‘…a peaceful remoteness from the ‘sturm and drang’ of modern life’.4 As leading French art critic of the day Gustave Geffroy observed of the artist’s celebrated solo exhibition at Galeries George Petit, Paris in March 1917 (in which Rencontre dans le Parc (Dans l’Allée) and the following lot 40 were possibly included), Bunny’s paintings express ‘the luminous joy of daylight… and the pleasure of living in the shadow of trees looking out on a festival of sunshine… [He] is a realist and a visionary, an observer of truth and a poet of the world of dreams.’5

1. Eagle, M. and Jones, J., A Story of Australian Painting, Macmillan Australia, Sydney, 1994, p. 132 2. ibid. 3. The author is most grateful to Dr David Thomas for highlighting this comparable work 4. Sydney Morning Herald, 22 September 1911, p. 7 5. Geffroy, G., ‘Rupert Bunny: Introduction’, Exposition Rupert C.W. Bunny, Galeries Georges

Petit, Paris, 1917, n.p.

VERONICA ANGELATOS

(1864 – 1947) FEBRUARY, CAVALAIRE, c.1913 oil on canvas on composition board 50.0 x 61.0 cm signed lower right: Rupert C W Bunny inscribed on label verso: February (Cavalerie [sic.]) bears inscription on frame verso: ROBERT HAINES

ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE

Estate of the artist Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Mr F E Trigg, Sydney, acquired c.1950s Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED

Exhibition of Paintings by Rupert C. W. Bunny, Fine Art Society’s Gallery, Melbourne, 15 - 27 November 1922, cat. 34 (as ‘February Sun at Cavalaire’) An Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Drawings by Rupert C. W. Bunny, Anthony Hordern and Sons Ltd Galleries, Sydney, 2 – 31 May 1923, cat. 34 (as ‘February Sun at Cavalaire’) possibly: Exhibition of Paintings by Rupert Bunny, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 3 – 22 September, cat. 26 (as ‘Cavalaire’) An exhibition of French Landscapes and a Group of Early Paintings by Rupert Bunny, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 1 – 8 October 1945, cat. 13 (as ‘February, Cavalaire’)

LITERATURE

‘Sundry Shows’, The Bulletin, Sydney, vol. 43, no. 2232, 23 November 1922, p. 34 (as ‘February Sun at Cavalaire’) ‘Rupert Bunny. Modern French Art’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 2 May 1923, p. 14 (as ‘February Sun at Cavalaire’) Turnbull, C., & Buesst, T., The Art of Rupert Bunny, Ure Smith Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1948, p. 71 (as ‘February, Cavalaire’)

Painted in the South of France during the years immediately following Rupert Bunny’s triumphant return to Australia in 1911, February, Cavalaire, c.1913 encapsulates well the ‘naturalness and sunny serenity’1 that embodied his work at this time – a precious ‘golden age’ before the ravages of The Great War would forever alter the cultural, political and social landscape of his beloved France. First sojourning in the picturesque seaside resort of Cavalaire-sur-Mer in the Provence/Côte d’Azur region during the winter of 1912 – 13, Bunny here completed two or three figure paintings including February, Cavalaire, and embarked upon his Symbolist-inspired mythological series. Also known as February Sun at Cavalaire, February, notably the present work and another image of Cavalaire were considered ‘audacious experiments’ when first exhibited in Melbourne at the Fine Art Society’s exhibition in November 1922, with the art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald remarking in particular upon the ‘shattering extravagance of Reckitt’s Blue’2 in February Sun at Cavalaire. Such comparison most certainly alluded to the tea dress worn by Madame Bunny here which not only evokes the ultramarine colour but also, the iconic striped pattern, of the famous laundry soap packaging, while the author’s comments regarding ‘the figure of the man [which] is confused and out of drawing’3 directly reference her male companion who is less distinguishable from the sun-dappled landscape in his khaki suit. Given his profile and attire which betray striking affinities to photographs of Bunny and especially, to his celebrated Self Portrait, 1920 (National Gallery of Victoria), indeed, it may be that the work depicts the artist with his beautiful wife and model, Jeanne-Heloise, enjoying an intimate moment of ‘dolce far niente’ in the gentle sunlight.

With their charm and sensuous beauty, Bunny’s lyrical explorations of the poetry in the everyday were, unsurprisingly, among his most favoured works by private collectors in Melbourne and Sydney which included such prominent figures as Hugo Meyer; Dr Samuel Ewing; and the Hon. Sir James McCay. Significantly, both February, Cavalaire and the previous lot, were originally owned by Mr F.E. Trigg who was a financial adviser to John Fairfax & Sons from 1945 – 60, and as such, would have known the Chairman, Warwick Fairfax, and longtime Managing Director, Rupert Henderson – both of whom were avid art collectors and renowned afficionados of Bunny’s art.

1. Eagle, M., The Art of Rupert Bunny in the Australian National Gallery, Australian National

Gallery, Canberra, 1991, p. 101 2. Modern French Art’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 2 May 1923, p. 14 3. ibid.

VERONICA ANGELATOS