Important Australian + International Fine Art

Auction | Melbourne | 26 November 2025

Important Australian + International Fine Art

Lots 1 – 59

Auction | Melbourne | 26 November 2025

Lot 12, Ian Fairweather, Figure group I, 1969 (detail)

Lots 1 – 59

Wednesday 26 November 7:00 pm

105 Commercial Road South Yarra, VIC telephone: 03 9865 6333

Tuesday 11 – Sunday 16 November 11:00 am – 6:00 pm 36 Gosbell Street Paddington, NSW telephone: 02 9287 0600

Thursday 20 – Tuesday 25 November 11:00 am – 6:00 pm

105 Commercial Road South Yarra, VIC telephone: 03 9865 6333

email bids to: info@deutscherandhackett.com telephone: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344 telephone bid form – p. 158 absentee bid form – p. 159

www.deutscherandhackett.com/watch-live-auction

www.deutscherandhackett.com | info@deutscherandhackett.com

(left page) Lot 22, Cressida Campbell, Bougainvillea, 2003 (detail)

Specialists

Chris Deutscher

Executive Director — Melbourne

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

Fiona Hayward

Senior Art Specialist

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

Crispin Gutteridge

Head of Indigenous Art and Senior Art Specialist

Crispin holds a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts and History) from Monash University. In 1995, he began working for Sotheby’s Australia, where he became the representative for Aboriginal art in Melbourne. In 2006 Crispin joined Joel Fine Art as head of Aboriginal and Contemporary Art and later was appointed head of the Sydney office. He possesses extensive knowledge of Aboriginal art and has over 30 years’ experience in the Australian fine art auction market.

Alex Creswick

Managing Director / Head of Finance

With a Bachelor of Business Accounting at RMIT, Alex has almost 30 years’ experience within financial management roles. He has spent much of his early years within the corporate sector with companies such as IBM, Macquarie Bank and ANZ. With a strong passion for the arts Alex became the Financial Controller for Ross Mollison Group, a leading provider of marketing services to the performing arts, before joining D+H in 2011.

Jennifer Terace

Front of House Manager – Melbourne

Jennifer holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Edith Cowan University and has experience across event management, retail operations, and community arts program coordination. She has worked as a practicing artist, artist’s assistant, and gallery assistant, gaining valuable insight into both the creative and logistical aspects of the visual arts sector.

Danny Kneebone

Design and Photography Manager

With over 25 years in the art auction industry as both photographer and designer. Danny was Art Director at Christie’s from 2000–2007, Bonham’s and Sotheby’s 2007–2009 and then Sotheby’s Australia from 2009–2020. Specialist in design, photography, colour management and print production from fine art to fine jewellery. Danny has won over 50 national and international awards for his photography work and art practice.

Specialists

Damian Hackett

Executive Director — Sydney

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

Henry Mulholland

Senior Art Specialist

Henry Mulholland is a graduate of the National Art School in Sydney, and has had a successful career as an exhibiting artist. Since 2000, Henry has also been a regular art critic on ABC Radio 702. He was artistic advisor to the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust Basil Sellers Sculpture Project, and since 2007 a regular feature of Sculpture by the Sea, leading tours for corporate stakeholders and conducting artist talks in Sydney, Tasmania and New Zealand. Prior to joining Deutscher and Hackett in 2013, Henry’s fine art consultancy provided a range of services, with a particular focus on collection management and acquiring artworks for clients on the secondary market.

Veronica Angelatos

Art Specialist and Senior Researcher

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

Ella Perrottet

Senior Registrar

Ella has a Masters of Arts and Cultural Management (Collections and Curatorship) from Deakin University together with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Visual Art) from Monash University, and studied in both Melbourne and Italy. From 2014, Ella worked at Leonard Joel, Melbourne as an Art Assistant, researcher, writer and auctioneer, where she developed a particular interest in Australian women artists.

Eliza Burton

Registrar

Eliza has a Bachelor of Arts (English and Cultural Studies and History of Art) from the University of Western Australia and a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne. She has experience in exhibition management, commercial sales, and arts writing through her work for Sculpture by the Sea and The Sheila Foundation.

Poppy Thomson Gallery Manager, Sydney

Poppy holds a Bachelor of Art History and Curatorship (Honours) from the Australian National University and has professional experience as a curator and research assistant. Prior to this role, she spent time in Paris after winning the 2023 Eloquence Art Prize, and now sits on the board of Culture Plus.

Specialists for this auction

Chris Deutscher

Damian Hackett 0411 350 150 0422 811 034

Henry Mulholland

Fiona Hayward 0424 487 738 0417 957 590

Crispin Gutteridge Veronica Angelatos 0411 883 052 0409 963 094

Administration and Accounts

Megan Mac Sweeney Poppy Thomson (Melbourne) (Sydney) 03 9865 6333 02 9287 0600

Absentee and Telephone Bids

Jennifer Terace 03 9865 6333

Shipping

Ella Perrottet 03 9865 6333

Auctioneers

Roger McIlroy Head Auctioneer

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

Scott Livesey Auctioneer

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

Lot 2

James Miller Marshall Gold prospecting, near Creswick, 1892 (detail)

Jeffrey Smart Night stop, Bombay,

Contents

Lots 1 – 59 page 12

Prospective buyers and sellers guide page 154

Conditions of auction and sale page 156

Telephone bid form page 158

Absentee bid form page 159

Attendee pre-registration form page 160

Index page 175

Alexander Schramm (German/Australian, 1814 – 1864)

[Aboriginal group on the tramp, towards evening], 1851

oil on canvas

19.5 x 35.5 cm

signed and inscribed lower left: A. Schramm / Adelaide 1851

Estimate: $60,000 – 80,000

Provenance

Private collection

Adrian Mibus and Louise Whitford, Whitford Fine Art, London and Brussels

Private collection, Adelaide, acquired from the above c.1980s

Of all Australia’s colonial artists who took on the challenge of por traying A boriginal people, whether sympathetically or not, one stands out as particularly difficult to categorise. Arriving in Adelaide from Hamburg aboard the Prinzessin Victoria Luise on 7 August 1849, Carl Friedrich Alexander Schramm was aged 36. The son of a Berlin book dealer, Schramm had studied art in that city and had painted in Italy and Poland. His Boating Party at Treptow, 1838 conforms to a particular variant of Biedermeier art, with ‘theatrical staging, narrow prosceniumlike foregrounds and flat patterning that often suggest scenic decoration.’ 1 Enough survives of Schramm’s German output to indicate that he had begun producing artworks with a sharpened critique of the false ‘idyll’ which Biedermeier art often portrayed. Indeed, his work may well have attracted the attention of German authorities, perhaps accounting for his presence on the Prinzessin Victoria Luise whose passenger list included sympathisers with the 1848 uprisings.

Those hints of Schramm’s attitude become more evident when we turn to his Australian output. His first Australian painting, perhaps the most ambitious of his career, was a large and detailed portrayal of an encampment of Murray River Aboriginal people on the northern bank of the River Torrens – Adelaide: A Tribe of Natives on the Banks of the Torrens, 1850 (National Gallery of Australia). These people had been attracted to the city by the government ration distribution but had outlived their welcome; the camp housing more than 80 people was soon regarded as a public nuisance. Schramm’s picture presented an alternative view of a complex and ebullient sociality. In its crowded but clear delineation it was not so far removed from the Boating Party at Treptow.

That benchmark oil painting established Schramm’s reputation, a nd he was to paint similar tableaux of multiple Aboriginal figures and scenes within scenes, as if the colonial world had been pushed back and made irrelevant. These sold well, won prizes at the Society for Arts annual shows, and lithographs followed. As these large encampments fragmented, Schramm might well have turned to more lucrative society portraiture, yet he persisted. He did not completely abandon his Biedermeier style –his Bush Visitors series, 1858 – 1860 conveys the same theatrical impression with bright colouring and distinct figuring, but he had also found another way to approach his subject, applying an acid, sardonic critique to the unfolding predicament of a colonised people dealing with their own displacement and emasculation.

In 1851, barely a year after Adelaide: A Tribe of Natives on the Banks of the Torrens, Schramm produced the work under consideration here. A straggling trail of partly clothed Aborigines with their dogs enters the field of view, arriving at the edge of settlement at sunset. One figure gestures towards a small cottage on a riverbank, overlooked by ragged eucalypts. Individual features are blurred by the sun’s glare, shifting the painting’s register from descriptive to allegorical. The group has arrived at the edge of the colony, and we are all familiar with the consequences.

[Aboriginal group on the tramp, towards evening], 1851 is perhaps the first colonial painting to steer a course past the literal, the ethnographic, the scenic, into the core of the colonial impasse. Using variants on this theme in sketches, lithographs and oil paintings, Schramm would confront this impasse repeatedly over the following decade until his death in 1864, aged 51.

1. Boime, A., ‘Biedermeier culture and the revolutions of 1848’ in Art in an age of civil struggle 1848 – 1871. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007, p. 471

Philip Jones

James Miller Marshall (1857 – 1935)

Gold prospecting, near Creswick, 1892

oil on board

55.5 x 40.5 cm

signed and dated lower left: J Miller Marshall / 1892 bears inscription verso: Prospecting for Gold / on the Gold Creek nr Creswick + Ballarat

Estimate: $60,000 – 80,000

Provenance

Private collection

Sotheby’s, Chester, England, February 1986

Private collection

Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in April 1986

Exhibited

Australian Art: Colonial to Modern, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 9 – 25 April 1986, cat. 52 (as ‘Gold Prospecting, near Creswick, Ballarat’)

Literature

Ingram, T., ‘Even in Chester they holler for a Marshall’, The Australian Financial Review, 27 March 1986, p. 38 (as ‘Gold Prospecting, near Creswick, Ballarat’)

Topliss, H., The Artist Camps: ‘Plein Air’ Painting in Australia, Hedley Australia Publications, Melbourne, 1992, pl. 17, pp. 20 (illus. as ‘Gold Prospecting, near Creswick, Ballarat’), 186

Related works

Fossicking for Gold, 1893, oil on canvas laid down on board, 44.0 x 33.0 cm, private collection, Victoria Walter Withers, Seeking for gold – cradling, 1893, oil on canvas on hardboard, 67.0 x 49.6 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Percy Lindsay Fossicking for gold, 1894 oil on canvas

29.5 x 21.8 cm

Private collection

Australian art history is replete with evocative stories of artists living and working together in the landscape. Think, for example, of the camaraderie of Australian Impressionists Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Louis Abrahams at the plein air painting camp at Box Hill in the summer of 1885, or of Curlew Camp on Sydney’s North Shore, where in the early 1890s Roberts and Streeton found creative inspiration in their rustic but picturesque ocean-side accommodation. Painting outdoors, these artists captured the effects of light and colour at different times of the day and in different seasons, communicating both the appearance and the experience of their landscape subjects.

Walter Withers met Roberts, Abrahams and Frederick McCubbin as a student at Melbourne’s National Gallery school and he too was an artist ‘who went out [in]to nature, and made successful attempts to represent her varying moods.’ 1 In 1893, he and his friend James Miller Marshall were invited to Creswick, a town not far north of Ballarat, to teach a summer school. ‘[They] spent several weeks… holding an out-of-door class during the month of January. Creswick, with its Italian colouring of blue and gold, made an ideal painting ground, and the students were

Walter Withers Seeking for gold - cradling , 1893 oil on canvas on hardboard

67.0 x 49.6 cm

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

enthusiastic workers. Amongst those who took advantage of this opportunity were Percy Lindsay (then a promising young landscape painter), and, at the evening drawing class held in the [Ballarat] School of Mines, his young brother, now the wellknown Norman Lindsay – a schoolboy then, whose remarkable facility in drawing aroused Withers’ wonder and delight.’ 2

English born, Marshall was the son of a painter who ‘received his early training as an artist at the South Kensington school, but as soon as he had acquired a sufficient grounding in the technical knowledge of drawing and painting… followed the example of the great French and English artists of the new school, painting and studying direct from nature.’ 3 He exhibited a series of landscapes at the Royal Academy of Art in London during the 1880s before travelling to Australia in 1890. While he primarily painted in and around Melbourne, Sydney Harbour from the Domain, 1893, a watercolour in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, suggests that he also ventured further north during his years in Australia. Another Lindsay brother, Lionel, who also undertook art classes with Marshall in Creswick described him fondly as a ‘big, bearded simple soul who asked from life a

full day’s painting and a pot of beer at eve on an ale-house bench’, and recalled his advice, ‘Plenty of water. Plenty of water and a full brush: that’s the secret of watercolour.’4

One of the notable outcomes of this summer in Creswick was a series of paintings by Marshall, Withers and Percy Lindsay which depict miners fossicking for gold. Among them, a trio of closely related paintings includes this work by Marshall, Withers’ Panning for gold, 1893 and Lindsay’s Fossicking for gold, 1894 (both private collection). Withers and Lindsay depict a lone prospector kneeling beside a shallow creek panning for gold with a cradle – a wooden sieve used to separate alluvial gold from washed soil – and other tools of the trade nearby. Both artists use the familiar blue and gold palette of the Impressionist landscape and emphasise space and distance, describing the long meandering path of the creek towards faraway hills. Marshall’s painting is the largest of the three and depicts two prospectors at work. His colouring is more sombre, with a moody sky above the creek and rocky ground, which is painted in rich shades of burgundy, brown and blue. The pictorial space of Marshall’s picture is also more condensed and perhaps, as a visitor to the country who was unfamiliar with the native flora, he pays particular attention to the depiction of the reedy growth along the creek edge and the gum trees, carefully describing the distinctive drooping habit of their foliage. Fossicking for gold, 1893, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, is one of at least two other related works that Marshall painted at the time.

The discovery of gold in the 1850s transformed the Australian colonies, drawing huge numbers of migrants from across the world who travelled to the goldfields eager to find their fortune. The settler population more than quadrupled in the decades between 1851 and 1871, with many arriving in Victoria where, in the first decade of the gold rush, more than a third of the world’s gold was found. Although the peak of the Victorian gold rush was over by the 1890s, as these paintings demonstrate the subject of miners at work in the landscape continued to be one that interested contemporary painters.

Walter Withers Panning for Gold, 1893 oil on canvas

46.0 x 30.4 cm

Private collection

1. ‘Art of Walter Withers’, The Argus, Melbourne, 29 July 1919, p. 6

2. McCubbin, A., The Life and Art of Walter Withers, Alexander McCubbin, Melbourne, 1919, p. 19

3. Table Talk, 24 June 1898, cited in Ingram, T., ‘Even in Chester they holler for a Marshall’, The Australian Financial Review, 27 March 1986, p. 38

4. Lionel Lindsay, cited in Clifford-Smith, S., biography of J. Miller Marshall, Design & Art Australia Online, at: https://www.daao.org.au/bio/version_history/j-miller-marshall-1/ biography/ (accessed 23 September 2025)

Kirsty Grant

Walter Withers (1854 – 1914)

The morning ride, c.1894 – 1902

oil on canvas

36.0 x 54.0 cm

signed lower left: Walter Withers inscribed on old label verso: Phillip Island

Estimate: $25,000 – 35,000

Provenance

John May, Melbourne, by 1920

Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 24 May 1973, lot 31 (as ‘Phillip Island’)

Sir Leon and Lady Trout, Brisbane Private collection

Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 22 April 1996, lot 61 Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited

Master Works from the Collection of Sir Leon and Lady Trout, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 21 September – 14 December 1977, cat. 61 (label attached verso and illus. in exhibition catalogue, as ‘Phillip Island’)

Literature

Withers, F., The Life and Art of Walter Withers, Australian Art Books, Melbourne, 1920, pp. 24, 25 (illus.)

‘Melbourne’s private art galleries. Mr John May’s collection. The art of Walter Withers.’, The Age, Melbourne, 12 April 1930, p. 5

Mackenzie, A., Walter Withers: The Forgotten Manuscripts, Mannagum Press, Victoria, 1987, p. 129

Related work

Morning Mist, Eltham, oil on canvas, 62.0 x 73.5 cm, private collection

In a photograph of early Heidelberg, the family home of Walter Withers sits on a rise above the railway line. Titled ‘Withers Court’, the handsome double-fronted cottage is located opposite that of John May, a collector more fairly described ‘as a specialiser, for in the pictures which cover the walls of his Heidelberg home, certainly three-fourths are the work of one painter, the late Walter Withers… probably the most representative group of his works collected under one roof.’ 1 Indeed, Withers’ wife Fanny noted that this painting The morning ride, c.1894 – 1902, was one which took ‘pride of place’ in May’s home2, and it was also one of the small selection of images which she reproduced in 1920 in a small book dedicated to her late husband’s career. In a newspaper article on May’s collection published in 1930, the writer also singled out the painting for praise as ‘another landscape which gives pleasure… A morning ride, charming in composition, and while couched in a low key, is luminous and full of colour movement.’ 3

Withers rarely travelled far for his subjects and found most around his various homes in Creswick, Heidelberg and Eltham. According to Mrs Withers, The morning ride dates from ‘these Heidelberg years’4, that is, 1894 to 1902, noting also that these small works, usually painted en plein air, captured much that is fresh and appealing in her husband’s best work. Although Withers had painted alongside, and maintained strong friendships with, the artists of the Heidelberg school, his paintings rarely shared the intense light and high key colour seen in those by Streeton and Roberts. Although a strong colourist, Withers’ paintings maintain rather a lower key more akin to David Davies, as seen in The morning ride where the lowering sky casts shadows across the land apart from a small burst of sun on the horizon line. A number of the artist’s paintings, such as Nearing the township, 1901 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), feature travellers returning home and this illuminated patch may easily be interpreted as an optimistic indication of journey’s end. Rather than grand narratives, Withers was drawn to the momentary and commonplace, what art historian Bernard Smith described as ‘an endeavour to capture the ‘spirit’ of the landscape… not to record its anatomy but to portray its soul.’ 5

In 1897, Withers was awarded the first Wynne Prize – which he won a second time in 1900 – establishing him as a firm favourite among audiences and collectors. Following a major commission to paint a series of murals for the Manifold family at their grand western-districts mansion ‘Purrumbete’, Withers left ‘sleepy Heidelberg… with its winding roads, its wooded hills, and quiet village life’ 6 and moved to Eltham in 1902, with his subsequent paintings all based around that location. He was highly respected amongst his peers, serving briefly as President for the Victorian Artists’ Society before co-founding the Australian Art Association in 1912. Plagued by ill-health, Withers died at Eltham in 1914 leaving a collection of paintings that were exhibited to appreciative audiences the following year at Collins House, Melbourne.

1. ‘Melbourne’s private art galleries. Mr John May’s collection. The art of Walter Withers.’, The Age, Melbourne, 12 April 1930, p. 5, at: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/ page/18959684 (accessed 4 September 2025)

2. Withers, F., The life and art of Walter Withers, Alexander McCubbin, Melbourne, 1920, p. 24

3. ‘Melbourne’s private art galleries’, op. cit.

4. Withers, op. cit.

5. Smith, B., Place, Taste and Tradition: a study of Australian art since 1788, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1945, p. 121

6. Withers, F., A short biography of Walter Withers, reprinted in Andrew Mackenzie, Walter Withers: the forgotten manuscripts, Mannagum Press, Victoria, 1987, p. 103

Andrew Gaynor

Elioth Gruner (1882 – 1939)

Figures by the shore, c.1934

oil on canvas on board

30.5 x 41.0 cm

signed lower right: GRUNER

Estimate: $25,000 – 35,000

Provenance

Arthur Hancock, Melbourne

Thence by descent

Private collection, Melbourne

Thence by descent

Private collection, Melbourne

Related work

Beach idyll, 1934, oil on canvas on board, 46.5 x 44.0 cm, New England Regional Art Museum, New South Wales, gift of Howard Hinton

We are grateful to Steven Miller for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

As a teenager, Elioth Gruner was forced to take on family responsibility early due to the death of his father when he was very young, followed by that of his eldest brother when Gruner was sixteen. Such tragedies led to him working twelve-hour days as a draper’s assistant to support his mother whilst informally attending Julian Ashston’s art classes in the evening. This left little time for him to indulge in recreation – of which swimming and body surfing with close friends was a favoured pastime. The resultant paintings of these rare, hedonist moments are amongst the earliest sustained images depicting Australia’s love affair with the beach. Following World War One, Gruner’s focus turned inland, and it wasn’t until the 1930s that he returned to painting beaches and headlands, by which time he had perfected his mature, softly modernist style. Whilst these latter images were mostly de-populated, Figures by the shore, 1934, adds narrative intrigue with its two bathers looking back to the viewer whilst a third sits contemplating the ocean beyond.

Gruner’s early beach paintings coincided with a loosening of society’s rules regarding beach bathing; indeed, it was not until 1903 that bathers were officially allowed in the water during daylight hours. Gruner’s paintings between 1912 and 1918 are therefore additionally fascinating as his bathers are already within their environment, totally at home in the sand or water. In works such as Bondi Beach, c.1912 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), the clustered sunbathers have become ‘vibrant

and economical studies in colour and tone (demonstrating) a new interest and facility in the simple arrangements of figures in patterns.1 This fascination with formalised design carries over into Figures by the shore with its classicist structure of the two main characters bracketed by trees; however, by placing these figures off centre, Gruner imparts a pleasing informality to the scene. The freshness of the brush marks also indicates that it was painted en plein air, in front of the motif.

Gruner suffered from depression and thus was not prolific, often destroying works he felt were not up to his exacting standards. In 1934, by contrast, he was buoyed by the previous year’s successes which included the magazine Art and Australia devoting an issue to his recent work, an act of public support which they had previously done to great acclaim in 1929. This positive affirmation continued when Gruner was awarded his fifth Wynne Prize in 1934 for Murrumbidgee Ranges, Canberra (National Gallery of Australia). In light of such events, it is tempting to detect a joyous purity within Figures by the shore, and in its companion work Beach idyll, 1934 (New England Regional Art Gallery). Whilst both are a welcome return to the figure-beach interaction, Gruner’s overall subject remains ‘the fine and subtle emotional quality of light (combined with a) feeling for design and form which (he) so courageously imposed on his work.’ 2

1. Clark, D., Elioth Gruner: Texture of light, Canberra Museum and Gallery, Australian Capital Territory, 2014, p. 17

2. Burdett, B., ‘The art of Daryl Lindsay’, Art in Australia, series 3, no. 39, August 1931, p. 23 Andrew Gaynor

Elioth Gruner (1882 – 1939)

Landscape, Bacchus Marsh, 1930

oil on plywood

30.0 x 40.0 cm

signed and dated lower right: GRUNER / 1930 bears inscription verso: LANDSCAPE / BACCHUS MARSH (W. BUCKLE)

Estimate: $30,000 – 40,000

Provenance

The artist, Sydney (probably ledger no. 370, as ‘Road with poplar’)

W. G. Buckle, by 1933

Arthur Hancock, Melbourne

Thence by descent

Private collection, Melbourne

Thence by descent

Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited

Exhibition of Pictures from Southern States, Queensland National Art Gallery, Brisbane, 22 July – 16 August 1930, cat. 8a (as ‘A road near Bacchus Marsh’)

Loan Exhibition of the Works of Elioth Gruner, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 21 December 1932 – 21 February 1933, cat. 43

Elioth Gruner Memorial Loan Exhibition, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 17 April – 31 May 1940, cat. 39, lent by Mr W.G. Buckle (label attached verso)

Literature

Art in Australia, Sydney Ure Smith, Sydney, 3rd Series, no. 50, June 1933, p. 37 (illus., as ‘Landscape, Bacchus Marsh, Victoria’)

Related works

Morning, Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, 1930, oil on canvas, 50.5 x 61.0 cm, private collection, sold Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 22 November 2023, lot 27

Werribee Gorge, 1930, oil on canvas on cardboard, 30.0 x 40.7 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

We are grateful to Steven Miller for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

Landscape, Bacchus Marsh, 1930, dates from a pivotal period in the career of Elioth Gruner when the many personal painting challenges he had undertaken over the previous seven years coalesced into his instantly recognisable mature technique. It was executed in the same year as two other significant works: Morning, Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, 1930 (Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 22 November 2023, lot 27), and the widely reproduced Mitchell River, Victoria (aka Gippsland lakes), 1930 (Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 14 September 2022, lot 24). These painting challenges had been triggered by an encounter with the British artist Sir William Orpen in 1923, who criticised Gruner’s technique and design, encouraging him to change to smaller canvases and to utilise a thinner, more pastel-like application of paint.

Gruner subsequently travelled to Europe looking closely at post-impressionists such as Paul Gauguin and absorbing their lessons on the flattening of space. Although some colleagues in Australia – most famously Norman Lindsay – were appalled by his subsequent, mildly modernist approach, audiences responded strongly to the new works, and between 1929 and 1937, Gruner added four more Wynne Prize awards for landscape painting to the three he already possessed.1 These included the nowiconic On the Murrumbidgee, 1929 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) shown in the competition in early 1930, a ‘high point of his progression towards creating modern landscape from a plein air practice of direct observation before the subject.’ 2

Buoyed by his success, Gruner undertook an extended drive through the south coast of New South Wales and on to the Gippsland region of Victoria where he painted Mitchell River, Victoria (aka Gippsland lakes), 1930. Following this, he travelled back to Melbourne and by May, was in regional Bacchus Marsh on Woiwurrung and Wathaurong country. Notably, he was in the company of two significant artist-educators – namely, George Bell, who would open his renowned modernist school two years later, and Daryl Lindsay, member of the famed artistic family and future Director of the National Gallery of Victoria. 3 This was a working holiday charged with much intellectual discussion and analysis, and contemporaneous paintings by each bear witness to shifts in emphasis and technique. It is interesting to compare Lindsay’s and Gruner’s paintings in particular. Although both exhibit a marked flattening of space, in works such as Lindsay’s Landscape at Myrniong, c.1930, and Landscape at Bacchus Marsh, c.1930 (both in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria), the brushwork comprises stipples of impasto strokes whilst the skies are filled with highly mannered clouds. By comparison, Gruner’s paintings from Bacchus Marsh demonstrate the continuing strength of his vision. In the lot on offer here, the majestic poplar and companion oak provide a central focus, whilst the forked roads lead the eye back to the foreground, bracketed by the boundary fence to the right and two small cottages at the left. However, it is the sensual pleasure that Gruner expresses with his sky and clouds that truly completes the image. Taking cues from other modernist contemporaries such as Grace Cossington Smith (see Gum Blossom, c.1928 – 32, Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 28 August 2024, lot 49), the blue brushstrokes radiate to the heavens, while the clouds on the horizon impart a true sense of reality. Indeed, Gruner himself was also impressed, writing to the critic Basil Burdett that he had ‘painted a sky at last.’4

1. Gruner was awarded the Wynne Prize in 1916, 1919, 1921, 1929, 1934, 1936, and 1937.

2. Clark, D., Elioth Gruner: Texture of light, Canberra Museum and Gallery, Australian Capital Territory, 2014, p. 12

3. Lindsay and his wife were temporarily renting a cottage at Bacchus Marsh, see: Lindsay, D., The leafy tree: my family, F.W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1965, p. 153

4. Elioth Gruner, Letter to Basil Burdett, 29 May 1930 in Art Gallery of New South Wales archives, MS1995.9, 1/17/10.

Andrew Gaynor

John Peter Russell (1858 – 1930)

Portrait of Dodge Macknight, c.1888

oil on canvas

55.5 x 47.5 cm

signed lower right: JP RUSSELL

Estimate: $1,000,000 – 1,500,000

Provenance

Bequeathed by Dodge Macknight to his sister–in–law, Elise Queyrel, Massachusetts, USA

Thence by descent

Mrs George W. Bruce, Massachusetts, USA

Thence by descent

Private collection, Delaware, USA

Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 29 August 2007, lot 48

Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited

An Impressionist in Sandwich: The Paintings of Dodge Macknight, Heritage Plantation of Sandwich, Massachusetts, 15 November –21 December 1980, cat. 68 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 4)

Australian Impressionists in France, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 15 June – 6 October 2013 (label attached verso)

John Peter Russell: Australia’s French Impressionist, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 21 July – 11 November 2018

Literature

Letter from Vincent van Gogh to John Peter Russell, Arles, 19 April 1888

Salter, E., The Lost Impressionist: a biography of John Peter Russell, Angus and Robertson, London, 1976, pp. 75, 95

Galbally, A., The Art of John Peter Russell, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1977, p. 34

Pickvance, R., Van Gogh in Arles, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1984, p. 253

Bailey, M., ‘A Friend of Van Gogh, Dodge Macknight and the Post–Impressionists’, Apollo Magazine, London, July 2007, pl. 4 (illus.), pp. 30, 31 (illus.)

Fish, P., ‘Spring bidding budding’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 25 August 2007

Jansen, L (ed.) et. al., Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 2009, vol. 4, p. 60 (illus.)

Taylor, E., Australian Impressionists in France, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2013, frontispiece (illus.), pp. 56, 57 (illus.)

Tunnicliffe, W. (ed.), John Peter Russell: Australia’s French Impressionist, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2018, pp. 39, 41 (illus., dated 1887 – 88), 203

When one of the greatest exponents of modern painting, Dutch master Vincent van Gogh, wrote admiringly of John Peter Russell’s portraits as ‘more serious and higher art’, praising in particular ‘such perfection as appeared to me in the Fabian and Macknight portraits’ 1, he articulated a keen appreciation for the work of Australia’s ‘lost impressionist’ that continues to resonate more than a century later. Occupying an esteemed position within Russell’s oeuvre, indeed the present Portrait of Dodge Macknight, c.1888 not only encapsulates superbly the artist’s technical brilliance and emotional breadth but, as the only known portrait of the American post-impressionist, the painting bears invaluable historical significance as well. With its whereabouts unknown until 2007, the work’s recent rediscovery has been a particularly exciting one for art critics and collectors alike; as acknowledged by the late Ursula Prunster, curator of the major Belle-Île exhibition held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2001 which featured the work of Russell, Monet, and Matisse, ‘I have been looking for this painting for a while...’ 2

John Peter Russell Dr Will Maloney, 1887 oil on canvas

48.5 x 37.0 cm

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Although not as widely appreciated today, during his lifetime Dodge Macknight was highly regarded by his contemporaries as America’s first modernist and certainly, one of the world’s four greatest watercolourists. 3 Discussing his legacy, a critic for The New Bedford Standard suggested, ‘In contemplating an exhibit of Macknight’s work, one should bear in mind that he is an extremist in an extreme school. His work should not be judged merely in the light of one’s own taste, but as an exposition of the artist’s conceptions. Some people call his paintings mere daubs of colour, others designate them as recorded thoughts transmitted through the eyes.’4

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Macknight began his career in the art world as an apprentice to a theatrical scene designer before entering the firm of Taber Art in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a company that manufactured reproductions of paintings and photographs. In December 1883, at the age of 23, he migrated to Paris where he enrolled at the studio of academic

John Peter Russell Portrait of Vincent van Gogh, 1886 oil on canvas

60.1 x 45.6 cm Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

John Peter Russell

Fabián de Castro, c.1888

oil on canvas

65.5 x 65.2 cm

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, USA

painter Fernand Cormon, studying alongside Toulouse-Lautrec, Émile Bernard and Louis Anquetin, together with the two artists who would play a key role in introducing Macknight to the Parisian avant-garde, Eugène Boch and John Peter Russell.

As Martin Bailey elucidates, Macknight and van Gogh first met through Russell in March 1886, the month that van Gogh joined Cormon’s studio, having arrived in Paris from Antwerp on 28 February 1886. Shortly thereafter, Macknight left Paris, heading first for the south of France and later that year for the Algerian coast, while van Gogh remained in Paris for another two years, during which he frequently met with Russell. 5 Connected through their mutual status as outsiders in an intensely competitive Parisian art scene, Russell and van Gogh soon forged a close friendship – one that would endure through well-documented letters and exchanges of artwork right up until the latter’s tragic death in 1890. And indeed, it was most probably during these Paris years that the Dutchman posed for his celebrated portrait by Russell which, now housed in the van Gogh Museum,

Amsterdam, he clearly cherished; as he would subsequently write to his brother Theo in one of his final letters, ‘Take good care of my portrait by Russell which I hold so dear.’ 6

On 20 February 1888, van Gogh arrived in Arles and several weeks later, Macknight came to Provence, staying in the nearby village of Fontvielle, north-east of Arles.7 Writing to his friend Eugène Boch, Macknight noted that he had ‘unearthed a couple of artists at Arles – a Dane [Christian Mourier-Petersen]’ and Vincent whom I had already met at Russell’s – a stark, staring crank, but a good fellow.’ 8 Van Gogh too would recount the meeting in a subsequent letter to Russell: ‘Last Sunday, I have met Macknight and a Danish painter, and I intend to go to see him at Fontvielle next Monday. I feel sure I shall prefer him as an artist to what he is as an art critic, his views as such being so narrow they make me smile.’ 9 And again, in his correspondence with Theo, ‘I must go and see him and his work, of which I have seen nothing so far. He is a Yankee, and probably paints better than most Yankees do. But a Yankee all the same. Is that saying

Macknight (1860 – 1950)

The Bay, Belle-Île, 1890 watercolour on paper

38.0 x 38.0 cm

Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

enough? When I’ve seen his paintings or drawings I’ll concede about the work. But about the man, still the same...’ 10 Ironically perhaps, van Gogh’s brusque assessment reflects more of his own notoriously volatile personality than any real dissatisfaction with Macknight, for only days later he would mention to his brother that he had invited the American to move into the Yellow House in Arles: ‘…it’s not impossible that he may come to stay with me here for a while. Then we would benefit, I think, on both sides.’ 11

Upon sighting Macknight’s work for the first time, van Gogh was typically gruff, recalling to Theo that ‘…He’s at the stage when the new colour theories are tormenting him, and while they prevent him from doing things according to the old system, he hasn’t sufficiently mastered his new palette to be able to succeed this way.’ 12 Yet, despite his criticism, the Dutchman was obviously impressed for less than one month later, after having seen various still-lifes that Macknight had just finished featuring ‘a yellow jug on purple foreground, red jug on green, orange jug on blue’ 13, he executed one of his famous

Sunflower canvases with orange flowers in a yellow pot, set against a turquoise background.14 Thus, contrary to the popular assumption of van Gogh as an artistic recluse in Arles, it would seem rather, that he and Macknight were exploring in tandem the theory of disparate colour complementaries.15

At the same time, working with Monet on the remote, storm-tossed island of Belle-Île off the coast of Brittany, interestingly Russell was embracing very similar techniques; as he elucidates in a letter to Heidelberg school artist Tom Roberts back in Melbourne: ‘…No vehicle colour only on absorbed canvas or better on stiff canvas prepared only with glue. Simple colours but strong keep pure as long as possible.’ 16 Thus, in stark contrast to the darker tonalities of Russell’s 1886 portrait of van Gogh, the present offers a luminous demonstration of the French impressionist technique with the brushstrokes open and relaxed, and the coarse texture weave of the canvas soaking up the paint upon application to reveal the artist’s hand visibly at work. Cropped asymmetrically in a manner reminiscent of Japanese woodcut prints, the vivid white,

Dodge Macknight, late 19th century Courtesy of Vose Galleries, Boston

Dodge

Isabella

red and blue-purple palette – shading through a toned white, pink and grey – is at once arresting and harmonious, contributing to create a portrait of great sensitivity and beauty. Closely related to Russell’s highly acclaimed Portrait of Dr Will Maloney, 1887 (National Gallery of Victoria) executed around the same time, the portrait moreover betrays that powerful quality of immediacy and informality so essential to the vision of the European avant-garde.

Following in the footsteps of Russell and Monet, in November 1888 Macknight made the first of many visits to Belle-Île where, pursuing a passion for colour shared and encouraged by the Australian, he would produce some of the finest watercolours of his career. In 1892, he married the governess of Russell’s children, Louise Queyrel, and in 1897 the couple and their young son returned to the United States, settling in East Sandwich where Macknight would remain for the rest of his life. Although initially condemned as ‘grotesque and uncouth’ 17 – barbs not unfamiliar to impressionist artists internationally at that time – his work was soon eagerly sought-after and acquired by public and private collectors alike, including eminent art patron Isabella Stewart Gardner, who had a dedicated ‘Macknight Room’ in her

Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890) Self-Portrait with Straw Hat, 1887 oil on artist board, mounted to wood panel 34.9 x 26.7 cm Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit

house at Fenway (now the Gardner Museum) and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts which purchased its first watercolour by Macknight in 1907 (five years before the first Sargent acquisition).

Returning to America with Macknight and subsequently passed down through the artist’s family before its first appearance on the market in 2007, thus the present work not only offers a rare glimpse into one of the most fascinating yet often forgotten members of impressionism, but notably, is accompanied by an impeccable provenance. In addition to its historical significance, Portrait of Dodge Macknight also embodies the radical avant-garde theories and experiments which, gleaned by Russell through his personal connection with the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, so distinguish him from the local movement pioneered by the Heidelberg school. As celebrated French sculptor Auguste Rodin astutely prophesised of Russell’s artistic legacy, ‘Your works will live on, I am certain. One day you will be placed on the same level as our friends Monet, Renoir and Van Gogh.’ 18

Letter from Vincent van Gogh to John Peter Russell, Arles, 19 April 1888, with reference to Russell’s Portrait of Dodge Macknight Thannhauser Collection, Guggenheim Museum, New York

1. Vincent van Gogh, Letter to John Peter Russell, Arles, 19 April 1888, letter 598, at https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let598/letter.html (accessed October 2025)

2. Ursula Prunster, in conversation with Deutscher and Hackett art specialists (August 2007)

3. Hind, C. L., Art and I, The Bodley Head, New York, 1921, pp. 98, 100 – 101 & 176. The other three were Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent and Hercules Brabazon.

4. The New Bedford Standard, January 1902, cited in An Impressionist in Sandwich: The Paintings of Dodge Macknight, Trustees of the Heritage Plantation of Sandwich, Massachusetts, 1980, p. 6

5. Bailey, M., ‘A Friend of Van Gogh: Dodge Macknight and the Post-Impressionists’, Apollo, July 2007, p. 30

6. Vincent van Gogh, Letter to Theo, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 5 and 6 September 1889, letter 800, at https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let800/letter.html (accessed October 2025)

7. Bailey, op. cit.

8. Dodge Macknight, Letter to Eugène Boch, Fontvielle, 19 April 1888

9. Vincent van Gogh, Letter to John Peter Russell, 19 April 1888, op. cit.

10. Vincent van Gogh, Letter to Theo van Gogh, Arles, c.25 April 1888, letter 601, at https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let601/letter.html (accessed October 2025)

11. Vincent van Gogh, Letter to Theo van Gogh, Arles, c.4 May 1888, letter 603 at https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let603/letter.html (accessed October 2025)

12. ibid.

13. Vincent van Gogh, Letter to Theo van Gogh, Arles, 29 July 1888, letter 650 at https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let650/letter.html (accessed October 2025)

14. Bailey, op. cit., p. 32

15. ibid.

16. John Peter Russell, Letter to Tom Roberts, Paris, 26 December 1887, reproduced in Galbally, A., The Art of John Peter Russell, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1977, p. 90

17. An Impressionist in Sandwich, op. cit., p. 6

18. Auguste Rodin , Letter to John Peter Russell, cited in ‘The Art of John Peter Russell’, Women’s Weekly, 3 May 1967, p. 34 at https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/4832171 (accessed October 2025)

Veronica Angelatos

Grace Cossington Smith (1892 – 1984)

Vase in the window, 1945

oil on compressed card

58.0 x 46.0 cm

signed and dated lower left: G. Cossington Smith 45. signed and inscribed with title on artist’s label verso: Vase in The Window / Grace Cossington Smith inscribed verso: Hydrangeas in the Window bears inscription verso: PROPERTY OF MARY TURNER

Estimate: $60,000 – 80,000

Provenance

Macquarie Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Mary Turner, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired directly from the above

Exhibited

Grace Cossington Smith, Exhibition of paintings, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 17 – 29 September 1947, cat. 4

Private Treasure – Public Pleasure, Orange Regional Gallery, New South Wales, 5 February – 5 March 1998 (label attached verso)

Literature

‘Grace C. Smith Exhibition’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 17 September 1947, p. 9

As was the case for many female painters of the late 19th and early 20th century, the domestic interior became the centre of Grace Cossington Smith’s artistic production, the crucible of her modernist experience. While flower pieces and still-life compositions were mainstays of Smith’s creative practice, by the 1940s, these were evolving from tightly cropped, rhythmic compositions to expanded views of still-life arrangements by the window, presented within the rooms of the house where she had lived for almost 50 years. Vase in the window, 1945, sets a spindly hydrangea cut straight from the garden against the corner of a windowsill, its blue flowerheads shimmering against an array of golden hues. Finding wonder in familiar surroundings, Smith has transformed this ordinary scene into a subtle expression of the genius loci of the home that bore her name.1

The death of the family’s patriarch, Ernest Augustus Smith, in September 1938, was a major event in the artist’s otherwise stable and quiet life – ‘rooms were purged, lives reorganised and relationships re-negotiated’ 2, the family home seen anew. Alongside her two unmarried sisters, Madge and Diddy, Grace gained full autonomy of the house, formally relocating her studio from the shed at the bottom of the garden. Although a few examples of imagined narrative subjects exist from the wartime period – for example, Dawn landing, 1944 and Signing, 1945 – the

majority of Smith’s regular output at this time was focused on the home front, retreating indoors and producing confident still lives marked by ‘a milky consistency of touch, verging on the tonal.’ 3

With a stately vertical composition, Vase in the window is an early example of the artist’s celebrated paintings of a still life in the window, which reached their high-pitched apogee in the mid1950s. The painting is vertically divided between yellow drapery on the left and, on the right, an amorphous, misty landscape seen through the windowpane, each painted with the artist’s textured square pointillism. Set against a complex geometry of diagonal and perpendicular lines from the tilted plane of the table and sill, the contours of Smith’s singular subject, alternately titled Hydrangeas in the window, shimmer with fractured brushstrokes, risking dissolution into the broader mosaic of the picture plane. Painted from the inside looking out, Smith’s interiors and still lives harness the vitality of the natural world, from ordinary cut garden blooms to the rare shafts of natural light that reached the house’s Quaker interior. More specific than the bouquets of wildflowers that proliferate around this time in Smith’s oeuvre, the common hydrangea, with its striking puffed heads and broad leaves, is elevated into a ‘flamboyant emblem of the lifeforce.’4

Vase in the window was first owned by Mary Turner, founder of Orange Regional Gallery and co-director of Macquarie Galleries, where Grace Cossington Smith faithfully exhibited her work for over forty years. The unwavering support and friendship Smith received from Turner and Macquarie Galleries was foundational to her significant artistic achievement and can be considered one of the greatest artist-patron associations in Australian art. 5

1. Her mother’s childhood home, ‘Cossington Hall’, in Leicestershire, was adopted c.1920 as a both a name for the new family home in Turramurra, and Grace Smith’s artistic nom de plume.

2. James, B., Grace Cossington Smith, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990, p. 110

3. ibid, p. 116

4. ibid, p. 147

5. Proudfoot, A., ‘Not (just) the charm school: contemporary art at the Macquarie Galleries 1938 – 1963’, The art world came to us: the Macquarie Galleries, 1938 – 1963, Ngununggula, New South Wales, 2024, p. 36

Lucie Reeves-Smith

Margaret Preston (1875 – 1963)

Sturt’s desert pea, 1925

hand-coloured woodcut

18.5 x 24.5 cm (image)

26.5 x 29.0 cm (sheet)

edition: 3/50

signed with initials in image lower left: MP. signed, numbered and inscribed with title below image: Sturt’s desert pea / 3rd proof / Margaret Preston

Estimate: $12,000 – 15,000

Provenance

James R. Lawson, Sydney, c.1960s

Private collection, Sydney

Thence by descent

Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited

Thea Proctor and Margaret Preston Exhibition, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 18 November – 2 December 1925, cat. 20 (another example) Exhibition of Woodcuts by Margaret Preston, Dunster Galleries, Adelaide, September 1926, cat. 66 (another example)

Literature

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

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

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

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

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

Related work

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

Margaret

Preston (1875 – 1963)

The River Murray near Wilcannia, 1946

colour monotype

36.0 x 38.0 cm (sight)

signed and inscribed with title below image: River Murray near Wilcannia monotype Margaret Preston

Estimate: $15,000 – 20,000

Provenance

H. A. McClure Smith C.V.O., Sydney, by 1949

James R. Lawson, Sydney, 14 December 1964

Private collection, Sydney

Thence by descent

Private collection, Sydney

Literature

Ure Smith, S., Margaret Preston’s Monotypes, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1949, p. 67

Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1987, cat. 304, p. 246

Margaret Preston (1875 – 1963)

Native flowers, 1949

colour stencil on black paper

31.5 x 23.0 cm

from an edition of 3 (plus 2 proofs) signed with initials in image lower right: M.P.

Estimate: $25,000 – 35,000

Provenance

Henry Castle, New South Wales, acquired directly from the artist Thence by descent Private collection, New South Wales

Exhibited

probably Gouache Stencils by Margaret Preston, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, September 1949

Margaret Preston: The Art of Constant Rearrangement, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 December 1985 – 9 February 1986 (another example)

Cutting Through Time–Cressida Campbell, Margaret Preston, and the Japanese Print, Geelong Gallery, Victoria, 17 May – 28 July 2024 (another example)

Literature

Your Garden: Australia’s down-to-earth gardening magazine, The Argus and Australasian Ltd, Melbourne, April 1954 (illus. front cover, another example)

Butel, E., Margaret Preston: The Art of Constant Rearrangement, Penguin Books & Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1985, cat. P.59, pp. 68 (illus., another example), 92 Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1987, cat. 361, pp. 279 (illus., another example), 336

Related works

Other examples of this work are in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Arthur Boyd (1920 – 1999)

The windmill, c.1959

oil on composition board

25.5 x 35.5 cm

signed lower right: Arthur Boyd

Estimate: $45,000 – 65,000

Provenance

Australian Galleries, Melbourne

Mrs R. J. Anderson, Beaumont, Texas, USA, acquired from the above

Thence by descent

Ross Anderson, Texas, USA, 1977

Thence by descent

Mary Anderson, Texas, USA, 1980

Rago Auctions, Lambertville, New Jersey, USA, 11 June 2025, lot 168

Private collection, Melbourne

Literature

Philipp, F., Arthur Boyd, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, cat. 8.59, p. 256

Arthur Boyd’s paintings of the Victorian countryside, produced in the late 1950s before he departed for England in 1959, comprise the artist’s most exhaustive exploration of the genre since his highly acclaimed Berwick and Wimmera series from 1948 to 1951. Displaying an intimate and subjective response to rural living, The windmill, c.1959, recalls the ‘landscapes of love’ produced during Boyd’s time at Berwick with his young family.1 This small pastoral scene is a window into quotidian life, presenting a tender view of a mother and child exploring the home paddock, safely enclosed by a fence line and a tangled spinney.

Arthur Boyd’s dry, straw-toned landscapes of his home state are paintings of his childhood, youth and early adulthood, infused with truthful feeling and sharp observation. In contrast to the Shoalhaven riverine landscapes painted throughout the last decades of his life, these early Victorian works depict an inhabited landscape, humanised and cultivated. During this time, Boyd painted the landscape wherever possible, ‘showing Australians where they lived, mapping it, writing it home with his brush.’ 2 Although traces of the primeval and untamed forests of The Hunter series from the early 1940s remain in the claw-like white trees of these paintings, the landscape is no longer presented as a threat. The pair of figures comfortably embedded in this landscape possibly depicts the artist’s wife, Yvonne, and their third child, Lucy, born in 1958. Though small, they constitute the focal point of this landscape, the baby gesturing to the towering presence of the windmill. Incidentally employing the sky-blue hues traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary, Boyd’s figure group of a Madonna and child reinforces the dominant goldand-blue chord of brilliant Australian sunshine in the bush.

This pastoral idyll, seen through a veil of tall thistles, rushes and weeds in the foreground, presents a rural Australian version of the hortus conclusus, the full and enclosed garden. While Boyd’s sparse Wimmera landscapes expressed the vastness and remoteness of inland Australia with a distant and shimmering horizon, here the horizon is obscured by a dense thicket of trees. The faithful windmill, an iconic silhouette of rural Australia, stands tall against the smooth blue sky, poking just above the textured line of vegetation. Alongside the small dam and grazing cow, the windmill is what Franz Philipp has called ‘motifs of habitation’, familiarising the wild bush into a warm and tranquil scene. 3

Prior to leaving for England, where he would stay for twelve years, Boyd’s paintings of the Australian landscape received significant critical acclaim. Where previously Boyd’s interpretations of the landscape had been modelled on European landscapes, his approach during this period became more personal and specifically Antipodean. When a number of these landscapes were exhibited for the first time at Australian Galleries, Melbourne in 1959, an enthusiastic Alan McCulloch exclaimed: ‘in these landscapes [Boyd] has come to an ‘old master’ phase, probably the best, if not his last.’4 The significance of Arthur Boyd’s reinterpretation of the traditional pastoral scene was further acknowledged in 1958, when his work was chosen to be presented alongside that of Arthur Streeton, together representing Australia at the Venice Biennale.

1. Margaret Plant, cited in Philipp, F., Arthur Boyd, Thames & Hudson, London, 1967, p. 64

2. Bungey, D., Arthur Boyd: a life, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2007, p. 248

3. Philipp, F., op cit., p. 60

4. McCulloch, A., Herald, Melbourne, 14 April 1959

Lucie Reeves-Smith

Ian Fairweather (1891 – 1974)

Figure group I, 1969

synthetic polymer paint and gouache on cardboard on composition board

76.0 x 104.0 cm

bears inscription verso: FIGURE GROUP I (1969) / NO 10.

Estimate: $250,000 – 350,000

Provenance

Estate of the artist, Queensland Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Christie’s, Melbourne, 28 April 1976, lot 500 Private collection, Melbourne and Victoria

Exhibited

Recent Paintings by Ian Fairweather, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 28 October – 9 November 1970, cat. 10 (label attached verso)

Ian Fairweather, A Posthumous Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 3 – 15 September 1975, cat. 1 (label attached verso, signed by Mary Turner)

Literature

Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, cat. 225, pp. 230 (illus.), 260

Ian Fairweather

Composition with figures, 1969 synthetic polymer paint and gouache on cardboard on hardboard, 105.0 x 74.6 cm

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney © Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency 2025

Ian Fairweather Barbecue, 1963

synthetic polymer paint and gouache on cardboard on composition board (4 sheets), 134.0 x 181.5 cm

Private collection

Sold Deutscher and Hackett for $1,708,000 (inc. BP), 10 April 2019, Sydney © Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency 2025

Ian Fairweather has been described as ‘the least parochial of Australian painters, an artist of exceptional force and originality’ 1 and he is undoubtedly one of the most singular artists to have worked in Australia during the twentieth century. Although he is claimed as an Australian and spent many years living here, he had a restless spirit, and the story of his life reads like something borrowed from the pages of an adventure book. Born in Scotland in 1891, Fairweather undertook his formal art education at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, studying under the formidable Henry Tonks and in 1922, being awarded second prize for figure drawing. As a prisoner of war in Germany during the First World War he had access to books about Japanese and Chinese art, and later, studied these languages at night. In 1929, he sailed to Shanghai where he lived for several years – the unique art, culture and philosophy of China exerting a lasting influence on his art. Peripatetic by nature, or perhaps reluctant to establish roots and commit to ongoing relationships, Fairweather travelled extensively – from London, to Canada, Bali, Australia, the Philippines, India and beyond – ‘always the outsider, the nostalgic nomad with a dreamlike memory of distant places and experience.’ 2

In the early 1950s, Fairweather settled on Bribie Island, off the coast of Queensland, where, for the rest of his life, he famously lived and worked in a pair of huts built with materials salvaged

from the surrounding bush. Conditions were primitive – no running water, sewerage or electricity – and Fairweather’s handmade bed and chairs were reportedly upholstered with fern fronds. 3 Black and white photographs show him working in the dedicated studio hut – often with a pipe in one hand and a paintbrush in the other – where paintings in progress are tacked up on rudimentary, handmade easels. Nearby, tins of paint stand open with brushes ready and waiting to be used. Surfaces are covered with random spatters and dribbles of paint, colours layered one on top of the other creating a visual trace of the pictures that were made there. In these images we see the artist once described as someone who ‘needed to paint like one needs to breathe’ and understand the spontaneity and energy with which he worked.4 Despite the rudimentary nature of his surrounds however – or perhaps because of it – the next two decades witnessed the production of many of Fairweather’s finest paintings and the 1960s saw his art acknowledged in significant ways, with works being included in the landmark exhibition Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (1961), the European tour of Australian Painting Today (1964 – 65), acquisitions for important public and private collections, and in 1965, a major travelling retrospective of his work being mounted by the Queensland Art Gallery.

Ian Fairweather in his studio hut, Bribie Island, Queensland, 1968 photographer: David Beal

Being interviewed in 1965, Fairweather described painting as ‘something of a tightrope act’, saying it was ’difficult to keep one’s balance.’ He went on to explain that for him, painting sat ‘between representation and the other thing – whatever it is.’ 5 The ‘other thing’ was abstraction and while he made his first foray into purely non-representational art in the late 1950s, this tension in his art is evident in much of the work that followed including the largescale masterworks Monastery, 1960 (National Gallery of Australia) and Monsoon, 1961 – 62 (Art Gallery of Western Australia). Figure group I, 1969 is one of a series of paintings made between the late 1960s and early 1970s in which the outline of human forms and other recognisable subjects emerges from a complex and elaborate ground, here a combination of brushstrokes and dribbles of paint in a muted palette of black, brown, grey and white with touches of pink and purple. If it was not for the title of the painting itself, it would be easy to miss the figures within the dynamic tracery of Fairweather’s mark-making which Murray Bail identifies as a reinvention of a mid-1950s image of boys playing with a ball.6

Returning to pictures again and again over an extended period of ti me, Fairweather developed painted surfaces which vibrate and shimmer with movement, directing our view from top to bottom and side to side. As the final layer to be applied however, it is the figurative element of this painting that prevails, introducing structure and stability to the rhythmic energy of the layers below.

Driven by a need to paint and charting his own unique path, Fairweather produced paintings that made a profound contribution to the development of Australian art. Combining varied influences and balancing figuration and abstraction, he created some of the most distinctive and important works of the twentieth century.

1. Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, p. 220

2. Bail, M., ‘The Nostalgic Nomad’, Hemisphere, Canberra, vol. 27, no. 1, 1982, p. 54

3. Bail, M., Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Millers Point, 2000, p. 119

4. Ryckmans, P., ‘An Amateur Artist’ in Bail, M., Fairweather, Art and Australia Books in association with the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1994, p. 18

5. Ian Fairweather, cited in Bail, ibid., p. 139

6. Bail, 1981, op. cit., p. 224 Kirsty Grant

Colin McCahon (New Zealand, 1919 – 1987) Fish Rock, c.1959

oil, tempera and ink on unstretched canvas

180.0 x 90.0 cm

signed and inscribed with title and medium on timber hanging rod verso: McCAHON FISH ROCK TEMPERA N.F.S

Estimate: $200,000 – 300,000

Provenance

Molly Ryburn, Auckland, New Zealand, a gift from the artist Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired in 1993

Exhibited

The Group Show, Canterbury Society of Arts Durham Street Art Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand, 8 – 23 October 1960, cat. 29 (nfs)

The Group Loan Show, Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand, 27 October – 6 November 1960, cat.8 (In 1960 The Group held its usual annual exhibition at the C.S.A and a selection of paintings from it was shown four days later at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery.)

Literature

Bloem, M., and Browne, M., Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam & Craig Potton Publishing, New Zealand, 2002, pp. 193, 253 Simpson, P., Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction, vol. 1 1919 – 1959, Auckland University Press, New Zealand, 2019, pp. 290, 350 Colin McCahon Online Catalogue, cat. CM000127: https://www.mccahon.co.nz

A strong and vibrant painting not seen in public since 1960, Fish Rock, c.1959 belongs to a small group of works by Colin McCahon painted during late 1959 which share a common medium, a common reference to a particular landscape (French Bay in the Manukau Harbour, Auckland), and a roughly similar size (although with variable widths). Other titles in the group include Rocks at French Bay (two versions, Auckland Art Gallery and private collection) and French Bay with Fish Rock and Headland (Gow Langsford Gallery, previously known as French Bay ). In size, materials and medium this group is also related to two major slightly earlier series – the monumental, 16-panel The Wake, 1958 (Hocken Collections) and 8-panel Northland panels, 1968 (Te Papa Tongarewa) – which McCahon made soon after his watershed visit to the United States in March-August 1958.

Although the primary focus of McCahon’s visit to America was to study museum practices (he was deputy director of Auckland Art Gallery), he also relished the opportunity to explore major

institutions and dealer galleries all across America. It was his first extensive exposure to international art since visiting the National Gallery of Victoria in 1951. Among the artists mentioned as highlights in his letters from the States were Mondrian, Diebenkorn and Tomioka Tessai in San Francisco; El Greco, Tintoretto and Renoir in Washington; Cézanne and Picasso in Philadelphia; Rothko and Hofmann in Baltimore; Juan Gris, Pollock, de Kooning and Kline in New York; and Gauguin in Boston. Much of his prodigious output in the year after his return from America (with the exception of The Wake) made up a major exhibition at Gallery 91 in Christchurch in October 1959: Colin McCahon: Recent Paintings November 1958 – August 1959. Notably, the show included the Northland panels, Northland triptych, 1958; the innovative Elias series, 1959 (various private collections and Auckland Art Gallery), and many other important individual works such as Cross, 1959 (Auckland Art Gallery) and Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is, 1958 – 59 (Christchurch Art Gallery). In the final weeks of 1959, after his big Christchurch show, McCahon returned for the last time to the land-and-seascapes of Titirangi and French Bay to make the

Colin McCahon, 1961

The New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 27 March 1961

Image courtesy: Bernie Hill

small, tight group that includes Fish Rock. He subsequently moved to central Auckland early in 1960, a transition which initiated a new phase of his work – the geometric abstraction of the Gate series.

Many of the changes in McCahon’s practice from the prolific year after his return from America are evident in Fish Rock and related works. Such modifications include abandoning frames for strips of unstretched canvas hung from wooden rods; a significant increase in size to near two metres in height, and discarding conventional oil paints for other pigments including ink and diluted commercial house paints. There was a significant shift in imagery too away from the dense networks of small lozenges of paint almost pointillist in methodology of the period prior to his travel abroad (seen, for example, in Flounder fishing, night, French Bay, 1957), towards freer and more gestural methods of paint application, and constructing paintings with larger, more open, quasi-geometrical units – a development anticipated in Rocks are for building with, 1958 (Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth). Significantly, Fish Rock was gifted by McCahon to Molly Ryburn, a friend and colleague at Auckland Art Gallery,

Colin McCahon Rocks at French Bay, 1959 ink and oil on unstretched canvas 196.0 x 192.5 cm

Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland Courtesy of the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust

who already owned Flounder Fishing, night, French Bay – a stylistic predecessor of F ish Rock. And indeed, it was in letters to Ryburn from San Francisco, New York and Cleveland that McCahon mentioned some of the highlights listed earlier.

French Bay is a small tree-fringed bay on the Manukau Harbour close to where the McCahon family lived in the bush suburb of Titirangi from 1953 to 1959. The bay (and bush) were frequent subjects of McCahon’s painting throughout those seven years, and there is a distinct French Bay series for each year from 1954 to 1959. Initially his focus was on boats and islands, then on the pohutukawa-fringed margins of the bay and the prismatic play of light on water, later on banded (and abstracted) strips of sky, land and water, and finally, upon the structure of rock formations at the water’s edge (evident in the 1959 group in particular). The French Bay paintings range from near realism at one end

of the spectrum to complete abstraction at the other. Fish Rock, com posed of strongly abstracted land and water references, is located around midway between these two polarities.

Fish Rock depicts irregularly shaped rectangular forms intruding from all four sides into the picture space, sometimes overlapping each other or seen through water. The colours include various shades of ochre from pale to dark, strongly outlined, but the dominant hue is a startling patch of bright blue towards the bottom of the picture which inevitably – because of the marine associations of the title – suggests water, though the absence of regular perspective means that the elements don’t easily resolve themselves into a sea-shore ‘scene’. The jostling quasi-geometrical shapes create a dynamic energy that strongly anticipates the more purely abstract arrangements in McCahon’s next major series, the Gate paintings of 1961 – 62. Fish Rock is distinctively located between past and future. Peter Simpson

Ian Fairweather (1891 – 1974)

Jetty, 1962

synthetic polymer paint on cardboard on composition board

70.0 x 98.0 cm

bears inscription verso: “JETTY” / BY IAN FAIRWEATHER

bears inscription verso: JETTY / Res for Mrs D Carnegie

Estimate: $200,000 – 300,000

Provenance

Perth Galleries, Western Australia

Douglas and Margaret Carnegie, New South Wales, by 1963

Private collection

Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 30 April 1995, lot 68

Private collection

Niagara Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso)

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in March 2008

Exhibited

7th São Paulo Art Biennial, Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, Brazil, 28 September – 22 December 1963, cat. 11 (label attached verso)

Blue Chip X: The Collectors’ Exhibition, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 4 March – 5 April 2008, cat. 8

Literature

Bail, M., Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Sydney, 2009, p. 243 Roberts, C. & Thompson, J. (eds.), Ian Fairweather: A Life in Letters, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2019, p. 326

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency 2025

In mid-1953 at the age of sixty-two, Ian Fairweather settled on Bribie Island, off the coast of Queensland, where he lived in a pair of self-built huts for the rest of his life. Despite the lack of creature comforts which most people take for granted, the relative contentment that Fairweather found in this environment was reflected in his artistic output which, over the following two decades, witnessed the production of many of his finest paintings. In 1962, a solo exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney saw buyers camp out overnight in order to secure one of his recent works. The Sydney Morning Herald headline hailed Fairweather as ‘Our Greatest Painter’ and more than half of the sixteen paintings in the show were acquired for public collections, including Epiphany, 1961 – 62 (Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art); Mangrove, 1961 – 62 (Art Gallery of South Australia); and Shalimar, 1961 – 62 (National Gallery of Australia) which was purchased for the then-developing national collection. Among the determined collectors who waited outside the gallery in driving rain was the art critic, Robert Hughes, who bought Monsoon, 1961 – 62 – later acquired by the Art Gallery of Western Australia – describing it as ‘a pure example of ecstatic motion.’ 1

The critical and commercial success of this exhibition built on the momentum that had been growing for some years, and the ensuing decade saw Fairweather’s art acknowledged in significant ways. Although he was geographically isolated from the contemporary artworld, his work was well known – primarily through commercial exhibitions at Macquarie Galleries, as well as occasional visitors to the island – and highly regarded by critics, collectors and curators alike. During these years his paintings were included in the landmark exhibition Recent Australian Painting, curated by Bryan Robertson at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (1961); the European tour of Australian Painting Today (1964 – 65); and in 1965, a major travelling retrospective of his work was mounted by the Queensland Art Gallery.

In 1963, Fairweather was one of seven artists including John Perceval, Albert Tucker and Leonard Hessing selected to represent Australia at the VII Bienal de São Paulo. Although he was more than twenty years older than all his fellow Australian exhibitors – and the only one who was born in the nineteenth century – his work was utterly contemporary and very at home

Ian Fairweather Shalimar, c.1962

synthetic polymer paint, gouache on cardboard mounted on composition board 124.0 x 178.0 cm

Fairweather

, 1962 synthetic polymer paint on four sheets of cardboard on composition board 139.6 x 203.2 cm

Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane © Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency 2025

in such company. He showed four paintings: Shalimar, Portrait of the Artist, 1961 – 62 (National Gallery of Australia); Night Life, 1962 (private collection); and this work, Jetty, 1962 which was lent from the collection of Douglas and Margaret Carnegie. 2 This selection reflected the tension that exists between representation and abstraction in Fairweather’s art. While the portrait and Night Life clearly reveal their figurative subjects, Shalimar, composed of at least seventy layers of paint, appears completely abstract. 3 At first glance, Jetty also seems like an all-over composition of brushstrokes in vivid shades of blue, applied on top of a lively ground of linear and painterly marks. The title of the work provides a clue of course and closer inspection reveals that the sequence of black lines in fact describes a simple jetty, its support structure depicted in the lower left of the picture and its long narrow form roughly dividing the composition in half. Like much of Fairweather’s art, Jetty emphasises the act of painting and the physicality of his expressive style. It also reflects the notion proposed by Murray Bail that Fairweather ‘articulated mood’4, here, artfully conjuring up the sight, sound, smell and calming effect of water rhythmically lapping against a wooden jetty.

As Fairweather explained in 1962, ‘I started as a traditional painter, but I was always interested in abstract, and for a long time I worked on abstract lines. But I’ve decided that pure abstract doesn’t suit me, and I’m trying to get back in my work to some representation… To me, painting is a personal thing. It gives me the same kind of satisfaction that religion, I imagine, gives to some people.’ 5

1. Bail, M., Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Millers Point, 2009, p. 176

2. The Carnegies also lent a painting by Perceval to the 1963 São Paulo Biennial.

3. Bail, op. cit., p. 178

4. ibid., p. 161

5. Ian Fairweather, Interview with Murray Bail, op. cit., p. 268

Kirsty Grant

Ian

Epiphany

Jeffrey Smart (1921 – 2013)

Study for Bus depot, 1979

oil on prepared cardboard

26.0 x 31.0 cm

signed lower left: JEFFREY SMART

Estimate: $100,000 – 150,000

Provenance

Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso, as ‘Study For Bus By The Tiber’)

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1981

Exhibited

Jeffrey Smart, Redfern Galleries, London, 7 June – 4 July 1979, cat. 31

Jeffrey Smart, Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney, 8 November – 3 December 1980, cat. 41

Jeffrey Smart, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 26 October – 7 November 1981, cat. 29

Literature

Quartermaine, P., Jeffrey Smart, Gryphon Books, Melbourne, cat. 741, p. 116

McDonald, J., Jeffrey Smart Paintings of the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990, cat. 188, p. 159

We are grateful to Stephen Rogers, Archivist for the Estate of Jeffrey Smart, for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

Jeffrey Smart’s Study for Bus depot, 1979, with crisp lines and saturated colours, shines brightly. A lone worker, sporting white overalls that gleam in the sunlight, wanders through an empty bus depot; a hosepipe snaking from a central drain indicates his recently abandoned maintenance task. This jewel-like study, containing an anthology of the artist’s most powerful motifs, was painted during a high point of Smart’s career, joining contemporaneous masterpieces such as The guiding spheres (Homage to Cézanne), 1979 and Autobahn in the Black Forest I and II, 1979. Seven years after his emigration to Italy, in 1971 Smart settled in an old farmhouse in Posticcia Nuova, near Arezzo. The arrival of Ermes de Zan in this house in 1973 heralded what Smart would call ‘the beginning of the happiest time in my life’ and their comfortable cohabitation from 1976 corresponded with a golden period of creativity.1

The success of Smart’s pictorial intelligence lies in the combination of sharp observational and rigorous compositional construction based on classical geometry. In depicting the reallife building boom of post-war Italy, Smart’s paintings championed its uniform, anonymous imagery. An inveterate traveller and long-standing expatriate, Smart also displayed a predilection for depicting the mechanisms and modalities of contemporary transport. Fully enclosed, Smart’s bus depot is a space between

destinations, an interstitial industrial area designed for vehicles and the workers he imagines servicing them. Here, a vast expanse of unmarked tarmac fills the frame, crowned by a row of candy-coloured parked buses and an apartment building which disrupts the horizon. The curlicue of the snaking tube provides surreal dynamism in an otherwise still composition.

Although appearing to be faithful recordings of real-world places, Jeffrey Smart’s paintings were most often composite images, constructed from disparate elements recalled from real-life locations or repurposed from other artworks. With a quality of completeness, this study is no mere aide-memoire and, in fact, represents the sole surviving record of one of his most successful compositions. The major work to which it related very closely, Bus depot, 1979, was tragically ruined during the framing process ahead of its exhibition in London’s Redfern Galleries in July 1979. This Bus depot was then cut down, retaining only the figure section on the left-hand side and truncating the hose motif to a closed arc. The figure lovingly painted, Bus depot effectively became a portrait of Ermes de Zan and was the only oil work of his own that Smart hung in their home at Posticcia Nuova. 2

With its plastic pipe absurdly open-ended, dominating the foreground and guiding the viewer’s eye through the spiral of the Golden Mean, Study for Bus depot was the first of Smart’s paintings to use the motif of the cursive tube. The prosaic origins of the central motif were recalled by the artist in 1982: ‘Behind the house up on the hill there’s a spring and the pipes had become calcified... and we had to go and buy a whole lot of tubes at the hardware wholesale place near Arezzo... And I was just standing around and I saw this marvellous unwinding of pipe going on... I thought, ‘oh heavens what a lovely thing.’’ 3 A year later, when struggling with the composition of a portrait of his friend, the author David Malouf, Smart returned to the motif and the complete composition of Study for Bus depot, leading to the creation of what he declared to be ‘the best picture I have ever painted’Portrait of David Malouf, 1980 (Art Gallery of Western Australia).4

1. Smart, J., Not Quite Straight. A Memoir, William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne, 1996, p. 445

2. Communication with Stephen Rogers, Archivist for the Estate of Jeffrey Smart, October 2025

3. Jeffrey Smart, Interview for The Australian Eye series, 21 June 1982, transcript, National Library of Australia, oral trc 994

4. Jeffrey Smart, Letter to David Malouf, Fryer Folios (Brisbane), vol. 12, no. 1, cited in Jeffrey Smart, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2021, p. 128

Lucie Reeves-Smith

Jeffrey Smart (1921 – 2013)

Night stop, Bombay, 1981

oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas on board

100.0 x 100.0 cm

signed lower right: Jeffrey Smart

Estimate: $1,400,000 – 1,800,000

Provenance

Private collection

Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane

Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above on 15 June 2006

Exhibited

Jeffrey Smart, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 26 October – 7 November 1981, cat. 1

Jeffrey Smart – Recent Paintings, Redfern Gallery, London, 11 November – 4 December 1982, cat. 4

Jeffrey Smart, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 5 – 16 April 1983, cat. 12

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

Jeffrey Smart, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, 23 October – 20 November 1992, cat. 8

Jeffrey Smart Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 August– 31 October 1999, cat. 63, and touring to: Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 26 November 1999 – 6 February 2000; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 10 March – 21 May 2000; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 10 June – 6 August 2000 (label attached verso)

Jeffrey Smart 1921 – 2013: Recondita Armonia – Strange Harmonies of Contrast, University Art Gallery, University of Sydney, Sydney, 2 November 2013 – 7 March 2014, cat. 10

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

Literature

Redfern Gallery advertisement, Art International, Lugano, vol. XXV, no. 7-8, September – October 1982, back cover (illus.)

Malouf, D., ‘Jeffrey Smart - Recent Work’, Art International, Lugano, vol. XXV, no. 9-10, November – December 1982, p. 67 (illus.)

Smith, M., ‘Jeffrey Smart: optimistic in the age of the bomb’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 1 April 1983, p. 24 (illus.)

Quartermaine, P., Jeffrey Smart, Gryphon Books, Melbourne, 1983, pp. 60, 91, 92, 94 (illus.), 117

McDonald, J., Jeffrey Smart. Paintings of the 70s and 80s, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990, pp. 39, 160

Capon, E., Jeffrey Smart Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1999, cat. 63, pp. 160 (illus.), 210

Capon, E., Jeffrey Smart Drawings and Studies 1942 – 2001, Australian Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2001, fig. 27, p. 108 (illus.)

Pearce, B., Jeffrey Smart, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2005, pl. 165, pp. 164, 165 (illus.), 255

Allen, C., Jeffrey Smart Unpublished Paintings 1940 – 2007, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 2008, pp. 31, 32 (illus.)

FitzGerald, M., ‘Malouf makes Smart choices’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 6 November 2013 (illus.)

Farrelly, E., ‘Smart art merits place among nation’s greats’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 14 November 2013

Malouf, D., ‘Our Second Nature,’ Muse, University of Sydney, Sydney, issue 6, November 2013, p. 1 (illus.)

Pearce, B., Master of Stillness: Jeffrey Smart, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2015, revised edition, p. 18 (illus.)

Hart, D., and Edwards, R., Jeffrey Smart, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2021, pp. 40, 43 (illus.), 69, 163

This work will be accompanied by Jeffrey Smart, Sketch, 1981 for Night stop, Bombay, 1981, pencil on paper, 17.5 x 23.0 cm

We are grateful to Stephen Rogers, Archivist for the Estate of Jeffrey Smart, for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

Jeffrey Smart

Sketch, 1981 for Night stop, Bombay, 1981 pencil on paper

17.5 x 23.0 cm

© The Estate of Jeffrey Smart

34.5 x 66.5 cm

Private collection

Jeffrey Smart was a true painter of modern life, finding arresting beauty in the crisp outlines of the built environment and the prosaic icons of an urban existence. Reflecting on this choice of subject matter and its harmonious marriage with contemporary styles of painting, as early as 1969 Smart declared, ‘I find myself moved by man in his new violent environment. I want to paint this explicitly and beautifully [...] how wrong a jet plane or a modern motor car looks painted impressionistically!’ 1 Indeed, it was Smart’s immediate experience of the world that provided the visual subject matter for his paintings, his attention often caught by an ordinary, passing glance: ‘suddenly I will see something that seizes me – a shape, a combination of shapes, a play of light or shadows, and I send up a prayer because I know I have seen a picture.’ 2 Night stop, Bombay, 1981, one of Smart’s most potent and dramatic images, came from one such intriguing view – sketched from the gangway of an aeroplane in the early hours of the morning during one of the artist’s many international trips.

Coinciding with a period of settled comfort with his partner Ermes de Zan in their Tuscan home ‘Posticcia Nuova’, from the late 1970s Jeffrey Smart’s art increasingly explored the notions of real and metaphorical travel. In addition to his permanent expatriation in Italy, Smart was an inveterate traveller. In 1980, he visited the United Kingdom, Egypt and Turkey before being called back to Australia in March 1981 following the death of his mother. On his return to Italy, he made stopovers to visit Hittite cities in Turkey, Syria and Yemen. 3 He was particularly attuned to the cultural predicament of Australia’s remoteness, relying heavily on increasingly affordable air travel to maintain

a presence with Australian audiences. Perhaps due to these frequent departures, Smart’s artistic output for 1981 was somewhat limited, only producing three final paintings: The ball game, Athens (private collection); Night stop, Bombay and The ventilators, the Domain (private collection). Seductive in its crisp ‘super realism’ and formal restraint, Night stop, Bombay is Smart at his finest, displaying strong iconographic affinities with some of his most celebrated works, including the iconic The guiding spheres II (Homage to Cézanne), 1979 – 80 (private collection) and The observer II, 1983 – 84 (private collection).

Like a freeze frame of a film, the closely cropped images of Smart’s world are loaded with a sense of intrigue, the suggestion of action existing and persisting just beyond the viewer’s line of sight. Seen from above, Night stop, Bombay presents a bird’s eye view of the tarmac of an airport runway, the larger context of air travel only obliquely referenced. Captured within the target of a yellow circle painted onto the asphalt, Smart paints a worker in bright orange overalls talking on the phone with a looping cable, his back turned to the viewer. Lovingly painted, a massive, disembodied wheel dominates the composition. The dramatic chiaroscuro of light flooding just one corner of the square canvas endows this view with a dream-like vividness. Discarded behind the worker lies a pair of hand-held lollipop markers, with distinctive blue-and-white striped handles – the arcane choreography of air marshalling long having been abandoned. In Night stop, Bombay, Smart clearly delights in the interplay of circles and directional lines, distilling them through the spatial and geometric relationships between the painted road marking,

Jeffrey Smart Madras airport, 1979

oil on board

© The Estate of Jeffrey Smart

Jeffrey Smart

The guiding spheres II (Homage to Cezanne), 1979 – 80 oil on canvas

55.5 x 64.7 cm

Collection of John Symond, AM © The Estate of Jeffrey Smart

the discarded objects and the giant wheel. The vertiginous view down onto the painted tarmac from the height of an aircraft, disorientingly removes the horizon from view. This device was laboriously refined by Smart many years before in another airport painting of a solitary figure, Madrid airport, 1965 – 66 (private collection). Similar to the tarmac in Madrid airport, which is conspicuously grimy, bearing the traces of the machinery of mass transport, here in Bombay, the yellow road marking is splotched with grease, as Smart noted within his rapid in-situ sketch.

The initial sketch, offered alongside Night stop, Bombay, reveals the rapid crystallisation of the motif, ‘becoming, more or less, without much alteration, the finished work’.4 Annotated with colour notes and areas of interest requiring greater detail, and a single splotch of yellow watercolour in the centre of the circle, the full composition is almost entirely present in this first sketch. The only slight revisions developed in the final painting were in the placement of the wheel, the direction of the sole straight line painted on the tarmac, and the expansion of the figure from just a pair of legs to a full body. Jeffrey Smart also created two detail drawings for Night stop, Bombay. Both addressed the aircraft wheel, on which Smart lavished special, hyper realistic attention, creating from it a visual synecdoche for air travel.

The patterned tread of the rubber tyre, provided for Smart, ‘an interesting decorative element’, justifying his meticulous level of detail. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Smart later revealed his substitution of a truck wheel, a more available form with which he had already become conversant. 5 By isolating this distressingly familiar symbol of modern activity, Smart endows it with an elevated, iconic status – its revolving functionality permanently stilled in his silent world.

The airport, more so than the train station or the autostrade beloved of Smart, implies the alienating speed of modern technological progress. The French anthropologist Marc Augé described them, alongside supermarkets and hotels, as ‘nonplaces of super modernity’, marked by an absence of identity.6 In these liminal environments, people are reduced to logistical points of data to be transmitted and processed. Smart chooses, with characteristic detachment, to present a cropped and oblique view of this transitional space. Creating thus a distinct sense of middle-of-the-night loneliness, Smart’s spotlit view describes a scene of one-way communication and invisible transmission of information. An anonymous airport worker converses with persons unknown, presumably with consequences that will be felt by these inert passengers awaiting transfer to their ultimate destination. Although the large, square canvas of Night stop,

Jeffrey Smart

The observer II, 1983 – 84 synthetic polymer paint and oil on canvas

100.0 x 142.0 cm

Private collection

© The Estate of Jeffrey Smart sold Menzies for $1,963,636 (inc. bp), 26 April 2018

Bombay doesn’t adopt the form of an aeroplane porthole, Smart nevertheless g ives us a vicarious, through-the-windscreen, view. This privileged view is one only accessible and observable to those pre-approved travellers in transit. While the uniform appearance of an airport conspicuously smooths out cultural differences, Smart’s titles such as Madras airport, 1979; Night stop, Bombay, 1981 and The terrace, Madrid airport, 1984 – 85 all suggest specific points of departure, layover and arrival.

In reducing the vast scale of an airport to that of a single man, Smart zooms in on a small pictorial incident, concentrated in the pool of light in the top left-hand corner of the canvas. Through a sophisticated interplay of surfaces and diagonals of light and shadow, Smart skilfully draws the eye to the startlingly white phone handset and to the mysterious communication with the outside world that it implies. Despite Smart’s suggestion of narrative tension, contemporary writers and commentators on his artworks, Peter Quartermaine and David Malouf, both emphasise a purely formal interpretation of the artist’s paintings. Recalling the hypnotic circular forms of The guiding spheres, 1979 – 80, Smart’s painted yellow road marking in Night stop, Bombay creates a second frame within the square support. In the in-between space of consciousness suspended between

time zones and regulated circadian rhythms, it acts as a gleaming ‘m andala for meditation.’ 7 Smart’s dedicated adherence to the teachings of French modern painting, particularly those of Paul Cézanne, predisposed him to highlight the geometric underpinnings of his paintings. The dominance of clear circular motifs in works from the 1980s, such as Night stop, Bombay and The observer point to Smart’s familiarity with Cézanne’s famous letter to Emile Bernard of 15 April 1904, in which he advised ‘to see in nature the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, putting everything into proper perspective, so that each side of an object or plane is directed towards a central point.’ 8

Smart’s early interactions in Adelaide with the pioneering Modernist Dorrit Black introduced him in the 1940s to the use of an underlying abstract framework on which to arrange a pictorial construction. By the time new modes of non-objective abstract art were emerging from New York in the late 1960s, particularly Hard-Edge and Colour Field painting, Smart had already been painting with an emphasis on geometric forms, saturated colours and flat surfaces for many years. The planar recession of a road’s surface, animated by fragmented symbols, provided Smart with a signature motif. In Night stop, Bombay, the horizon is completely absent, the two-dimensional surface of the

‘Jeffrey Smart: optimistic in the age of the bomb’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 April 1983, p. 24

tarmac fills the composition, its taut painted contours echoing the essential shapes of contemporary avant-garde abstraction.

Reaching their fullest dramatic expression, the paintings emerging from Smart’s halcyon days of the late 1970s and early 1980s became some of his most well-known images. David Malouf wrote of the masterful orchestration of these recent works in 1982 – ‘stripped now of the last suggestion of anecdote or occasion these lyrical and formally dramatic set pieces raise classic questions, which Smart takes up with a seriousness and sense of play that is the real key to their individual mood [...] and joy in the world of his own making of an artist at the top of his form.’ 9

1. Smart, J., ‘Artists on their art’, Art International, vol. XII/55, 15 May 1968, p. 47

2. Jeffrey Smart, cited in Hawley, J., ‘Jeffrey Smart made simple’, Good Weekend, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 May 1989

3. Hart, D., and Edwards, R., Jeffrey Smart, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2021, p. 148

4. Jeffrey Smart, cited in Quartermaine, P., Jeffrey Smart, Gryphon Books, Melbourne, 1983, p. 92

5. Jeffrey Smart, cited in Capon, E., Jeffrey Smart Drawings and Studies 1942 – 2001, Australian Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2001, p. 109

6. Auge, G., Non-Places: Introduction to an anthropology of super modernity, Verso, London/ New York, 1995

7. Quartermaine, op. cit., p. 94

8. Translation from John Renald, Paul Cézanne, London, 1950, p. 172, cited in Quartermaine, op. cit., p. 120

9. Malouf, D., ‘Jeffrey Smart - Recent Works’, Art International, vol. XXV, no. 9, 1982, p. 69 Lucie Reeves-Smith

Installation view, Jeffrey Smart, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2021 – 22 Night stop, Bombay, 1981, lower right © The Estate of Jeffrey Smart

James Gleeson (1915 – 2008)

Spain II, 1959 – 61

oil on canvas and oil on composition board

triptych

121.5 x 211.0 cm (overall)

signed and dated right outer panel lower centre: J. Gleeson. 61 signed, dated and inscribed centre inner panel lower right: Opus / James Gleeson / 1959 – 1961

Estimate: $80,000 – 120,000

Provenance

Honor Smith, commissioned directly from the artist Estate of Edward M. Smith Sotheby’s, Sydney, 27 August 2001, lot 13 (as ‘Spain – A Triptych’) Private collection, Melbourne

Related works

Spain, 1951, oil on canvas, 67.0 x 47.0 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Sketch for painting ‘Spain’ #2 triptych, c.1950, drawing in pen, black ink and pencil, 13.4 x 23.2 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

James Gleeson was Australia’s best-known and most committed Surrealist artist. Over more than six decades, his unified oeuvre looked beyond observable reality, plumbing instead the furthest reaches of his unique, vivid imagination. Born in Sydney in 1915 and coming of age at the outbreak of World War Two, Gleeson’s formative years were profoundly marked by a pervasive atmosphere of violence, uncertainty and disorder. In a discussion with Lou Klepac in 1986, Gleeson reflected that he had initially subscribed to the socio-political ideology of Surrealism, in particular the possibility it offered to ‘keep the rational mind in balance and perhaps prevent such disasters as war, indifference and fanaticism.’ 1

Surrealism encouraged the use of an eclectic and highly personal mix of images to evoke the alternative reality experienced through dreams and differing mental states. In 1967, Sandra McGrath penned a profile of Gleeson for the periodical Art and Australia. In it, she explained, ‘As a painter within the context of Australian painting, he is curiously aloof and removed. He finds no inspiration in the barren Australian

landscape or its meagre myths. He is no Williams or Nolan. Gleeson draws his warmth from the European tradition. He is wrapped in a classical mantle. He is absorbed sensuously in the Italian landscape, and intellectually it is the Greek myths rather than the Australian myths that capture his imagination.’ 2

With a monumental, dramatic and fearsome power, Gleeson’s altarpiece triptych Spain II records the artist’s transformative encounter with classical Europe in the years immediately following the end of World War Two. After having been long delayed, Gleeson’s modern European Grand Tour only began in 1947, when the artist was aged 32. There he read widely, met with influential Surrealists and viewed masterpieces of Western Art hitherto only known through reproduction. He spent three months in Italy, one month in Holland and four months in France, living the rest of the time in London, where he shared a close collaborative friendship with the Australian sculptor Robert Klippel.

Shortly after his return to Australia, Gleeson produced three major works poignantly expressing the devastation of war that he had seen in the ruined splendour of the Continent: Italy, 1951 (Art Gallery of New South Wales); Greece, 1951; and Spain, 1951 (National Gallery of Australia). Commissioned by Edward and Honor Smith, the imposing triptych Spain II was developed from the composition of its predecessor, becoming a more expansive narrative tableau with the addition of hinged side wings that fold in to cover the main image, each painted on the reverse with an abstract design. Compositionally replicating the biblical cycle of creation, temptation and fall that can be found in altarpieces of the late Medieval period and early Renaissance – for example, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1490 – 1510 (Museo del Prado) – Gleeson’s Spain II displays the full panoply of his enigmatic visual symbology.

Although he had never been to Spain, James Gleeson was well read and had exceptional visual literacy, gleaning visual motifs from a myriad of sources. 3 Gleeson’s discovery of works of art of the Italian Renaissance, particularly those by Michelangelo, opened his eyes to a Humanist conception of the world. Composed of a disorienting and unlikely blend of disparate elements, Spain II places an idealised man within the landscape alongside various objects and motifs evoking the essence of

James Gleeson Spain, 1951 oil on canvas

67.0 x 47.0 cm

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

© The Estate of James Gleeson, 2025

James Gleeson

Sketch for painting ‘Spain’ #2 triptych, c.1950 drawing in pen, black ink, pencil 13.4 x 23.2 cm

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © The Estate of James Gleeson, 2025

past times and the Spanish culture. The meticulously painted male nude in the centre of the composition – likely modelled on Gleeson’s life partner Frank O’Keefe, whom he had met in 1948 – echoes the pose of Michelangelo’s David and surveys impassively the oneiric scene that unfolds around him.

With a deliberate construction and painstaking realism verging on trompe-l’oeil, Gleeson creates a disjointed narrative. His juxtaposition of objects and scale replicates in paint the Surrealist techniques of collage, creating an overall fantastical effect reminiscent of paintings by Salvador Dalì, whose work Gleeson had encountered in the Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art in Sydney in 1939. Partly inspired by El Greco’s View of Toledo, 1596 – 1600, which Gleeson knew from reproductions 4, the ominous threat of the Spanish Inquisition abounds in Spain II – from the hooded penitents beckoning in the middle distance, the abundance of crucifixion motifs, the distant citadel of Toledo and a charging bull. The surging flames consisting of writhing bodies are directly inspired by William Blake’s watercolour illustrations of the fires of purgatory created in 1824 to illustrate the inferno in Dante’s Divine Comedy (confirmed in the notes accompanying the sketch of Spain II held in the National Gallery of Australia). The curious four-sided vessels

filled with skulls in the left-hand panel are a common motif in Gleeson’s works of the period, inspired by Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia Urn Burial, 1658. 5 The reclining female figure in the foreground, again reminiscent of the works of Dalì, is displayed with see-through skin, demonstrating Gleeson’s Surrealist interest in what lies beneath the surface. Although she is portrayed with stony grey skin encrusted with jewels quite different to the lifelike flesh of the men, she also expresses the power of regeneration, with flowers freshly blooming from her chest.

Painted at an early turning point in Gleeson’s career, Spain II contains many of the artist’s most iconic motifs, all combined in one ambitious multi-panelled work. It encapsulates the vividness of Gleeson’s subconscious imagination, while responding to contemporary social concerns and illustrating the astounding depth and breadth of his cultural literacy.

1. Klepac, L., James Gleeson. Landscape out of Nature, The Beagle Press, 1987, p. 14

2. McGrath, S., ‘Profile: James Gleeson’, Art and Australia, no. 5, vol. 3, December 1967, p. 253

3. Ryan, A., James Gleeson. Drawings for Paintings, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2003, p. 19

4. See Free, R., James Gleson. Images from the Shadows, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1996, p. 15

5. Discussion of this motif may be found in Kolenberg, H. and Ryan, A., James Gleeson. Drawings for Paintings, 2003, Art Gallery of New South Wales, pp. 13, 48

Lucie Reeves-Smith

Arthur Boyd (1920 – 1999) Wimmera landscape, c.1962

oil and tempera on composition board

92.0 x 121.5 cm

signed lower right: Arthur Boyd

Estimate: $120,000 – 160,000

Provenance

Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired c.1962

Justin Miller Fine Art, Sydney Private collection, Melbourne, acquired in 2014

Justin Miller Fine Art, Sydney Private collection, Perth, acquired from the above in 2022 Estate of the above, Perth

An untiring and extremely skilful painter of landscapes, Arthur Boyd is undoubtedly among Australia’s most revered artists with his highly personalised images of his homeland now iconic within the national consciousness. Among the more revelatory and widely acclaimed of his achievements, the extended sequence of luminous, sun-parched landscapes inspired by his travels to the Wimmera region in north-west Victoria are particularly celebrated. As Janet McKenzie elaborates, ‘…[in these paintings] Boyd created an archetypal Australian landscape. Possessing both a poetic lyricism and a down to earth quality and capturing the glorious light, these works… [offer] a sense of acceptance that many country-dwelling Australians could identify with.’ 1

Boyd first encountered the Wimmera region during the summer of 1948 – 49 when he accompanied the poet Jack Stevenson on a number of expeditions to Horsham in north-west Victoria. With its flat, semi-arid paddocks and endless horizons, the wheatfarming district presented Boyd with such a stark contrast to the verdant, undulating hills of Berwick and Harkaway (where he had recently undertaken an expansive mural series of Brughelesque idylls at his uncle’s property, The Grange) that he found himself required to develop a new visual vocabulary in order to capture this desolate landscape. Although the Wimmera could not be described as ‘uninhabitable’, it was for Boyd, his first glimpse of the vastness of Australia’s interior. As Barry Pearce notes, ‘…He discovered there a hint of something that had drawn other painters of his generation, a subject tentatively recorded by a few artists of the nineteenth century and touched on by even fewer of the twentieth: the empty spaces of the great interior. Of course, the Wimmera was wheat country and not by any means forbidding, nor forsaken. But in hot dry weather it could have, over sparse, unbroken horizons, a searing expanse of sky that elicited an acute sense of the infinite…’ 2

When initially unveiled at the David Jones Gallery in 1950, the Wimmera landscapes were greeted with universal acclaim – no doubt, as more than one author has observed, ‘because their

sun-parched colours were so reminiscent of the Heidelberg school.’ 3 Significantly the paintings resonated not only amongst the public, but also with institutions such as the National Gallery of Victoria who purchased arguably the most famous work from the series, Irrigation Lake, Wimmera, 1950, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales who acquired Midday, Wimmera, 1948 – 49 – thereby representing the first works by Boyd to enter a major public collection. Imbued with the spirit of the land, these works represented for many their first encounter with these ‘more intimate aspects of the Australian landscape’4 and thus, not only established Boyd’s reputation as ‘an interpreter of the rural Australian environment’ 5, but moreover, launched his career on the international stage, with Boyd subsequently awarded the honour of representing Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1958.

So profound was the impact of the stark simplicity and shimmering light of the Wimmera upon Boyd’s psyche that he would subsequently revisit the subject on several occasions over the following decades – whether painting at his property ‘Riversdale’ on the Shoalhaven river in southern New South Wales, or abroad while residing in London and Italy. A later iteration completed most likely in the early sixties, Wimmera landscape, c.1962 is one such ‘re-imagining’ of the Wimmera region, illustrating well the complexity of Boyd’s vision which is invariably an amalgam of visual observation, artistic experience and emotional response. Offering a sophisticated reappraisal of the theme in its absolute sparseness, economy of detail and restrained palette, the image is one of intimacy and warmth – a poignant homage to the artist’s beloved homeland, created at the height of his painterly powers. Here there is no angst, no challenge, no dramatic dialogue between man and nature as may be found elsewhere in Boyd’s oeuvre; to the contrary, the work exudes a mood of stillness and calm acceptance, as Franz Philipp astutely observes of such Wimmera paintings ‘…the phrase ‘landscapes of love’ comes to mind.’ 6

1. McKenzie, J., Arthur Boyd: art and life, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, p. 62

2. Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd Retrospective, The Art Gallery of New South Wales and The Beagle Press, Sydney, 1993, p. 20

3. Campbell, R., ‘Arthur Boyd (1920 – )’, Australia: Paintings by Arthur Streeton and Arthur Boyd, XXIX Biennale, Venice, 1958, n. p.

4. Pearce, op. cit.

5. Philipp, F., Arthur Boyd, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, p. 67

6. ibid., p. 64

Veronica Angelatos

John Olsen (1928 – 2023)

Flooded river, Kimberley, 1983

oil on canvas

167.0 x 152.0 cm

signed and dated lower right: John Olsen / 83 inscribed with title verso: Flooded River / Kimberly [sic]

Estimate: $180,000 – 240,000

Provenance

The Christensen Fund Collection, Perth (label attached verso)

Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne

Savill Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso)

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1997

Exhibited

John Olsen: The Land Beyond Time, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, then touring nationally, May 1983 – February 1990, cat. 81 (label attached verso)

Arthur Boyd & John Olsen: Two Great Australian Painters, Savill Galleries, Sydney, 7 – 31 May 1997, cat. 8 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, n.p.)

Literature

Olsen, J. et al., The Land Beyond Time, Macmillan Company of Australia Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1984, pp. 251 (illus., as ‘Lake Gregory in flood III’), 309 Ellis, W. F. (ed.), The Land Beyond Time: paintings and drawings by John Olsen, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 1984, p. 66 (illus.)

McGregor, K., and Zimmer, J., John Olsen: Journeys Into the You Beaut Country, Thames and Hudson, Melbourne, 2016, pp. 117 (illus.), 338

Related works

Lake Gregory in flood I, 1983, oil on canvas, 168.0 x 153.0 cm, private collection

Lake Gregory in flood II (also known as Flooded Lake Gregory), 1983, oil on canvas, 146.0 x 135.0 cm, private collection

Between August 1982 and April 1983, John Olsen travelled extensively through the northern reaches of Western Australia as part of a project commissioned by the Christensen Fund in Perth which resulted in the lavish book Land beyond time 1 Described as a journey of ‘modern exploration of Australia’s North-West frontiers’ 2, Olsen’s companions included authors Geoffrey Dutton and Mary Durack, and naturalist Vincent Serventy. Halfway through the project unseasonal rains filled Lake Gregory (Paraku), an otherwise brackish body of water situated between the Great Sandy and the Tanami deserts. The flooding spurred memories for Serventy and Olsen who had previously visited Lake Eyre (Kati Thanda) together in 1974 when it too overflowed and brought life back to the desert. For Olsen, who had already spent many years

studying Buddhist and Zen texts, this ephemeral experience of ‘fullness out of emptiness’ perfectly fitted his understanding of their principles. Flooded river, Kimberley, 1983, shows the artist expressing this sentiment with the swollen waters of the lake forming a vast central bowl that teems with life whilst sending tendrils of growth into the otherwise sparse red dirt beyond.

Olsen encountered Lake Gregory during a small plane flight in April 1983 with Dutton describing ‘the great muddy invasion of the red and yellow land… Roads and a riverbed disappeared into the edge of the lake, with only the trees along the riverbanks showing above the waters that flooded into the lake.’ 3 On landing, the manager of the nearby Aboriginal settlement and cattle station took the party on a boat ride ‘down the flooded river between the trees’ before returning to the community ‘under tall coolabah trees where hundreds of darters were nesting, the chicks wobbling in agitation in the shallow nests.’4 The art critic Robert Hughes once wrote of Olsen’s ability to use his mind ‘as a sieve, catching a complex load of emotions and associations… the picture seems to grow from his brush as naturally and directly as a twig from a branch,’ 5 and in Flooded river, Kimberley, it is possible to trace Olsen’s painterly journey as he follows the flights of the many thousands of birds whilst they chase insects and fish. Completed at his home studio in Clarendon, South Australia, Flooded river, Kimberley, is full of the artist’s signature calligraphic brush marks, bustling from here to there as they seek to capture this short-lived episode of life.

1. Olsen, J. et al., The Land Beyond Time: a modern exploration of Australia’s north-west frontiers, Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1984

2. See Olsen, J., Drawn from Life, Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney, 1997, pp. 189, 190

3. Geoffrey Dutton, cited in Olsen et al., op. cit , p. 244

4. ibid., p. 246

5. Hughes, R., ‘Abstract Regions’, Nation, Canberra, 8 October 1960

Andrew Gaynor

Arthur Boyd (1920 –

1999)

Shoalhaven with boat

oil on composition board

122.0 x 91.0 cm

signed lower right: Arthur Boyd bears inscription verso: No. 3

Estimate: $100,000 – 150,000

Provenance

Private collection

Gould Galleries, Melbourne

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above

‘The natural beauty of the Shoalhaven area caused Boyd to marvel constantly. His paintings are a celebration of grandeur and wonder of Nature. It is to Boyd’s credit that a single landscape can inspire such diversity of work. He gives us the impression that there are infinite possibilities, as long as we train ourselves to see.’ 1

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

Soul-piercing in its beauty, the Shoalhaven region offered both refreshing solace for the artist’s world-weary eyes, and endless potential as a subject – ‘the variation in the area with its great deep tones and high keys’ bearing strong affinities with music. As

Boyd elaborated, ‘in the desert there is only one note, just one low singing note. In this landscape the tonal range – not tonal in the obvious sense of colour, but the actual fact of the horizon which can vary from very high to low, to infinite, depending on your line of vision – makes it a greater challenge. It has a knife-edged clarity. Impressionism could never have been born here, but Wagner could easily have composed here.’ 2 Wild and primordial, the region differed completely from the ordered English countryside to which he had grown accustomed and thus, a new vision was required to unlock its tangled mysteries. If previously Breughel and Rembrandt had offered inspiration, now Von Guérard, Piguenit and Buvelot became Boyd’s spiritual mentors.

With its shimmering light, golden palette and signature format of the landscape divided into three horizontal bands of air, earth and water, Shoalhaven with boat offers a superb example of the early Shoalhaven landscapes which – devoid of the mythological creatures and symbolic narrative punctuating later versions –simply pay homage to the sheer beauty, grandeur and wonder of Nature. Capturing the beauty of the Shoalhaven in the blistering heat of the midday sun, indeed the work is a poignant reminder of how Boyd, comfortable once more with the eternal diversity of the Australian landscape, ultimately did tame his wilderness: ‘...what was unfamiliar became familiar, what was menacing became friendly, what was awesome became intimate.’ 3

1. McKenzie, J., Arthur Boyd at Bundanon, Academy Editions, London, 1994, p. 42

2. Arthur Boyd, cited in Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993, pp. 26 – 27

3. McGrath, S., The Artist and the Shoalhaven, Bay Books, Sydney, 1982, p. 79

Veronica Angelatos

Bronwyn Oliver (1959 – 2006)

Two rings + two, 2005

copper

45.0 x 33.0 x 33.0 cm

Estimate: $140,000 – 180,000

Provenance

Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2005

Literature

Fink, H., Bronwyn Oliver: Strange Things, Piper Press, Sydney, 2017, p. 221

Related works

Two Rings, 2005, maquette, copper, 45.0 x 33.0 x 33.0 cm, ibid., pp. 192 (illus.), 221

Two Rings, 2006, copper, 200.0 x 260.0 x 260.0 cm, private collection, installed at Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Victoria, ibid., pp. 188 – 199 (illus.), 221

With identical annular forms leaning against each other and lin ked in an eternal embrace, Bronwyn Oliver’s sculpture of Two rings + two, 2005 evokes completeness and interdependence with a striking geometric simplicity. Crafted from her signature hand-woven copper wire, the two toruses are fully enclosed, perfectly formed, with no beginning and no end. Trapped within the hollow centre of each ring is a movable sphere, woven with the same angular pattern. The smooth sophistication and balance of Two rings + two reveals the late sculptor at the pinnacle of her powers, building on the essential forms, skilful techniques and recurrent concepts of her practice with each new work.

In her 2017 monograph on the immensely respected contemporary sculptor, Hannah Fink explains that Oliver inherited, through her education at Alexander Mackie College, Lyndon Dadswell’s concept of space flowing through a sculpture.1 Oliver’s repertoire of fundamental sculptural shapes — spiral, loop, funnel, tube, disc, and sphere — provided in their static volumes an expression of rotational movement, an essential elemental and rhythmic force. In the final years of her brief life, the resolved forms of the sphere and the ring inspired some Oliver’s most elegant and self-assured compositions.

In 2005, responding to the successes of recent public commissions, including Vine, 2005 her largest work, installed at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney in May of that year, Bronwyn Oliver dedicated herself to her craft with yet more unbridled energy and passion. Here a new accelerated rhythm of working, ‘halfway between commission and exhibition’, allowed for the production of small-scale sculptures that could also be presented as proposal concepts for larger public commissions. 2 Capitalising on the iterative propulsion of her artistic ideas, Oliver created during this period a series of paired works, one large and one

small, each form containing the conceptual potential for the next. Existing alongside the pair of works titled Two rings, the monumental fabrication (installed at Tarrawarra Museum of Art) and its painstakingly hand-crafted maquette (private collection), Two rings + two is the only version of this visual concept to include a sphere within its internal cavity. Proving a stabilising anchor within the larger circular motion of its cage, these additions hark back to Oliver’s eggs hidden within the spirals of Home of a curling bird, 1988 and Eyrie, 1993. Explicitly referencing the pure mathematical origins of the ring torus, Oliver’s perfectly sized spheres imply the potential for movement around a central axis of rotation – here doubled in a continuous and reciprocal orbital motion like that of planetary bodies.

While strong threads of baroque extravagance and curious organic resonance run throughout Bronwyn Oliver’s sculptures, Two rings + two distinguishes itself for its pure, almost platonic, abstraction. Allowing light and air to permeate through the form, its warm, patinated copper surface is a transparent web of straight lines, a meticulous mosaic of triangles and trapezoids evoking the craquelure of glazed ceramics. Joining earlier works like Focus, 2004, Unity, 2001 and Mandala, 2004, the careful balance and philosophical tenor of Two rings + two distantly relates to Buddhist and Shinto symbols and rituals, encountered during the artist’s travels to China and Japan.

In August 2006, three works by Bronwyn Oliver were exhibited posthumously within the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award at the National Gallery of Victoria, encapsulating powerfully her sculptural legacy: Stroke, 2006; Rose, 2006 (her last work), and the large, fabricated version of Two rings

1. Fink, H., Bronwyn Oliver. Strange Things, Piper Press, Sydney, 2017, p. 51

2. ibid., p. 178

Lucie Reeves-Smith

Installation view: Bronwyn Oliver, Two Rings, 2005, The Sculpture of Bronwyn Oliver TarraWarra Museum of Art (19 November 2016 – 5 February 2017)

Photo: Andrew Curtis

Cressida Campbell born 1960

Bougainvillea, 2003

hand-painted unique woodblock print

83.0 x 60.0 cm

signed lower left: Cressida Campbell

Estimate: $150,000 – 200,000

Provenance

Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney (label attached verso)

Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above on 29 April 2003

Exhibited

Cressida Campbell, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 29 April – 24 May 2003, cat. 6 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

Timeless: The Art of Cressida Campbell, S.H. Ervin Gallery (National Trust), Sydney, 10 January – 22

February 2009; Queensland University of Technology, Art Museum, Brisbane, 5 March – 19 April 2009

Literature

Low, L. A., ‘Exhibitions’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 9 May 2003, p. 23

Crayford, P., The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures Pty Ltd, Sydney, 2008, cat. P0303, pp. 83 (illus. woodblock), 347

Related work

Bougainvillea, 2003, watercolour on incised woodblock, private collection, in Noordhuis-Fairfax, S. (ed.), Cressida Campbell, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2022, pp. 161 (illus. detail), 239 (illus.)

Stretching diagonally from a simple glass carafe, a thorny cutting of red bougainvillea hangs above a resplendent Lampas tablecloth of sky blue, patterned with a motif of flowering and fruiting branches. In Bougainvillea, 2003, a unique watercolour print, celebrated printmaker Cressida Campbell has cropped and compressed the picture plane to create a flat surface of pure and harmonious pattern. With only a small handful of vigorous pictorial elements, Campbell’s still life cleverly pits a wild and unruly nature against its smoothed and edited representation in art.

Bougainvillea belongs to a small group of prints and painted woodblocks, created by Campbell in the late 1990s and early 2000s, featuring a decorative still life combination of flowers, fruit, ceramics and luxurious patterned fabrics. Amongst these are some of the artist’s most successful works, including Persimmons and silk, 1997; Nasturtiums, 2002 (Art Gallery of New South Wales); Plums with Indian cloth, 2004, and Ranunculus with painted cloth, 2010. As it had been for Margaret Olley, a longtime friend and supporter of the artist, the visual appeal of one’s own home generates for Campbell both a source of constant pleasure and an endless fount of subject matter. Consequently, almost all of Campbell’s still lives are semi-

autobiographical, borne from her immediate environment and reflecting the many cultural inspirations of her life. Here, the Italian woven silk fabric, originally of Indian Mughal design, likely came from Campbell’s sister, designer Sally Campbell 1

The various textiles within the prints and painted woodblocks, from shibori fabrics to ikats, hand-painted silks and brocades, are mostly acquired through Sally’s imports, ‘I’m always buying them to use in my paintings’, the artist explained in 2011. 2

Bursting from a sturdy wine decanter which wouldn’t be out of place serving house red in a Greek beachside taverna, the decorative profusion of the bougainvillea cannot be contained by the edges of the Campbell’s plywood block. In addition to the mottled texture of the printed watercolour paint happily evoking the plant’s distinctive papery blooms, the artist acknowledges the passing of time with subtle differences of colour. The wide range of red and pink hues conveys blooms past their prime on the desiccated tip of the branch and fallen into the water in the carafe, leached of their vibrancy.

Although she has asserted the importance of stylised design and pattern over subject matter in her artworks, Campbell had nevertheless acknowledged her remarkable ability to ‘draw plants pretty precisely, they’re like poems.’ 3 Botanical luxuriance formed the basis for the 18 prints shown alongside Bougainvillea in Campbell’s solo exhibition at Rex Irwin Art Dealer in 2003, their titles and subject matter including natives banksias and everlasting daisies, cliveas, orchids, peonies, monsteras, nasturtiums, jacaranda and orchids. Native to Latin South America and popular throughout the Mediterranean, the bougainvillea is a wild and unruly creeper, flowering in Sydney gardens from the first sign of spring right through to the end of summer. Never intended to be a cut flower, this specimen was likely a cutting from Margaret Olley’s viny garden in Paddington, offered as a suitably dramatic painting subject.4 Having applied an asymmetric composition, informed by Japanese pictorial technique, to a traditional still life expression of transient worldly pleasures, Campbell’s resulting image is striking and splendid.

1. Cressida Campbell, cited in Noordhuis-Fairfax, S. (ed.), Cressida Campbell, National Gallery of Australia, 2022, p. 48

2. Millar, A., ‘Artist in Residence’, Sydney Magazine, Sydney, April 2011, p. 83

3. Cressida Campbell, cited in Noordhuis-Fairfax, op. cit., p. 164

4. ibid.

Lucie Reeves-Smith

Howard Arkley (1951 – 1999)

O.Y.O. Flats, 1987

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

198.5 x 168.0 cm

signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Howard Arkley / OYO FLATS / 1987

Estimate: $800,000 – 1,200,000

Provenance

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Henry Gillespie, Melbourne

Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 2 October 1994, lot 148 (incorrectly dated as 1988)

Private collection Melbourne, acquired from the above Private collection, Melbourne

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2013

Exhibited

Howard Arkley: Suburban Urban Messages, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 1 – 19 September 1987, cat. 3 (label attached verso, as ‘OYO Flats’)

The Newcastle Show Association $10,000 Invitation Art Purchase, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, New South Wales, 19 February – 13 March 1988

Downtown: Ruscha, Rooney, Arkley, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne, 14 March – 14 May 1995

Howard Arkley, Gould Contemporary, Melbourne, 14 November – 14 December 2013

Howard Arkley and Friends, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Melbourne, 5 December 2015 – 28 February 2016

Literature

Trioli, V., ‘Art in the Open Market’, The Age, Melbourne, 30 September 1994, p. 11 (illus.)

Gibson, J., ‘Los Melbos’, Art + Text, Melbourne, no. 51, 1995, p. 21 (illus.)

Crawford, A., and Edgar, R., Spray: The Work of Howard Arkley, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2001, p. 136 (illus.)

Gregory, J,. Carnival in Suburbia, The Art of Howard Arkley, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006, fig. 2.30, pp. 20, 81, 84, 85 (illus.)

Fitzpatrick, A., and Lynn, V., Howard Arkley and Friends, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2015, pp. 114 (illus.), 143 Howard Arkley Online Catalogue Raisonné: https://www.arkleyworks. com/blog/2009/11/19/o–y–o–flats–1987/ (accessed September 2025)

Related works

Modern O.Y.O. Flats, 1988, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 180.0 x 150.0, private collection, Melbourne

Urban Apartments, 1999, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 175.0 x 135.0 cm, private collection

© The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art.

Study and source material for O.Y.O Flats

Howard Arkley Archive State Library of Victoria, Melbourne

‘Australian art has been dominated by the rural landscape, and I think there is somethin g false and overrated – it’s romanticised or, at the very least, lopsided. Most of the population live in an urban environment. This environment affects us – the kinds of people that Australians are, and the way we behave. It affects our formative years, so it is a very important element.’ 1

While already a contemporary artist of note, in 1987 Howard Arkley was on the precipice of major success. Characteristically, he was working at a phenomenal pace, holding painting exhibitions in Sydney and Adelaide and a works on paper exhibition in Brisbane, as well as being included in exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria (twice); Heide Park and Art Gallery (now Heide Museum of Modern Art); 200 Gertrude Street (now Gertrude Contemporary); and at the University Gallery (now Ian Potter Museum of Art) and Ormond College at the University of Melbourne. 2 As Arkley’s first wife, artist Elizabeth Gower observed: ‘If I had to find one word to describe Howard, it would be ‘inten se’… He had a wild

imagination. His conversations were intense. Whatever the subject, he’d have an opinion on it. And his most passionate subject was Art – his Art, your Art, everyone’s Art, the Art world, Art politics, good Art, bad Art. He’d thought about it all. It was Art for breakfast and Art for dinner.’ 3 Arkley had included paintings of suburban houses in previous exhibitions in 1983 and 1986 4 , but his 1987 solo exhibition, Howard Arkley: Urban Suburban Messages at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney – which featured O.Y.O. Flats, 1987 – was the first to significantly foreground the artist’s suburban theme. Over the next decade, this subject was to fuel his reputation, and it continued to both preoccupy and fascinate him until his representation of Australia at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999 with the exhibition The Home Show, and his untimely death in his Melbourne studio just one month later.

Arkley’s love of suburban design began as far back as 1978 his with photographic documentation of Australian flywire screen doors. He and Gower had recently returned from travel in Europe and New York, where they had enthusiastically analysed and

sketched the patterns they had encountered ‘in everything from the Paris railway station and linoleum, to Japanese prints and the paintings of Alfred Jensen and Matisse’. 5 However, for Arkley, it was these homegrown versions of Paris’ Art Deco and Art Nouveau grilles, gates and doorways that were to have the most influence, establishing a connection between the seeming banality of suburbia and the rich creative possibilities of the pattern and decoration that he found there, and went on to imagine. The artist knew the suburbs well, having grown up in Surrey Hills in Melbourne’s east (the home of another great artist of the suburban vernacular, John Brack), and having returned to live in the ‘burbs’ (in Oakleigh) in 1991. Yet despite his deep commitment to the suburbs as a legitimate, meaningful and endlessly inspiring source for his art, Arkley was at once both a champion and occasional detractor of suburban life. Many of his comments defend the suburbs: ‘[t]he majority of Australians live in suburbs, but they are also cynical and embarrassed about it. They don’t see the suburbs as a subject for art, but it’s a very good way of life. There’s a barbeque in the backyard, and

Howard Arkley

Urban Apartments, 1999

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

175.0 x 135.0 cm

Private collection

© The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli

Contemporary Art

it’s safe for children, what’s to be embarrassed about?’ 6 Yet there are also glimpses in Arkley’s interviews of the realities of suburban existence for a restless, high energy artist attuned to the vicissitudes of inner-city living: ‘I actually moved out to the suburbs to get a hands-on experience… and it’s really boring. I’ve just about worn out my stay’.7 The paintings themselves remain mute on Arkley’s philosophical motivations for making them — heartfelt celebration or postmodern critique? — yet there is no denying that the artist’s sustained engagement with the suburbs made them definitively his own. As he declared:

‘What I would actually like to do is the equivalent to when you’re driving along in the country and you look at the landscape and you say, ‘Oh there’s a Fred Williams.’ You change the way people see it. And you make people look at it…’ 8

Like many of Arkley’s suburban exteriors, O.Y.O. Flats was inspired by a real estate advertisement for the sale of a ‘LIGHT AND BRIGHT’ apartment with a ‘SUNNY OUTLOOK ON LIFE’

Rolfe

Henry Gillespie, 1985

synthetic polymer paint and screenprint on canvas

101.6 x 101.6 cm

Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

ARS/Copyright Agency, 2025

in Rathdowne Street, North Carlton. Using the advertisement’s fine line drawing as the starting point of his painting, Arkley transposed the composition’s tight framing and somewhat lurching perspective, as well as the viewer’s vantage point from the street – filling the open white spaces of the apartment’s original ‘likeness’ with shimmering terracotta brickwork, a tessellated fence of alternating pastel hues, and large blocks of strong colour that emphasise the building’s blocky modernist form. The artist’s command of the airbrush really comes into play here, with the work’s confident black linework emphasising the block’s solidity and ‘good bones’ (to steal a real estate term), while proudly emphasising the painting’s undeniable Pop sensibility. As Arkley happily admitted, he was ‘never ever going to be a de Kooning or a John Olsen’ and he ‘was never going to love paint and wallow around in it’ 9:

‘I wanted my work to look like a reproduction of a painting, not be a painting. I want it to look like it was a slide or a book. I want it to look like the paintings that educated me, and I saw them in reproduction in books and magazines and slides etc. I didn’t want any great big globules of paint running down, because in a book they don’t have that – they’re nice and flat and shiny.’ 10

However, despite the work’s joyous high-keyed palette and cloudfree blue sky, the ‘Own Your Own’ of Arkley’s title also points to something far less sunny: the challenges of global capitalism and the ever-diminishing Australian dream of home ownership. The modest apartments of this simple block of flats represent the aspirations of all first home buyers—the possibility of ‘owning your own’ and of getting a toehold in the market—along with the promises this brings of security and happily-ever-afters.

Like Andy Warhol before him, Arkley was not averse to reusing and repurposing his own imagery. The apartment block of O.Y.O. Flats may stand alone amongst the artist’s California bungalows, Spanish villas and triple-fronted brick veneer houses, but it continued to intrigue and ‘work on’ Arkley, who created two further versions: Modern O.Y.O. Flats, 1988 (with an altered perspective, different plants and a more muted palette) and Urban Apartments, 1999 (again, with altered perspective, and the replacement of the original gum with a palm tree11).

It is fair to assume that the easy correspondence that O.Y.O. Flats establishes between Arkley and Warhol also resonated with the painting’s first owner, Henry Gillespie who met Warhol at a party in Los Angeles in the 1980s, later becoming the

Andy Warhol and Henry Gillespie

Courtesy of Henry Gillespie

Andy Warhol

Arkley at the opening of Howard Arkley: Suburban Urban Messages, Roslyn Oxley9, Sydney, 1 – 19 September 1987

Australian editor of Warhol’s Interview magazine. He is one of only two Australians to have been painted by the artist (the other is Loti Smorgon AO) and was given one of the four portraits Warhol made of him in 1985 as payment for his work on the magazine.12 It is fitting to imagine O.Y.O. Flats in this company.

1. Howard Arkley, from an unpublished interview with the authors in Crawford, A. & Edgar, R., Spray: The Work of Howard Arkley, Craftsman House, Melbourne, 1997, p. 88

2. For a list of Howard Arkley’s exhibitions in 1987 and the works contained within them see: Gregory, J., ‘1987’, Arkley Works, at: https://www.arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/11/20/1987/ (accessed 29 September 2025)

3. Elizabeth Gower, cited in education resource for the exhibition Howard Arkley, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, at: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/school_resource/ howard-arkley/ (accessed 29 September 2025)

4. Howard Arkley: Urban Paintings, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 22 October – 13 November 1983 and Howard Akley: Recent Paintings, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 20 September –8 October 1986. Arkley also showed the interior painting Suburban, 1983 in his exhibition Howard Arkley: Recent Works (15 June – 2 July) at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney in 1983.

5. Brown, R., ‘Art in the Urban Environment’ in Casual Works: Working Drawings, Source Material, Doodles 1974 – 1987, 200 Gerturde Street, Melbourne, 1988, unpaginated, cited in Fitzpatrick, A., ‘Sampling: The Art of Howard Arkley’, Howard Arkley and Friends, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, 2015, p. 12

6. Gardner, K., Australia at the Venice Biennale: A Century of Contemporary Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2021, p. 132

7. Howard Arkley, cited in Barclay, A., ‘Mobile Message’, Herald Sun, 16 August 1996, cited in Gregory, J., Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006, p. 10

8. Howard Arkley, from an unpublished interview with the authors, Crawford, A. & Edgar, R., Spray: The Work of Howard Arkley, Craftsman House, Melbourne, 1997, p. 89

9. Howard Arkley, cited in Wyzenbeek, T. (dir.), Howard’s Way, ABC-TV Arts, 1999

10. ibid.

11. This work was shown in the artist’s first international commercial exhibition: Howard Arkley: Home Show, Karen Lovegrove Gallery, Los Angeles, 9 July – 14 August 1999. According to John Gregory, the exhibition was a sell-out: Gregory, J., ‘‘Howard Arkley: Home Show’, Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, Los Angeles, Jul-Aug 1999’, Arkley Works, at: https://www.arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/11/20/1987/ (accessed 1 October 2025)

12. Wall label, Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 3 March – 14 May 2023, at: https://www.agsa.sa.gov.au/collection-publications/ collection/works/henry-gillespie/27242/#about-narrative-1541 (accessed 1 October 2025). The portrait that belonged to Gillespie was acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1996; the remaining three are in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

Kelly Gellatly

© The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art.

Howard Arkley (1951 – 1999)

The freeway, 1999

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

150.0 x 366.0 cm

signed and dated verso: Howard Arkley 99

signed, dated and inscribed with title verso:The Freeway 99 / Howard Arkley 99 / 1999

Estimate: $1,500,000 – 2,000,000

Provenance

Roger Wood and Randal Marsh, Melbourne, commissioned directly from the artist in 1999

Exhibited

On the Road: The car in Australian art, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne, 11 December 1999 – 19 March 2000

Howard Arkley: The Retrospective, The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne, 17 November 2006 – 25 February 2007 (label attached verso, as ‘Freeway’)

Howard Arkley and Friends, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Melbourne, 5 December 2015 – 28 February 2016

Literature

Moore, M., ‘Howard Arkley’, Hemisphere [United Airlines inflight magazine], June 1999, pp. 66 – 67 (illus.)

Gott, T., and Gellatly, K., On the Road: The Car in Australian Art, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne, 1999, p. 4 (illus.)

Crawford, A., ‘Howard Arkley 1951 – 1999’, Art & Australia, vol. 37, no. 3, 2000, p. 376 (illus.)

Gregory, J,. Carnival in Suburbia, The Art of Howard Arkley, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006, fig. 1.31, pp. 46, 48 – 49 (illus.)

Fitzpatrick, A., and Lynn, V., Howard Arkley and Friends, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2015, pp. 22, 36, 37 (illus.), 138 – 39 (illus.)

Gruber, F., ‘Howard Arkley, the man who saw Australian suburbia in technicolour’, The Guardian, 7 December 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/ dec/07/howard–arkley–the–man–who–saw–australian–suburbia–in–technicolour (accessed September 2025)

Gregory, J., ‘Mining the Howard Arkley Archive’, La Trobe Journal, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, no. 107, November 2022, p. 19 Howard Arkley Online Catalogue Raisonné: https:// www.arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/11/22/the–freeway–1999/ (accessed September 2025)

© The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art.

I

am a passenger and I ride and I ride

I ride through the city’s backsides

I see the stars come out of the sky

Yeah, the bright and hollow sky

You know it looks so good tonight

I am a passenger I stay under glass

I look through my window so bright

I see the stars come out tonight

I see the bright and hollow sky

Over the city’s ripped backsides

And everything looks good tonight

(Iggy Pop, Passenger, 1977)

Howard Arkley’s monumental The freeway, 1999 was commissioned by Roger Wood and Randal Marsh of Wood Marsh Architecture after they were awarded the Victorian Architecture Medal for their 1995 project for Melbourne’s Eastern Freeway extension, which saw the firm design a scheme comprised of interconnected sculptural arcs that also served as sound barriers. The pair had been part of Howard Arkley’s social circle since the 1980s when they launched their careers with the redesign of Inflation nightclub in the Melbourne CBD 1, and were the only architects amongst a wide group of young creatives that included artists Tony Clark, Juan Davila and Bill Henson, musician Nick Cave, and fashion designer Martin Grant. As Roger Wood recalls:

‘When it was handed over he [Arkley] said that the Eastern Freeway for him was something that he couldn’t imagine, you know the scale, and so he wanted to do something to rival that scale… [H]e saw that accolade as being important, and he saw that gesture [in the Freeway design], which is interlocking curved walls, as being represented by this painting.’

It took Arkley over two years to complete the painting (or, as Roger Wood commented, ‘to get around to painting it’).

The documentary Howard’s Way, 1999, which screened on ABC-TV in February 2002, records Arkley in his Oakleigh

Howard Arkley Freeway exit, 1999 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 175.0 x 135.0 cm

The Buxton Collection, Melbourne

© The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art

studio just prior to his departure for the Venice Biennale with The freeway be hind him, still a work-in-progress. The film provides an invaluable insight into the making of the painting, as Arkley discusses the blue and green colourway of a sign declaring ‘BARGAIN priced right’ as the inspiration or ‘key’ that ‘set off’ the work: ‘That’s a technique that I’ve used over last eight years, ten years… Going into a supermarket, picking a product, like soap powder, or baked beans…’ 3

Broad areas of the overpass, the freeway below, and the surrounding landscape are laid out – the pop of bright yellow of the street sign and various elements of the skyscrapers are yet to be filled. Interestingly, in this state of ‘undress’, the painting clearly demonstrates the power of Arkley’s assured airbrushed outlines, and the vital role they play in pulling the composition seamlessly together. The studio is a mess, but the canvas is pristine, propped up on two large paint cans so that it is at the right height to work on. When asked by Ashley Crawford, ‘Why paint a highway, Howard?’, Arkley responds:

‘It’s a universal motif. Everybody understands it, everybody uses it… The freeway, the highway has symbolic references, and it has very ordinary family, suburban references like getting away, getting to work… and of course it has a history in various forms and I’m just plugging into that.’4

Wood and Marsh had not seen the painting prior to its eventual d elivery, and initially, the grey rather than black airbrushed lines came as a shock, as it was the first time that they had seen grey outlines in Arkley’s work. Adding a warm, soft contrast to the building blocks of colour that comprise the image, Arkley told the pair that he did the grey line for them (although grey outlines do appear in several of the artist’s paintings from 1994 on). The grey airbrushed line of this and other freeway paintings undoubtedly references the concrete and industrial materials from which these enormous structures are made, but also serve to highlight the paintings’ formal concerns, with their swathes of solid contrasting colour and shape. As Anthony Fitzpatrick has observed,

‘In the overlooked, indeterminate, and in-between space, of this urban infrastructure, Arkley discovered a new motif with which he could reprise some of the concerns of his initial formal investigations into the tensions between absence and presence, stasis and movement.’ 5

Arkley’s interest in the freeway began in 1994 with the paintings A Freeway Painting (Exit), 1994 and A Freeway Painting (Over Pass), 1994, which debuted in the exhibition Howard Arkley: The Pointillist Suburb Series at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne in November of that year.6 Based upon a photograph Arkley had taken during a trip to Canberra in 1987 7—’modified and

Howard Arkley

A freeway painting (exit), 1994 synthetic polymer paint on canvas

182.5 x 365.5 cm

Private collection, Melbourne

© The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art

combined with material ranging from the art and photography of [American artist] Ed Ruscha, computer games and computer art, architectural renderings from Domus [magazine], and film and literary references such as J.G. Ballard’s Crash ’ 8 — this new subject represented an exciting departure for the artist, and one that continued to unfold alongside his signature suburban imagery until his death in 1999 (he was to paint an additional nine freeway paintings between 1995 – 99, with The Freeway, 1999 the last). According to Arkley’s friend, architect Peter Corrigan, Arkley once said ‘…that he had to move on from them [the Australian suburbs] for the sake of his art so he started painting freeways and traffic sections, those exits out of his world.’ 9 Arkley too seems to hint at this in a deadpan comment he makes in the documentary Howard’s Way, which he finishes with a wry smile: ‘This suburban thing is in danger of swallowing me up. It’s a problem, and I think it would be a good idea perhaps if I headed for the You Yangs and got some relief.’ 10

At over three and a half metres long, The freeway presents Arkley’s interest in the freeway in cinemascope – creating a widescreen, immersive vision of the road that we seem, as a viewer, to experience from the verge. If we are supposed to navigate this space by car—after all, with the freeway, that’s the only way—the confusing directions on the yellow sign provide no clue as how to do so, and the rectangular space below remains blank, as if waiting for the hurried flourish of a local tagger. Divorced from time and a place, this is the freeway as sign – a piece of instantly recognisable infrastructure that either enables a connection to the city from the suburbs or an invaluable means of escape. Indeed, the street sign’s double arrows seem to say, ‘Take your pick’. Ironically, Arkley never

learnt to drive, so the vast empty roads and grand sweeping curves of his freeway overpasses are something that he was only able to experience as a passenger, absorbing their visual and physical stimuli unencumbered.11 Despite being an artist that had long eschewed the Australian landscape tradition, in The freeway Arkley created the ultimate urban landscape.

After Arkley travelled to Venice in May 1999 for the vernissage of the Venice Biennale and the launch of his exhibition The Home Show in the Australian pavilion, he and his partner Alison Burton travelled briefly to Italy, and then London and Ireland 12,before finally landing in America for the opening of Arkley’s first international commercial exhibition at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery in Los Angeles.13 While in LA, Arkley took the opportunity to photograph the city’s eponymous web of freeways, riding shotgun with fellow artist Callum Morton, who had been a student of Arkley’s at Prahran College of Advanced Education. As Morton recalls:

‘We drove to a number of freeway interchanges: the point where the 2 flies over the 134 and the 110 hits the 5. Clasping his camera in one hand, Howard would hang his head out the window and scream out: ‘STOP!’ I’d quickly pull up on the side of the freeway and he’d jump out and rush up and down the service lane taking photos. At one point, I remember, he ran across all four lanes of the Glendale Freeway, that skinny body flailing across the asphalt and me with my hand over my eyes.’ 14

Morton also drove Burton and Arkley to Nevada, where he attended their midnight wedding in a Las Vegas chapel. Morton remembers Arkley sitting in the back of the car,

Study for The freeway, 1999

Howard Arkley Archive State Library of Victoria, Melbourne

Howard Arkley working on The freewa y, 1999 photographer unknown

singing along to the Kinks: ‘He had the worst voice I’ve ever heard; I can still hear that raspy little voice.’ 15 Sadly, just three days after returning triumphant to Australia, Howard Arkley died in his studio of a heroin overdose at the age of 48.

The Howard Arkley Archive in State Library Victoria holds seventy-five freeway photographs from the artist’s adventures in LA – testament to the fact that it was a subject he wanted to continue to explore. The freeway was to be the last.

Unless otherwise noted, all quotes by Roger Wood and Randal Marsh are from a conversation with the author at Wood Marsh’s Port Melbourne office, 30 September 2025.

1. At the time the firm included Dale Jones-Evans and was called Biltmoderne. It became Wood Marsh in 1987 after Jones Evans left the firm.

2. Wyzenbeek, T. (dir.), Howard’s Way, ABC-TV Arts, 1999 (screened February 2000), see: ‘Bibliography’, Arkley Works, at: https://www.arkleyworks.com/bibliography/ (accessed 2 October 2025)

3. Howard Arkley, cited ibid.

4. ibid.

5. Fitzpatrick, A., ‘Sampling: The Art of Howard Arkley’, in Fitzpatrick, A. & Lynn, V., Howard Arkley and Friends, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, 2025, p. 22

6. Howard Arkley: The Pointillist Suburb Series at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 7 November – 3 December 1994

7. Gregory, J., A Freeway Painting (Over Pass) 1994’, Arkley Works, at: https://www. arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/12/09/a-freeway-painting-over-pass-1994/ (accessed 3 October 2025) Gregory states this date as 1987 in Gregory J., Carnivale in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006, p. 45

8. ibid.

9. Peter Corrigan, cited in education resource for the exhibition Howard Arkley, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 17 November 2006 – February 2007, at: https://www.ngv. vic.gov.au/school_resource/howard-arkley/ (accessed 29 September 2025)

10. Howard Arkley, cited in Wyzenbeek, op. cit.

11. Gregory, Carnivale…, op. cit., p. 46

12. For an in-depth account of Arkley’s activities in 1999, see Gregory, J., ‘1999’, https://www. arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/11/21/1999/ (accessed 6 October 2025)

13. Howard Arkley: Home Show, Karen Lovegrove Gallery, Los Angeles, 9 July – 14 August 1999

14. Callum Morton, cited in Howard Arkley and Friends, op. cit., p. 59

15. Callum Morton, cited in Coslovich, G., ‘Art of Suburbia: Howard Arkley’s Life and Work Highlighted in New Exhibition’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 18 November 2015, at: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/m21cover-20151113-gkyr2r.html (accessed 6 October 2025)

Kelly Gellatly

Howard Arkley (1951 – 1999)

Arrows and crosses, 1980

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

203.5 x 77.5 cm

signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Arrows and Crosses / H Arkley 80

Estimate: $50,000 – 70,000

Provenance

Coventry Gallery, Sydney

Private collection

Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 10 August 1998, lot 169

Gould Galleries, Melbourne

Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 16 April 2008, lot 55 (dated 1979)

Private collection, Brisbane

Exhibited

Howard Arkley, Coventry Gallery, Sydney, 4 – 22 March 1980, cat. 13 (as ‘Ticks and Crosses’)

HA: Howard Arkley, Monash University Gallery, Melbourne, 18 October – 30 November 1991, cat. 20 (as ‘Arrows and Crosses’ also noting alternative title ‘Op’)

Howard Arkley, Gould Galleries, Melbourne, 12 August – 2 September 2001, cat. 3

Howard Arkley, Gould Contemporary, Sydney, 16 March – 14 April 2002, cat. 2

Howard Arkley and Friends, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, 5 December 2015 – 28 February 2016

Literature

Burke, J., ‘Bringing it all back home: thoughts on recent abstract painting’, Art and Australia, Sam Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 18, no. 4, 1981, pp. 372, 374 (illus., as ‘Op’)

Duncan, J., (ed.), HA: Howard Arkley, Monash University Gallery, Melbourne, 1991, p. 17 (illus., as ‘Deco’)

Crawford, A., and Edger, R., Spray: The Work of Howard Arkley, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1997, p. 28 (illus., as ‘Deco’ 1979)

Gregory, J., Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006, p. 57 (illus., as ‘Deco’ 1979)

Howard Arkley Online Catalogue Raisonné: https:// www.arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/11/14/arrows-andcrosses-1980-aka-op/ (accessed September 2025)

Howard Arkley’s painting Isotype, 1979, a commanding example of the artist’s elegant black and white abstractions, was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria in 1979.1 It was Arkley’s first purchase for a public collection. The exhibition that Isotype was selected from showcased the first of the artist’s ‘door’ paintings but also revealed that Arkley was moving in an exciting new direction. 2 Never one to rest on his laurels, Arkley had gone from the cool and spare sophistication of his black and white works to a series of large-scale paintings that jostled with an explosion of colour, pattern and decoration. As recognised by Janine Burke in her 1981 discussion of new abstraction, Arkley’s inspiration for these surprising works was an informed and cheeky amalgam of high and low sources drawn from art history, popular culture, and everyday life:

‘Arkley uses the doorways of suburbia and drops of material to determine the shape and scale of his paintings while their content is rife with mass-cultural visual cues: zinging, pulsating OpArt designs of the 1960s now retrieved and made familiar by courtesy of New Wave fashion and typography, the whirling configurations of psychedelic ‘bad taste’ with its high-keyed, sweet colours and

the recognizable designs of cheap, mass-produced household objects like Laminex, linoleum, mosaic tiles and shower-curtains.’ 3

Arrows and crosses, 1980 confidently continues Arkley’s challenge to the notion of ‘pure form’, interrupting the visual oscillations of Op Art with the artist’s assured airbrushed marks that seem to dance across the canvas.4 At once effortlessly precise and playful, the work’s complex design involves a combination of coloured sprayed elements with a repeated overall pattern of arrows and crosses in fine black line. With his first wife, artist Elizabeth Gower (from whom he separated in 1979) Arkley shared an interest in the way in which patternmaking could interrupt, complicate and converse with abstraction, thus also incorporating ideas drawn from craft and feminism into his abstract compositions. Such diverse sources are evident in the tram that Arkley was commissioned to paint by the Victorian Ministry for the Arts in the same year that Arrows and crosses was made. With its white background and all-over pattern of red, blue, black and grey circles, the tram’s makeover (or ‘gloss up’ in today’s jargon) was inspired by both embroidery and the fuzzy-edged circles of dot matrix printing. 5 One can imagine

that Arkley would have loved broadcaster Phillip Adams’ description of these ‘new’ Melbourne trams as ‘mobile murals’ and ‘electric frescoes’ 6 and the capacity of the tram to enable his art to participate and function in everyday life.

Arkley’s abstraction may have been eclipsed in both the art world and popular imagination by his later suburban imagery, but abstraction remains a key to the success of this work, with its lively juxtaposition of surfaces filled with colour, stencilling and moiré pattern. It is the strength and assuredness of a painting such as Arrows and crosses that has seen several of Arkley’s friends, such as John Nixon (himself a committed non-objective artist), emphasise the significant role of abstraction in Arkley’s oeuvre:

‘…Howard’s roots were in modernism, that’s where he started. Then after many years he got onto the ‘houses’, a very Australian topic. This was his most fruitful period with regard to his public profile and the support of collectors, but towards the end of his life he planned to return to abstraction – how this would have played out we will never know.’ 7

1. The work was acquired through the Michell Endowment, which was dedicated to the work of emerging Australian artists.

2. The exhibition was Howard Arkley: Recent Paintings, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 9 – 20 May 1979

3. Burke, J., ‘Bringing it all back home: thoughts on recent abstract painting’, Art and Australia, vol. 18, no. 4, Winter 1981, p. 372

4. This work was first shown in the exhibition Howard Arkley at Coventry Gallery, Sydney (4 – 22 March 1980). Gregory, J., ‘Arrows and Crosses 1980’, ArkleyWorks at: https://www.arkleyworks.com/ blog/2009/11/14/arrows-and-crosses-1980-aka-op/ (accessed 8 October 2025)

5. Arkley’s tram, Tram no. 384, 1980 was the twelfth in a series of sixteen commissioned as part of the Transporting Art Program. Gregory, J., ‘Tram No. 384’ 1980’, ArkleyWorks at: https://www. arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/11/14/tram-no-384-1980-3m/ (accessed 8 October 2025)

6. Phillip Adams, cited in Jones, R., ‘Transporting Art – Melbourne’s Art Trams’, Melbourne Tram Museum, 2028, https://www. hawthorntramdepot.org.au/papers/transportingart.htm (accessed 8 October 2025)

7. John Nixon, cited in Lynn, V., ‘And Friends’, in Fitzpatrick, A. & Lynn, V., Howard Arkley and Friends, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, 2025, p. 47

Kelly Gellatly

Ian Fairweather (1891 – 1974)

The river, c.1954

oil on cardboard

39.0 x 53.0 cm

signed lower right with initials: IF

Estimate: $50,000 – 70,000

Provenance

Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Nicholas G. Andrews, Sydney Alan Geddes, Sydney Lawsons, Sydney, 16 May 1989, lot 88 (as ‘Youngtse River [sic]’)

Private collection

Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 5 May 2003, lot 115 (as ‘Yangtse River [sic]’)

Private collection

Niagara Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso)

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in March 2004

Exhibited

Show of Sixes, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 8 – 20 February 1956, cat. 6

Summer Collection of Works by Eminent Australian Artists, Irving Fine Art, Sydney, 5 January – 3 February 1990 (as ‘Yangtse River [sic], c.1945 – 47’)

Blue chip VI: the collector’s exhibition, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 2 – 27 March 2004, cat. 15 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 17)

Literature

Irving Fine Art advertisement, Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press Pty Limited, Sydney, vol. 27, no, 2, 1989, p. 188 (illus.)

Described by Murray Bail as ‘the least parochial of Australian painters, an artist of exceptional force and originality,’ 1 Ian Fairweather remains one of the most enigmatic figures of twentieth-century Australian modernism. Blending abstraction with the fluidity of calligraphic mark-making, indeed Fairweather forged a visual language so distinctive that it not only it set him apart from his contemporaries, but quickly won the admiration of peers including Russell Drysdale, Margaret Olley, and Donald Friend. Notably, his work also drew critical acclaim from major art world figures such as Robert Hughes, who famously camped overnight outside Sydney’s Macquarie Galleries in 1962 to acquire a Fairweather painting for his own personal collection.

An ‘itinerant, escapist utopian’ 2, Fairweather’s life was defined by endless movement and solitude. His travels throughout Europe, Asia, and the Pacific not only shaped his worldview but became the impetus for his art – as biographer Murray Bail observed, Fairweather’s journeys ‘wander through his art like a Chinese line,’ 3 each work a distillation of experience and memory rather than a literal depiction of place. Undoubtedly most formative were his years in China during the 1930s, where, immersed in both the dynamism of Shanghai and the meditative calm of smaller towns such as Huzhou, Hangzhou,

and Suzhou, he absorbed the philosophies of Chinese painting and calligraphy – with his subsequent abstraction echoing the rhythm, restraint, and spiritual stillness of East Asian aesthetics.

Nearly two decades later, after enduring many years of peripeteias and hardship, in 1953 Fairweather made his way back to Bribie Island, off the Queensland coast, where he would spend the remainder of his life. Ironically, it was on this remote island that he finally found a measure of stability and, for the first time since the outbreak of the Second World War, was able to establish a home (albeit austere) and dedicate himself wholly to painting. Isolated but creatively fulfilled, Fairweather worked from memory and from the sketches he had carried with him, drawing upon a mind crowded with vivid impressions of his travels. ‘I paint for myself,’ he mused, ‘and have no sense of mission, nor do I feel any compulsion to communicate, though naturally I am pleased when it seems I have done so.’4

A compelling example from this period, The river, c.1954 was most likely inspired by the artist’s recollections of Huzhou, in the Yangtze River delta north of Hangzhou. As was his custom, Fairweather sent the painting to Macquarie Galleries devoid of notes, leaving the choice of title to be assigned by the gallery’s directors when it was exhibited in the annual Show of Sixes in 1956. Though abstract in part, the composition retains an overall connection to landscape representation with its pale, winding river moving sinuously through a network of loosely drawn mountains and amorphous forms, evoking not one specific place but more likely, a composite memory of several – Huzhou, Suzhou, and possibly even Queensland.

Fusing memory, place and spiritual inquiry, such paintings from this mature period thus unfold across the support like a stream of consciousness, ‘essentially ‘written’ by his own experiences’ 5 – each a rich palimpsest of textured surfaces and allusions that inevitably reveal the inner depth or spirituality so fundamental to Fairweather’s highly idiosyncratic vision. The culmination of a lifelong quest to attain or comprehend some deeper existential meaning, they are contemplative works that powerfully transcend time or circumstance to elucidate emotions universal to all human experience. As Laurie Thomas reflected upon the originality of Fairweather’s legacy: ‘He paints what he sees. But what he sees nobody else had seen unti l now.’ 6

1. Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, p. 220

2. Ian Fairweather, cited in Fisher, T. , The Drawings of Ian Fairweather, 1997, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, p. 5

3. ibid.

4. Ian Fairweather, cited in Abbott-Smith, N., Ian Fairweather: Profile of a painter, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1978, p. xi

5. Bail, op. cit.

6. Thomas, L., ‘Ian Fairweather’, Art and Australia, Sydney, vol. 1, no. 1, May 1963, p. 35

Veronica Angelatos

Tony Tuckson (1921 – 1973)

Blue and Red (TP2), c.1958 – 61

oil on cardboard

100.5 x 67.5 cm

Estimate: $25,000 – 35,000

Provenance

Watters Gallery, Sydney

Hugh Jamieson, Sydney

Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 28 April 1997, lot 121 (as ‘Abstract’)

Private collection

Sotheby’s, Sydney, 24 August 2004, lot 44 (as ‘Abstract’)

Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited

Tony Tuckson. Paintings, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 27 May – 13 June 1970, cat. 2

Literature

Legge, G., Free, R., Thomas, D. and Maloon, T., Tony Tuckson, new, revised and updated edition, Watters Gallery for Craftsman House, Sydney, 2006, pl. 69, pp. 88 (illus.), 197

In May 1970, Tony Tuckson, a well-known and respected arts administrator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, presented a large number of abstract paintings at Sydney’s Watters Gallery, choosing to exhibit a survey of his older work, mostly produced between 1958 - 1965. This was simultaneously his first and penultimate solo exhibition, with Tuckson passing away prematurely in 1973 at the age of 52. Holding the position of Deputy Director to Hal Missingham since 1957, Tuckson’s observation of strict standards of professional ethics discouraged public exhibition of his own artworks for almost a decade. Only when his curatorial focus was wholly devoted to the pioneering collection of Aboriginal and Oceanic Art, and the commercial landscape of art galleries in Sydney was sufficiently robust, did Tuckson suddenly emerge from the shadows.1

The appearance of this ‘underground, secret action painter’ presenting a fully-formed and sophisticated abstract expressionist practice, was nothing short of astounding for local critics. 2 Reviewing the year in art, critic James Gleeson described this arrival as ‘a sudden flood. 3 The first exhibition immediately generated recognition at an institutional level – Daniel Thomas attempted to purchase two works for the Art Gallery of New South Wales (the trustees only allowing one, namely Greeny yellow [TP23] ), and the National Gallery of Australia acquired Black, red and white upright [TP14 ] for their collection, still over a decade before the completion of their building in Canberra. Blue and red (TP2), c.1958 – 61, is a key painting from this first exhibition, a pivotal example of Tuckson’s private transformation from figuration to absolute gestural abstraction.4

The rhythmic spacing of blue and red lines, both straight and curved, across the scumbled white surface of Blue and red retain the distant memory of earlier figurative compositions, both from the Cocktail for two series and his De Kooningesque female nudes, one of which was exhibited as cat. 1 in the same exhibition at Watters. The process of abstraction from figures into a flat schema of shapes had been developed from a series gouache on paper works in similar saturated tones throughout the mid-1950s.

Confidently gestural, Blue and red was painted with a palpable sense of urgency. With a restricted palette of just three hues, the painting is arranged vertically with an ordered, grid-like structure of horizontal and vertical shapes evenly dispersed across the cardboard. Visibly unconcerned with smooth finishes and decorative polish, Tuckson’s immediate and raw mode of creation emulated those of the international avant-garde, namely French Art Informel (Jean Dubuffet), and American action painting (Willem De Kooning and Jackson Pollock), to which Tuckson had been exposed through periodicals received by the library at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. 5 Other more local influences abound in Tuckson’s 50s abstractions: the flattened cubist space and layered shapes from early instruction in abstract art at East Sydney Tech from Ralph Balson and Grace Crowley, and confident linear figuration from Ian Fairweather, whose work Tuckson collected in the 1950s, not only for the art gallery but also for his personal collection. Tuckson’s important recognition of Australian Aboriginal art as fine art rather than ethnographic artefacts also influenced his own mark-making towards the end of the 1950s. Synthesising these various influences into a refined and distinctive gestural style marked Tuckson as Australia’s foremost abstract expressionist, whose legacy continues to be felt today.

1. Santoro, L, ‘Going Public: Tuckson at Watters Gallery,’ in Tuckson, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2018, p. 65

2. Lynn, E., ‘Incandescent Glow’, Bulletin, Sydney, vol. 92, vol. 4707, 6 June 1970, p. 49

3. Gleeson, J., ‘Profit Loss in 1970’, Sun, Sydney (undated except in Tuckson Files, Art Gallery of New South Wales)

4. The TP and TD numbering system for Tuckson’s artworks was devised posthumously, starting from his first exhibition. Blue and Red was the second work listed in the catalogue for the exhibition at Watters in 1970, hence TP2. In the show, all works were exhibited untitled and described solely with medium and size, and approximately dated in tranches: c.1958 – 61, May 61 – Oct 62, Oct 62 – 1965 and one work from 1970

5. Daniel Thomas, cited in Legge, G., (et al.) Tony Tuckson, revised ed., Craftsman House, Sydney, 2006, p. 29

Lucie Reeves-Smith

Sidney Nolan (1917 – 1992)

Kelly and floating policeman, c.1964

oil on composition board

57.0 x 72.5 cm

signed lower right: Nolan bears inscription on gallery label verso: KELLY + FLOATING POLICEMAN / SIDNEY NOLAN

Estimate: $100,000 – 150,000

Provenance

Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso)

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above

Related works

Policeman floating in the river, 1964, oil on hardboard, 152.4 x 122.9 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Kelly and policeman, 1964, oil on hardboard, 152.4 x 121.9 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Sidney Nolan Policeman floating in the river, 1964 oil on hardboard

152.4 x 122.9 cm

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney © The Sidney Nolan Trust.

All rights reserved, DACS / Copyright Agency 2025

Sidney Nolan is arguably the most significant Australian artist of the twentieth century. From his earliest works of the 1930s through to major canvases executed in the late 1980s, Nolan’s inventiveness and prodigious output across art, theatre, dance and film made him a renowned figure on the world stage. He was also an inveterate traveller, visiting six continents whilst still retaining his deep connection to his homeland, its history and its legends. Of these, the doomed explorers Burke and Wills, the shipwrecked Eliza Fraser and the Antarctic explorer Douglas Mawson loom large, but it was the iconic bushranger Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly whose story dominated Nolan’s imagination to the extent that he saw him as an alter-ego, such that his colleague Albert Tucker always started letters to Nolan with the words ‘Dear Ned’. Kelly’s story still causes consternation in many quarters but in this infamous figure, the artist recognised a similar defiance and independence – one which animated Nolan’s evolving ruminations on the outlaw. Kelly and floating policeman, c.1964, is an evocative example from the third series, now recognised as the artist’s most personal sequence.

Ned Kelly was born of proud Irish heritage in the small town of Beveridge, north of Melbourne, subsequently moving with his

family to Greta, east of Benalla. Following an incident when the drunk Constable Fitzpatrick attempted to seduce his fourteenyear-old sister Kate, Kelly was forced into hiding and his mother Ellen was taken into custody, then jailed as a deliberate incentive to draw her son out. Outraged by this blatantly unjust provocation, Kelly and his three companions (Joe Byrne, Steve Hart and Ned’s younger brother Dan) absconded to the bush; when police attempted to capture them, three officers were left dead. Now declared outlaws, the Kelly Gang committed several flamboyant bank robberies and became legends amongst the Irish-born communities in the area. After evading police for some eighteen months, the Gang were finally cornered at Glenrowan. Wearing their now-famous armour, Ned’s three companions were killed whilst he, grievously wounded, was taken back to Melbourne for trial. On 11 November 1880, aged twenty-five, Ned Kelly was hanged, and his legend has increased ever since.

Told that his grandfather had participated in the pursuit of the Gang, Nolan often visited Kelly’s armour as a child when it was displayed at the old aquarium attached to the Royal Exhibition Building.1 Following a hapless journey to ‘Kelly country’ in 1946 in the company of his Angry Penguins colleague, Max Harris,

Sidney Nolan

Kelly and policeman, 1964 oil on hardboard

152.4 x 121.9 cm

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney © The Sidney Nolan Trust. All rights reserved, DACS / Copyright Agency 2025

Nolan began his first series on the outlaw at Heide, with his patron Sunday Reed assisting on some of the panels. Set as an episodic odyssey, these paintings from 1946 – 47 were chronological, painted in jaunty, high-key colours utilising a faux-naïve style described famously as being comprised of ‘Rousseau and sunlight.’ 2 By the time of the second series dated 1955 – 56, Nolan was living in London but had also travelled extensively through central Australia, experiencing harsh landscapes, drought and herds of dead cattle. Reflecting this, the second sequence is thus paler in palette, the atmosphere parched, and Kelly struggles through saltpans on a cadaverous horse, bearing wounds from his travails. In 1964, John and Sunday Reed organised a European tour of the original paintings from 1946 – 47 (of which they retained possession), giving Nolan his first opportunity to see them again since his abrupt departure from Heide. Their impact on his psyche was profound, as it was on British audiences with the Daily Mail describing them as ‘25 paintings that seize you by the throat.’ 3 Nolan now decided to create a new sequence set amidst the forests and muddy banks of the Goulburn River at Shepparton, ‘where I spent my boyhood holidays... It is very much my father’s country.’4 The series begins with a preliminary painting in August 1964, subsequently followed by several images

of Antarctica, and Burke and Wills. Kelly reappears in late October and from then on, a number of compelling works appear, including Kelly and floating policeman, c.1964, plausibly painted before December, after which Nolan’s palette changed markedly.

Nolan’s close friend Elwyn Lynn described the Kelly of 1964 as ‘a much-diminished, frail dryad of the woods, more human and less a generalised symbol’ 5; and the outlaw’s vulnerable nakedness in Kelly and floating policeman is demonstrative of this. The dead trooper (whose two stripes indicate a Senior Constable) references the deadly ambush at Stringybark Creek, the pivotal moment when Kelly’s destiny was sealed. This symbolism was also key for Nolan and he painted two larger versions of this psychologically-charged scene: Policeman floating in the river, 1964, and Kelly and policeman, 1964 (both Art Gallery of New South Wales). Such a motif would also later reappear in the second panel of the monumental Riverbend, 1964 – 65 (Australian National University).

1. The Aquarium was in the northeast wing of the Royal Exhibition Building from 1930 until 1953, when it was destroyed by a fire.

2. Sidney Nolan, cited in Clark, K. et al., Sidney Nolan, Thames and Hudson, London, 1961, p. 30

3. Walter, R., ‘25 paintings that seize you by the throat’, Daily Mail, London, 1 July 1964

4. Sidney Nolan, cited in The Listener, London, 13 November 1969

5. Lynn, E., Sidney Nolan: myth and imagery, Macmillan, London/Melbourne, 1967, p. 31 Andrew Gaynor

Albert Tucker (1914 – 1999)

Horned figure, 1966

synthetic polymer paint on composition board

91.0 x 122.0 cm

signed and dated lower left: Tucker / 66 inscribed with title verso: HORNED FIGURE bears inscription on gallery label verso: HORNED FIGURE / ALBERT TUCKER

Estimate: $80,000 – 120,000

Provenance

Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso)

Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited

Albert Tucker, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 26 April – 13 May 1966, cat. 15

The

, 1964 oil and plaster on board

101.3 x 75.8 cm

Albert Tucker decided to explore distinctly Australian themes in his work while living in Italy (he had left Australia in 1947 and was to not return until 1960), where distance allowed a different perspective on the creative possibilities contained within inherited myths and traditions. Sharing a fascination with the story of Ned Kelly alongside his close friend Sidney Nolan, who had painted his first Kelly series in 1946 – 47, Tucker began his investigations of Australian iconography in the same place, creating versions of the Kelly story that pictured the bushranger as a dark, mysterious and isolated figure quite unlike the jaunty iron-clad hero of Nolan’s brightly coloured Ripolin paintings. As Tucker later recalled in an interview with Janet Hawley, he had once said to Nolan that ‘I was painting hell, and he was painting paradise… and I saw a very satisfied grin spread across Nolan’s face.’ 1

The subject of Kelly was a starting point for Tucker, resulting in a broader exploration of the hardship of life in the Australian bush and the relationship between man and the land. The craggy and scarified forms of Tucker’s images from this time – thick with paint and encrusted surfaces – were no doubt inspired in part by Nolan’s photographs of the 1962 Queensland drought, which he shared with Tucker when the pair reconnected in Rome where Tucker was based. 2 However, the artist’s discovery in Paris of the work of Jean Dubuffet, and his meeting with Italian artist

Alberto Burri while living in Rome, also played a considerable role in this important transition in his practice. Tucker soon adopted Burri’s use of polyvinyl acetate (which enabled Burri to build up the surfaces of his works), using its ‘flexible and leathery toughness’ 3 to great effect in his subsequent Antipodean Heads, and, as these works coalesced into bushrangers, explorers and other creatures, for the remainer of his career.

As he recalled: ‘I’d been away long enough to be suffering acute bouts of nostalgia and I was getting all these memory images of Australia – and oddly enough not so much specific imagery, but in images of texture and colour and light and all that kind of thing that’s very Australian, very rough textures.’4

Following the influence of artists such as Picasso, Tucker had a lifelong interest in non-Western art and he began collecting sculptures and masks in Melbourne in the 1940s, later travelling to New Guinea to experience the Sepik River region firsthand and further expand his collection. Like the early French modernists, ‘primitive’ art served as a liberating force in Tucker’s practice, helping to free him from the inherited constraints of the Western tradition and open his practice to the power and possibilities of myth. The potent combination of Surrealism, the poetry of T.S. Eliot and contemporary discussion of Jung’s archetypes, served as a platform for discovery and experimentation in his

Albert Tucker

intruder

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney © The Albert & Barbara Tucker Foundation. Courtesy of Smith & Singer Fine Art

Albert Tucker

Faun attacked by parrot 3, 1968 synthetic polymer paint, sand and wood on hardboard

137.0 x 106.5 cm

© The Albert & Barbara Tucker Foundation. Courtesy of Smith & Singer Fine Art

work from as early as the 1940s and the creation of his now iconic series Images of Modern Evil, 1943 – 48. From the grinning faces of the women in a painting such as Victory girls, 1943 (National Gallery of Australia) and the triangular gaping mouth of the figure in Memory of Leonski, 1943 (National Gallery of Victoria), the mouth motif thus transformed into the shape of a crescent, serving as a kind of visual shorthand for the artist:

‘In a way, that crescent thing became a kind of key; it was a hieroglyphic thing. I reached the point in around 1943 that, if I painted and I did not have that crescent, then I could not work. I would have to tear it down, throw it away, nothing would happen. But the moment I got that crescent image in, the thing would fill itself in. It was like automatic writing. Once I had that key form, the rest of the thing would fill itself in rapidly and immediately with whatever data was in my head at the time from wandering around Melbourne.’ 5

While maintaining an echo of Tucker’s crescent form, Horned figure, 1966 seemingly takes its cue from the mythological horned figures that populate ancient sculpture and the memory of a double-headed axe that the artist had seen in the Etruscan Museum in Rome.6 With its feathery visage and cleaved mouth, statuesque body and claw-like torso, the creature of Horned figure

is a menacing and primordial amalgam of recognisable parts. And, like its creator’s contested relationship to his homeland, it appears at once part of the landscape it finds itself in, and strangely isolated from it. As Tucker reflected in later life:

‘…But I do feel that whatever the struggles and conflicts and difficulties of my own life and I did work out the resolution of a lot of them through images and painting and I’d hope this [his paintings] plots a sort of an autobiographical diagram almost, a diagrammatical account of my life because I think it can be traced through all that now. And so... I feel that I have left a few footprints shall I say…’ 7

1. Hawley, J., ‘Making Pictorial Sense of Modern Evil’, Good Weekend, 18 February 1995, p. 40, cited in Burke, J., Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker, Random House Australia, Sydney, 2002, p. 163

2. ‘Albert Tucker’, Art Gallery of New South Wales at: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/ collection/artists/tucker-albert/ (accessed 23 March 2025)

3. ibid.

4. Harding, L., Hinterlands: Albert Tucker’s Landscapes 1960 – 75, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, 2008, p. 31

5. ‘James Gleeson Interviews: Albert Tucker’ (transcript), 2 May 1979, National Gallery of Australia, at: https://nga.gov.au/media/dd/documents/tucker.pdf (accessed 23 May 2025)

6. Albert Tucker, The Intruder, 1964’, Art Gallery of New South Wales, at: https://www. artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/429.2016/#about (accessed 23 May 2025)

7. Heimans, F., Australian Biography: Albert Tucker, (video excerpt and transcript), 26 mins, 1993, National Film and Sound Archive, at: https://www.nfsa.gov.au/collection/curated/ asset/99512-australian-biography-albert-tucker?utm_source=pocket_saves (accessed 23 May 2025)

Kelly Gellatly

Emily Kam

Kngwarreye (c.1910 – 1996)

Yam country, 1993

synthetic polymer paint on canvas 151.0 x 91.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Delmore Gallery cat. 93A07 bears inscription on label verso: Yam Country / January 1993

Estimate: $150,000 – 200,000

Provenance

Commissioned by Delmore Gallery, via Alice Springs, Northern Territory in 1993 William Mora Galleries, Melbourne Applied Chemicals Collection, Melbourne Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 29 November 2007, lot 32 Private collection, Sydney Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 22 October 2011, lot 9 Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited

Of My Country: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, The Applied Chemicals Collection, Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, 1 May – 30 May 1999, and touring to: Hamilton Art Gallery, Victoria, 4 June – 10 July 1999; Swan Hill Regional Gallery, Victoria, 16 July – 22 August 1999; Wagga Wagga Gallery, New South Wales, 27 August – 19 September 1999; Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria, 28 December 1999 – 2 February 2000; George Adams Gallery, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, 31 March – 30 April 2000

This painting is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Delmore Galleries, Alice Springs.

Celebrated for her vibrant and colourful paintings based on the ever-changing desert landscape in her father and grandfather’s Country of Alhalker, Emily Kngwarreye was deeply rooted in the Anmatyerr land of her ancestors, to whom she paid respect through a lifetime of ceremonial song, dance and painting. Her art chronicled on canvas this triangular-shaped country where Emily was born in 1910, the youngest of three children, and where she lived in the ways of the eastern Anmatyerr.

When the borders of the Utopia pastoral lease were drawn across their lands in 1926, the traditional life of the Anmatyerr and Alyawarr people was disrupted. Over the ensuing decades, local people including Kngwarreye, lived a traditional life combined with intermittent work on the emergent pastoral stations. In 1977, Emily was introduced to batik as part of adult education classes held on Utopia Station and rose to become the most senior member of the fledgling Utopia Women’s Batik Group. Ten years later, in 1988 – 89, Kngwarreye painted her first work on canvas, initiating a meteoric and well-documented rise to fame.

Stylistically, Yam country, 1993 echoes a number of remarkable earlier paintings executed in 1990 and 1991. Notably, it was created in January of 1993, during a summer which was memorable for below-average rainfall and shortage of water across the country – with the drought felt particularly keenly in the Simpson Desert and Central Australia regions including at Utopia, a land characterised as a broad, flat area of desert covered by windswept sand hills and little vegetation. Offering a bright, joyous celebration of this land’s resilience, Yam country focuses upon the imminent burgeoning of the yam seed, the bush potato from which Kngwarreye derived her name. The underlying graphic matrix of meandering lines mirrors the subject – the rhizomatic roots of the Anwerlarr (the pencil yam, Vigna lanceolata) – painted here in bold red lines and semi-covered by superimposed dotting and broad stippled blotches that systematically weave across the surface of the painting. Occupying a unique transitionary place in the development of Kngwarreye’s technique with disparate compositional and stylistic devices coexisting on the one canvas, indeed the work represents an apt symbolic expression of the swift seasonal changes about to animate the desert landscape of the artist’s country.

As Janet Holt states in the accompanying certificate of authenticity, ‘It is often an important ceremony that is triggered by the nature and/or timing of the season that provokes Emily’s memory and lasting emotions. In this case, she has painted following summer rains that are accompanied by the annual ceremonial season. She also believes that through ceremony (‘awelye’) and her belief in the power of the desert, she can help provoke the desert’s hidden energy into a new and bountiful season, and consequent crop of bush tucker.’

Nearly three decades have passed since Emily Kngwarreye died in September 1996, yet her name remains synonymous with the best of Australian Indigenous art. An original, intuitive and often enigmatic artist, her painting career lasted less than a decade, but the critical acclaim for her prodigious output has only burgeoned in the years subsequently and today she is recognised internationally as one of the most important contemporary artists of the twentieth century.

Crispin Gutteridge

31 Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally

Gabori (c.1924 – 2015)

Dibirdibi country, 2009

synthetic polymer paint on linen 121.5 x 136.5 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name, title, medium, Mornington Island Arts and Crafts cat. 3954–L–SG–0109 and Alcaston Gallery cat. AK14953

Estimate: $25,000 – 35,000

Provenance

Mornington Island Arts and Crafts, Mornington Island, Queensland Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne (stamped on stretcher bar verso) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in December 2009

Exhibited

Makarrki – My Big Brother, King Alfred’s Country, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, 12 January – 6 February 2010 (label attached verso)

Coming to painting late in life as an octogenarian in 2005, th e art of Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori stands as a profound tribute to her homeland on Bentinck Island—a small, sparsely vegetated rise in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, where she spent the first two decades of her life. In her youth, Gabori and her community lived from the natural abundance of the surrounding ocean and estuaries, following the communal traditions of the Kaiadilt people.

In 1948, after a series of natural disasters, Gabori and the remaining inhabitants of Bentinck Island were forcibly relocated to the Presbyterian mission at Gununa on nearby Mornington Island. Although skilled in making fish traps and woven baskets, the Kaiadilt, unlike many other Aboriginal language groups, did not have a tradition of mark-making—whether on tools, objects, or bark. Taking this cultural background into account, Gabori’s artistic vision is entirely self-fashioned, drawn from the mental maps of her beloved Bentinck Island and the country she cherished. From her earliest works, Gabori painted aspects of her own country as well as those of her brother, father, and husband—depicting not only the geography of the land but also the rich sea life central to the Kaiadilt world.1

A powerful evocation of her husband’s homeland, Dibirdibi Country, 2009 depicts a subject Gabori returned to more often than any other. Here, she recalls the country of her husband, Kabarrarjingathi Bulthuku Pat Gabori, and the story of the Rock Cod Ancestor. The painting represents the mangrove swamps and saltpans of his country, as well as a small river near his birthplace—the mythic site where, in ancestral times, the liver of Dibirdibi, the Rock Cod Ancestor, was cast into the sea, creating a permanent freshwater well. 2

Known for her luminous palettes and intuitively bold brushwork, Gabori layers multiple meanings into her depictions of Dibirdibi. She paints at once the physical landscape of the saltpans, the Dreaming of the Rock Cod Ancestor, a portrait of her late husband bound to his country, and, ultimately, her own profound sense of longing, loss, and remembrance.

1. Pinchbeck, C., ‘Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori’ in unDisclosed, 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2012, p. 64

2. McLean, B., ‘Dulka Warngiid; The Whole World’ in Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori Dulka Warngiid: Land of All, Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2016 p. 40

Crispin Gutteridge

Emily Kam Kngwarreye (c.1910

– 1996)

Untitled (Awelye), 1993

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

121.0 x 91.0 cm

bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Delmore Gallery cat. 93L046

Estimate: $60,000 – 80,000

Provenance

Commissioned by Delmore Gallery, via Alice Springs, Northern Territory in 1993

Private collection

Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 24 November 1998, lot 128

Private collection, Melbourne

This painting is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Delmore Galleries, Alice Springs.

The genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye is apparent in the way she created highly evocative paintings of great visual complexity out of deceptively simple marks with the brush. Untitled (Awelye), 1993 is painted in a varied palette of closely matched, high key tones where the overlapping brush marks create an optical density and depth that takes the eye across all parts of the canvas. The effect is to evoke the dizzying summer heat of December in the desert. Yellow, white and pink dots float in and out over a field of red, green and soft purple.

As Janet Holt recalls in the accompanying certificate of authenticity, ‘we observe a close aerial view of country in early transformation…. Birds are quiet, brittle grass and dry twigs snap, and soft growth amazingly rises and spreads over the bare soil’. With emergent growth out of the heat and dryness of summer and with the potential of coming rain, each feathered brush mark suggests the myriad of plants that bloom at this time of year.

33

Frederick McCubbin (1855 – 1917)

Portrait of the artist’s son John [Sydney], 1903

oil on canvas

137.5 x 70.0 cm

signed and dated lower right: F McCubbin / 1903

Estimate: $150,000 – 200,000

Provenance

Private collection

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Sir Archibald Glenn OBE, Melbourne, acquired from the above in November 1973

Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited

Fred and Louis McCubbin, Athenaeum Art Gallery, Melbourne, 14 August – 1 September 1912, cat. 11

Spring Collection Recent Acquisitions, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 24 October – 7 November 1973, cat. 16 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, n.p., as ‘Portrait of the Artist’s son, Sidney [sic]’)

The Art of the Dog, Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum, Victoria, 31 March – 27 May 2007, cat. 61

Telling Lives, Town Hall Gallery, Hawthorn Arts Centre, Melbourne, July 2007

We are grateful to Peter Perry, former Director of the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum, for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

Frederick McCubbin

Lost, 1907 oil on canvas

134.6 x 199.0 cm

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

One of Australia’s most celebrated painters, Frederick McCubbin was pivotal to the development of Australian Impressionism through both his role as a founding member of the Heidelberg School and his close association with key figures of the movement, including Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder, and Louis Abrahams. Importantly, his artistic vision was also influenced by 19th century French realist painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage and Gustave Courbet, as well as the plein air traditions and the aestheticism of James McNeill Whistler – all of which informed the stylistic development of the Heidelberg group.

In 1886, McCubbin was appointed as drawing master at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School – a role which became official in 1888 with a salary of £300 per annum, and which he held until his death in 1917. Though he maintained an active painting career, teaching became a financial

necessity due to the demands of supporting a large family, comprising four sons and three daughters. Notably, several of his children would inherit his creative spirit: Louis and Sheila went on to become painters, Alexander pursued publishing, and Kathleen established herself as a writer.

One of the artist’s fondest models was his fifth child, John ‘Sydney’ McCubbin (1896 – 1954) – known affectionately as ‘Ginger’ and immortalised in the superb portrait on offer here. Born on 13 June 1896 in Brighton, Victoria, Sydney thus features in some of his father’s most iconic works, including Lost, 1907 (National Gallery of Victoria) in which – aged about ten years old – he is portrayed alone and vulnerable in the harsh Australian bushland. His youngest sister, Kathleen, later recalled that the work was painted early in the morning and captured the environment surrounding their family property at Mount Macedon, ‘Fontainebleu’.1 Sydney was also the model for the infant in On

On the wallaby track, 1896 oil on canvas

122.0 x 223.5 cm

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

the wallaby track, 1896 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), and likewise appears in Boy flying a kite, 1909 (private collection) as well as A frosty morning (also known as Winter morning), 1910, held in the Ewing Collection at the University of Melbourne.

Although a subject in his father’s art, Sydney ultimately pursued a quite distinct career path in the field of science and technology. According to family accounts, particularly in Kathleen’s memoir Autumn Memories: A McCubbin Family Album, Sydney was a ‘born inventor’ and following the First World War, became deeply engaged with the emerging field of wireless radio technology. 2 Inspired by Marconi’s groundbreaking discoveries, Sydney immersed himself in the study of shortwave radio, captivated by its ability to transmit signals around the globe. His innovative thinking and technical expertise quickly earned him a strong reputation in this rapidly evolving field, and by the time Sydney married in 1932, his profession was

listed as ‘Radio Engineer’, reflecting his serious commitment to the discipline. At the time of his death on 26 May 1954, his occupation was formally recorded as ‘Inventor’ – a fitting tribute to a man whose mind was constantly seeking new frontiers.

Thus, while his father captured the spirit of the Australian landscape on canvas, Sydney helped explore the invisible landscape of wireless communication. Though less publicly celebrated than his father’s legacy as an educator and pioneer of national artistic identity, his achievements nevertheless exemplify the continuation of intellectual and creative inquiry within another generation of the McCubbin family.

1. Mackenzie, A., Frederick McCubbin 1855 – 1917 ‘The Proff’ and his art, 1st edition, Mannagum Press, Victoria, 1990, p. 134

2. Mangan, K., Autumn Memories A McCubbin Family Album, Georgian House, Melbourne, 1988, p. 139 – 140

Frederick McCubbin

Tom Roberts (1856 – 1931)

Portrait of Annie Springthorpe [née Inglis], 1887

oil on canvas

60.5 x 51.0 cm

Estimate: $50,000 – 70,000

Provenance

Dr John Springthorpe, Melbourne, commissioned directly from the artist, 1887

Private collection

Sotheby’s, Sydney, 16 August 1999, lot 67

Private collection, Melbourne

Literature

Barbour, F. H., ‘Jottings’, 1887 – 88, La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, MS 8746

Cotter, J., Tom Roberts and the Art of Portraiture, Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2015, fig. 5.15, p. 214 (illus.)

Related work

Annie Springthorpe and Enid Springthorpe, 1891, oil on wood panel, 37.5 x 27.5 cm (irreg.), private collection

ACCOMPANIED BY FAMILY HISTORY BOOK

In Memoriam by Dr John Springthorpe, c.1897, following the death of his wife Annie (née Inglis).

An important member of the Australian Impressionists, Tom Roberts is hailed as the father of Australian landscape painting. He is particularly renowned for the creation of nationalistic pictures such as Shearing the rams, 1888 – 90 (National Gallery of Victoria) and A break away!, 1891 (Art Gallery of South Australia), which were painted in the years leading up to Federation and celebrate nineteenth century rural life and masculine activity.

Roberts was also a skilled painter of people, able to capture the mood and character of his subjects, as well as their physical likeness, and in fact portraiture makes up around a third of his painted oeuvre. As Mary Eagle observed, ‘he was a different painter when tackling portraits. Almost invariably they evoked from him sure, subtle and sophisticated brushwork and an equally competent characterisation.’ 1 His motivation was sometimes practical – as he once explained to a friend, ‘Portraits pay… my boy’ 2 – with commissions of politicians and other public figures easier to secure than patronage for large and time-consuming subject and history pictures. 3

Soon after his marriage to Annie Inglis in January 1887, Dr John Springthorpe commissioned this portrait of his new wife who he described as ‘self-sacrificing, modest, tender, true and wise.’4 Springthorpe was a distinguished Melbourne doctor – a graduate of the University of Melbourne who in 1881 became

the first Australian to gain membership to the Royal College of Physicians – and a keen patron of the visual arts. He had commissioned Roberts to paint his own portrait in 1886 and later, John Longstaff also painted him on two occasions. Springthorpe purchased works by Roberts, Streeton and Conder from the famous 9 x 5 Impression Exhibition of 1889 and when his art collection was sold following his death, The Argus reported that, among others, it also included work by Hans Heysen, Louis Buvelot, H. J. Johnstone, J. H. Scheltema and Web Gilbert. 5

Seated close to the picture plane and looking out towards the viewer, Annie Springthorpe exudes a serene confidence which belies her youth. She was only twenty years old at the time and as her friend, Fanny Barbour, observed, ‘I’m sure if she wasn’t married she’d just be a madcap school-girl.’ 6 Roberts describes her features and delicate complexion: rosy cheeks, brown eyes and auburn hair – golden when it catches the light – which is drawn up onto her head. Characteristically, he also takes pleasure in the depiction of her clothing, from the lace collar and gold brooch at her neck to the stylised ruffled panel down the front of the dress which is masterfully described entirely in black paint. Although black clothing often signified mourning, Julie Cotter explains that it held other meanings at this time –‘power, elegance, urbanity, subversion and sexual allure’ – and that Roberts incorporated these into his images of women.7

Roberts painted Annie Springthorpe again in 1891, this time an intimate and informal portrait with her young daughter Enid on a small wood panel. Six years later she died prematurely during the birth of her fourth child. Bereft at the loss, John Springthorpe memorialised his beloved wife in a book (a copy of which accompanies this painting) and an extravagant temple-like monument at the Boroondara Cemetery, Kew. A collaboration between architect Harold Desbrowe Annear, sculptor Bertram Mackennal, the artist John Longstaff and others, it was completed in 1901 and is now on the Victorian Heritage Register. 8

1. Eagle, M., The Oil Paintings of Tom Roberts in The National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997, p. 54

2. Tom Roberts, cited in Taylor, G., Those Were the Days, Sydney, 1918, p. 100, cited in Topliss, H., Tom Roberts 1856 – 1931, A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, p. 20

3. See Topliss, ibid.

4. Jalland, P., ‘Magnificent obsession’, The Age, Melbourne, 23 March 2002, at: https://www. theage.com.au/entertainment/books/magnificent-obsession-20020323-gdu2dd.html (accessed 1 September 2025)

5. ‘Dr. Springthorpe’s Art Collection Sold’, The Argus, Melbourne, 25 May 1934, p. 5

6. Barbour, F. H., Jottings, 1887 – 88, La Trobe Collection, State Library Victoria MS8746

7. Cotter, J., Tom Roberts & the Art of Portraiture, Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2015, p. 214

8. Sanders, A., ‘Springthorpe, John William (1855 – 1933)’, Obituaries Australia, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, at: https://oa.anu.edu.au/obituary/ springthorpe-john-william-8610/text24842 (accessed 1 September 2025). See also Sanders, A., ‘Less than Six Degrees of Separation’, lecture given at the National Portrait Gallery, 28 May 2011, at: https://www.portrait.gov.au/content/less-than-six-degrees-ofseparation (accessed 1 September 2025)

Kirsty Grant

Arthur Streeton (1867 – 1943)

Cedar tree, Combe Bank, 1913

oil on canvas

76.5 x 63.5 cm

signed with initials lower left: AS. bears inscription verso: A. STREETON

Estimate: $50,000 – 70,000

Provenance

Sir Robert Mond, Combe Bank, United Kingdom

Nevill Keating Pictures, London Private collection, Melbourne

Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 22 April 1996, lot 14 Henry Krongold, Melbourne

Thence by descent

Private collection, Melbourne

Related work

The lake, Coombe Banks [sic], 1913, oil on canvas, 64.0 x 102.0 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Arthur Streeton first lived in London between 1897 and 1906 but struggled to make an impression. For some years, he wooed the ‘brilliant, educated, successful, socially experienced and well-connected Canadian-born violinist Esther Leonora (Nora) Clench’ 1, but his comparative status as an impoverished artist weighed heavily on his mind. Knowing that he still had a larger profile in Australia – indeed, a number of his early works were already attracting large sums at re-sale – Streeton decided to return briefly in late 1906, holding financially successful exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney. Sufficiently emboldened, he returned to his now-fiancé in London, and they were married in 1908. Part of the honeymoon was spent in Venice, and Streeton returned there for a painting expedition in September, where he ‘threw off his devotion to conscious art, and became absorbed again in truth of presentation.’ 2 Through his wife’s connections, he met Dr Ludwig Mond, whose chemical manufacturing business was famed in Europe. Mond was a major collector of art works, predominantly by historic European artists, but his ‘tastes were wide enough to encompass contemporary art, and Streeton was to find Ludwig Mond, and his sons Robert and Alfred, a valuable source of patronage over the years to come.’ 3 Indeed, the Monds purchased one of Streeton’s paintings of Venice’s Grand Canal in 1909, and the artist’s son was christened Charles Ludwig Oliver Streeton in honour of their patron and friend. In 1912, Streeton ‘joined a party led by the painter Sigismund Goetze, to travel down the Loire. Nora had been instrumental in Streeton’s involvement with Goetze, who was married to Ludwig Mond’s sister, Violet.’4

Over Easter the following year, Streeton, Nora, Oliver and his nanny stayed at the Monds’ home Combe Bank in Sevenoaks, Kent. Built in 1725 for the Duke of Argyle, Combe Bank is a

Palladian-style villa sited near the River Darent with extensive a creages of forest including ‘a dozen or so old cedars and miles of park.’ 5 Ludwig Mond purchased the property in 1906 but on his death in 1909, it passed to his son Robert who carried out extensive alterations to the gardens, building a rockery and a formal rose garden. Streeton wrote vividly of the days and evenings there filled with ‘billiards, golf, fishing, shooting, ‘music’, peaches and grapes – nothing wanting.’ 6 It also included a major commission from Mond to paint ‘a dozen landscapes of the place and surroundings to be hung in the house.’ 7 Cedar tree, Combe Bank, 1913, in particular, clearly expresses Streeton’s delight as he painted aspects that caught his eye. Rapidly executed, likely en plein air, the vigorous horizontal brush marks of the work convey the sweeping movement of branches caught by breezes on a gusty day. Likewise, the agitation inherent in the blustering clouds accentuates this sensation.

Other subjects featured in the sequence include a small play cottage known as the ‘Children’s house’, a stand of other cedars, and a substantial vista of the noble frontage of Combe Bank with attendant mature trees. A further work, The lake, Combe Banks, 1913, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, features people boating on the southern side of the property – again surrounded by trees and foliage. All these paintings display the ‘truth of presentation’ Streeton had been striving for following Venice, particularly evident in the evocative spontaneity he captured in this painting.

1. Wehner, V., Arthur Streeton of Longacres: A Life in the Landscape, Mono Unlimited, Melbourne, 2008, p. 6

2. Lindsay, L., ‘Arthur Streeton’, in The Arthur Streeton Catalogue, Arthur Streeton, Melbourne, 1935, p. 16

3. See Wray, C., Arthur Streeton: Painter of Light, Jacaranda, Brisbane, 1993, pp. 116, 120

4. ibid., p. 122

5. Arthur Streeton, Letter to Walter Pring, 30 March 1913, cited in Galbally, A. and Gray, A. (eds.), Letters from Smike: The Letters of Arthur Streeton 1890 – 1943, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p. 125

6. ibid.

7. ibid.

Andrew Gaynor

Rupert Bunny (1864 – 1947)

Orchard in springtime, c.1923

oil on canvas

54.0 x 65.5 cm

signed with artists’ monogram lower left: RCWB bears inscription on stretcher verso: Spring

Estimate: $30,000 – 40,000

Provenance

Mrs E Ward–Thomas, Sydney

Don Burrows, Sydney

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne

Private collection

Sotheby’s, 30 April 2002, Melbourne, lot 132

Private collection, Brisbane

Exhibited

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 1 – 14 September 1982, cat. 28 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

Literature

Thomas, D., Rupert Bunny 1864 – 1947, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1970, cat. 0505, n.p.

Thomas, D., The Life and Art of Rupert Bunny: A Catalogue Raisonné, Thames and Hudson, Melbourne, 2017, vol. 2, cat. 0611, pp. 68 – 69

37

Rupert Bunny (1864 – 1947)

River at Suèvres, c.1922

oil on canvas

59.5 x 73.0 cm

signed with artists’ monogram lower left: RCWB bears inscription on stretcher bar verso: River at Suevres

Estimate: $30,000 – 40,000

Provenance

Mrs M. G. Sloman, Melbourne Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 3 May 2000, lot 283 Private collection, Brisbane

Exhibited

Exhibition of oil paintings by Rupert C. W. Bunny, Anthony Hordern and Sons Galleries, Sydney, 8 – 22 September 1925, cat. 12

Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Rupert C. W. Bunny, The New Gallery, Melbourne, 1 – 13 November 1926, cat. 9

Probably: Exhibition of Paintings by Rupert Bunny, Georges Gallery, Melbourne, 9 – 19 September 1947, cat. 8 (as ‘River at Sucures [sic]’)

Literature

‘Australian Artist: Pictures of Southern France’, The Argus, Melbourne, 2 November 1926, p. 14

‘Art Notes’, The Age, Melbourne, 2 November 1926, p. 7

‘A Melbourne Art Show’, The Bulletin, Sydney, 4 November 1926, vol. 47, no. 2438, p. 36

‘MR. BUNNY’S PAINTINGS.’ The Australasian, Melbourne, 6 November 1926, p. 1243

Turnbull, C., and Buesst, T., The Art of Rupert Bunny, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1948, p. 74

Thomas, D., The Life and Art of Rupert Bunny: A Catalogue Raisonné, Thames and Hudson, Melbourne, 2017, vol. 2, no. 0555, p. 65

Walter Withers (1854 – 1914)

A coming storm, c.1898

oil on canvas

31.0 x 51.0 cm

signed lower left: Walter Withers bears inscription on Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery label verso: The Coming Storm

Estimate: $20,000 – 30,000

Provenance

Estate of the artist, until 1926

Sedon Galleries, Melbourne

Ross Mackenzie, Tasmania, acquired from the above Thence by descent

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired c.1980s Christie’s, Melbourne, 3 – 4 May 2004, lot 98 (as ‘The Coming Storm, Winter’)

Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited

Possibly: 3rd Annual Exhibition of the Yarra Sculptors Society, Yarra Sculptors’ Society, Melbourne, 1901, cat. 13 (as ‘A Coming Storm’) Art Union of Paintings by the Late Walter Withers and his Son Meynell Withers, Sedon Galleries, Melbourne, 3 – 15 May 1926, prize 12 on long term loan to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 1974 – 1980 (label attached verso)

Literature

Mckenzie, A., Walter Withers: The Forgotten Manuscripts, Mannagum Press, Victoria, 1987, p. 42

Ruth Sutherland (1884 – 1948)

Girl seated on a wheelbarrow in a farmyard, c.1920

oil on canvas on board

43.5 x 50.0 cm

Estimate: $10,000 – 15,000

Provenance

Doris Bullock, Adelaide, a gift from the artist

Thence by descent

John Bullock, Adelaide

Thence by descent

Private collection, Adelaide Exhibited

A Century of Australian Woman Artists, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 4 June – 3 July 1993, cat. 36 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 55)

Hans Heysen (1877 – 1968)

The white gum, 1945

watercolour on paper

32.0 x 40.5 cm

signed and dated lower left: HANS HEYSEN 1945 bears inscription with title, artist and ref. W-93-DH.H. on label verso, signed by David Heysen

Estimate: $30,000 – 40,000

Provenance

Probably: David Heysen, Adelaide Private collection, Adelaide Private collection, Melbourne Menzies, Sydney, 1 December 2021, lot 68 Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited

Landscape, Five Fifty Art Advisory, Melbourne, 6 May – 3 July 2021, cat. 11 (label attached verso)

Hans Heysen’s prodigious talent was recognised early to the extent that in 1899, at the age of twenty-two, four South Australian patrons made a gift to £400 enabling him to study in Europe for four years. Upon his return, the results were immediately apparent with the Art Gallery of New South Wales purchasing The coming home, 1904, followed by Heysen’s first Wynne Prize for landscape painting that same year. He also married one of his students, Selma Bartels. In 1908, the couple (now with two daughters) moved to rented premises in Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills. Four years later, they purchased ‘The Cedars’, a sprawling property of thirty-six acres filled with thousands of gum trees, a great number of which became central to his paintings – with the artist often returning over time to chart the changing effects of light upon them as they aged. Here he built a bespoke studio, which remains standing today as the oldest surviving example in Australia. Employing his European studies as foundation, Heysen was thus able to ‘(render) the gum tree familiar; they are like oak trees, solid, reliable citizens of the countryside.’ 1 The white gum, 1945, features one of these majestic trees looming above grazing cattle, set against a background vista of scrubby forest and hills.

Heysen never forgot his first patrons’ generosity nor the faith they had in his skills, and he remained a dedicated and prodigious artist to the end of his long life. He also took great pride in the success of his daughter Nora whose training was largely under the benevolent gaze of her father. Heysen was also a master draughtsman and his disciplined, yet sensitive, drawings provided

the armature for his equally impressive watercolours. Indeed, of the nine Wynne Prizes he would eventually win, five were watercolours. It is ‘the medium of the light touch’ 2, unlike oil paint, which can be layered and mixed over time. Watercolours, once dry, resist later alterations so the artist must get the colour and the stroke correct the first time. This is particularly evident when studying a work such as The white gum, in the variation of colouring in the trunk of the tree, and in that of the purpleblue hills and bushland; these are skills honed over decades of practice, to which art collectors repeatedly responded.

The white gum was painted in the final year of World War II, a challenging period for the German-born Heysen who had already endured xenophobia towards him during the Great War. Nora had been a war artist based in Finschhafen, New Guinea, enduring bombing raids as she worked, while her father also suffered a great sadness when one of his oldest friends (one of the original four patrons) died in 1945. The white gum may therefore be considered against such circumstance. As much as the world attempted to tear itself apart, and as friends would inevitably age and die, his beloved trees would survive – sentiments which imbue his mature paintings with a vitality and measured optimism that is impossible to ignore.

1. Plant, M., ‘Render unto the gum tree’, in The real thing, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 1997, p. 56 2. ibid., p. 57

Andrew Gaynor

Bill Henson born 1955

Untitled 1985/86, 1985 – 86

printed 1995

type C photograph

120.0 x 102.0 cm

edition: 7/20

signed, inscribed and numbered below image: Image 95 EDITION: 7/20

‘UNTITLED 1985 – 86’ Bill Henson

Estimate: $15,000 – 20,000

Provenance

Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited

Bill Henson: Three Decades of Photography, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 8 January – 3 April 2005; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 23 April – 10 July 2005 (another example)

Literature

Henson, B., and Annear, J., Mnemosyne, Scalo, Zurich, in association with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, p. 295 (illus. another example)

Related work

Untitled 1985/86, from the series Untitled 1985/86, type C photograph, 106.5 x 86.5 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Bill Henson born 1955

Untitled #13 1985/86, 1985 – 86

type C photograph

105.0 x 86.0 cm (image)

128.0 x 100.0 cm (sheet)

edition: 14/20

signed, inscribed and numbered below image: Image #13 EDITION 14/20 ‘UNTITLED 1985/86’ Bill Henson

Estimate: $15,000 – 20,000

Provenance

Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited

Bill Henson: Three Decades of Photography, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 8 January – 3 April 2005; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 23 April – 10 July 2005 (another example) Suburban Sublime: Australian Photography, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 10 August 2024 – 10 August 2025 (another example)

Literature

Henson, B., and Annear, J., Mnemosyne, Scalo, Zurich, in association with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, p. 290 (illus. another example)

Related work

Another example of this photograph is held in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

2 Ngaarr – 2 Strong, 2023

pigment and acrylic on linen

200.0 x 200.0 cm

signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: 2 NGAARR – 2 STRONG / REKO 2023.

Estimate: $30,000 – 40,000

Provenance

Station Gallery, Melbourne

Private collection, Melbourne

‘Art can save you. Art can change you. Art is an act of power. Don’t let anyone say you can’t do it or say otherwise. I think if I could inspire other people or have other people talk about my work in the future, I just want them to remember that I am just this kid that came from the west. I had nothing and took a chance.’ 1

Growing up in Melbourne’s multicultural western suburbs, Reko Rennie recalls that he did not experience overt racism until later in life, ‘There were Vietnamese immigrants, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish kids, all these different nationalities, a real melting pot of diversity in the community.’ 2

Raised by his mother and maternal grandmother, Julia—a Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay woman born in Walgett, northern New South Wales, and a member of the Stolen Generations—Reko became aware of the impacts of structural racism from an early age. Although his family had endured the institutional racism that separated Julia from her birth family, his mother’s strength and pride in her Aboriginal identity deeply influenced him. From a young age, visits to the National Gallery of Victoria with his mother exposed Reko to art from diverse cultures around the world. While he felt disconnected from the Aboriginal art typically displayed in galleries—most often works from remote communities—he found inspiration in urban Indigenous artists such as Destiny Deacon, as well as international figures like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Andy Warhol.

Reko sought out an art that reflected his lived experience and ‘for the young Rennie, graffiti was synonymous with city life.’ 3 2 Ngaarr – 2 Strong translates literally to ‘Too Strong’ in the Kamilaroi language of his maternal grandmother and accordingly, the present is a bold gestural composition shimmering in blue and red. It has an energy that echoes the tagging and urban interventions from Rennie’s earlier expressions in graffiti on trains, bridges, buildings and other structures along train lines in the inner west of Melbourne.

Signalling an intention to position his Indigenous heritage at the forefront of his artistic practice, Rennie’s OA (Original Aboriginal) project, employs Kamilaroi patterning inherited from his grandmother – specifically, the diamond-shaped designs previously carved into trees for use in ceremony. Such traditional designs are combined with hard-edged abstraction, camouflage and geometric patterning, together with graffiti-style text to produce proclamations of political resistance and commentary on Aboriginal identity, alongside broader cultural themes of power, memory and history.

1. Reko Rennie, cited in an interview with Myles Russell-Cook, August 2024 in ‘Sacred geometry: The art and life of Reko Rennie’ in REKOSPECTIVE: The Art of Reko Rennie at: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/sacred-geometry-the-art-and-life-of-reko-rennie/ (accessed 16 October 2025)

2. ibid

3. ibid.

Crispin G utteridge

Del Kathryn Barton born 1972

Self with protective head-wear to think about my father, 2001

pencil and coloured pencil on paper

76.0 x 56.5 cm

signed, dated and inscribed with title lower right: self with protective head-wear to think about my / father / del.k.b. / 2001

Estimate: $7,500 – 10,000

Provenance

Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney

Private collection, Sydney

Clementine Blackman, Sydney

Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 20 April 2011, lot 128

Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited

Del Kathryn Barton, Drawings from California, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney, 2001, cat. 31

Jonny Niesche born

1972

After image (study), 2020

voile, acrylic mirror and wood

75.5 x 61.0 x 6.5 cm

signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: “After image study” / NIESCHE / 2020

Estimate: $12,000 – 18,000

Provenance

Station Gallery, Melbourne

Private collection, Queensland, acquired from the above in 2021

Grace Cossington Smith (1892 – 1984)

Autumn at Apolima, 1951

oil on canvas on cardboard

46.5 x 36.5 cm

signed and dated lower left: G. Cossington Smith. 51 signed and inscribed with title on artist’s label verso: Autumn at apolima / Grace Cossington Smith

Estimate: $25,000 – 30,000

Provenance

The Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane Private collection

Christie’s, Sydney, 26 October 1987, lot 695 Private collection

Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 26 April 1999, lot 36 Private collection, Perth

Exhibited

Society of Artists Jubilee Exhibition, Education Department Gallery, Sydney, 1 – 17 September 1951, cat. 3 (as ‘Autumn at Apolema’ [sic])

Grace Cossington Smith, The Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 18 – 28 March 1952, cat. 4

Lina Bryans (German/Australian, 1909 – 2000)

From the studio, Harkaway, 1952

oil on canvas on cardboard

76.0 x 63.0 cm

signed lower left: Lina

signed and inscribed with title verso: ‘From the studio Harkaway’ / Lina Bryans

Estimate: $6,000 – 8,000

Provenance

Private collection, Melbourne

Roger Cooper, Victoria, friend of the artist

Private collection, Melbourne and Victoria

48

Harald Vike (1906 –

1987)

Self portrait, 1940

oil on canvas

46.0 x 30.5 cm

inscribed with title and dated upper right: Self portrait / July 1940

Estimate: $15,000 – 25,000

Provenance

The artist, until 1983

Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, June 1988 (label attached verso)

Private collection, Perth

Thence by descent

Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited

Australian Art: 1820s–1980s, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 19 May – 3 June 1988, cat. 68 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

Harald Vike 1906 – 1987: A Retrospective, Art Gallery of Western

Australia, Perth, 13 July – 9 September 1990, cat. 21 (label attached verso)

Harald Vike Retrospective, McKenzie Gallery, Perth, 31 July – 8 August 2004

after Van Gogh: Australian artists in homage to Vincent, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria, 6 September – 30 October 2005

Literature

Goddard, J., Harald Vike 1906 – 1987 A Retrospective, Kingstream Fine Art Pty Ltd, Perth, 1990, cat. 21, pp. 47, 51 (illus.), 88

Bromfield, D., ‘Vike an urban master’, The West Australian, Perth, 21 July 1990

Rooney, R., ‘Nordic nuance, Aussie accent’, Weekend Australian, 11 November 1990

James, R., and McCulloch, S., after Van Gogh: Australian artists in homage to Vincent, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria, 2005, pp. 16 (illus.), 17

Jeffrey Smart (1921 – 2013)

Study for Wallaroo, 1951

oil on plywood

13.0 x 23.0 cm

signed lower right: Jeff Smart bears inscription verso: “WALLAROO”

Estimate: $20,000 – 30,000

Provenance

George Page Cooper, Melbourne

Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 3 November 1993, lot 46 Private collection, Melbourne

Related works

Wallaroo, 1951, oil on plywood, 68.4 x 107.0 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Large Study for Wallaroo, 1951, pen, ink and watercolour wash on paper, 31.0 x 48.0 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Wallaroo VI, 1951, drawing in pen, ink wash, gouache, 29.0 x 48.2 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

We are grateful to Stephen Rogers, Archivist for the Estate of Jeffrey Smart, for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

The following excerpts are from Deborah Hart’s discussion of Wallaroo, 1951 (for which this lot is the study) in ‘Wallaroo: A Summation and Farewell’ in Jeffrey Smart, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2021, pp. 82 – 87:

‘Jeffrey Smart’s Wallaroo, 1951 is a painting of utmost clarity and poise. It embodies a rhythmic swing in the dynamic of two boys carrying a boat, echoed by the posts rising in the foreground and the dramatic arc of the pipeline emerging from the edge of a cluster of rocks, leading our vision around to the background. There is an insistent doubling of forms across the scene, like notes that rise and fall between the spaces of a musical composition. The slender figure stepping out of from the water’s edge holds his arm out in a balletic pose for balance. It becomes another curing line, a gesture akin to floating in air like the boat itself. The luminous beach is the open terrain into which the figures enter, moving towards architectural structures positioned like stage props in the background. The figures seem held in time; the haunting stillness gently amplified by the orb of the moon, ‘a note against a plain surface’ that inevitably adds to the romanticism of the whole conception as an evocation of being and becoming, held in equilibrium.

…[The work] came into being during the course of visiting the copper mining town of Wallaroo on the Spencer Gulf coast of South Australia where he spent time in the landscape undertaking pencil drawings and watercolour studies. In this environment, he discovered the ruins and wreckage of the old mines, ‘great mounds of earth thrown up, making small

mountains of different colours’, and old buildings constructed by Cornish immigrants in the nineteenth century. Smart felt the best way to arrive at a conception for the painting was to spend time ‘just to get the feel of this town’, noting how different sights made their way into sketches, with elements extracted and reoriented in the final composition…

Looking back, Wallaroo represented the culmination of much of what Smart had learned and been working towards over the previous decade: in its earthly palette, painterly brushwork and engagement with the local South Australian landscape. The bold shapes and underlying geometry were informed by Dorrit Black’s teachings and her introduction of dynamic symmetry and the golden mean, linking the art of the past with modern artists like Paul Cézanne and Fernand Léger…[Meanwhile] the underlying classicism in the work, relating to harmony and balance, was informed by his keen interest in the ancient world which came to the fore during 1950 while he was living on the island of Ischia and spending time visiting Greek temples, as well as making regular trips to the Naples National Archaeological Museum.

…Ultimately the painting is an amalgam of multiple overlapping currents of interest for a burgeoning artist on the cusp of new discoveries. At 30 years of age, it is testimony to the fact that he recognised his path forward was to distil what he later often described as ‘crystalline clarity’ out of complexity. As the last direct engagement in his art of this period with the South Australian landscape, Wallaroo can be considered an evocative farewell painting to Smart’s place of origin and a work of key significance in his artistic development.’

National

Jeffrey Smart Wallaroo, 1951 oil on plywood

68.4 x 107.0 cm

Gallery of Australia, Canberra

© The Estate of Jeffrey Smart

Arthur Boyd (1920 – 1999) St Jerome, c.1968

oil on canvas

114.5 x 108.5 cm

signed lower right: Arthur Boyd

Estimate: $60,000 – 80,000

Provenance

Eddie Glastra Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1997

At the close of the 1960s, Arthur Boyd had already been living continuously as an expatriate in London for ten years, his reputation as a contemporary artist on the international stage in ascendancy. Here, he had fortified his strong allegiance to the traditions of European paintings, visiting original works by masters hitherto only accessible through printed reproductions. Christian iconography had been embedded in Boyd’s imagination from an early age through the ritual reading of biblical stories to him by his grandmother, Emma Minnie Boyd (1858 – 1963).1 These familiar narratives were again brought to the fore with Italian paintings from the Trecento seen during his visit to the towns of Assisi and Gubbio in 1964. Seizing on a friendship and association with the medievalist art historian Thomas S. R. Boase (a former director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and President of Magdalen College, Oxford), Boyd embarked on a series of highly inventive responses to the stories of Saint Francis and, later, the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar. Likely created in parallel to this celebrated series depicting the banished king, Boyd’s vigorous painting of Saint Jerome similarly presents a penitent figure exiled in an inhospitable wilderness, hounded by threats unseen.

Arthur Boyd found a renewed vigour for painting around 1966, generating energetic works in sustained narrative suites. Subsequent expressive paintings, including St Jerome, saw Boyd delve back into his ample visual vocabulary, creating images that blended man, beast and the landscape. Importantly, Boyd yielded to his audience’s free association, cautioning, ‘if you look at my pictures and wonder what they are about, they are mostly about animals and people [...] they really have little to say unless the person looking at them is able to

make up a story.’ 2 Saint Jerome nevertheless appears within Boyd’s painting with traditional attributes: in the red robes of a cardinal, bent over the Bible. Both he and his companion, a lion (who, according to hagiographical belief, had been tamed by Jerome’s removal of a thorn from its paw), seem impervious to the creeping forest and a ghostly apparition that surges from the darkness. In contrast to the snarling beast who had pursued Nebuchadnezzar in the wilderness, the silvery lion in this painting now provides Jerome with serene companionship.

The story of Saint Jerome was particularly popular in 15th-century European art, establishing an iconography in which the site of his exile, the Syrian desert, was transformed into a temperate wooded landscape. With the textured, rapid brushwork, Boyd’s tangled wood rises on either side of the canvas, creating an enveloping structure of trees reminiscent of the threatening forest in Nebuchadnezzar caught in the forest, 1968 (Art Gallery of South Australia) and the earlier Hunter by a creek, 1966. Almost indistinguishable from this dense vegetation, the wizened, bearded form of the saint is depicted in profile, bent over his work. Although identified here as Saint Jerome, the figure of a pilgrim alone in nature, save for the watchful presence of an animal, is featured often in Boyd’s paintings. Echoing the saint’s own teachings, Boyd questioned the validity of materialistic greed and rapid urbanisation. 3 He presents in these works visual expressions of his search for truth and freedom in a disordered world.

1. Hoff, U., The Art of Arthur Boyd, Andre Deutsch, London, 1986, p. 83

2. Arthur Boyd, cited in Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993, p. 15

3. Gunn, G., Arthur Boyd. Seven Persistent Images, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1985, pp. 34 – 37

Lucie Reeves-Smith

Arthur Boyd (1920 – 1999)

Cloud, 1969

wool and cotton

202.0 x 210.0 cm

edition: 2/4

woven signature lower right: Arthur Boyd

woven monogram T/M/P lower right maker’s label attached verso: De Tapecarias De Portalegre, Portugal

Estimate: $30,000 – 40,000

Provenance

Clune Galleries, Sydney

Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1970

Exhibited

Arthur Boyd: Tapestries, Clune Galleries, Sydney, opened 17 February 1970

Arthur Boyd: Tapestries, South Yarra Gallery, Melbourne, opened 15 April 1970 (another example)

Exhibition of Paintings, Ceramics, Graphics and Tapestries by Arthur Boyd, Australian National University, Canberra, 21 – 26 October 1971 (another example)

Literature

Lynn, E., ‘Dominant tapestries’, The Bulletin, Sydney, vol. 92, no. 4693, 28 February 1970, p. 49

Related work

Nebuchadnezzar making a cloud, 1968, oil on canvas, 174.8 x 183.2 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Stimulated by his friendship with the art historian and medieval scholar T.S. Boase in London in the late 1960s, Arthur Boyd embarked on a major artistic series depicting the travails of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, whose story was related in the 2nd-century biblical apocalypse, the Book of Daniel. Created with fervent energy from 1966, Boyd’s series of paintings was initially intended to illustrate a text on the theme by Boase (who subsequently published 34 of the works in his dedicated tome in 1974), and was followed by many variations on the theme, including a pioneering group of tapestries based on the paintings, of which Cloud, 1969 was among the first. The ‘shocking, compelling and traumatic’ Nebuchadnezzar paintings had been exhibited to rapturous acclaim in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney in 1968 1, and a small group of 6 tapestries followed in February and April 1970 at Clune Galleries in Sydney and South Yarra Galleries in Melbourne. It was Cloud, replicating one of the most memorable images from the painted suite, Nebuchadnezzar making a cloud, which was chosen as the illustration for the cover of both exhibition catalogues.

No painter had ever before devoted himself to imagining the experiences of Nebuchadnezzar during his exile in the wilderness and descent into madness, punished for pride and blasphemy. Nebuchadnezzar making a cloud, 1968 (National Gallery of Australia) depicts the original sin of this story cycle: ‘the Jewish legend which told that Nebuchadnezzar made a cloud to hide him from human eyes so that he would be [invisible] like God.’ 2 While some of Boyd’s images from this series were based on written biblical accounts, they were also allegorically interwoven with recurrent motifs from his visual imagination and illustrations of his own contemporary social and political concerns. From a trunk emanating from the torso of the ghostly white king’s body, recumbent on green grass, Boyd’s cloud takes the form of an atomic mushroom cloud, emblazoned with a divine face that peers back down at the king. As Deborah Hart has suggested, ‘The envisioning of his power holds him captive. He is the maker of his own end, unable to lift himself from the enormity of his own creation.’ 3 We find here a poignant analogy with the man-made terror of the atom bomb, to which Boyd expressed his opposition in a peace march organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at Easter in 1960 –‘the largest demonstration London has seen this century.’4

Replicating the subtle streaks of colours from Boyd’s pastel works of Saint Francis and his gestural ferocity of the Nebuchadnezzar suite, the master weavers of Tapeçarias de Portalegre in Portugal translated Arthur Boyd’s imagery into textile on a vast scale. Encouraged by Frank McDonald, director of Clune Galleries and an enthusiast for the medium, tapestry became in the early 1960s a medium of interest for many Australian artists, including John Olsen, Sidney Nolan and John Coburn. Cloud was among the first tapestries to be woven from Arthur Boyd’s paintings, followed by a monumental 20-piece cycle of Saint Francis, now held in the National Gallery of Australia and to be the subject of a major solo exhibition there opening in June 2026.

1. McCaughey, P., ‘The Triumph’, The Age, Melbourne, 25 June 1968

2. Hoff, U., The Art of Arthur Boyd, Andre Deutsch, London, 1986, p. 57

3. Hart, D., Arthur Boyd. Agony and Ecstasy, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2014 p. 90

4. On this day 18 April 1960: Thousands protest against H-bomb, BBC, London at: http:// news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/18/newsid_2909000/2909881.stm (accessed 16 October 2025)

Lucie Reeves-Smith

John Olsen (1928 – 2023)

Lake Eyre, c.1996

watercolour and pastel on paper

79.0 x 88.0 cm

signed and inscribed with title lower right: John Olsen / Lake Eyre

Estimate: $35,000 – 45,000

Provenance

The Lowenstein Sharp collection, Melbourne Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 11 November 2002, lot 19 (as ‘Inland Lake’)

Private collection, Sydney Olsen Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired in 2019

Exhibited

John Olsen Archive, Olsen Gallery, Sydney, 11 December 2019 – 1 February 2020, cat. 3

For many artists, there is a motif to which they return at numerous points in their career, reinterpreting and drawing new inspiration. For Sidney Nolan, it was Ned Kelly; for Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire. For John Olsen, the motif is Lake Eyre. Its significance is such that Patrick McCaughey has described it as being central to ‘four decades of Olsen’s Dreaming.’ 1 ‘I’ve been nearly drowned on the blessed lake when our boat sank in a sudden storm; nearly been sucked under by the quicksand-like treacherous black mud; nearly been blown away by winds that howl in at midnight, buffeting your tent; I’ve had desert sand blow into my eyes, my paint, the camp oven, and ruin my beautiful fish paellas... but all in all, I’ve had a fabulous time there.’ 2

Located 700 kilometres north of Adelaide, Olsen first visited Lake Eyre in October 1974 in the company of naturalist Vincent Serventy. They had journeyed to see the lake’s largest flood in 500 years, an experience which profoundly affected the artist’s way of interpreting his world. ‘The lake might be viewed as an unconscious plughole of Australia, a mental landscape... Because it is 13 metres below sea level – and perhaps nowhere in Australia does one have the feeling of such complete emptiness – covered by a bowl of endless sky with inviting silences, there is, as you stand on the edge of the lake, a feeling that you are standing on the edge of a void.’ 3 For Olsen, Lake Eyre was important both visually and conceptually, as a place of contradictions – of fullness and emptiness, life and death.

Like the artist Ian Fairweather, whom he greatly admired, Olsen was fascinated by Chinese art and literature, and found in the vast expanse of the lake a strong association with Sung

Dynasty painting and the importance of space. Thus, in Lake Eyre, c.1996 he presents a perfect encapsulation of his artistic predecessors’ interpretation of the void as evoking the concept of ‘everything and nothingness’, ‘a place for contemplation, a vast, engulfing space.’4 Set on a highly tilted plane that may be viewed on a macro – and micro – level, the work captures that characteristic Olsen informality with the off-centre placement of the lake – a compositional device featured in many of his most iconic works, including Dark void, 1976 (formerly in the collection of the National Australia Bank) and Bathurst butter, 1999 (private collection) which Olsen presented as a gift to his wife at the time, Katherine Howard, on their tenth wedding anniversary.

Demonstrating Olsen’s brilliance as a master watercolourist, indeed the work dates from one of the most significant decades in the artist’s vast oeuvre – noted for the publication of Deborah Hart’s fine monograph in 1991 and his autobiography, Drawn from life in 1997, as well of course as the major retrospective exhibition hosted by the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales during 1991 – 92 which confirmed his enduring place as one of Australia’s finest artists.

1. McCaughey, P., Why Australian Painting Matters, The Miegunyah Press and Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2014, p. 23

2. John Olsen, cited in Hawley, J., ‘John Olsen’, Encounters with Australian Artists, University of Queensland Press, Queensland, 1993, p. 134

3. John Olsen, cited in Hart, D, John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, p. 133

4. Hart, ibid., p. 135 Andrew Gaynor

53

Fred Williams (1927 – 1982)

City skyline, Sydney Harbour, 1973

gouache on paper

15.0 x 76.5 cm

signed lower right: Fred Williams

Estimate: $20,000 – 25,000

Provenance

Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Melbourne

Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 29 April 2009, lot 13

Private collection, Sydney

Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 20 April 2011, lot 55

Private collection, Melbourne

Related works

Sydney Harbour, Fort Denison, 1973, gouache on paper, 14.0 x 77.0 cm, private collection

Sydney Harbour with ferry, 1973, gouache on paper, 14.0 x 77.0 cm, private collection

We are grateful to Lyn Williams for her assistance with this catalogue entry.

Banksy

A Collection of Works lots 54 – 59

Despite remaining officially anonymous, Banksy has become a household name, and his highly recognisable graphic motifs have reached far beyond the local street art scene from which he emerged in the late 1990s. In 2010, Time magazine compiled a list of the 100 most influential people in the world, including the English street artist, who, having always taken great care to protect his anonymity, appeared masked with a paper bag. Banksy’s messages, in contrast, are stencilled plainly in blackand-white on city walls, editioned in print and virally shared the world over, boldly addressing the unjust truths of contemporary society. Working from the guerrilla underground art scene of Bristol, Banksy’s provocative humanist motifs were first painted directly, or ‘bombed’, in the streets. Fulfilling a democratic and anti-elitist ethos, these murals reached ordinary people on their commutes around the city, and Banksy’s distinctive style of visual metaphor quickly gained broad popular support.

In many cases, Banksy’s images first appeared clandestinely sprayed directly onto street walls at prominent city junctions or emblazoned on cardboard protest signs used in mass public demonstrations throughout the early 2000s. To clearly communicate and appeal to the broadest possible audience, Banksy’s images feature simplified and easily readable archetypes, emblems around which to rally. Contravening the artist’s noble intent of democratic access to art, many of Banksy’s original public artworks have since

been removed. His images instead survive in the medium of screen-prints, which were commercially published and distributed in limited print runs by the artist-run cooperative ‘Pictures on Walls’ throughout the early 2000s.

In this medium, Banksy stands on the shoulders of giants, notably Andy Warhol, who was amongst the first to recognise the potential of the silkscreen to preserve the defining images of a generation. Warhol’s experimentations with printmaking set in motion the dismantling of hierarchical boundaries separating art media. In so doing, he also provided a framework for Banksy to reinterpret his site-specific practice into a tool of mass distribution, satisfying the artist’s disdain for the commercial structures of the art world.

Rude Copper, 2002, is considered to be the first of Banksy’s commercial prints, produced with Steve Lazarides, Banksy‘s agent at the time, and published in an edition of 250 examples. Its simple composition presents a British police officer in traditional uniform, his custodian ‘bobby’ helmet partially concealing his face, making an obscene hand gesture. Exemplifying Banksy’s famous anti-authoritarian stance common to practitioners of street art, Rude Copper derides these avatars of government power. It was produced during a time of strong popular criticism of the Terrorism Act, which, in 2000, expanded the Metropolitan Police’s powers to arrest and detain without warrant.

Bomb Love, Bristol, 1998 photographer unknown

Bomb Love, Laugh Now, and HMV were all early prints in Banksy’s oeuvre, produced the following year, in 2003. One of Banksy’s most powerful anti-war works addressing the controversial Iraq war, Bomb Love, features a little girl cuddling up to a missile, an incongruous contrast of innocence and violence – originally stencilled in East London in 2001 and later screenprinted with a fluorescent pink background. Laugh Now and HMV both use personified animals to make broader commentaries on power. Laugh Now is one of Banksy’s most enduring images: a forlorn monkey wearing a sandwich board transformed into a messenger of an impending revolution, retaliation for the historical and enduring mistreatment of animals in the entertainment industry. Similarly addressing inequalities of the entertainment industry, HMV appropriates the 1921 logo of the British music publishing company His Master’s Voice, giving the dog a bazooka with which to counter the directions of his master transmitted through the gramophone.

Barcode, 2004, transforms the stripes of these ubiquitous machine-readable symbols of commerce into the bent bars of a cage transporting a leopard. Showing the leopard walking free from the strictures of trade and exploitation, Banksy presents a hopeful scene of self-emancipation. Similarly criticising our dependence on mass-market consumerism, Trolleys, 2007, shows a group of prehistoric humans attempting to hunt a trio of shopping trolleys abandoned in their desert plain. With a comic juxtaposition of traditional huntingand-gathering practices with these icons of contemporary processed and packaged food, Banksy highlights our collective loss of skills and social collaboration.

Taking a rapid and resource-efficient method of creating artwork (aerosol and stencil cut-out) and applying it to an equally rapid mass-distributed medium, Banksy has been able to react and comment on current events almost immediately, creating valuable visual records of the anti-war and antiestablishment zeitgeist of the turn of the millennium.

Lucie Reeves-Smith

Banksy: Ape Rule (Laugh Now) photographer: Steve Lazarides

Banksy British, born 1974

Bomb Love, 2003

screenprint in colours on paper

70.0 x 50.0 cm (sheet)

edition: 383/600

numbered below image lower right published by Pictures on Walls, London

Estimate: $15,000 – 25,000

Provenance

Private collection

Forum Auctions, London, 28 November 2018, lot 3

Private collection, Melbourne

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Pest Control, London, issued in 2018, complete with one half of the corresponding, numbered, Di–Faced Tenner note attached.

Banksy British, born 1974

Rude

Copper, 2002

screenprint on paper

57.0 x 41.0 cm (sheet)

edition: 225/250 numbered below image lower right published by Pictures on Walls, London

Estimate: $15,000 – 25,000

Provenance

Private collection

Tate Ward Auctions, London, 24 June 2021, lot 243

Private collection, Melbourne

Literature

Banksy, Banksy: Wall and Piece, Century, London, 2006, p. 3 (illus., another example)

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Pest Control, London, issued in 2009, complete with one half of the corresponding, numbered, Di–Faced Tenner note attached.

Banksy British, born 1974

Laugh Now, 2003

screenprint in colours on paper

70.0 x 50.0 cm (sheet)

edition: 468/600 numbered below image lower right published by Pictures on Walls, London

Estimate: $30,000 – 40,000

Provenance

Private collection

Christie’s, London, 23 September 2021, lot 20

Private collection, Melbourne

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Pest Control, London, issued in 2021, complete with one half of the corresponding, numbered, Di–Faced Tenner note attached.

Banksy British, born 1974

HMV, 2003

screenprint on paper

29.0 x 44.0 cm (sheet)

edition: 287/600 numbered below image lower right stamped lower left: BANKSY published by Pictures on Walls, London

Estimate: $20,000 – 30,000

Provenance

Private collection

Lawsons, Sydney, 30 March 2021, lot 1

Private collection, Melbourne

Literature

Banksy, Banksy: Wall and Piece, Century, London, 2006, p. 201 (illus., another example)

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Pest Control, London, issued in 2020, complete with one half of the corresponding, numbered, Di–Faced Tenner note attached.

Banksy British, born 1974

Trolleys, 2007

screenprint in colours on paper

56.0 x 76.0 cm (sheet)

edition: 102/150

signed, dated and numbered below image lower right: Banksy 07

published by Pictures on Walls, London, with their blindstamp lower right

Estimate: $40,000 – 60,000

Provenance

Private collection

Forum Auctions, London, 26 June 2019, lot 344

Private collection, Melbourne

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Pest Control, London, issued in 2013, complete with one half of the corresponding, numbered, Di–Faced Tenner note attached.

Banksy British, born 1974

Barcode, 2004

screenprint on paper

50.0 x 70.0 cm (sheet)

edition: 276/600

numbered below image lower right

stamped lower left: BANKSY

published by Pictures on Walls, London

Estimate: $30,000 – 40,000

Provenance

Prescription Art, Brighton, United Kingdom

Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above on 20 October 2018

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Pest Control, London, issued in 2012, complete with one half of the corresponding, numbered, Di–Faced Tenner note attached.

Six Generations of Family Winemaking

While we are ever grateful and respectful of our past, it’s our future that excites us the most. And always has done. Any business that has managed to flourish across three centuries won’t ever be accused of resting on its laurels or wishing for yesteryear.

We stand on the shoulders of those who went before us and in doing so, we have a clearer view of what lies ahead.

And while it rests with the fifth and sixth generations of the Hill-Smith family to guide the ship, it’s all those who make up the wider Yalumba family today we are most grateful for. From our staff to our suppliers, trade partners and supporters. Every one of them has an undying passion for fine wines and great quality in all they do.

They inspire us and push us to greater heights, and we look forward to further collaboration with them, as well as new partners, in the years ahead.

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Risk in the lot, including risk of loss or damage, will pass to the buyer on either the date payment is due, whether or not it has been made, or on collection by the buyer, whichever is earlier. The buyer is therefore encouraged to make arrangements to ensure comprehensive cover is maintained from the payment due date.

TRANSPORT AND SHIPPING

Deutscher and Hackett directly offers services including storage, hanging and display, appraisals and valuations, collection management and research and in all instances will endeavour to coordinate or advise upon shipping and handling, insurance, transport, framing and conservation at the request and expense of the client. Deutscher and Hackett does not accept liability for the acts or omissions of contracted third parties.

EXPORT

Prospective bidders are advised to enquire about export licences — including endangered species licences and cultural heritage permits, where relevant — prior to bidding at auction. Telephone the Cultural Property and Gifts Section, Museums Section, Ministry for the Arts, on 1800 819 461 for further information. The delay or denial of such a licence will not be grounds for a rescission of sale.

COPYRIGHT

The copyright in the images and illustrations contained in this catalogue may be owned by third parties and used under licence by Deutscher and Hackett. As between Deutscher and Hackett and the buyer, Deutscher and Hackett retains all rights in the images and illustrations. Deutscher and Hackett retains copyright in the text contained in this catalogue. The buyer must not reproduce or otherwise use the images, illustrations or text without prior written consent.

conditions of auction and sale

ALL PARTIES ARE STRONGLY URGED TO READ THE CONDITIONS OF AUCTION AND SALE INCLUDED IN THIS CATALOGUE

The terms and conditions of business set forth below are subject to amendment by verbal or written notice prior to and during the auction and sale. They constitute the entire contractual agreement with the buyer in respect to any lot offered at auction. By bidding at auction in any manner compliant with bidding procedures, the buyer and all bidders agree to be bound by these terms and conditions and the terms of the prospective buyers and sellers guide contained in this catalogue, as amended. To the extent that an agent acts on behalf of the buyer, liability for obligations arising from these conditions of business will pass to the buyer. Multiple buyers are jointly and severally liable for obligations arising from this agreement.

DEFINITIONS

1. Definition of terms:

a. The ‘buyer’ refers to the party with the highest accepted bid for any lot at auction and/or such party’s principal where bidding as agent.

b. The ‘vendor’ refers to the party consigning property for sale and/or such party’s principal where acting as agent.

c. ‘Deutscher and Hackett’ refers to Deutscher and Hackett Pty Ltd ACN 123 119 022, its subsidiaries, officers, employees and agents.

d. The ‘hammer price’ refers to the final bid price (including any GST) accepted by the auctioneer, or in the case of a post-auction sale, the agreed sale price (including any GST).

e. The ‘buyer’s premium’ refers to the 25% (inclusive of GST) payable by the buyer calculated as a percentage of the hammer price.

f. ‘GST’ refers to the goods and services tax imposed by the A New Tax System (Goods and Services) Act 1999 as amended.

g. The ‘lot’ refers to the item(s) described against any lot number in the catalogue.

h. The ‘reserve’ refers to the minimum price (including any GST) the consignor will accept for a lot.

PRELIMINARY CONDITIONS AND DISCLAIMER

2. Agency: Deutscher and Hackett acts as agent for the vendor and the contract of sale for the lot will be between the buyer and the vendor.

3. Property is sold ‘as is’: To the extent permitted by law:

a. no guarantees, warranties or representations are made (express or implied) by Deutscher and Hackett or the vendor in relation to the nature and condition of any lot; and

b. Deutscher and Hackett disclaims liability for any misrepresentations, errors or omissions, whether verbal or in writing, in the catalogue or any supplemental material.

All factual information provided by the vendor is merely passed on by Deutscher and Hackett from the vendor or other source. Deutscher and Hackett has made no attempt to verify this information. All additional statements of opinion represent the specialist opinions of Deutscher and Hackett employees and should not be relied upon as statements of fact.

4. Responsibility to inspect: Responsibility remains with the buyer to satisfy its, his or her self by inspection and evaluation prior to purchase as to the nature and condition of any property.

CONDITIONS AT AUCTION

5. Registration: Bidders must register to bid and obtain a bidder’s paddle prior to the commencement of the auction. Registration requires that bidders provide proof of identity and Deutscher and Hackett may impose other obligations on the registration of bidders in its discretion.

6. Auctioneer’s discretion: Deutscher and Hackett reserves the right to absolute discretion over the conduct of the auction including the regulation of bidding and its increments. This discretion extends to the challenge or rejection of any bid, the right to withdraw any lot and the right to determine the successful bidder or reoffer a lot in the event of a dispute. The prospective buyers and sellers guide details an indicative process for the conduct of auctions. All parties are strongly urged to read the prospective buyers and sellers guide included in this catalogue.

7. Bidding: Deutscher and Hackett may sell each lot to the highest bidder at auction provided the reserve price has been met or where the net amount accounted to the vendor is at least equivalent to the net amount that would have been achieved for a sale at the reserve price. The fall of the auctioneer’s hammer marks the acceptance of the highest bid and the conclusion of a contract for sale between the vendor and the buyer. Unless otherwise agreed in writing with Deutscher and Hackett, the individual physically present at the auction who signals the bid accepts personal liability to pay the purchase price, including the buyer’s premium and all additional fees, taxes and charges.

GOODS AND SERVICES TAX

8. Amounts inclusive of GST: Unless otherwise specified, all amounts specified in this section as payable by the buyer, or otherwise used to calculate payment to Deutscher and Hackett, are inclusive of any GST component. Deutscher and Hackett will provide buyers with a tax invoice that meets the requirements of the Australian Taxation Office.

9. Application of GST to buyers: Buyers are required to pay a 10% GST which sum is:

a. included in the final bid prices where buying from a GST registered vendor; and

b. included in any additional fees charged by Deutscher and Hackett; and

c. included in the buyer’s premium.

If a buyer is classified as a “non-resident” for the purpose of GST, the buyer may be able to recover GST paid on the final purchase price if certain conditions are met.

POST-SALE CONDITONS

10. Post auction private sale: Should the lot fail to sell at auction, Deutscher and Hackett is authorised to sell the lot privately for a period of seven days in which event this agreement shall apply to the relevant buyer to the full extent of its provisions.

11. Payment: The buyer will not acquire title until payment has cleared in full. Interest at a rate of 17.5% p.a. will be charged over outstanding accounts where no extension of terms has been granted. Interest will be payable from the payment due date. With respect to each lot purchased, the buyer agrees to make the following payments within seven days from the date of sale:

a. The hammer price.

b. In exchange for services rendered by Deutscher and Hackett, a buyer’s premium calculated at 25% (inclusive of GST) of the hammer price.

c. Post sale packing, handling, shipping and storage where applicable.

d. If payment is made via Visa, Mastercard or American Express, any merchant fees payable by Deutscher and Hackett on the transaction as indicated in the prospective buyers and sellers guide. Payment must be made within seven days of the date of sale in Australian dollars by cash, cheque, direct deposit, approved credit cards or electronic funds transfer using the form and/or trust account details provided at the back of this catalogue. In certain circumstances, extension of payment may be granted at the discretion of Deutscher and Hackett. Once funds have cleared, the proceeds of the sale less the buyer’s Premium, GST and any commission or costs charged as agreed will be remitted to the vendor within thirty-five days of the date of sale provided payment has been received in full. Funds will be held in an interest bearing account by Deutscher and Hackett until remitted to the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett will be entitled to any interest earned during this period. Application for a cultural heritage export licence or any other licence in no way affects the buyer’s obligation to make payment or collection within the periods specified in sections 10 and 13a.

12. Risk and Title: Risk in the lot, including risk of loss or damage, will pass to the buyer on the earlier of:

a. the date payment is due, whether or not it has been made; and b. collection by the buyer.

The buyer assumes risk for the property in all respects from this date and neither Deutscher and Hackett nor the vendor will be liable for loss or damage occurring after the payment due date. The buyer is encouraged to make arrangements to ensure comprehensive cover is maintained from this date. Title in the lot does not pass to the buyer, even if the lot is released to the buyer, until the buyer has paid all sums owing to Deutscher and Hackett. If a buyer makes a claim against Deutscher and Hackett for damage or loss after sale, the buyer’s premium and the final bid price shall be payable notwithstanding.

13. Freight:

a. The buyer may only remove a lot from the Deutscher and Hackett premises once payment has been cleared in full and must be removed no later than seven days after the date of sale. Should items not be removed by this time, storage and insurance costs may be charged to the buyer. If a lot has not been collected within 30 days after the date of sale and alternative arrangements have not been with Deutscher and Hackett, the lot may be re-sold by Deutscher and Hackett without reserve at the next auction and Deutscher and Hackett may set off any amounts owed for storage and insurance costs and its standard commission before remitting the proceeds to the buyer.

b. Buyers are required to make their own arrangements for packing, handling, shipping and transit insurance for their property. Deutscher and Hackett does not accept responsibility or liability for the acts or omissions of any third party, such as a shipping agent, whether or not such a party has been recommended or suggested by Deutscher and Hackett.

14. Limited Warranty of Authorship: If a buyer is able to establish that a lot is a forgery in accordance with these conditions for sale within five years of the date of sale, the buyer shall be entitled to rescind the sale and obtain a refund of the hammer price from the vendor. The buyer must return the lot in the state in which it was sold within fourteen days of notifying Deutscher and Hackett of the forgery allegations. For a lot to be established as a forgery, the following conditions must be satisfied:

a. the buyer must supply two independent expert testimonies attesting to the forgery. Deutscher and Hackett is entitled to request further expert evidence where it deems the evidence provided to be unsatisfactory;

b. there must be no conflict of opinion among accepted experts in the field; and

c. the forgery must be able to be proven through means that at the time of publication of the catalogue were commonly employed and that will not damage or otherwise put the lot in jeopardy.

The limited warranty and the right to rescind the sale is not assignable and the buyer must have retained title to the lot without disposing of any interest in it up until the buyer notifies Deutscher and Hackett of the forgery allegations. The buyer acknowledges that it has no rights directly against Deutscher and Hackett if a lot is established to be a forgery.

15. Termination, Breach and Legalities:

a. Deutscher and Hackett breach: To the extent permitted by law, the sole and maximum remedy to a buyer for breach of warranty is a refund of original purchase price, including buyer’s premium. In such an event the sale contract shall be rescinded and all costs associated with returning the property (in the state in which it was sold) to the premises of Deutscher and Hackett are to be borne by the buyer. Deutscher and Hackett is not liable for any indirect or consequential loss or damage for any matter arising directly or indirectly as a result of the sale.

b. Buyer breach: Deutscher and Hackett may, in addition to other remedies available by law, exercise one or more of the following rights or remedies for breach:

i. Cancel the sale and retain any payment or property in Deutscher and Hackett custody as collateral or liquidated damages.

ii. Charge the buyer interest at the rate of 2% above the rate fixed under section 2 of the Penalty Interest Rates Act 1984 (Vic).

iii. Resell the property without reserve at the next auction or privately on five days notice. Any disparity between sale and resale prices, including associated costs such as, but not limited to, legal, storage and sale expenses, will be to the account of the defaulting buyer.

iv. Apply any part payment received from the buyer in respect of any lots at its discretion.

v. Retain any of the buyer’s property held by Deutscher and Hackett until the buyer has satisfied its obligations to Deutscher and Hackett.

vi. Take any other action Deutscher and Hackett deems necessary or appropriate.

vii. Refuse to permit the buyer to participate in future auctions.

viii. Provide the vendor with the buyer’s details to permit the vendor to take action against the buyer to recover the money.

16. Governing law and jurisdiction: These terms and conditions and any matters concerned with the foregoing fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of the state in which the auction is held.

17. Severability: In the event that any provisions of this agreement should be found unenforceable in a court of law, that part shall be discounted and the remaining conditions shall continue in full force and effect to the extent permitted by law.

Telephone Bid Form

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

Billing address (PO Box insufficient)

*Not including buyer’s premium or GST (where applicable). Bids are made in Australian dollars.

Please refer to the Prospective Buyers and Sellers Guide and the Conditions of Auction and Sale in this catalogue for information regarding sales.

By completing this form, I authorise DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT to contact me by telephone on the contact number(s) nominated. I understand it is my responsibility to enquire whether any Sale-Room Notices relate to any lot on which I intend to bid. I also understand that should my bid(s) be successful, a buyer’s premium of 25% (inclusive of GST), will be added to the final hammer price. I accept that DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT provides this complimentary service as a courtesy to its clients, that there are inherent risks to telephone bidding, and I will not hold DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT responsible for any error.

SALE CODE: Freeway

SALE No.: 084

IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART

MELBOURNE AUCTION 26 NOVEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 – 59 105 COMMERCIAL STREET

SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

please email, post or fax this completed form to:

DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

tel: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344

info@deutscherandhackett.com

INTERNAL USE ONLY

RECEIVED BY DATE TIME

SALE CODE: Freeway

SALE No.: 084

IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART

MELBOURNE AUCTION 26 NOVEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 – 59 105 COMMERCIAL STREET SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

Absentee Bid Form

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print) Billing address (PO Box insufficient)

(required)

please email, post or fax this completed form to:

DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

tel: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344

info@deutscherandhackett.com

RECEIVED BY

INTERNAL USE ONLY

*Not including buyer’s premium or GST (where applicable). Bids are made in Australian dollars.

Absentee bids must be received a minimum of twenty-four hours prior to auction. All absentee bids received will be confirmed by phone or fax. In the event that confirmation is not received, please resubmit or contact our office.

Please refer to the Prospective Buyers and Sellers Guide and the Conditions of Auction and Sale in this catalogue for information regarding sales. By completing this form, absentee bidders request and authorise DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT to place the following bids acting as agent on their behalf up to and including the maximum bid specified. Lots will be bought at the lowest possible bid authorised by a bidder in absentia.

Should the bid be successful, the buyer will be obliged to pay the final bid price plus buyer’s premium of 25% (inclusive of GST) of the final bid price. DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT provides this complimentary service as a courtesy to clients and does not accept liability for errors and omissions in the execution of absentee bids.

Attendee Pre-Registration Form

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

SALE CODE: Freeway SALE No.: 084

IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART

MELBOURNE AUCTION 26 NOVEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 – 59 105 COMMERCIAL STREET SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

please email, post or fax this completed form to:

DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

tel: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344

info@deutscherandhackett.com

tel: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344

info@deutscherandhackett.com

Catalogue Subscription Form

JOHN NIXON SONG

UNTIL 1 FEB FREE ENTRY THE IAN POTTER CENTRE: NGV AUSTRALIA, FED SQUARE

RIGG DESIGN PRIZE 2025

Richard Lewer Envy (after Edouard Manet) 2023 (detail)

synthetic polymer paint on brass

Private collection, Adelaide

Photographer: Andrew Curtis

War surgeon, anti-fascist, avant-gardist, benefactor: discover J.W. Power’s remarkable life story.

Australia’s most accomplished artist of the interwar European avant-garde. New publication available now

Tête c.1932 oil on canvas

x 55.9 cm

love of art lives on

will your legacy be? David Hockney’s A closer winter tunnel, February–March 2006 was purchased with funds provided by Geoff and Vicki Ainsworth, the Florence and William Crosby Bequest and the Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation 2007 For further information or to discuss your bequest in confidence, visit agnsw.art/leave-a-gift or phone +61 2 9225 1746

HANY ARMANIOUS STONE SOUP

Hany Armanious, Mumble 2023, pigmented polyurethane resin, gouache. Courtesy of the artist and Fine Arts, Sydney.

Live Auction Melbourne 26 March 2025, achieves total sales of $4.2M Entries Invited for forthcoming Auction, March 2026

Emily Kam Kngwarreye

Untitled (Awelye), 1992

synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 164.0 x 228.0 cm

Estimate: $400,000 – 600,000 Sold for $1,196,591 (inc. BP)

© Emily Kam Kngwarreye / Copyright Agency 2025

105 Commercial Rd, South Yarra, VIC Enquiries: 03 9865 6333

Sydney enquiries

36 Gosbell St, Paddington, NSW Enquiries: 02 9287 0600 Melbourne enquiries

info@deutscherandhackett.com www.deutscherandhackett.com for appraisals please contact

COPYRIGHT CREDITS

7 © The Estate of Grace Cossington Smith

8 © Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency 2025

9 © Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency 2025

10 © Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency 2025

11 © Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency 2025

12 © Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency 2025

13 © Courtesy of the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust

14 © Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency 2025

15 © courtesy of The Estate of Jeffrey Smart 2025

16 © courtesy of The Estate of Jeffrey Smart 2025

17 © The Estate of James Gleeson, 2025

18 © Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency 2025

19 © John Olsen/Copyright Agency 2025

20 © Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency 2025

21 © Estate of Bronwyn Oliver. Courtesy of Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

22 © Cressida Campbell/Copyright Agency 2025

23 © The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art

24 © The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art

25 © The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art

26 © Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency 2025

27 © Tony Tuckson/Copyright Agency 2025

28 © The Sidney Nolan Trust. All rights reserved, DACS/Copyright Agency 2025.

29 © The Albert & Barbara Tucker Foundation. Courtesy of Smith & Singer Fine Art

30 © Emily Kam Kngwarreye/Copyright Agency 2025

31 © Estate of Sally Gabori/Copyright Agency 2025

32 © Emily Kam Kngwarreye/Copyright Agency 2025

40 © Hans Heysen/Copyright Agency 2025

41 © Bill Henson, 2025

42 © Bill Henson, 2025

43 © courtesy the artist and Ames Yavuz, Melbourne

44 © Del Kathryn Barton

46 © The Estate of Grace Cossington Smith

47 © Courtesy of the artist’s estate

49 © courtesy of The Estate of Jeffrey Smart 2025

50 © Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency 2025

51 © Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency 2025

52 © John Olsen/Copyright Agency 2025

53 © Estate of Fred Williams/Copyright Agency 2025

LOTS CONSIGNED BY GST REGISTERED ENTITIES

Lot 17 James Gleeson

Lot 41 Bill Henson

Lot 42 Bill Henson

Lot 43 Reko Rennie

CULTURAL HERITAGE PERMITS

Under the provisions of the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act, 1986, buyers may be required to obtain an export permit for certain categories of items in this sale from the Cultural Property Section:

RESALE ROYALTY

Some lots consigned for this sale may be subject to the Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Act 2009 (Cth). Any payments due under the obligations of the Act will be paid by the vendor.

Design and Photography: Danny Kneebone

© Published by Deutscher and Hackett Pty. Ltd. 2025

ISBN: 978-0-6457871-8-4

Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts

GPO Box 2154

Canberra ACT 2601

Email: movable.heritage@arts.gov.au

Phone: 1800 819 461

Arkley, H. 23, 24, 25

Banksy 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59

Barton, D. K. 44

Boyd, A. 11, 18, 20, 50, 51

Bryans, L. 47

Bunny, R. 36, 37

Campbell, C. 22

Cossington Smith, G. 7, 46

Fairweather, I. 12, 14, 26

Gabori, S. 31

Gleeson, J. 17

Gruner, E. 4, 5

H. 40

E. K. 30, 32

J. M. 2

C. 13

F. 33

Roberts, T. 34 Russell, J. P. 6

Schramm, A. 1

J. 15, 16, 49 Streeton, A.

R.

S. 28

B. 21 Olsen, J. 19, 52

Preston, M. 8, 9, 10

W. 3,

specialist fine art auction house and private gallery