Important Australian + International Fine Art

212

COOL CLIMATE ART IN A BOTTLE. With its dramatic, cool climate, the breathtaking Tasmanian landscape is an artist’s dream and a sparkling winemaker’s paradise. This is Méthode Tasmanoise.

kwp!JAN10153

Highly Important Works of Art The Baudin Expedition to Australia (1800 – 1804) Lots 1 – 13

Important Australian and International Fine Art + Important Indigenous Art Lots 14 – 139

IMPORTANT FINE ART AUCTION • MELBOURNE • 28 NOVEMBER 2018

3

MELBOURNE • AUCTION + VIEWING 105 commercial road, south yarra, victoria, 3141 telephone: 03 9865 6333 • facsimile: 03 9865 6344 info@deutscherandhackett.com

SYDNEY • VIEWING 16 goodhope street, paddington, new south wales, 2021 telephone: 02 9287 0600 • facsimile: 02 9287 0611 info@deutscherandhackett.com

4

melbourne auction

sydney viewing melbourne viewing

absentee/telephone bids live online bidding

LOTS 1 – 139 WEDNESDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2018 7:00pm 105 commercial road south yarra, victoria, 3141 telephone: 03 9865 6333 THURSDAY 15 – SUNDAY 18 NOVEMBER 16 goodhope street paddington, new south wales, 2021 telephone: 02 9287 0600 11:00am – 6:00pm THURSDAY 22 – TUESDAY 27 NOVEMBER 105 commercial road south yarra, victoria, 3141 telephone: 03 9865 6333 11:00am – 6:00pm email bids to: info@deutscherandhackett.com telephone: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344 telephone bid form – p. 193 absentee bid form – p. 194 www.deutscherandhackett.com/watch-live-auction

www.deutscherandhackett.com • info@deutscherandhackett.com

5

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 more recently, as co-founder and Executive Director of Deutscher~Menzies. He has extensively advised private, corporate and museum art collections and been responsible for numerous Australian art publications and landmark exhibitions. He is also an approved valuer under the Cultural Gifts Program.

DAMIAN HACKETT executive director — sydney Damian has over 25 years experience in public and commercial galleries, and the fine art auction market. He completed a BA (Visual Arts) at the University of New England, was Assistant Director of the Gold Coast City Art Gallery, and in 1993 joined Rex Irwin Art Dealer, a leading commercial gallery in Sydney. In 2001 Damian moved into the fine art auction market as Head of Australian and International art for Phillips de Pury and Luxembourg, and from 2002 – 2006 was National Director of Deutscher~Menzies.

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

CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE head of aboriginal art and senior art specialist Crispin holds a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts and History) from Monash University. In 1995, he began working for Sotheby’s Australia, where he became the representative for Aboriginal art in Melbourne. In 2006 Crispin joined Joel Fine Art as head of Aboriginal and Contemporary Art and later was appointed head of the Sydney office. He possesses extensive knowledge of Aboriginal art and has over 15 years experience in the Australian fine art auction market.

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH contemporary art specialist and gallery manager – sydney Lucie completed her studies in Belgium, obtaining Masters of Arts in Art History (Modern and Contemporary Art), together with a Bachelors of Art History, Archaeology and Musicology from the Université Catholique de Louvain. Since returning to Australia in 2014, she has gained sound experience in cataloguing, research and arts writing through various roles with the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre and with private art advisory firms Tutela Capital and LoveArt International.

6

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

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

ALEX CRESWICK head of finance With a Bachelor of Business Accounting at RMIT, Alex has almost 15 years experience within financial management roles. He has spent much of his early years within the corporate sector with companies such as IBM, Macquarie Bank and ANZ. With a strong passion for the arts more recently he was the Financial Controller for Ross Mollison Group, a leading provider of marketing services to the performing arts. Alex is currently completing his CPA.

MARA SISON registrar Mara has a Bachelor of Arts (Humanities) from the University of Asia and the Pacific, Philippines and a Master of Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies from Deakin University. She gained her experience in the private and not-for-profit sectors as a Gallery Manager and Exhibitions Coordinator for MiFA Asian Contemporary Art and Melbourne Fine Art Galleries and as an Administration Officer for Australia China Art Foundation.

MELISSA HELLARD head of marketing and client services Melissa has a Bachelor of Communication (Media) from RMIT University, and a Master of Art Curatorship from The University of Melbourne. Melissa gained experience in the corporate sector assisting companies such as NAB, AFL and Fiat Chrysler Group in a variety of fields including marketing, events and sponsorship. With an enduring passion for the visual arts, Melissa was more recently the Finance and Administration Assistant for Deutscher and Hackett.

7

specialists for this auction

ART SPECIALISTS • LOTS 1 – 13 Anne McCormick 0416 299021 Derek McDonnell 0416 299022 ART SPECIALISTS • LOTS 14 – 139 Chris Deutscher 0411 350 150 Damian Hackett 0422 811 034 Henry Mulholland 0424 487 738 Crispin Gutteridge 0411 883 052 AUCTIONEERS Roger McIlroy Scott Livesey ADMINISTRATION AND ACCOUNTS Alex Creswick (Melbourne) 03 9865 6333 Lucie Reeves-Smith (Sydney) 02 9287 0600 ABSENTEE AND TELEPHONE BIDS Lucie Reeves-Smith 02 9287 0600 please complete the absentee bid form (p. 194) or telephone bid form (p. 193) SHIPPING Mara Sison 03 9865 6333 CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTIONS Claire Kurzmann 03 9865 633

8

contents lots 1 — 13

page 14

lots 14 — 139

page 44

prospective buyers and sellers guide

page 186

conditions of auction and sale

page 188

catalogue subscription form

page 191

attendee pre-registration form

page 192

telephone bid form

page 193

absentee bid form

page 194

index

page 211

9

IMPORTANT NOTICE

CULTURAL HERITAGE PERMITS

Some imagery on bark and early western desert paintings in this catalogue may be deemed unsuitable for viewing by women, children or uninitiated men. We sug gest ar t co - ordinators at Aboriginal communities show this catalogue to community elders for approval before distributing the catalogue for general viewing. Co-ordinators may wish to mask or remove certain images prior to circulation. The English spelling of aboriginal names has evolved over the years. In this catalogue every effort has been made to use the current linguistic form. However original information from certificates has been transcribed as written with the result that there are different spellings of the same name, title, language group and story.

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: Department of Communications and the Arts GPO Box 2154 Canberra ACT 2601 Email: movable.heritage@arts.gov.au Phone: 1800 819 461 Under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), permits are required for the movement of wildlife, wildlife specimens and products made or derived from wildlife.

This includes species on the endangered species list. Buyers may be required to obtain an export permit for certain categories of items offered at auction. Permits must be obtained from: Wildlife Trade Regulation Section Environment Australia GPO Box 787 Canberra ACT 2601 Email: wildlifetrade@environment.gov.au Phone: (02) 6274 1900 Under the provisions of the Wildlife and Protection (Regulation of Exports and Imports) Act, 1982, buyers may be required to obtain an export permit for certain categories of items offered at auction (including plant or animal products derived from an Australian native species such as: ivory, tortoise shell, feathers, etc). Permits must be obtained from the Wildlife Protection Section, Environment Australia-Biodiversity Group at the address above, prior to items being export from Australia.

10

HIGHLY IMPORTANT WORKS OF ART THE BAUDIN EXPEDITION TO AUSTRALIA (1800 – 1804) NICOLAS-MARTIN PETIT (1777 – 1804) + CHARLES-ALEXANDRE LESUEUR (1778 – 1846)

LOTS 1 – 13

in association with

HIGHLY IMPORTANT WORKS OF ART THE BAUDIN EXPEDITION TO AUSTRALIA (1800 – 1804)

LOTS 1 – 13 in association with

NICOLAS-MARTIN PETIT (1777 – 1804) + CHARLES-ALEXANDRE LESUEUR (1778 – 1846)

INTRODUCTION Please refer to the separate detailed catalogue prepared by Hordern House. This in-depth study provides an intriguing insight into the Baudin expedition of 1800-1804. Furthermore, it fully describes the importance and cultural significance of these outstanding works; the first contact art of Australia.

This catalogue and the accompanying publication describes a substantial collection of Baudin voyage art. Most such collections of voyage art found permanent homes in the nineteenth century, and have remained basically static since, meaning that it is startling to have something genuinely new, and perhaps revolutionary, to add to this critically important story.

All of the works in the present catalogue and accompanying publication are by the two main artists on the voyage, Nicolas-Martin Petit and Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, and all of them until very recently formed part of a remarkable collection of voyage art from a single French collection, having been in the vendor’s family since the mid-nineteenth century. Prior to their recent rediscovery and sale in Paris, all of the works were completely unknown and unrecorded.

This is one of only two major caches of Petit and Lesueur works which both date from the voyage and which later became part of the core group of images considered for publication in the official account: the first cache is, of course, now part of the collection of the Le Havre Muséum d’histoire naturelle, acquired in the late 1870s and since recognised as the centrepiece of the visual history of the voyage. Even taking into account the Le Havre collection, only a relatively small catalogue of known Baudin voyage works by either Petit or Lesueur survives, and they are extraordinarily rare on the open market, especially as concerns Australian subjects.

In terms of the present catalogue, Petit’s ability most obviously shines through in the Tasmanian portraits in gouache, which transcend simple voyage art. But the way the eye is drawn to them should not detract from the other riches, his two original sketches of Tasmanian men, as well as the two Timorese and two Sydney works from his pen, along with his fascinating images of competing groups. Petit’s artistic skill no doubt reflects, in part, his studies with the most celebrated French artist of the day, the great neo-classicist, Jacques-Louis David.

12

By the same token, although now chiefly remembered as a scientist and natural history artist, the three views by Lesueur, depicting Timor, a scene on the Vasse in Western Australia and a view in Port Jackson, are major additions to his oeuvre, and extremely rare examples of any of his Baudin voyage artworks. As we describe in detail in the accompanying publication, each of these Lesueur views is of singular importance, none more so than the extremely early Western Australian scene.

That the present group of works exists at all is testament to the care with which they were preserved by a series of voyage veterans and custodians: Petit and Lesueur themselves, but also François Péron and Louis de Freycinet, all of whom took possession of this group over a forty-year period marked by official indifference and political turbulence.

All of these works are in remarkable condition, having been in the care of individuals – either directly involved in the Baudin voyage or later, as the accompanying publication documents, a French family with naval connections – who recognised their unique artistic and historical significance. The gouaches in particular are striking in terms of their clarity and strength of colour.

Hordern House in association with Deutscher and Hackett are delighted to have the opportunity to offer this collection, and hope that the present catalogue and accompanying publication will both honour and more fully describe these most important works of art relating to early Australia.

THE COLLECTION The works of both Petit and Lesueur on the Baudin voyage have been much studied, most significantly in the ground-breaking “Baudin in Australian Waters” (BAW ). As that work and the many studies and exhibitions that have followed show, the other known portraits by Petit, the great majority of which are held by Le Havre, are famous as much for their beauty as their mystery, chiefly because although they later became the basis for the eye-catching engravings in the published atlas of views (1807), very little was written by any of the French officers or scientists describing their interactions. Crucially, no notebook or journal by Petit himself has ever been recorded, which may explain why the scenes of Aboriginal life dominate the visual record, but are under-described in Péron’s accompanying text.

The most likely reason for this disparity between the visual and written records is that in the original planning for the voyage publication there was supposed to be a complete extra volume on the ethnography of the people of Timor, Tasmania and mainland Australia. Péron himself, who had some training in the nascent field of anthropology, was to be the author of this work: that a magisterial work was planned is clear, but so is the fact that no part of it was ever published, and that only fragments of it now remain, of which none are more vital than the pictures themselves.

In the catalogue and accompanying publication each of the individual works is illustrated and described, where it is clear that while the group includes an embarrassment of riches, that primus inter pares are the Tasmanian portraits by Petit, blazing comets in the known history of the Baudin voyage. All of these Tasmanian portraits were created in early 1802 as a record of the series of interviews the French had with the men and women of D’Entrecasteaux Channel.

We discuss the import of these Tasmanian pictures at greater length in the accompanying publication but the central point is that following the work of John Webber on Cook’s third voyage (amounting to a handful of original sketches and the associated engraved plates), and the known works of Jean Piron on the D’Entrecasteaux voyage (some simple pencil outline sketches in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, and four engraved plates in the account published by La Billardière), the portraits of Petit are the last pre-settlement works.

As a result, the rediscovery of these five unrecorded Tasmanian portraits, three evocative works in gouache, and two of the on-the-spot drawings done by Petit ashore, is quite astounding. We strongly believe that at least four of the portraits will prove to have been done during the Baudin expedition’s stay in the region of North West Bay at the northern end of D’Entrecasteaux Channel, between 19 January and 5 February 1802: if true, they will be the only works known to have been done by Petit on mainland Tasmania.

upon to act as a translator when Baudin and Flinders met in 1802, and immediately after the meeting he dashed off a memorandum recording his impressions (now held at the British Museum, Natural History Department). Brown wrote: “C Baudin showd us coloured figures of the natives of Van Diemens land they appeared to be characteristic but not well executed. There were figures of their huts, of their tombs, & of their canoes. The canoe is exactly similar to that given by Billardière. All of the natives were painted with woolly hair & C Baudin on being questiond on this head assurd us that it was really so. The hair of all the figures was of an ochry red in all probability from the ochre with which they colour their whole bodies…”1 The idea of Baudin and Flinders looking through these portraits as they rested at Encounter Bay is a striking and quite moving thought.

Brown’s eye may not have been ready to appreciate what he saw, but it is not his opinion that concerns us. What matters now is that he is explicit that the portraits that Baudin and Flinders examined together were coloured: the only extant coloured portraits that Petit is recorded as having made in Tasmania were the series of gouaches and now a single work in pastel (also in the present catalogue).

Even reduced to simple numbers the importance of these works is apparent. In the great review of the Baudin voyage by Bonnemains, Forsyth and Smith (BAW ) only eleven gouaches of Tasmanian subjects are listed, making the addition of three more a cause for celebration, the more so because, as is described in more detail in our accompanying publication, each of the three is unusually well-provided with notes and details that make it possible to reimagine this entire period.

1. R.W. Giblin, Flinders, Baudin, and Brown at Encounter Bay, pp. 4-5

Not only that, but a remarkable eyewitness report survives that confirms the Tasmanian portraits must have been done on board the Géographe and before the meeting with Flinders at Encounter Bay: no less a figure than Robert Brown, the botanist serving with Flinders, was hastily called

13

CHARLES-ALEXANDRE LESUEUR 1 (1778 – 1846, French) CASES DE LA TERRE DE LEWIN (GÉOGRAPHE BAY, W.A.), probably June 1801 pen and ink and graphite on laid paper a framing mount of blue-grey paper applied over the paper sheet 98 x 175 mm (image) 158 x 235 mm (sheet) inscribed with title on mount lower centre: Cases de la Terre de Lewin inscribed upper left on mount: No 2 inscribed upper right on mount: LI estimate :

$200,000 – 300,000

ENGRAVED This view was not included in the first edition atlas of 1807, but was added by Freycinet in the second edition of 1824 as the second illustration on plate 31. Noted as C.A. Lesueur delint., J. Devilliers aqua forti, A. Delvaux sculpt.

RELATED WORKS See also especially Le Havre B:16028, 16031 &16032, in turn part of a series of clearly related sketched of the huts on the Vasse in June 1801

An extremely rare and exceptionally early original depiction of Western Australia, relating to the arrival of the Baudin voyage at the Vasse River near modern Busselton.

Péron best captured the mood among the crew and the savants when they first reached New Holland, describing how everyone who could be spared rushed ashore and made forays inland: the woods on the shores of the Vasse must have echoed with the French officers loudly tramping about in small parties of half-a-dozen or so, but of the actual inhabitants they saw very little, although a party which included Bernier and Maugé were “more fortunate” than that of Péron, having met with an old man who had told them in no uncertain terms to go home.

Although Péron’s investigation of what he termed a “bosquet religieux” on the banks of the Vasse would lead him to speculate on the religion of the region, he was dreadfully disappointed to miss having any personal interaction with the local Aboriginal people, and in his account therefore relied heavily on the notes of his friend Lesueur, who had been part of a group that had chased after a couple: the man had escaped into the forest, but the French had caught up with the pregnant woman, their clumsy approach terrifying her so much that she was literally rendered inanimate.

14

Lesueur had also, Péron continued, made some further investigations of his own, and one passage relates directly to the present work: “Lesueur informed me that he had seen several huts of the natives, which were all built on the humid banks of the salt marshes that covered the shore on the right-side of the river; that they were roughly constructed of slender branches of trees stuck in the ground and fastened together at the points, somewhat like an arbour, and covered on the outside with the useful sort of bark which I have before noticed… In front of each of these huts were observed the remains of extinguished fires; and amongst the ashes some remnants of fishes, of kangaroos, and some beaks of wild swans. M. Lesueur had made a drawing of these miserable cabins, which he shewed me, and I was of opinion that it was impossible to find elsewhere more wretched habitations…” (Péron, Voyage of Discovery, p. 68).

Given the demanding pace Baudin set on their subsequent voyage north to Timor, this would be the most substantial investigation made by the French, although Freycinet on the little Casuarina did tidy up some nagging navigational questions when he sailed through these waters in 1803.

An engraving closely based on this scene was ultimately included in the second edition of the Baudin voyage published in 1824, where it was given the helpfully descriptive title “Nouvelle-Hollande: Terre de Leuwin, Étangs sales de la Rivière Vasse, Cabanes des Savages de la Baie du Géographe” and, importantly, was noted as having been drawn

by Lesueur himself.

The beautifully realised scene includes five very small Aboriginal figures in the background (one at left, crouching in the reeds, with a visible fish-trap, and four hunting on the right). It is not quite like any of the other pencil sketches recorded by Bonnemains, although a long series (see particularly B:16026-16033) show distinctive similarities both in the style and structure of the huts. One of the more intriguing aspects of the present drawing is that it prominently includes the clump of Xanthorrhoea, which is not present in any of the sketches reproduced

by Bonnemains, but which features on the finished plate.

One significant difference is in the rendering of the human figures. In both they are little more than outlines, but the original has a liveliness that has gone missing in the engraving where, for a start, the figure wading in the water not only seems to have no head, but is now missing the bird neatly caught on his spear (which is why the two tiny birds to his left are so clearly here making their escape, rather than flying towards the hunter as in the finished scene).

Although unsigned, the attribution to Lesueur is confirmed by the subject matter and style; the fact that all of the other related drawings in Le Havre are also by Lesueur; and that when it was finally published in 1824 the scene is noted as Lesueur “delint.”

15

NICOLAS-MARTIN PETIT 2 (1777 – 1804, French) (FULL–LENGTH PORTRAIT OF A TIMORESE WOMAN HOLDING HER BABY), August – November 1801 pencil on laid paper drawing squared-up in pencil 329 x 216 mm (sheet) bears inscription upper right: No. 15 and five lines in sepia ink in Péron’s hand relating to the engraving process estimate :

ENGRAVED None known, but worth comparing with plate XXVI RELATED WORKS See following, lot 3

$35,000 – 55,000 An extremely fine pencil sketch of a nursing mother in Timor, with a particularly detailed depiction of the face and head. The child on her lap has been quickly sketched in, as has a spreading banana palm tree behind her.

The first edition of the Baudin atlas of 1807 included only two Timorese portraits, that of the famous chief “Naba-Leba” (plate XXV) and of a woman called “Canda” in a bright red dress carrying water in two enormous pails suspended from a yoke (plate XXVI). The second edition added quite a lot more on Timorese life including four extra portraits, a Malay cavalryman on horseback (39), a Malay soldier (40), a “Malais Libre” (41), and a woman in a blue dress from the “Île de Rotti” (42).

The present woman is conceivably (although not definitively) the original for the water-carrier named Canda, and if so, this would be one of those occasions when the engraver has really lost the fineness and subtlety of the original work. To date we have not discovered anything in any of the journals that would shed more light on this question.

As with several other examples of Petit’s work in Le Havre this sketch has been neatly squared up and some secondary notes have been added, as part of the process of preparing the scene to be engraved. A technical note in sepia ink by Péron at the top shows that the drawing was being used in planning for engraved illustrations. From what is decipherable the note apparently concerns the need to reduce some of the proportions. Similar notes appear on drawings lots 3, 12 and 13.

16

17

NICOLAS-MARTIN PETIT 3 (1777 – 1804, French) (FULL–LENGTH PORTRAIT OF A TIMORESE WOMAN HOLDING HER BABY), August – November 1801 pen and ink portrait in outline on laid paper with armorial watermark with fleur-de-lys design 318 x 232 mm (sheet) signed lower right: N. Petit bears inscription upper right: No. 15 (bis) and three lines in ink in Péron’s hand relating to the engraving process estimate :

$35,000 – 55,000

ENGRAVED None known

A beautiful companion work to the previous item, importantly with the signature of Petit.

RELATED WORKS See above, lot 2

This is a more highly refined drawing than the preceding portrait, its simplicity reflecting Petit’s neo-classical training, and the ability to compare the two works together so closely gives an insight into his technique. Especially given that no other version of the portrait is apparently known, the complementary nature of the two pictures becomes more important than ever. While the previous drawing is far more detailed around the face but extremely cursory in its depiction of both the appearance of the child and the woman’s flowing dress, both of the latter aspects are much more clearly defined here.

As with many of the Petit sketches this bears marks of the process by which drawings were considered for engraving for publication. Although this image does not appear in the official account and is not known to have been engraved, the note at the top by Péron in his typical sepia ink, which reads “No. 15 (bis) pouvant offrir des détails pour la planche No. 15”, shows that it may have been consulted for use of detail in another image which ultimately may not have been used in the publication.

Similar notes appear on drawings lots 3, 12 and 13.

A thorough study of such notes by Péron in the Le Havre collection has not yet been undertaken though many have been painstakingly deciphered by Bonnemains for BAW.

18

19

CHARLES-ALEXANDRE LESUEUR 4 (1778 – 1846, French) (A SCENE IN THE CEMETERY IN THE HILLS BEHIND KUPANG), August – November 1801 pen, ink and graphite on laid paper a framing mount of blue-grey paper applied over the paper sheet 152 x 214 mm (image) 222 x 290 mm (sheet) estimate :

$35,000 – 55,000

ENGRAVED This view was not included in the first edition atlas of 1807 but was added by Freycinet in the second edition of 1824 as plate 51. The finished engraving was noted as C.A. Lesueur delint., J. Devilliers aqua forti, A. Delvaux sculpt.

The most senior of Baudin’s men to die was Anselme Riedlé, after an agonising illness, on 21 October 1801. His loss was greatly felt, and the decision was taken to bury him in some state, his coffin carried by four local soldiers and accompanied by a great cortège of officers, savants and local dignitaries.

RELATED WORKS See also a couple of pencil studies reproduced in Baglione, G., and Crémière, C., Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, and noted as Le Havre nos. B:17042 & 17045

Apparently at the behest of Péron himself, as a botanist Riedlé was interred alongside the plot of Bligh’s old colleague, the gardener David Nelson, who had died in Kupang after the long-boat voyage in the wake of the Bounty mutiny. Their grave was marked with a “rough” stone.

A beautifully-executed view of the main cemetery in Kupang, with three Malay men in the foreground, standing among a group of some of the more remarkable local tombs. The French fort, with a flag flying, is shown in the distance towards the left, and in fine detail the distant Géographe, in the bay beyond the fort, is shown with a plume of smoke, presumably in the midst of firing a salute.

This scene was not published until the second edition of Baudin’s voyage in 1824, where it was given the very descriptive caption “Île Timor. Vue d’un Cimetière Malais, d’une partie de la Baie et de la ville de Coupang, de l’Île de Simao et de l’Île de Kéra” (plate 51).

As the long caption confirms, and indeed as the scene itself makes perfectly clear, this view is taken from the main cemetery overlooking the port of Kupang: the centre of town and the flagstaff at the fort can be seen in the background, while the single ship in the roadstead is assumed to be the Géographe, prior to the arrival of the Naturaliste, later in 1801.

The burials shown in the foreground of the cemetery were of more than academic interest because, sadly, there were deaths among Baudin’s crew, and the presumption is that they would have been buried either here in this main cemetery or nearby. These tombs however are clearly Timorese rather than the rougher burials of the expedition. On the other hand, while the shape of the expedition’s fort is well-defined, in front we can see several protuberances which might be rocks, or plausibly the expeditioners’ graves.

20

The smoke emanating from the ship would be from a cannon pointing towards the fort. Could this even have been a salute accompanying the burial of Riedlé?

An interest in funerary traditions was not unique to the Baudin voyage, as many early modern voyagers not unreasonably saw the burial of the dead as a way of understanding different societies. In Timor, Lesueur also did a companion scene of the Chinese cemetery in Kupang which overlooked the harbour from further to the east (plate 52) and also some detailed depictions of individual Chinese tombs (plate 53).

If we are right in speculating that the burial of Riedlé was indeed taking place near the fort, the comparison between the local tombs and the simple French interment would have been of poignant interest to Lesueur.

21

NICOLAS-MARTIN PETIT 5 (1777 – 1804, French) RECTO: (PORTRAIT OF A MAN IN PROFILE, HEAD AND PARTIAL SHOULDERS), January or February 1802 pastel on paper with watermark of crowned lion and sword with a pencil drawing of different man verso 270 x 191 mm (approx., irregular) estimate :

$300,000 – 400,000

ENGRAVED No full portrait, but feasibly related to the seated man figured in plate XV (1807) RELATED WORKS Certainly B:20006, possibly B:20005

A wonderful profile portrait, the only known Tasmanian example of Petit working with coloured pastel: the artist has really captured the man, which is testament to his ability in the medium.

Given both the medium and the time constraints under which he was working this is an accomplished drawing, effortlessly capturing the man’s strong features, with a hint of a kangaroo-skin cloak draped over his right shoulder. He has a light beard and short hair, but not enough of his torso is shown to be confident about any scarification or other ornamentation.

One of the points, often stated, about the ways in which original works were converted into published engravings is that there was some inevitable distortion from the original. This sense of distortion and variation is particularly in play here, and yet it is clear that the present portrait is the original study for a gouache in Le Havre (B:20006), as is underscored by the great similarity in profile, the sparse beard and open mouth, the cropped but not fully shaven hair, and even the cloak over the shoulder.

22

It feels less immediately convincing, but the portrait does also bear a more than passing resemblance to another gouache (B:20005), showing a full-study of seated man at a fire (again, similar hair, nose, ears and beard, similar cloak over right shoulder, creased forehead, etc.). Significantly, assuming there is a connection between this simple profile in pastel and the fuller gouache, then it is clear that a version of this seated man was used in the composite plate XV. Bonnemains does not list any other studies of any kind associated with this portrait, much as one might expect.

Because there is no specific engraving, and because neither this nor the associated portraits have any captioning, it is not possible to speculate about the precise locality in which this portrait was made; and therefore it is not possible to make any firm statement about its exact date of composition, beyond saying it is definitely from the period the French stayed in the region of Bruny Island—D’Entrecasteaux Channel—Maria Island.

It is tempting, nonetheless, to assume that this also dates from the same meetings and the same period as the following portraits simply because one of the men from the “Île Van Diemen” is drawn on the verso, implying that the sketches were done straight after each other.

23

NICOLAS-MARTIN PETIT 5 (1777 – 1804, French) VERSO OF LOT 5: (PENCIL PORTRAIT OF A MAN IN PROFILE, HEAD AND SHOULDERS), January or February 1802 pencil on paper 270 x 191 mm (approx., irregular)

ENGRAVED None known RELATED WORKS The full pastel portrait of this man is lot 6 in this auction. Le Havre holds a pencil and charcoal version of this portrait, signed by Petit, that looks like an engraver’s study (B:20014.1) and an ink version on brown tracing paper (B:20014.2)

A fine pencil sketch, clearly the original likeness that Petit then used to create his full portrait of a “Sauvage de l’île Van Diemen (Canal de d’Entrecasteaux)” (no. [6], following). The profile and general features of the man are unmistakable, as is the headband and elaborate cloak he is wearing; both of these would have been unusual in the French artist’s experience, given that the Tasmanian men were often said to be naked.

In terms of style and execution, the sketch can be compared with at least one other in Le Havre, an equally quick pencil portrait of a different man (B:20020).

The portrait and the likely time and place it was made are discussed more fully under lot 6 following, and in the introduction to the Tasmanian section on pp. 31-33 of the accompanying publication.

24

25

NICOLAS-MARTIN PETIT 6

(1777 – 1804, French) SAUVAGE DE L’ÎLE VAN DIEMEN (CANAL DE D’ENTRECASTEAUX), early 1802, probably late January or early February ink, watercolour and gouache on lightly tinted blue paper 177 x 151 mm (image, within a ruled border) 216 x 186 mm (sheet) signed lower left: N.m. petit inscribed with title below image: Sauvage de l’Île Van Diemen (canal de D’Entrecasteaux). estimate :

$600,000 – 800,000

ENGRAVED None known RELATED WORKS The original outline pencil sketch of this man is lot 5b in this auction.

Le Havre holds a pencil and charcoal version of this portrait, signed

by Petit, that looks like an engraver’s study (B: 20014.1) and an ink version on brown tracing paper (B:20014.2)

A magnificent and detailed portrait of a Tasmanian man in striking profile. Although Péron and many of the other journalists on board noted that a large number of the Tasmanian men they interviewed were naked, the present example shows a mature and initiated man not only wearing the familiar kangaroo-skin cloak, but with a matched headband as well.

As in most of the gouaches in Le Havre, Petit has not added any background detail (not even some simple foliage), which gives such portraits a dramatic focus. The portrait has a number of precisely observed details of dress and scarification, not only the elaborate clothing, but the man’s full beard, his prominent and dazzlingly white teeth (the remarkably good teeth of the Tasmanians were much commented on by many of the French officers and savants), the hazel eyes, and particularly the scars (short vertical lines on the chest, round dots on the upper arms).

As we discuss in the introduction to the Tasmanian section in the accompanying publication (pp. 31-33), one of the most important aspects of this portrait is that it includes a detailed caption identifying the man as a “sauvage de l’Île Van Diemen (Canal de D’Entrecasteaux)”.

We take this precise wording to show Petit identifying the location, using the reference to the D’Entrecasteaux Channel to pinpoint the general region, and “Île Van Diemen” as a specific reference to the mainland (and not, that is, the more frequently used “Terre de Diemen”, which the French use to refer to the entire region including the outlying islands).

The only major interaction between the French and the Tasmanians on the mainland is that which took place at North West Bay, where the two ships were anchored from 19 January to 5 February 1802, and where the astronomer Bernier set up his observatory tent on a tiny island near the shore. Bernier, and one of the officers appointed to assist him, SaintCricq, both reported having extensive meetings with a group of some 40 people including women and children, and our pictures presumably relate to this interaction (and would therefore be the only confirmed record of that period, given none of Petit’s other works include any similar reference to the Île Van Diemen).

This hypothesis, we further suspect, has its strongest support in the gouache with mountainous background (catalogue no. [8]): it is unlikely that the mountainous range dominating the background could be part of the topography of either Bruny or Maria islands.

No full portrait of this man was ever published but that one was planned is clear from the collections in Le Havre, which include both a pencil and charcoal sketch by Petit (B:20014.1), while the man is also figured on a corresponding ink drawing on brown tracing paper (B:20014.2).

26

27

NICOLAS-MARTIN PETIT 7

(1777 – 1804, French) FEMME SAUVAGE DE L’ÎLE VAN DIEMEN (DÉTROIT DE D’ENTRECASTEAUX), early 1802 probably late January or early February ink, watercolour and gouache on lightly tinted blue paper 205 x 200mm (image, within a ruled border) 235 x 212 mm (sheet) signed lower left: N.m. Petit inscribed with title below image: Femme Sauvage de l’Île Van Diemen (Détroit de D’Entrecasteaux). bears inscription in image upper right: Terre de Diémen estimate :

$700,000 – 900,000

ENGRAVED No full portrait, but very clearly related to the seated woman in plate XV (1807). It should be noted that the finished plated is noted as “Lesueur del.”, so clearly it was Lesueur who made the rather “stagey” arrangement of the finished plate using Petit’s original studies.

A superb portrait of a seated woman in three-quarter profile, her legs crossed in the way noted by many of the French, with short cropped hair and a kangaroo skin cloak loosely draped over her right shoulder, her left breast exposed. She has no ornamentation, scarification nor jewellery. The portrait is one of only a handful that Petit did of women, which in itself is significant.

RELATED WORKS Le Havre holds two pencil and charcoal versions of this portrait, both also by Petit, although only one is reproduced in Bonnemains (see nos. B:20013.1 & 20013.2)

Once again the location has been noted with some precision in the caption, which is an important detail because it means it is very likely she too was sketched near the French observatory in North West Bay (see discussion in note to drawing lot 6). Unusually for works from this series by Petit, the scene includes an accurate and quite evocative display of local foliage, the dominant brown and blue tones of which give the scene an extremely realistic feeling. The picture does have some unusual dimensional aspects which, it is presumed, is Petit’s way of trying to represent the way in which the French described the long, thin limbs of the Aboriginal people.

No full portrait of this woman was ever published, but a simplified and rather generic version was added to the group scene published as plate XV in the first edition of Baudin’s voyage.

28

29

NICOLAS-MARTIN PETIT 8 (1777 – 1804, French) SAUVAGE DE L’ÎLE VAN DIEMEN (DÉTROIT DE D’ENTRECASTEAUX), early 1802 probably late January or early February ink, watercolour and gouache on lightly tinted blue laid paper 183 x 278 mm (image within an ink border, within ruled border) 212 x 323 mm (sheet) signed lower left: N.m. petit inscribed with title below image: Sauvage de l’Île Van Diemen (détroit de D’Entrecasteaux). estimate :

$700,000 – 900,000

ENGRAVED None known RELATED WORKS Le Havre holds a pencil and charcoal version of this portrait, also by Petit (B:20012)

An extremely important work: not only a superb portrait in its own right, this example is one of the rare occasions when Petit included a full landscape in the background, here rendered with the sort of topographical accuracy and well-observed use of colour that marked the famous coastal profiles he painted. Previously known only from a later pencil sketch in Le Havre with no documentation of any kind, the caption to the present work therefore reveals that this is a man from the region of D’Entrecasteaux Channel and, as with the previous two items, is believed to depict a man from the interaction that took place at North West Bay. Not only is this a fine portrait, it is probably the finest of Petit’s major Tasmanian studies: it is certainly the most fully realised, and also one of the occasions on which he has really mastered the representation of the elongated but still muscular limbs. There is a sense of repose, but also of place, most particularly in the wonderfully accurate juxtaposition of the lush foliage in the middle ground with the blackened trunk on which the man is leaning. The mountain range in the background is rendered so precisely that it may yet prove possible to locate the spot quite accurately: certainly there can be no doubt that this is meant to be part of the ridge of higher ground on the mainland, as the topography of both Bruny and Maria Islands is somewhat gentler. Indeed, that the mainland is depicted here is further suggested by the fact that the man is leaning against a scorched tree trunk (the use of fires by the Tasmanians, and the partially scorched landscape of the mainland, was frequently described by the French).

30

The man himself is quite beautiful. He has an incredibly strong profile with prominent brow and nose, tightly cropped hair with what would seem to be thin braids as decoration, and long elegant limbs. There is no visible scarification nor ornamentation of any kind (although of course the torso, where this was usually most prominent, is not visible), and he is wearing a very full kangaroo cloak draped over his right shoulder.

Indeed, he is so attractive that the only sketch of this man in Le Havre had led to some debate about the sitter’s sex: the nineteenth century curator Hamy thought it showed a man, his twentieth-century colleague Bonnemains a woman. The use of “sauvage” in the caption here (and not “femme sauvage” as with the previous item), would seem to settle the debate.

Apart from a similar but not as fully-realised work depicting a man seated before a fire (B:20005), and the full-length portrait of a boy standing on a beach in front of a heavily-wooded hillside, which also features carefully depicted mountains in the background (B:20021.4), this is only the third full Tasmanian view known to have been executed by Petit, and gives a tangible sense of his talent (and of the sort of work that was unfulfilled because of his early death).

No full portrait of this man was ever published.

31

CHARLES-ALEXANDRE LESUEUR 9 (1778 – 1846, French) GROTTES DES NATURELS DE LA NOUVELLE GALLES DU SUD, June – November 1802 pen, ink and graphite on laid paper a framing mount of blue-grey paper applied over the paper sheet 96 x 175 mm (image) 155 x 235 mm (sheet) inscribed with title on mount lower centre: Grottes des Naturels de la Nouvelle Galles du Sud inscribed upper left on mount: No. 1 inscribed upper right on mount: LI estimate :

$200,000 – 300,000

ENGRAVED This view was not included in the first edition atlas of 1807, but was added by Freycinet in the second edition of 1824 as the first illustration on plate 31 (and therefore as the companion view to lot 1 in the present list). The finished engraving was noted as C.A. Lesueur delint., J. Devilliers aqua forti, A. Delvaux sculpt.

RELATED WORKS possibly related to, at least in terms of locality, to Le Havre B:16043

A bucolic scene of life on the shores of Port Jackson with figures fishing and cooking. For the era this is a tremendously important scene, and further evidence that the French genuinely sought out the Sydney Aboriginal people in their traditional ways of life and did not, like many of their English compatriots almost 15 years after the First Fleet, content themselves with depictions of Aboriginal men and women in the township of Sydney proper. This offers a snapshot of a still vibrant culture that existed on the very edges of settlement.

This would not be published until the second edition of Baudin’s voyage, 1824, when it was the upper of two views on plate 31 (the lower was a companion scene of life on the Vasse River in Western Australia, no. [1] in this catalogue). When published, it was given a slightly fuller caption than here, which confirmed that it was Lesueur’s depiction of ways of life in Port Jackson (“Nouvelle-Hollande: Nouvelle-Galles du Sud. Grottes, chasse et pêche des sauvages du Port-Jackson”).

Although the relationship between this original sketch and the finished plate is very close, it is equally obvious that there are several important differences which make the finished version less lively, notably in the depiction of the human figures that populate the scene which have become in the engraving more lumpen (particularly in terms of the group at the fire and the family arriving at left). Lesueur’s depiction of the towering sandstone of the headland is particularly naturalistic, making it appear much more correctly weathered and less “blocky” than the finished engraving.

32

One quite remarkable aspect of the scene is the inclusion, at left, of the man lying down in the thick grass while an eagle hovers just above him.

The clue as to what is being depicted is actually in a small pencil note in Le Havre which includes thumbnail sketches of various scenes of Aboriginal life (B:16009), the first of which is described as showing “un poisson dans la bouche, chasse aux aigles” (a fish in the mouth, hunting eagles). While this seems cryptic, it relates to something David Collins described in his 1798 book: “a native will stretch himself on a rock as if asleep in the sun, holding a piece of fish in his open hand; the bird, be it hawk or crow, seeing the prey, and not observing any motion in the native, pounces on the fish, and, in the instant of taking it, is caught by the native…” (An Account, p. 455).

For such a distinctive and well-known scene it is interesting to see that it bears little resemblance to any of the other sketches and studies recorded in Le Havre by Bonnemains.

There is however one very intriguing comparison to be made with the most fully elaborated scene of funerary rites done by Lesueur (B:16043) which has, in the middle ground, a towering shoreline not unlike that figured here.

Although unsigned, the attribution to Lesueur is confirmed by the subject matter and style; the fact that all of the other drawings in Le Havre are also by Lesueur; and that when it was finally published in 1824 the scene is noted as Lesueur “delint.”

33

NICOLAS-MARTIN PETIT 10 (1777 – 1804, French) (ABORIGINAL WARRIOR WITH SPEAR), June – November 1802 pen, ink and graphite on laid paper with armorial watermark with fleur-de-lys 278 x 214 mm signed and inscribed lower right: N. Petit à Bord du géographe estimate :

$350,000 – 450,000

ENGRAVED No engraving is based directly on this image. However the figure must be an early version of the man who would be included in the “Port-Jackson, Nlle Hollande cérémonie préliminaire d’un mariage, chez les sauvages” plate in the Freycinet atlas (no. 104) RELATED WORKS See particularly B:20030 and 20044.1 A finely-rendered portrayal of a warrior from New South Wales advancing with his shield raised and spear held in his woomera. Petit has not only signed the work but noted that he drew it while “on board the Géographe”, which firmly dates the work as another voyage piece.

The man has a distinctive profile and, like many of the Sydney Aboriginal people drawn by Petit, has his hair tied back with a simple band. It is possible to make out several details of his distinctive scarification, with long vertical lines on both breasts, a series of shorter horizontal lines on his pectorals, and a long series of short lines around the torso. There is also evidence of some scars on his arms (but these are perhaps battlewounds rather than ornamentation?). Not only does the man brandish his spear, but the shield is very clearly of the famous crossed design seen in the finished plates as red on a white background, and he wears the belt or cincture around his waist which, as one of the plates in Baudin shows, was worn by men when facing combat so as to have a place to tuck in their club.

There is no full chalk or pastel image antecedent to this portrait. For the great formal portraits for which Petit is best known, he would make a quick preliminary sketch and then quickly follow this up with a grander coloured portrait: in Tasmania this was done in gouache, in Sydney in pastel (although why Petit made the change has never been explained). These were then used by the studio in Paris to prepare finished engravings.

34

There does however exist one preliminary sketch by Petit that is antecedent to the present work: it is largely done in outline but has identical scarification and obvious facial similarities, as well as the distinctive headband which allows the man’s very curly hair to fall forward on to his brow, as well as the unusual cincture of cloth around his abdomen (B:20030). These details might also mean that the present sketch is a profile of the man also shown at far left in a sketch of three men in a “corobré ou danse” (B:20044.1).

We do not doubt that there is more to be discovered about this portrait and its relationship with the similar studies in Le Havre. Perhaps the key will prove to be the notorious “marriage” scene engraved by Sébastien Leroy for inclusion in the Freycinet atlas of 1825 as plate 104, “PortJackson, Nlle. Hollande: cérémonie préliminaire d’un mariage, chez les sauvages.” In the finished version of the scene six men (three on each side) fight over a struggling woman in the middle, a seventh man stands at far left holding a spear over his shoulder in his woomera (two early studies for this work can be seen at lots 12 & 13 following). A close comparison of the man standing to the left, most particularly his general pose and the scarification on his torso, confirms that this must be the same man. This is doubly important because the plate is stated to be created by Leroy after “N. Petit.” Given we know the ways in which Freycinet rehabilitated and used the Baudin-era drawings to supplement his own publication, this is further striking evidence not only of how this work was done, but also of Freycinet’s early stewardship of the collection.

Moreover, it is also possible that the man was an important component of the work being done on another plate that was commissioned by Freycinet from the artist and engraver Pierre-Antoine Marchais, depicting a scene of ritual combat in New South Wales. Presumably meant for inclusion in the Freycinet atlas Historique (where it would have joined scenes such as the “marriage” plate), Marchais got as far as preparing a fine watercolour (Christie’s, Freycinet Collection, 2002, lot 95) and some engraver’s studies, but never issued a finished plate.

35

NICOLAS-MARTIN PETIT 11 (1777 – 1804, French) (ABORIGINAL MAN AND WOMAN FISHING WITH SPEAR FROM CANOE, WITH FIRE AT CENTRE), June – November 1802 pen, ink and graphite on laid paper watermarked “Budgen 1801” 224 x 333 mm signed and inscribed lower right: Nicholas petit à Bord Du géographe estimate :

$450,000 – 650,000

ENGRAVED None known RELATED WORKS A particular study of canoes was a feature of the works of both Petit and Lesueur, but we are not aware of any study that is closely related to the present scene (but refer to the accompanying publication for more commentary on some of the more interesting comparisons held in Le Havre)

A scene of tremendous importance, giving a detailed depiction of a man armed with a fiz-gig standing in the prow of a canoe while a woman tends a fire in the middle of the craft. These canoes were regarded as almost a trademark of Aboriginal life on the waterways of Port Jackson (they can be spotted scattered around on the water in most of the known views, including those done by Baudin’s artists), but it is rare to have such a finely realised study.

Although men and women paddling canoes were not infrequently sketched by the artists, they were never the focus of any of the published plates. In the first edition of Baudin’s voyage two men are seen in a canoe in the background of the Tasmanian scene of plate XIV, for example, and another canoe is prominent in the matching New South Wales scene shown in plate XXIII. The present sketch must be compared with a similar scene held in Le Havre which also shows a man and a woman in a canoe (B:20025.1), but with the vital proviso that it is evident that the two scenes include different people.

The man in the front of the boat is particularly intriguing, not least because of the obvious similarities with the sketch of the man with a spear (our no. [10]). He has the same tightly curled glossy hair, the same prominent nose, and apart from the absence of the smaller vertical scars on the torso, quite similar scarification. If we accept that the headband and the belt were worn for ritual combat and not fishing, the identity becomes even more possible.

36

However, there are enough differences to the brow, nose, lips and chin as to suggest that it is two individuals, and this is further underlined by the fact that several of the known men, notably Couribarigal and Mosquito, have similar but not identical scarring.

In fact the closest resemblance is with the man on the right in two Petit sketches (B:20045.1 & 20045.2), shown working on a fire. Unfortunately because that man is shown hunched over, his torso is not visible.

The woman in the canoe is more of a mystery, and given that fewer women were drawn then men, a very important inclusion in the scene.

Once again identification is rather hampered by the fact that her back is turned to the viewer, and she is shown completely unadorned.

The first edition of Baudin’s voyage (1807) included only one woman from New South Wales, “Oui-ré-kine”, plate XX, noted in pencil on one of Petit’s sketches as “Toulgra’s mère”, while the 1824 second edition added two more, both sadly unnamed, the second holding a young child (“Jeune Femme de la Tribe des Cam-mer-ray-gal”, plate 26 & “Jeune Femme de la Tribu de Bow-row-bi-ron-Gal”, plate 28).

Apart from these three there is also an intriguing finished portrait of a woman named as “Oïe réquiné” (B:20035), which seems to be a secondary phonetic rendering of the above “Oui-ré-kine”, but clearly depicts a different woman; had the two swapped names in some way?

Other than these four major portraits, a woman is also included in a rendering of a second man and woman in a canoe (B:20025.1). Lastly, there is an outline sketch of a woman with child (B:20026) and a woman with child is also at far right of a scene of three men dancing (B:20044.1): it is not proven, but both of these may be additional studies of the woman with child from the tribe of the “Bow-row-bi-ron-gal.”

What this means is that there are only seven other Baudin-era sketches held in Le Havre, depicting perhaps as few as five women from the Sydney region. We have no doubt that the debate about how the present woman fits into this group will be difficult to resolve, but this should only serve as a reminder of the importance of these portraits.

37

NICOLAS-MARTIN PETIT 12

(1777 – 1804, French) RECTO: (ABORIGINAL WOMAN BEING COMPETED FOR BY TWO RIVAL GROUPS OF THREE ABORIGINAL MEN), prior to 1804 pen and ink on laid paper watermarked “Budgen 1801” 188 x 327 mm (sheet, irregular) bears inscription upper right: ink note in Péron’s hand No. 23 (bis) voiez au dos… (referring to drawings on verso of sheet) estimate :

$150,000 – 250,000

ENGRAVED Ultimately published as plate 104 in the Freycinet atlas of 1825, noted as Sébastien Leroy (dess.) after Petit RELATED WORKS No such scene recorded at Le Havre

The basic composition here bears comparison with the finished plate except that by the time of publication a third man had been added to the group holding onto the woman on the left (a further hint, if any was needed, of the “classical” design of this scene – despite the shocking nature of the subject it is one of the times that Petit’s training under David seems most obtrusive). Here, as in the finished image, the woman is mostly facing away from the viewer.

VERSO: A SERIES OF EIGHT SKETCHES, probably 1804 or earlier including (TWO PORTRAITS AND WHAT MAY BE A STUDY FOR THE PORT JACKSON WARRIOR WITH SPEAR) pen and ink on paper long pencil notes, not yet deciphered, perhaps further information referred to by Péron’s note on the recto of the sheet [see Hordern House separate catalogue for illustration and description]

Despite its sense of having been constructed from different parts and given an invented structure, there is still a strong sense that all of the figures are individually identified, which does add to the importance of the work, and which may help further unravel some of the mysteries of the New South Wales portraits. It is, moreover, most unusual to have any surviving examples which show Petit’s style of working on these composite scenes.

ENGRAVED None known

That no engraving was originally completed is basically confirmed by the fact that by the time it was included in the Freycinet account in 1825, it was noted as “dess.” by one of the Freycinet-era artists that worked on the Uranie images in Paris, Sébastien Leroy, after Petit’s original.

RELATED WORKS None known

Drawing related to the “Port-Jackson, Nlle. Hollande: cérémonie préliminaire d’un mariage, chez les sauvages” plate in the Freycinet atlas of 1825.

This is the first of two remarkable working sketches by Petit, showing him trying to balance this violent scene. As many historians have commented (Konishi, Starbuck), there is no record of the French artist actually witnessing this scene, which would seem to derive, at least in part, from a written passage on “Courtship and Marriage” in David Collins’s published work, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales (1798). The scene would have an afterlife when a version was included at the base of the famous Sydney Punchbowl, now in the State Library of New South Wales, that was commissioned and made in China in the 1820s. That the drawings in both lots 12 and 13 show letterfolds suggests that they are possibly the original artwork connected to the manufacture of the Sydney Punchbowl. A replica of this bowl was commissioned by Hordern House in 2013: examples are held by the State Library as well as Government House, Sydney.

38

It is difficult to be sure about the way in which this and the second similar study (lot 13) were actually composed. It is on a paper-stock definitely associated with other voyage works, particularly with Port Jackson drawings lots 10 and 11 which are on the same paper, and we can therefore reasonably assume that it was done on the voyage; perhaps the major additions such as the man who has clearly been added at left could be later. All of this is complicated by the sketches on the verso of both sheets [see separate catalogue for full description], which might just as well be shipboard sketches (not dissimilar, for example, to the sort dashed off by Lesueur).

Péron’s note at top right, and similar notes on the Timor drawings lots 2 and 3 and a related note on the related drawing lot 13, all attest to the images having been planned for publication in the first edition of the Baudin account (and obviously before Péron’s death in 1810), though none was in fact published until the second edition of Baudin’s voyage.

39

NICOLAS-MARTIN PETIT 13 (1777 – 1804, French) RECTO: NOUVELLE HOLLANDE … MASSACRE D’UNE FEMME PAR LES SAUVAGES (ABORIGINAL WOMAN BEING COMPETED FOR BY TWO RIVAL GROUPS OF ABORIGINAL MEN, WITH FIVE FIGURES ON THE LEFT AND FOUR ON THE RIGHT), prior to 1804 pen and ink on laid paper watermarked “Bugden 1801” 217 x 332 mm (sheet, irregular) bears inscription upper right: five-line ink note in Péron’s hand No. 23 au trait…. estimate :

$150,000 – 250,000

ENGRAVED Ultimately published as plate 104 in the Freycinet atlas of 1825, noted as Sébastien Leroy (dess.) after Petit

The second preliminary sketch relating to the “Port-Jackson, Nlle.

Hollande: cérémonie préliminaire d’un mariage, chez les sauvages”, plate 104 in the Freycinet atlas of 1825.

RELATED WORKS No such scene recorded at Le Havre, but see the sheet of thumbnail “scenes from Aboriginal life” which alludes to an unpictured scene, “massacre d’une femme” (B:16009)

If anything this is a yet more violent scene than the first version, here featuring ten figures in total: five men competing with four on the right, one of the latter holding his woomera above his head. The woman they are fighting over is here facing the viewer directly, her legs askew, her hair being pulled and with no fewer than seven of the men pulling on her arms. This makes the scene still more unsettling, but also means that it is possible to see the scarification Petit has figured on her torso, which may help unravel aspects of the scene.

VERSO: A SERIES OF SKETCHES, prior to 1804 comprising (FULL-LENGTH PORTRAIT OF A MAN WITH TOP HAT, ANOTHER FIGURE STUDY, A PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN, A DISTANT VIEW OF A CASTLE) pencil on paper [see Hordern House separate catalogue for illustration and description] ENGRAVED None known RELATED WORKS None known

Again there is much here which helps us understand how Petit worked, notably the way he has very clearly highlighted one man (fourth from the left) as a way of trialling a slightly different overall composition. As with many of the Le Havre works this has notes relating to the planned plate at upper left (in Péron’s distinctive hand) which can be compared with similar notes on drawings lots 2, 3 and 12. Its significance regarding the dating of this drawing is discussed in the note to lot 12.

Another intriguing inclusion here is the pencilled-in title “Nouvelle Hollande” at the top. Many of the Le Havre studies have a similar pencil title, which may have been meant as a way of visually tying all of the material together, but was not used in the finished plates.

At the bottom of the sheet the series of rough sketches (discussed at lot 13b in the accompanying publication) has an original pencil caption, the quite blunt “[ma]ssacre d’une femme par les sauvages”, which is of course quite different from that used on the finished plate in 1825.

When was the pencil caption to the present view added? Could it be that the later use of “mariage” in the printed caption is a misprision?

40

41

42

Important Australian and International Fine Art + Important Indigenous Art Lots 14 – 139

43

CRESSIDA CAMPBELL 14 born 1960 GUM BLOSSOM, 2000 watercolour on incised woodblock 111.0 x 87.0 cm signed with initials lower right: CC estimate :

$75,000 – 95,000

PROVENANCE Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Cressida Campbell, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, 14 November – 9 December 2000, cat. 1 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) LITERATURE Crayford, P., (ed.), The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures Pty Ltd, 2008, cat. W0001, pp. 143 (illus.), 352

Cressida Campbell is an intimist, steadily creating images of subtle poetic charm against continuous tides of brash and dogmatic contemporary art. Through a delicate orchestration of the grooves and furrows of an incised plywood block, and the chalky deposits of watercolour left on its surface, Campbell conjures images whose prosaic subject matter conceals their meticulous conception. These are testaments to the artist’s sophisticated visual intelligence and her humble appreciation for the small wonders of the world around her, this shared human experience delighting collectors the world over.

Gum Blossom, 2000 depicting a branch of a flowering eucalypt, is one such work, reaffirming in sumptuous colours and clear lines the resilient beauty of the ancient Australian landscape. Its elongated willow-like leaves are painted with silvery green, supported by madder stems and golden blossoms – a pale tonal palette typical of Australian flora. In spite of her profound respect for observable reality, Campbell’s images are more than recorded snapshots. These images are constructed and edited into harmonious panels, the intricacies of their design gradually revealing themselves to the viewer. With its imposing scale amplifying the clarity of her linear and tonal details, in Gum Blossom, Campbell transforms a simple section of a native tree into a captivating and immersive visual experience.

Campbell’s unusual printing technique also incorporates drawing, carving and painting.

After incising her detailed drawing into a plywood block, the artist paints its design with water-soluble paints (although not necessarily in realistic colours), wets the block and then prints a single impression. Appreciating the mottled texture left behind in the negative image on the block, Campbell has been exhibiting these with the same reverence as her prints since the late 1980s. Gum Blossom was the largest amongst twenty-two woodblocks of the exhibition at Philip Bacon Galleries, displaying simply and without pretence the free form beauty of Nature itself.

Decades practicing as a master printmaker employing the techniques of Japanese Ukiyo-e style have refined Campbell’s understanding of negative space and harmonious pictorial structure. In Gum Blossom, she creates a bold and balanced composition in isolating the graphic tangle of leaves, gumnuts and spent blooms, and presenting the form diagonally across the picture plane stark against a pale and empty background. This asymmetric and dynamic composition moderates the rigour of the artist’s meticulous academic naturalism and the picture’s shallow pictorial depth. Beyond her adoption of Ukiyo-e stylistic techniques, Campbell has also incorporated their philosophical approach into her still lives and landscapes – in various ways, they all express momentary worldly pleasures.

Its elegant branch adorned with blossoms in various stages of bloom, Gum Blossom is a subtle and poised reminder of the fleeting pleasures of life.

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

44

45

DEL KATHRYN BARTON 15 born 1972 GIRL #7, 2004 synthetic polymer paint, watercolour, gouache and ink on polyester canvas 120.0 x 86.0 cm signed lower right: - del kathryn barton signed, dated and inscribed with title on stretcher bar verso: girl #7 / del kathryn barton 2004 estimate :

PROVENANCE Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney Private collection, Adelaide, acquired in November 2011 EXHIBITED Del Kathryn Barton, girl, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney, 6 November – 1 December 2004

$55,000 – 75,000

The paintings of Del Kathryn Barton have long woven the elements of decoration and adornment with foliage, birds and animals as a complex metaphor of ambiguous desire and eroticism. Seated and semi-nude, Girl #7, 2004 is adorned with merely a fabric pelt around her décolletage and a skirt of layered and spotted fragments. It is one of a series of portraits exhibited in that year simply titled ‘Girl’. Each work explores the stereotypical notion of what it means to be a young girl betwixt childhood and womanhood juxtaposed with an inner and somewhat darker world of the subconscious. These girls and their accoutrement display at once innocence and eroticism, beauty and ugliness, cuteness and savagery and the domesticated and the feral. Everything in Girl #7 is on the cusp of transformation or mutation, somewhat like a character from Grimms’ Fairy Tales. She stares at the viewer with blackened eyes, as though they are either scratched out or as armour against any close inspection of her soul. In her lap sits a black rabbit delicately poised either ready to scamper away in fear or dig its claws into the soft flesh of the sitter’s lap. The birds poised on the leaves of an acanthas spinosus seem ready to menace their prey, either rabbit or girl or perhaps simply fly away. Girl #7 is a dark beauty who keeps dark pets as company.

The sexuality of the portrait is overtly evident from the acanthus fronds sprouting out from behind the rabbit, an animal which has long symbolised fertility in art in many cultures. The leaves appear like a metaphor for the female reproductive system, their stems as a fallopian tube and the leaves as her ovaries. Yet the acanthus leaf structure is spiked and forked by nature and barely hospitable presenting yet another edge to an otherwise soft and human analogy. The botanic has long served as lavish adornment in Barton’s work and the choice of acanthus leaves harks back to its classical decorative uses in Greco Roman architecture. More significantly in Girl #7 it provides an indelible link between woman and nature just as the rabbit and birds place her in the entire menagerie of the animal kingdom. So intrinsic is the theme of the ‘wild’ in Barton’s work, the monumental painting Come of things, 2010 was included in the Art Gallery of New South Wales exhibition Wilderness of that year and was acquired for the Gallery’s permanent collection.

46

47

BRETT WHITELEY 16 (1939 – 1992) MELANCHOLY, 1970 oil and mixed media on card on board 72.5 x 75.5 cm inscribed centre lower right: David. OK I let you have first choice, & you ask me to define melancholia. / Thats [sic] easy, its [sic] not a mental disease marked by depression & lack of cheerfulness… / Its [sic] a sea eagle looking for fish in the rain. signed and dated verso: Brett Whiteley 1970 estimate :

$120,000 – 180,000

PROVENANCE Australian Galleries, Melbourne Barry Stern, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1977 Private collection, London, acquired from the above c.1977 LITERATURE Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné: 1955-1992 [in press], Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2019, cat. no. 91.70 We are grateful to Kathie Sutherland for her assistance in cataloguing this work.

‘And then she said, “Please produce something beautiful and simple, so we don’t have to think too much”, and I said “Yes, it’s time for purity.

Do you have a theme?” She turned and tinglingly said, “Yes, The Sea”’.1 When Brett Whiteley’s muse thus suggested the sea as a new theme, both appreciated the need for him to restore and recharge his creative soul after the grueling production of his monumental Alchemy, 1973 earlier that year. Demanding a total turning inward ‘to steal the Fire’, 2 the frenetic surrealist eruptions characterising the Alchemy series had encompassed a myriad of sources and influences to present across eighteen panels an autobiographical journey of gigantic ambition – a birth-to-death vision of the artist. Now, turning his attention outward to the gentler subject of nature, and specifically waves, Whiteley found a motif which was not only visually satisfying, but emotionally and intellectually less draining. Diametrically opposed in their absence of artifice or angst, thus Whiteley’s wave compositions offered a peaceful antidote to his darker, more labored musings – tangibly embodying the complex Rimbaudian duality that so distinguishes his oeuvre.

As Sandra McGrath elucidates, ‘… in truth he was living out one of his constant themes – good and evil, optimism and pessimism, New York and Fiji, Christie and the London Zoo series … all meshed into one overall psychological and pictorial design, one lifelong attempt to reconcile extremes, one eternal battle to identify the truth that E.M. Forster recognised as being accessible only by experiencing opposites’. 3

Painted three years earlier, the magnificent Melancholy, 1970 represents an important prelude to the Waves series of nine oils and seven large drawings that was unveiled at Australian Galleries in 1973. In the surging cacophony of linear swirls here one may already discern the genesis of such masterpieces as Thebe’s Revenge, 1973, with the calligraphic line not only revealing the artist’s formidable talent as a draughtsman but moreover, referencing his abiding interest in Asian art and paying homage in particular to Hokusai’s celebrated ‘Wave’. Similarly, there exist poignant allusions to his artistic and spiritual mentor Vincent van Gogh, in whose work the young Antipodean perceived ‘… a heightening of reality, in that everything I looked at took on an intensity – an expandingness’.4The inclusion of the sea eagle also invites comparison with Whiteley’s own lyrical depictions of the bird kingdom –especially those inspired by his recent travels to Fiji, such as The Pink Heron, 1969 – where the flight-filled creature serves unequivocally as a metaphor for freedom, both of body and spirit, ‘… the idea of extraordinary escapism, a world external from the quagmire’. 5 That Melancholy is imbued with such connotations of optimism and hope despite its ostensibly gloomy title would also seem to accord with the artist’s inscription on the reverse of the work, most probably directed to his friend and philosophical sparring partner at the time, David Litvinoff: ‘… you ask me to define melancholia. That’s easy, it’s not a mental disease marked by depression and lack of cheerfulness … It’s a sea eagle looking for fish in the rain’. Exuding elegance and inspired simplicity, the painting evokes brilliantly the kind of intense, meditative response that Whiteley had so admired not only in the work of Van Gogh, but in the prose of French modernist poet Baudelaire; as specifically cited in the catalogue accompanying his Waves exhibition.

‘O Man, so long as you are free you will cherish the sea / The sea is our looking-glass; you contemplate / Your own soul in the infinite unfolding of its waves, / While your mind is no less a bitter gulf’.6 1. Whiteley, B., ‘Introduction’ in Waves, exhibition catalogue, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, June 1973, unpaginated 2. McGrath, S., Brett Whiteley, Bay Books, Sydney, 1979, p. 152 3. ibid., p. 94 4. Whiteley cited in Waves, op. cit., unpaginated 5. McGrath, op. cit., p. 94 6. Baudelaire cited in Waves, op. cit., unpaginated

VERONICA ANGELATOS

48

49

JOEL ELENBERG 17 (1948 – 1980) MAKIKO, 1980 bronze with black Belgian marble base 76.0 cm height including base edition: A.P. aside from an edition of 6 signed at base: Joel Elenberg estimate :

$150,000 – 200,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Sydney, acquired directly from the artist

Undoubtedly one of the most remarkable aspects of Joel Elenberg’s artistic evolution is that he only embraced the medium of sculpture four years before his untimely death at the age of 32. Disillusioned with the contemporary sculpture scene which he believed ‘had fallen into disrepute with too much welding, fibre-glassing and clay,’1 Elenberg traveled to Italy in 1976 to pursue the ancient tradition of carving marble – gravitating towards the stone for its timelessness and tactility, but also because ‘it was difficult and in Australia it was unexplored’. 2 Upon his pilgrimage to Carrara, Tuscany – the home of marble sculpture since Michelangelo’s time – the young Antipodean thus discovered a whole village of carvers, artists and Italian masons who for generations had been cutting, carrying and chiseling blocks for some of the world’s greatest monuments. As he gleaned their skills and techniques, Elenberg developed such empathy with these local artisans that he subsequently chose them to complete his final sculptures.

Certainly, that marble was ‘difficult’ or posed a considerable challenge for the young sculptor is an understatement. The art of carving was all but lost, the materials were expensive and the very act of chiseling required a strength which Elenberg – in the beginning – did not possess.

Perhaps most fundamentally however, whether pursuing the medium of stone or bronze, there was the psychological barrier; modern sculpture in particular had become an intimidating art form. As Elenberg elucidated at the time, ‘People today seem to equate sculpture with a capital S. Most people think of a sculpture as large abstract steel works against big buildings. I wanted to bring it back to a personal level…’ 3

50

With its impeccable elegance and daring simplicity, Makiko, 1980 illustrates well how successfully Elenberg reintroduced a sense of intimacy back into contemporary sculpture. Betraying strong stylistic affinities with the streamlined female heads of European modernists such as Matisse, Picasso and Brancusi (who in turn were influenced by the aesthetics of African tribal sculpture), indeed the work offers an exquisitely beautiful example of Elenberg’s achievements. In a similar vein to the work of Brancusi especially, any accumulation of detail is here radically rejected to create a pure and resonant form of timeless, classical proportion. Moreover, that the bronze has been polished to sensuous perfection creates an underlying conflict between medium and form that not only echoes the work of his artistic predecessor, but perhaps reflects Elenberg’s own, self-confessed dual personality – the soft and the lyrical with the tough and intellectual.

Revealing Elenberg’s enduring fascination with ancient votive sculpture, the complex tactile qualities of bronze and more universally, the ‘majesty of man’, thus Makiko encapsulates superbly the artist’s late oeuvre which was so widely acclaimed at the time of its inaugural exhibition that one critic was prompted to remark, ‘…Elenberg has the whole Sydney art world eating out of his hand!’.4 Without question, it is Elenberg at his finest – dignified, serene and always mysterious.

1. Brett Whiteley cited in McGrath, S., ‘Truth – in marble’, The Weekend Australian Magazine, 20 – 21 February 1982, p. 8 2. Elenberg cited in Joel Elenberg: Stone Carving: 1977-78, Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney, October 1978, unpaginated 3. Elenberg cited in McGrath, S., ‘Marble star’, The Weekend Australian, 14 – 15 October 1978, p. 6 4. ibid.

VERONICA ANGELATOS

51

YVONNE AUDETTE 18 born 1930 COMPOSIZIONE, 1959 oil on canvas 73.5 x 100.0 cm signed and dated lower right: Audette / 59 artist’s stamp verso bears inscription verso: 3 / H. 283 / 5045 on Galleria Schettini stamp estimate :

$25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Galleria Schettini, Milan (stamped and label attached verso, stock no. F.S. 7513) Galleria Michelangelo, Bergamo (stamped and label attached verso) Sotheby’s, Sydney, 21 March 2005, lot 3 Company collection, Sydney

The generation of Australian artists born around the turn of the nineteenth century counted among its ranks a significant number of successful women artists including Grace Cossington Smith, Christian Waller and Grace Crowley. Similarly, many women who came of age during the 1960s and 70s forged successful artistic careers, taking advantage of women’s liberation and other social freedoms of the time.

Born between the wars, Yvonne Audette is however a rare female member of the generation for whom both the expectations of women and opportunities for them beyond marriage and motherhood were limited.1 Following studies in Sydney at the Julian Ashton Art School, with Lyndon Dadswell at East Sydney Technical College and independent classes with both Desiderius Orban and Godfrey Miller, Audette left Australia in September 1952. Like so many young Australian artists she wanted to see the great art of the world, but unusually for the time she sailed to New York rather than London or Paris. While this decision was influenced by her American-born parents’ agreement to provide financial support if she went there rather than to Europe, it proved to be fortuitous, coinciding with the emergence of the New York School of Abstract Expressionist painting which had a profound effect on her artistic development. Audette gained first-hand exposure to the work of the major exponents of the movement, including Willem de Kooning (whose studio she visited in 1953), Robert Motherwell and Mark Tobey and while her training had been in the academic figurative mode, at this moment she began to move towards abstraction. Notes in sketchbooks from this time document her thinking, ‘architectural structure of de Kooning. Let go of all figuration – Calligraphic gesture of Kline … Calligraphic work with free gesture has endless possibilities’ and the gentle exhortation, ‘Don’t get too sophisticated’. 2

52

Audette left New York in May 1955 and after travelling in Europe, arrived in Italy where she established a studio in Florence. 3 Welcomed into a community of successful practising artists including Arnaldo Pomodoro and Lucio Fontana and stimulated by their example, she worked hard, drawing on her experiences and range of creative influences to develop a mature abstract style. While Audette’s art has continued to evolve throughout her career, it is characterised by the textural layering of line and form, dextrous mark-making and a lyrical use of colour, a unique amalgam of contemporary local and international influences, which make it distinctive within twentieth-century Australian art. Painted in a range of earthy browns, blacks and greens that evoke the landscape, Composizione, 1959 comprises a series of variously scaled squares and rectilinear forms combined to create a carefully balanced central structure. The application of the paint in short staccato brushstrokes that echo the geometric components of the painting, enlivens the surface, adding to a sensation of movement within the overall pictorial equilibrium. In 1959 Audette travelled to Turkey and the Middle East, to France where she met the abstract artist Maria Elaina Vieira da Silva, and then to America where the scale and vitality of the New York art scene both confirmed and reinvigorated her direction to pursue painting as ‘a means to grasp the invisible, the mysterious logic of things’.4 As she later wrote, ‘I wish to substitute the more obvious visual associations for the more tenuous processes which have the power to awaken an inner vision. My imagery rests just below the horizon of recognition’. 5 1. See Ewington, J., Yvonne Audette: Abstract Paintings 1950s & 1960s, exhibition catalogue, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1999, pp. 19 – 20 2. The artist quoted in Grant, K., Yvonne Audette: Different Directions 1954-1966, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2008, unpaginated 3. Audette lived in Florence until 1963 when she relocated to Milan before returning to Australia permanently in 1966.

4. The artist quoted in James, B., ‘Yvonne Audette: The Later Years’, Heathcote, C., et. al., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949-2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, p. 152 5. ibid.

KIRSTY GRANT

53

RALPH BALSON 19 (1890 – 1964) CONSTRUCTIVE PAINTING, 1953 oil on composition board 70.0 x 91.0 cm signed verso: Balson estimate :

$150,000 – 200,000

PROVENANCE Estate of the artist, New South Wales Thence by descent Private collection, New South Wales EXHIBITED Ralph Balson, Second Memorial Exhibition, Gallery A, Sydney, 18 July 1968, cat. 23 (label attached verso)

Radical in his thoughts and remarkably well-read in international developments of the avant-garde, Ralph Balson is now regarded as the father of Australian abstract painting. Along with Grace Crowley, with whom he worked in close collaboration and mutual support, Balson ascribed to the Greenbergian modernist theory that art had its own teleology and was evolving towards an ideal form based on hard-edged geometry and harmonies of pure colour. Studying the work and theories of pioneering modernist artists in the United States, in particular, László Moholy-Nagy and Piet Mondrian, Balson created impersonal ‘objective’ geometric paintings with dynamic compositions that expressed his understanding of the universe. This idealism was a driving force in Balson’s career and encouraged the enterprising artist to constantly create and innovate his method of abstraction.

Constructive Painting, 1953, is a jaunty and playful composition of fractured rectangular planes. Although at first glance this painting appears to follow to the rectilinear grid-like composition characteristic of Balson’s Constructive paintings of the mid 1950s, movement is nevertheless introduced by an asymmetric and irregular distribution of forms. In destabilising the severity of the underlying grid with a placement of planes ever so slightly off-axis, each form outlined with irregular edges and visible brushstrokes, Balson expresses his own hand in the creation of this abstract painting.

Balson’s ‘Constructive’ abstractions were remarkably flat, emphasising the planar nature of the painted surface, the only element of depth remaining being a suggestion of superimposed layers , reminiscent of Moholy-Nagy’s paintings of the 1920s that Balson had certainly seen reproduced in publications.1 Through a manipulation of adjacent colour tones, Balson could transform a series of rectangles into a complex and dynamic composition of slipping and sliding planes. However,

54

the interaction between Balson’s planes of opaque block colours is ambiguous, the succession of their layers is not uniform, some receding while their counterparts float to the foreground.

Echoing the Cubist practice of découpage, this illusion of transparency is a technique that Balson had translated into paint from the earliest phases of his preparatory process. Both Balson and Crowley created collages of semi-transparent coloured paper and string to map out their compositions. 2 Constructive Painting, like other paintings of the time – Abstract Painting, 1947 by Grace Crowley and Balson’s own Constructive Painting, 1955 – retains a linear motif of a meandering ribbon, its startling graceful line unifying several shapes across the fractured picture plane. In contrast to his earlier Constructive Paintings, the brightly coloured forms of this work mostly exist alone, untethered to other planes and seeming to float above (or behind) their grey support.

This fracturing and separation of form prefigures the total explosion of colour that would characterise Balson’s work from 1956 onwards, the ‘Non-Objective Paintings’.

Constructive Painting was created at a pivotal point in Balson’s career.

While he remained for most of his life a quiet man removed from the social scene of the Sydney art world, it was in 1953 that Balson finally started to receive a solid critical reception. Not only did the Art Gallery of New South Wales acquire one of his Constructive Paintings for their permanent collection, but the Conference of Interstate Gallery Directors (a meeting of the directors of Australia’s major art museums) selected two of his paintings, both from the 1950s, to be included in a major diplomatic exhibition in London of the best contemporary Australian Art, Twelve Australian Artists, alongside established artists Russell Drysdale, Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd. 3 1. Taylor, E., ‘Progression and Collaboration’, Grace Crowley Being Modern, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2006, p. 43 2. Evatt, M. A. ‘The Crowley–Fizelle Art School’, Quarterly, AGNSW Research Library and Archive, Sydney, October 1966, p. 315 3. Thomas, D., ‘Ralph Balson and Gallery A’, Gallery A Sydney 1964 – 1983, Campbelltown Arts Centre, New South Wales, 2009, p.106

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

55

RICHARD LIN (LIN SHOW-YU) 20 (1933 – 2011, British) PAINTING WITH ALUMINIUM BAR, 1962 oil and aluminium on canvas 76.0 x 127.0 cm signed and dated on stretcher bar verso: Lin Show Yu May 1962 bears inscription on stretcher bar verso: 50 LINS 18 estimate :

$300,000 – 500,000

PROVENANCE Gimpel Fils, London (label attached verso) Colonel Aubrey Gibson, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1962 Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne Melbourne Fine Art Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above, December 1998 EXHIBITED Melbourne Fine Art Gallery, Melbourne, November – December 1998, cat. 82 LITERATURE Miller, R., ‘the art collectors 2: Colonel Aubrey Gibson’, Art and Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol.2, no.3, December 1964, p. 173 (illus.)

‘White is the most ordinary of colours, it is also the most extraordinary; it is the absence of colour, it is also the sum of colours; it is the most majestic of colours, it is also the most common; it is the colour of tranquility, it is also the colour of grief’.1 After living and working in England for five decades virtually without acclaim, today late Taiwanese artist Richard Lin is finally receiving the recognition he deserves as one of the leading artists of the twentieth century. Only last month, the first European retrospective exhibition of his oeuvre, ‘Richard Lin: Selected Works from the Artist’s Estate’, was hosted by global auction house Bonhams at their London headquarters; and over the past year, seven of the top ten highest prices for Lin’s work have been realised at auction worldwide. No doubt fundamental to the compelling appeal of Lin’s sublime achievements is his highly unique artistic vision – born from an amalgamation of both Eastern and Western cultures, of Oriental and Occidental aesthetics. For while the elegant simplicity of his geometric abstractions such as the present Painting with Aluminium Bar, 1962 evokes unmistakable parallels with Minimalism, Lin notably also stands apart from this formal movement and its emphasis on rationality and the elimination of all emotion or expression. Rather, his masterpieces emanate a subtle energy and fluid sensuality hidden beneath the surface of the picture plane that is directly inspired by Eastern philosophies, and specifically, the abstract landscapes of Mi

56

Fu, a Song Dynasty master working nine centuries earlier. Straddling such dualistic perspectives – one Western and representational, the other Eastern and spiritual – thus Lin occupied what anthropologist Levi Strauss defines as that ‘in-between’ space between multiple worlds, afforded the rare opportunity ‘to glimpse through many slightly ajar doors’ yet paradoxically belonging everywhere, and nowhere, at once; as the artist’s daughter Katya poignantly muses, ‘… my father often felt like a stranger, almost everywhere’. 2 Born into a prominent Taiwanese family in 1933, Lin lived a cossetted life before being sent to study in Hong Kong in 1949, and subsequently, at Millfield, an exclusive independent co-educational school in Somerset, England. In 1954, within two years of arriving in England, he was accepted at the fashionable Regent Street Polytechnic to study Western art and architecture where he absorbed the influences of major artistic movements including de Stijl, Bauhaus, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, and key figures such as Le Corbusier, Ben Nicholson, Mark Rothko and Piet Mondrian. Upon his graduation in 1958, Lin was promptly offered his first show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and in 1964, he was invited to participate in Documenta III at Kassel, Germany where – as the first Chinese artist to be included in this prestigious exhibition – he represented Britain with works from his signature ‘Painting Relief’ series. A complex narrative, Lin’s stylistic evolution began with semi-abstract landscape paintings in the late 1950s, followed subsequently by more traditional works inspired by Chinese calligraphy and ink-and-wash painting, before he finally embraced his celebrated ‘White series’ – the artist’s hallmark genre which he would continue to explore until 1984 when, abruptly declaring the death of painting, he turned his attention instead to three-dimensional arts.

As encapsulated by the magnificent Painting with Aluminium Bar offered here, Lin’s iconic White paintings feature the careful arrangement of whites of various different depths and shades to create compositions that are meticulous and precise, yet simultaneously fluid and energetic.

While there are undeniable elements of minimalism – the departure from representational form; the use of only rectangles and lines; and the almost undetectable brushstrokes – Lin is not regulated by the purely logical placement of shapes, nor does he insist upon eradicating all emotion or denouncing lyricism. To the contrary, if one observes the painting long enough, one begins to realise that it is not so detached or inaccessible; there is a greater energy, a presence within the absence.

Thus highlighting the difference between seeing with one’s eyes and perceiving with one’s spirituality, Painting with Aluminium Bar represents an exquisite example of Lin’s enduring legacy – his powerful ability to transcend space and time. As the artist himself reflected enigmatically upon his half-century long career in the catalogue accompanying his exhibition at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, ‘What is before us?

There are not enough words to describe and no words to do so aptly.

Anything can be something; there is no difference between anything and anything is everything’. 3 1. Richard Lin 2. The artist’s daughter Katya cited in Harris, G., ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’, Bonhams Magazine, August 2018, Issue 56, pp. 44 – 47 3. Lin cited in ‘Introduction’ in Richard Lin, ex.cat., Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, 2010

VERONICA ANGELATOS

57

LEON KOSSOFF 21 born 1926, British VIEW OF KING’S CROSS AND PENTONVILLE ROAD I, 1997 pastel and charcoal on paper 59.5 x 84.0 cm inscribed with initials verso: LK0052 bears inscription on backing verso: 52 estimate :

$45,000 – 65,000

PROVENANCE Annandale Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2001 EXHIBITED Leon Kossoff, Recent Paintings and Drawings, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, 13 April – 20 May 2000; Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 1 June – 22 July 2000, cat. 52 (label attached verso) LEON KOSSOFF, Annandale Galleries, Sydney, 21 March – 12 May 2001, cat. 29 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 34)

Kossoff than an academic representational accuracy. The dense strokes and sweeping gestures coalesce into vignettes that Kossoff then uses to inform large oil paintings, often working on multiple drawings of the same subject in tandem, all pinned to the studio wall.

RELATED WORK King’s Cross, March Afternoon, 1998, oil on panel, 147.0 x 198.0 cm, Private collection, illus. in Leon Kossoff Recent Paintings and Drawings, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 2000, p. 93

A painter of London, Kossoff has observed over thirty years of sustained artistic practice the accelerated transformation of the city from the ruins of the Blitz through to today’s sleek urban metropolis. He has painted, in his characteristic muddy impasto, many views of the city, particularly ones that encapsulate its business, its beating heart of human activity.

In conversation in 1996, the artist explained that ‘London, like the paint I use, seems to be in my bloodstream, it’s always moving – the skies, the streets, the buildings’.1 Anchored in rigorous practice of immediate plein air observation and an intimate and personal interaction with the city, Kossoff’s cityscapes in paint and pastel are in fact composite images of many different superimposed observations, combined to discover the underlying essence of each place, the fundamental interaction between space, light and the people who inhabit it. This is the glorious celebration of life, in all its relentless and grimy glory, that Kossoff presents simply and humbly in each of his compositions. Surpassing the accessible appeal of illustration, Kossoff’s drawing absorbs and harnesses the viewers’ attention, endowing the otherwise modest genre of landscape painting with emphatic expression.

Executed with undeniable vigour, Leon Kossoff’s charcoal and pastel drawing of the forecourt of King’s Cross station and junction of Pentonville Road in the London borough of Camden bristles with energy, both human and atmospheric. The figures spilling from the mouths of the station and the crowd surging in tides against the grand façade of its edifice are evanescent, only intermittently legible amongst his demiurgic tangle of charcoal lines. The high vantage point from which Kossoff observed this scene imposes an impersonal distance between the viewer and the activity below, while brooding and ominous skies lend a theatricality to the image to counterbalance the dynamic spiral composition drawing the viewer’s eye in opposing directions.

Kossoff is one of the most influential figurative painters in Britain, amongst the last remaining members of a group of artists operating in London immediately after World War Two, including Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon. Loosely grouped together under the ‘School of London’ umbrella, many of these artists studied under David Bomberg and consequently adopted a similar spontaneous and haptic style of painting. In 1995, Kossoff was included in a group exhibition held in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. A year later, a retrospective exhibition celebrating Kossoff’s career was held at the Tate. Today, the artist’s works are held in major museum collections around the world, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Gallery in London.

LITERATURE Heathcote, C., ‘Leon Kossoff Bliss in the Here and Now’, Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 38, no. 4, Winter 2001, pp. 534 – 535 (illus.)

With feverish and unbridled gesture, Kossoff fixes his momentary subjective experience of a world in constant mutation. Echoing the practices of his fellow School of London peers, a translation of the physical and visual sensation of the scene is of greater importance to

58

1. Moorehouse, P., Leon Kossoff, Tate Gallery, London, 1996, p. 36

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

59

ARTHUR BOYD 22 (1920 – 1999) THE TRIBUTE MONEY, c.1950 – 52 glazed ceramic tile 33.0 x 44.0 cm estimate :

$25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Peter Bray Gallery, Melbourne (labels attached verso) Gerald Griffin, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1952 Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Ceramic Paintings by Arthur Boyd, Peter Bray Gallery, Melbourne, 26 August – 4 September 1952, cat. 24 RELATED WORK The Thirty Pieces of Silver, c.1950, ceramic painting, illus. in Philipp, F., Arthur Boyd, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, pl. 55, cat. 6.9

The career of Arthur Boyd is distinguished by his mastery across media, be it painting, drawing, printmaking or ceramics. The son of Australia’s first studio potter Merric Boyd, Arthur learnt by example and then through his own experimentation on his father’s equipment at the family compound known as ‘Open Country’. In 1944, he formed his own business, AMB Pottery, in partnership with his brother-in-law John Perceval and their colleague Peter Herbst. Sited in a former butcher’s shop in Neerim Road, Murrumbeena, the pottery utilised some of Merric’s old machinery bolstered by a new gas kiln, stillage and electric wheel. The immediate aim was mass manufacture of utilitarian crockery to meet the demand caused by wartime shortages but once released from these restrictions, they set about making earthenware to their own design with under-glaze painted decorations featuring flowers, animals and joyous, boisterous scenes. Concurrently, Boyd was also painting significant works such as The Mockers and The Mourners, both 1945, based on biblical stories, before transferring similar narratives onto clay in an interlinked suite of ceramic tiles of which The Tribute Money, c.1950 – 52, is a fine example.

60

The mid-1940s was also the period when the young artist became enamored of the imagery of Rembrandt and the Flemish artists Pieter Brueghel and Hieronymus Bosch, and the paintings from his ‘biblical period’ bear witness to these influences. The simplified passages of rich colour in the paintings of Tintoretto further informed Boyd’s painterly techniques at the time. With the added impetus of his involvement in the AMB Pottery, he started experimenting with an ‘idiosyncratic’ combination of oxides and slip mixed to the consistency of oil paint.1 Boyd was quickly dazzled by the results, recalling in later years his excitement as he took the first tile out of the kiln: ‘It was the most marvelous feeling … a painting doesn’t have anywhere near the impact of pulling something out that has been almost purged by being through fire…. It is a pure object and it is changed. It’s formed in the fire and so the surprise is marvelous’. 2 Between 1949 and 1953, Boyd created multiple, richly glazed tiles on subjects as diverse as Jonah and the whale, the prodigal son, Moses and the tablets, and Europa and the bull, each with the intense colouration of stained glass.

Boyd’s first biographer, Franz Phillip, noted that the use of ceramic tiles provided the artist with ‘a field of threefold experimentation: colouristic, compositional and iconographic’ and that he displayed ‘a preference for two or three figures, for a dominant pictorial rhythm, a strong telling and pervading gesture’, 3 all aspects evident in The Tribute Money. This tile illustrates an incident within the life of St Peter as described in the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus directs Peter to find a coin in the mouth of a fish in order to pay the temple tax imposed by the Romans. Two figures covertly pass the coin whilst a third looks away, either cautious or abashed by his companion’s kowtowing to the imperialist authorities.

With its simplified figures adorned in cloaks each of a single colour, The Tribute Money is both an amalgam of Boyd’s artistic influences and a strikingly individualistic response to their original examples.

1. See Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd: retrospective, Beagle Press, Sydney, 1993, p. 170 2. Arthur Boyd, 1993, quoted in Pearce, B., op. cit., p. 169 3. Philipp, F., Arthur Boyd, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, p. 68

ANDREW GAYNOR

61

ARTHUR BOYD 23 (1920 – 1999) NEBUCHADNEZZAR ON FIRE IN A GREEN LANDSCAPE (NO. 2), 1969 oil on canvas 159.0 x 177.0 cm signed lower right: Arthur Boyd bears inscription verso: 47 estimate :

$80,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Philip Bacon Gallery, Brisbane Private collection, Melbourne Christie’s, Melbourne, 1 May 2000, lot 168 Savill Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works

by Arthur Boyd, Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland, 14 April – 10 May 1969, cat. 47 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, pl. 11) RELATED WORK Nebuchadnezzar on fire fallen in a field, c.1966, oil on canvas, 114.7 x 109.6 cm, illus. in Boase, T. S. R., Nebuchadnezzar, Thames and Hudson, London, 1972, pl. 5, p. 25

In 1985, the academic Grazia Gunn curated an exhibition on the ‘seven persistent images’ she identified as running continuously through the art of Arthur Boyd.1 In the associated catalogue, she made the penetrating observation that ‘(s)tarting from the premise of man as victim, Boyd makes human suffering the central subject and continuous underlying theme of his work’. 2 With the Old Testament figure of Nebuchadnezzar, the artist found a perfect vehicle for a charged series of paintings and drawings that explored the possibility of redemption following exile and disgrace.

The flawed heroes of the Bible had long held fascination for Boyd, who first heard their tales read aloud by his grandmothers ‘from an illustrated bible, the tinted engravings in the text being as marvellous as they were bizarre, often even gruesome’. 3 Many of his earlier paintings, sculptures and ceramics were inspired by these narratives, often depicted within an Australian setting. By the mid-1960s, the artist and his family were expatriates based in England and as a consequence of his growing reputation, Boyd was able to undertake collaborations with notable British specialists in various fields. One of these was Thomas S. R. Boase, a medieval scholar who had actually first met the artist in

62

Australia in 1956, and with whom he had published a book on the life of St Francis of Assisi in 1968.4 Their next project was based on the Chaldean leader Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled from 604 to 561 BC, with his kingdom based in Babylon, a city of archaeological renown with its ziggurats, Ishtar Gate and hanging gardens. As recounted in the Book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Jerusalem and made slaves of the city’s Jews, and as his despotic power increased, so did his hubris until finally he went mad, and was driven out into the wilderness, eating ‘grass as oxen’, his hair ‘grown like eagle’s feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws’. 5 A significant inspiration for Boyd’s artistic approach to the story was the watercolour by William Blake depicting Nebuchadnezzar on his knees, half-human, half-animal. He would have also studied Blake’s suite of watercolours depicting Dante’s The Divine Comedy, an artistic gem within the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne since 1920. Also entwined is the story of Icarus flying too close to the sun only to crash and burn, a subject Boyd depicted on ceramic tiles in the early 1950s. In Nebuchadnezzar on Fire in a Green Landscape (No. 2), 1969, the outcast king, like Icarus, is shown engulfed in flames, crawling pitifully within an acid-green field, a riveting yet pathetic figure desperately seeking sanctuary under an otherwise calm, crepuscular English sky. A further impetus for Boyd was the then-raging Vietnam War, a conflagration which had led to the horrific experience of protesters selfimmolating on Hampstead Heath near the artist’s home. When twentyseven paintings from the series were exhibited in Edinburgh in 1969, the accompanying catalogue text noted that ‘(Boyd’s) paintings encompass good and evil; things elemental and mysterious, and things intensely human and vulnerable’.6 Nebuchadnezzar on Fire in a Green Landscape (No. 2) is a powerful work from an equally powerful series, and related examples are now housed within major institutional collections including the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria.

1. Gunn, G., Arthur Boyd: seven persistent images, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1985 2. Gunn, G., op cit., p. 23 3. Gunn, G., ‘Tribute. Arthur Boyd: 1920-1999’, Art and Australia, Sydney, vol. 37, no. 2, December 1999/January – February 2000, p. 207 4. Boase, T. H. S., St Francis of Assisi, Thames and Hudson, London, 1968 5. Book of Daniel: 4:33 6. Oliver, C., ‘A Welcome to Arthur Boyd’, Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works by Arthur Boyd, catalogue essay, Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1969 ANDREW GAYNOR

63

CHARLES BLACKMAN 24 (1928 – 2018) WINDOW LIGHT, 1965 oil and charcoal on paper on board 151.0 x 130.5 cm signed lower right: Blackman estimate :

$120,000 – 180,000

PROVENANCE South Yarra Gallery, Melbourne Mrs V. Kahlbetzer, Sydney Christie’s, Melbourne, 27 April 1998, lot 70 Savill Galleries, Melbourne Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 4 May 2004, lot 33 Company collection, Sydney EXHIBITED New Paintings, Charles Blackman, Skinner Galleries, Perth, February 1966, cat. 24 New Paintings, Charles Blackman, South Yarra Gallery, Melbourne, 29 March – 22 April 1966, cat. 11 Charles Blackman, Schoolgirls and Angels, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 18 May – 16 August 1993, and touring: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 23 September – 21 November 1993; City Art Gallery, Brisbane, 7 December 1993 – 27 January 1994; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 16 February – 4 April 1994, cat. 76 (label attached verso) LITERATURE Moore, F. St. J., Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls and Angels, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, p. 91 (illus.)

Dickins, B., & McGregor, K., Charles Blackman, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2010, p. 103 (illus.)

RELATED WORK Window Shadow, 1965, oil on canvas, 183.4 × 142.6 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Two months after his sell-out solo exhibition at the Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, in June 1960, Charles Blackman won the prestigious Helena Rubinstein Travelling Scholarship and by February the following year he and his family had relocated to London. Initially settling into a house in Highgate where he transformed the mezzanine into a studio, Blackman frequented the city’s galleries viewing the work of British and European artists he had previously only seen in books, as well as visiting the Louvre in the company of his friend Arthur Boyd. In 1961 three of his works, including Dreaming in the Street, 1960 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) were shown in Recent Australian Painting, the groundbreaking exhibition curated by Bryan Robertson at the Whitechapel Gallery. That same year he represented Australia alongside Brett Whiteley at the Biennale des Jeunes in Paris and later, held a solo exhibition at

Matthiessen Gallery. In response to this exhibition, the art critic for the Manchester Guardian wrote that Blackman’s paintings have ‘the kind of sensibility that makes the mixture rich and human’1 while another declared that he ‘succeeded in blending the heavily loaded content, the powerful and highly individual form and the wide range of his colours into a most effective whole and the resulting combination is a completely personal style, fully worked out and executed’. 2 Blackman and his family lived in London for the next five years, travelling, immersing themselves in the rich cultural life of the city and becoming part of a lively social set that included the writer Al Alvarez and comedian Spike Milligan, as well as expatriates Barry Humphries and John Perceval, among others. Blackman’s art flourished. His paintings were represented in numerous group shows, including the major historical survey of Australian art mounted by the Tate in 1963, as well as commercial exhibitions at home. These years also witnessed increasing critical acknowledgement of his work with institutional acquisitions and the publication of a monograph

by Ray Mathew. The promise of a retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery no doubt spurred Blackman’s productive creativity on and when it didn’t eventuate, apparently due to the rise of a new generation of British painters whose work took precedence, 3 his studio was abundantly stocked with good paintings, some of which were shown in a solo exhibition at London’s Zwemmer Gallery in 1965.

Window Light, 1965 wasn’t included in the Zwemmer exhibition, however, in its focus on a figure (or a shadowy presence) in an interior, it is closely related to others that were, including Window Shadow, 1965 (National Gallery of Victoria). Blackman brought the painting back to Australia when he returned in early 1966 and it was included in his exhibition at Skinner Galleries in February, part of the program for the 1966 Perth Festival. A female figure whose face is shown in complete shadow sits on a simple wooden chair, silhouetted by bright white light coming in through the window behind. With the exception of the figure whose hands are clasped on her lap and left foot rests casually on the crossbar of the chair, every element in the picture is rigidly geometric. It is likely, as contemporary critics noted, that in the linear simplicity of this composition Blackman was influenced by the minimalist aesthetic of geometric abstraction 4, but it is ultimately his romantic sensibility that prevails in an image that, in the artist’s trademark style, expresses deep human emotion and feeling via the simplest of visual means.

1. Newton, E., Manchester Guardian, 6 November 1961 quoted in Shapcott, T., Focus on Charles Blackman, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1967, p. 56 2. Rosenthal, T. G., Arts Review, 4 November 1961, quoted in Shapcott, op. cit.

3. See Moore, F. St. J., Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls and Angels, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, p. 22 4. See Rosenthal, T. G. quoted in Shapcott, op. cit., p. 70 and unnamed art critic quoted in Moore, op. cit, p. 91 KIRSTY GRANT

64

65

CHARLES BLACKMAN 25 (1928 – 2018) LEAPING CHILDREN, 1968

66

67

CHARLES BLACKMAN 25 (1928 – 2018) LEAPING CHILDREN, 1968 oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas diptych 213.0 x 176.0 cm (each) 213.0 x 352.0 cm (overall, excluding frame) right panel: signed and dated lower right: BLACKMAN 1968 left panel: inscribed with title on stretcher bar verso: LEAPING CHILDREN estimate :

$180,000 – 240,000 (2)

PROVENANCE Bonython Gallery, Sydney Private collection Ted Lustig, Melbourne Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 18 November 1996, lot 128 Company collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Charles Blackman: Parks and Other Paintings, South Yarra Gallery, Melbourne, 29 October – 14 November 1968, cat. 9 Charles Blackman, Bonython Gallery, Sydney, 8 July 1969, cat. 57 Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls and Angels, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 18 May – 16 August 1993, and touring: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 23 September – 21 November 1993; City Art Gallery, Brisbane, 7 December 1993 – 27 January 1994; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 16 February – 4 April 1994, cat. 85 (labels attached verso) LITERATURE Gleeson, J., ‘Blackman Master of the Figurative’, The Sun, Sydney, 9 July 1969, p. 47 (illus.)

Fenner, F., ‘Blackman, Beyond Hats and Schoolgirls’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 9 October 1993, p. 13A Moore, F. St. J., Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls and Angels, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, pp. 98 – 99 (illus.)

68

To dance. Is there anything so elemental to human creative expression?

With the barest of props – merely a song in their minds – children intuitively know the joy of such movement. In Leaping Children, 1968, Charles Blackman, one of Australia’s most enduring chroniclers of childhood ritual and experience, captures one such moment, a life-sized diptych of five young dancers lost within their private whirl. One girl gives in with such abandon that she has flipped during her trajectory and now stands on her head, inverted, like Alice through the looking glass. In a painterly sea of green and blue, this image is also one of homecoming and sunlit sensation, a joyous response to Australian life by an artist reconnecting with his homeland following five years based in England.

The Blackman’s new home was in Attunga Ave, Woollahra, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, and Charles quickly set to work building a huge studio on the upper floor of the house. In this endeavour, he was assisted by Halifax Hayes, ‘(a) Charles Atlas, mountain of a man, (who helped) realise the artistic visions of the diminutive Charles. Hal’s physical strength and Leonardo da Vinci mind complemented Charles’ intelligence and mercurial, restless spirit. They forged a rare bond in deep friendship’.1 One of their major projects was ‘the creation of the formidable floating easel’ 2 which allowed the artist to work on an increasingly large scale.

From its elevated position, the studio had sweeping views over the suburb, and also looked over ‘a wonderful garden which two very fine gentlemen had manicured into a beautiful thing’ 3 which became the inspiration for a concurrent sequence, The White Cat’s Garden. Other subjects focussed on the family at leisure at the nearby beaches, harbour pools and parks, or relaxing with Blackman’s mother and stepfather at the central coast town of Ettalong. It was an extremely happy and productive time and optimistic energy radiates from Leaping Children.

However, as with all works by the artist, there is mystery flickering at the edges. The children are absorbed in their group frolic but apart from the physical connection of held hands, each figure is enveloped by an interior mood, faces veiled or turned away from the viewer and from each other. Their movement is conveyed by blurred edges and blended fields of pigment, heightened at key points by sharply incised lines, as if moments within their passage have been highlighted or temporarily frozen before dissolving once more into the dance.

Leaping Children was first exhibited at South Yarra Gallery but due to space restrictions, was shown in a cramped position as a corner diptych. Seven months later, at the more spacious Bonython Gallery in Sydney, it was shown to its full advantage alongside the three equally large versions of The White Cat’s Garden and the truly monumental Ettalong Beach. It would have been a powerful visual experience. The exhibition also impressed the noted artist-critic James Gleeson who included a reproduction of Leaping Children alongside his positive review, commenting that ‘Blackman … opens up the doorway from the world of ordinary events into the world of the artist’s imagination, where children play or dream or float unfettered by the bonds of everyday realities’.4

Charles Blackman at his Retrospective Exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 17 May 1993 [featuring Window Light, 1965, lot 24, extreme right] © News Ltd

1. Auguste Blackman, correspondence with Deutscher and Hackett, September 2018 2. Auguste Blackman, op cit.

3. Amadio, N., Charles Blackman: the lost domains, Reed, Sydney, 1980, p. 42 4. Gleeson, J., ‘Master of the Figurative’, The Sun, Sydney, 9 July 1969, p. 47

ANDREW GAYNOR

69

FRED WILLIAMS 26 (1927 – 1982) UNTITLED LANDSCAPE I, c.1966 gouache on paper 75.5 x 57.5 cm signed lower left: Fred Williams estimate :

$45,000 – 65,000

PROVENANCE Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Mr James Cromie, Sydney Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne Art Equity, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Malaysia Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, signed and dated 29 July 2010.

Fred Williams reached his maturity as a painter in the mid-1960s, elevating his idiosyncratic style of landscape painting to unprecedented levels of critical acclaim and positive public reception. Consolidating and refining his stylistic devices to a rapid shorthand, Williams began working more frequently en plein air with quick drying gouache capable of recording immediate observations of the landscape. Williams worked restlessly in series, exploring in each of them a new set of formal precepts rather than a subject or motif. Works such as Untitled Landscape I, c.1966 show the points of junction between series, where defining elements of previous investigations were carried over to the next, providing stylistic bridges to unify his oeuvre.

Untitled Landscape I is a quintessential example of Williams’ painterly simplification of the vast Australian landscape to its most defining elements: colour, space and a random smattering of marks illustrating essential topographical features. Created shortly after his return from the Helena Rubinstein Travelling Art Scholarship, back at home at the foot of the Dandenong Ranges, this work displays the defining feature of the Upwey landscapes, a shallow vertical depth with a razor-edge horizon line bisecting the painting both compositionally and spatially. Williams presents a bold dichotomy between delicately nuanced washes of yellow ochre gouache and a narrow strip of stark white sky.

Williams’ radical abridgement and abstraction of the Australian country provided a modern alternative to the lyrical narrative landscapes of the Heidelberg school and the nationalistic mythology of the Angry Penguins group, exploring instead how the basic building blocks of colour and form alone could communicate what the artist felt was the pictorial truth of the land, recorded lucidly and without hierarchy. Untitled Landscape, like many of Williams’ works of this period, both in gouache and oil, evokes the overwhelming scale of the Australian landscape. By tampering with linear perspective and reducing the points of reference, Williams creates a wall-like section of landscape populated with trees and scrub whose scale and spatial relationships remain ambiguous.

Williams suggests the monumentality and vastness of the Australian landscape in rural Victoria with a remarkably relaxed facture. Anchored by the bold vertical marks of tree trunks in the centre of the composition, the image is counterbalanced by a painterly canopy of gum trees exploding in liberated gesture beyond the horizon line. These flourishes demonstrate Williams was being drawn further away from the panoramic ambiguity of the You Yang works and the literal formalism of the earlier Sherbrooke Forest series, prefiguring the delicate and light-filled touch that would characterise the Lysterfield works yet to come.

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

70

71

FRED WILLIAMS 27 (1927 – 1982) UNTITLED LANDSCAPE II, c.1966 gouache on paper 75.5 x 57.5 cm signed lower right: Fred Williams estimate :

PROVENANCE Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Mr James Cromie, Sydney Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne Art Equity, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Malaysia Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, signed and dated 29 July 2010.

$45,000 – 65,000

Untitled Landscape II, c.1966, is a dramatic and bold picture, with subtle highlights of white, royal blue and orange suspended over a velvety burnt sienna ground. Six tall saplings dominate the foreground of this gouache, some stretching almost the full length of the picture towards the horizon line, echoing the claustrophobia of Fred Williams’ earlier Forest series. These monumental forms dominating the composition are strongly counterbalanced by the overall sparseness of the landscape and Williams’ delicate gesture. Its dark colours, whilst warm in tone, produce an arid and melancholy vision of the Australian outback. Tenebrous and brooding, this gouache, and many others of this time were painted at the end of the day, the artist approaching his familiar landscape from an alternative tonal perspective. The strong contrast between the blackened trunks and white highlights suggest a recent bushfire, foreshadowing the inspiration this apocalyptic theme would provide to the artist later in life.

Here, Williams nourishes the myth of the unknown Australian landscape, ashen and austere but also universal and unifying in its elemental power and archetypal forms.

Williams devoted his life to the creation of a contemporary approach to the romantic tradition of landscape painting, creating instead a distinctive gestural visual language that presented only the most essential elements of the subject, displaying the strangeness of the Australian environment with sincerity and respect for its history. Irregular and asymmetric, Williams’ compositions show the ancient and untameable landscape of the Antipodes, almost always devoid of human presence and constructions. Williams had a sophisticated understanding of colour, using it sparingly to evoke form and space in this period of his career – in contrast to the riotous colours of the later Weipa and Pilbara series.

Painted in the bushy hinterland of Melbourne, this gouache, like its yellow companion piece bears the same strong and high horizon line bisecting earth and sky characteristic of his paintings of the late 1960s.

In these Upwey landscapes, the daubs and dashes of Williams’ brush are suspended above a flat and uniform ground. Here, it is the sparseness and scale of the landscape that provide the focus for Williams’ image; the silhouetted tree canopies stretching beyond the horizon, swampy ponds at their roots only just discernible amongst Williams’ idiomatic brushstrokes.

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

72

73

JOHN BRACK 28 (1920 – 1999) RECLINING NUDE, 1980 oil on canvas 127.0 x 153.0 cm signed and dated lower right: John Brack 1980 inscribed with title on artist’s label verso: RECLINING NUDE estimate :

PROVENANCE Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney Drs Frank and Joan Croll, Sydney Thence by descent Dr Joan Croll AO, Sydney EXHIBITED John Brack, Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney, 16 August – 10 September 1980, cat. 10 LITERATURE Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. I, pl. 48, pp. 156, 158 (illus., as ‘Recumbent Nude’) & vol. II, cat. o264, pp. 35, 169 (illus., as ‘Recumbent Nude’)

$550,000 – 750,000

When John Brack embarked on his first sustained series of paintings of the nude during the mid-1950s he was consciously positioning himself within the long tradition in Western art of depicting the naked female body. With characteristic focus and commitment to his artistic growth, he sought to test the development of his work through a return to the rigour and discipline of life drawing and placed an advertisement for a model in the newspaper. His questions about how he might make a new and meaningful contribution to the genre were answered by the single response he received, from a thin middle-aged woman whose appearance demanded a radically different treatment that was far removed from the sensual nudes of earlier artists such as Rubens and Gauguin. Brack quickly realised that ‘there is absolutely nothing whatsoever erotic in an artist’s model unclothed in a suburban empty room’1, and produced a series of striking paintings including Nude in an Armchair, 1957 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) and The Bathroom, 1957 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), that boldly challenged expectations of the subject. While some lamented the skinny, sexless appearance of the model, art critic Alan McCulloch wrote that in pitting himself against tradition Brack had successfully demonstrated that ‘he [was] on all occasions master of the medium’. 2 The nude returned as a major subject within his oeuvre during the 1970s and 80s and in these works, a certain restrained sensuality and pleasure in depicting the female form is apparent. The contrast between the uncomfortable tension of the 1950s nudes and paintings like Reclining Nude, 1980, where the subject looks out at the viewer completely at ease with her nakedness, seems to reflect the changes in social mores that had taken place in the intervening years and the increased informality of the late twentieth century. These differences might also point to the development of Brack’s own confidence and artistic maturity. In the mid-1950s he was at the beginning of his career with a handful of solo exhibitions to his name, still defining his visual language and establishing his artistic persona. In 1968, with the help of a monthly stipend from his Sydney dealer Rudy Komon, Brack resigned from his position as Head of the National Gallery School in Melbourne and for the first time in his life was able to paint full-time. The ensuing decades witnessed regular solo exhibitions, private commissions and the publication of the first monograph on his art.

74

75

JOHN BRACK 28 (1920 – 1999) RECLINING NUDE, 1980

Reclining Nude is typical of the nudes of these decades, depicting the model in a spartan room – a purpose-built studio adjacent to Brack’s house – with its flowing vertiginous floorboards, a richly patterned Persian carpet and in the foreground, a pair of casually discarded shoes (presumably the model’s), which highlight the artifice of the scene. It was in a portrait of his friend, the Melbourne gynaecologist Hal Hattam, painted in 1965, that Brack first incorporated a Persian carpet as a significant element of the composition which also informed its meaning.

Inspired by the carpet that covered the floor of his studio – then in a small room behind his office at the Gallery School – Brack used it in this painting to symbolically express an aspect of the sitter. 3 A key element of the later nudes, the variously patterned and richly coloured carpets functioned as signifiers of cultural traditions, history and the patterns of civilisation. As Helen Brack has noted, the carpets also represent the world of men 4 and in the context of the nudes where the subject is always female this has a particular relevance, pointing to the differences the artist perceived between the sexes and the counterbalance they provide each other. 5 Whether he was depicting a familiar suburban scene or a model in the studio, Brack sought to imbue his imagery with layers of meaning beyond the surface, his lifelong aim being to understand and illuminate the complexities of the human condition.6 Helen Brack has described the recurring focus on the nude in his oeuvre as ‘John’s need for discipline in seeing and depicting, and his constant effort to define how women are’.7 Brack’s own statement further clarifies the universality of his ambition: ‘When I paint a woman … I am not interested in how she looks sitting in the studio, but in how she looks at all times, in all lights, what she looked like before and what she is going to look like, what she thinks, hopes, believes, and dreams. The way the light falls and casts its shadows is merely … a hindrance unless it helps me to show these things.’ 8 Brack typically began with a series of sketches from the model which were worked up into a more finished drawing which, in turn, was used as the basis for the painting and this careful process is reflected in the fine compositional balance, precision and meticulous detail of this painting and indeed, all of his mature work.

76

Reclining Nude comes from the collection of Dr Joan Croll AO who, with her husband Frank, purchased it from Brack’s 1980 Sydney exhibition.

A renowned breast cancer specialist, Croll is the subject of one of the relatively few portrait commissions Brack undertook, and in this 1976 painting – now hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra – she is depicted sitting in an armchair in the same spare room with another Persian carpet on the floor.

1. Brack, J., interview, Australian Contemporary Art Archive, no. 1, Deakin University Media Production, 1980, transcript, p. 6 2. McCulloch, A., ‘Classical themes’, Herald, 13 November 1957, p. 29 3. See Grant, K., et al., John Brack, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009, p. 110 4. See Lindsay, R., The Nude in the Art of John Brack, exhibition catalogue, McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park, Victoria, 2007, unpaginated 5. See Helen Brack quoted in Gott, T., A Question of Balance: John Brack 1974 – 1994, exhibition catalogue, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria, 2000, p. 23 6. Grant, op. cit., p. 87 7. Brack, H., ‘This Oeuvre – The Work Itself’, Grant, K., op. cit., p. 16 8. Brack, J. quoted in Grishin, S., ‘The nudes of John Brack’, John Brack (1920-1999): A Tribute Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, Rex Irwin, Sydney, 1999, unpaginated

KIRSTY GRANT

John Brack in his studio completing Nude on Shag Rug, 1976–77, February 1977 courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

77

BERTRAM MACKENNAL 29 (1863 – 1931) DIANA WOUNDED, 1905 bronze 37.0 cm height signed and dated at base: 1905 / B. Mackennal estimate :

$35,000 – 45,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Royal Academy, London, 1906, cat. 1648 (another example) Bertram Mackennal: The Fifth Balnaves Sculpture Project, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 17 August – 4 November 2007 (another example) LITERATURE Edwards, D., Bertram Mackennal: The Fifth Balnaves Sculpture Project, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, pp. 66 – 68, 116 – 118 (illus., p. 66, another example) RELATED WORKS Diana Wounded, 1907 – 08, life-size marble version, Tate Gallery, London, acquired by the Chantrey Bequest, 1908

The mythological tales of Diana, virgin huntress, inspired many artists over the centuries, Titian’s painting Diana and Actaeon in London’s National Gallery being one of the Renaissance master’s greatest works. Bertram Mackennal’s bronze Diana Wounded, 1905 is a far cry from Actaeon being torn to pieces by his own hounds. Moreover, she is stripped of her godly attributes ‘her bow and hounds’ and presented as a blithe nude in her virgin splendour. Her contemporary appearance, as a nubile Edwardian beauty, has been commented on by several writers.1 Like his fellow Symbolists of the 1890s Mackennal portrayed the femme fatales of his time ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ and the past Circe, 1893 (bronze, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest 1910), and Salome, c.1895 (bronze, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney). Things changed in the first decade of the new century. His women became outwardly more genteel, though refinement did not reduce their considerable appeal.

Diana, in Roman mythology, was the moon goddess of the hunt and birthing, equated with the Greek Artemis, daughter of Zeus and brother of the sun god Apollo. Jupiter gave Diana permission ‘to live in perpetually celibacy’ and, as ‘the patroness of chastity’, ‘to shun the society of men’. 2 Mythological references are avoided in Mackennal’s bronze.

‘Diana Wounded is even more tongue-in-cheek. The vicious Roman moon goddess in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is inverted. It is she, not the quarry Damasichthon, son of Amphion and Niobe, who is injured in the leg’. 3 Taking into account the association of ‘Diana’ with ‘heavenly’ and ‘divine’, Mackennal carried this further. Divine in looks rather than status, she is a sight perilously tantalising to the mortal male. The action of bandaging her thigh, inspired by the more explicit sight of ‘a model doing up her stocking’, effectively enabled the artist to show off her bodily attributes without loss of modesty.4 This teasing play between the appealing and the unobtainable epitomised that beguiling blend of poise and pleasure so typical of la belle époque and its English Edwardian counterpart. Although calling freely upon ancient Greek and Roman sculptures of the goddess of love, Aphrodite and Venus, she is a thoroughly modern Edwardian maiden. Effectively using the contrappostal pose, Mackennal created an ideal image endowed with grace, but sensuous of modelling. When Mackennal made a marble life-sized version in 1907 – 08, he crowned Diana with her crescent moon. It was smartly acquired by the Chantrey Bequest and given to London’s Tate Gallery in 1908. The Times called it ‘one of the most beautiful nudes that any sculptor of the British school has produced’. 5 The artist thought it one of his best works too.

1. Edwards, D., Bertram Mackennal: The Fifth Balnaves Sculpture Project, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, pp. 67 – 68 2. Lemprière, J., Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary of Proper Names mentioned in Ancient Authors, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, London, revised edition, 1972, p. 204 3. Hutchison, N., ‘Here I am!’; sexual imagery and its role in the sculpture of Bertram Mackennal’, in Edwards, op. cit., p.

116 4. ibid.

5. ’The Royal Academy: second notice’, Times, London, 8 May 1908, p. 6, quoted in Edwards, op. cit., p. 67

DAVID THOMAS

78

79

CONRAD MARTENS 30 (1801 – 1878) VIEW OF SYDNEY COVE, 1838 watercolour and scraping out on paper 43.0 x 63.0 cm signed and dated lower right: C. Martens / Sydney 1838 estimate :

$200,000 – 300,000

PROVENANCE John Gilchrist (1803 – 1866), Sydney Thence by descent William Oswald Gilchrist (1843 – 1920), United Kingdom, the eldest son of the above Clara Elizabeth Gilchrist (née Knox) (1851 – 1930), United Kingdom, wife of the above Thence by descent Sir Edward Ritchie Knox (1889 – 1973), Sydney Thence by descent Edward Geoffrey Knox (1924 – 1983), Canberra Thence by descent Private collection, Canberra RELATED WORK ‘Sydney from the North Shore Jany 8. 1836’, pencil on paper, 25.7 x 37.0 cm, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (PXC 295, f. 23) ‘Sydney Cove from the North Shore’, 1836, watercolour with scraping out on paper, 32.0 x 47.8 cm, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (DGD 8/f. 5) [Shore line scene, seated figure in right foreground – unfinished], pencil on paper, 13.0 x 22.0 cm, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (PXC 391, f.39a)

This is a quintessential Sydney view painted by one of the best known colonial artists. The vantage point is from Milsons Point looking directly across the Harbour to Fort Macquarie, built during the term of Governor Macquarie as a defence, but never used, with Sydney Cove and warehouses and ships’ masts to the right. The Sydney Opera House is now on the site of Fort Macquarie. As well as a celebration of the magnificent harbour setting, the painting also documents the flourishing settlement.

In his preliminary sketch for this work (Mitchell Library PXC 294, f.

23) Martens gave a key to the main buildings, which include from left to right: the first St Mary’s Cathedral, Hyde Park Barracks, part of the Legislative Council Chambers (one of the former ‘Rum’ hospital buildings), Government Stables; and on the western side, the Sydney Barracks, and Government Warehouse (Commissariat Building) on the shore of Sydney Cove. Painted some two years after the sketch, Martens

80

made some amendments in this finished work: the old windmill tower near present day Governor Phillip’s statue had been demolished, and the partly built new Government House, begun in 1837, is clearly visible above the fort. Unusually for Martens, he has placed an artist (himself?) with sketchbook and easel seated on a rock as a focal figure in the foreground near where the northern approaches to the Sydney Harbour Bridge now stand. A preliminary study for this figure is in one of his sketchbooks (Mitchell Library PXC 391, f. 39a).

Martens had been in Sydney since April 1835 and quickly established himself as the artist of choice for the colonial merchants, officials and landowners. This success is reflected in an increasingly confident handling of his materials and subjects. Smaller, earlier versions of the subject of this painting (Mitchell Library, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Newcastle Art Gallery) are all simpler, albeit competent watercolours.

In this ultimate version, Martens has completely altered the scale, mood and complexity using rich indigo tones and contrasting highlights to achieve a dramatic stormy sky looming to the south of the city. This contrasts with the sunlit sandstone of the fort emphasising the focal point of the view in the middle distance. To the left of the fort is one of the local paddle steamers Experiment or Australian, identified by the smart black and white horizontal stripes on the tall funnel.

Apart from its intrinsic quality as one of Martens’ best works done at a time when his career was blossoming, this work has an impeccable provenance. As recorded in Martens’ account book in an entry which gives its title as ‘View of Sydney Cove’ dated 22 November 1838, it was acquired for fifteen guineas (Martens’ highest price at the time for a large work) by the Scottish merchant John Gilchrist (1803 – 1866) who had been based in Sydney since 1828. Like others involved in the local shipping trade, he lived at first at Millers Point. After his marriage he built Greenknowe at Darlinghurst (now Potts Point) in the mid-1840s and lived there with his family until returning to England in 1854.

His eldest son William Oswald Gilchrist (1843 – 1920) followed his father in the firm and married Clara Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Sir Edward Knox, founder of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company. This painting of Sydney Cove passed into the Knox family and has remained with their heirs until the present time.

ELIZABETH ELLIS OAM EMERITUS CURATOR, MITCHELL LIBRARY

81

EMANUEL PHILLIPS FOX 31 (1865 – 1915) (FISHING BOATS AND JETTY, LE BRUSC), c.1912 – 13 oil on canvas 38.0 x 46.0 cm signed lower left: E. Phillips Fox estimate :

$25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Leonard Joel, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne

From their Paris apartment at 65 Boulevard Arago, Emanuel Phillips Fox and his wife Ethel Carrick often visited the French coasts, especially the fashionable beach resorts of Trouville and Royan, and later the south of France and the sunny waters of the Mediterranean. In September 1912, Fox had written to Hans Heysen: ‘… I hope to go South for October & look forward to getting some good work, in the neighbourhood of Arles …’.1 Later, during the spring of 1913 Fox and Carrick were in the south, at Le Brusc and Sanary, close by to Toulon. It was here, according to Carrick, that ‘Fox painted several brilliant seascapes’. 2 The small fishing village of Le Brusc, described as a hamlet within the town of Six-Fours, lies west of Toulon, with Sanary and Bandol to the north. The Brusc lagoon, often dotted with colourful small fishing boats, separates Brusc from the open sea. It appealed to Fox as seen in Le Brusc, South of France, c.1912 – 13 (formerly in the D. R. Sheumack Collection, Zubans 424) and related paintings. The Argus reviewer of Fox’s Melbourne exhibition of June 1913 singled out these works for special mention: ‘A seascape that is very characteristic of the Mediterranean is met with in No. 64 [The Mediterranean], a very refreshing stretch of water with a rich mass of foreground rock. Others of the same class dealt with by impasto of pure colour are “The Coast at Le Brusc” (63), “The Shallows” (66), and “Towards Sanary, France”’. Catalogue number 60 in this exhibition is tantalisingly titled ‘Le Brusc, France’, eluding identification.

Fox had a special gift for painting water, the play of light on and through breaking waves seen at its best in Green Wave, Manly, c.1914 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). Another singular feature of his art is the handling of paint – thick, lively and enticing – appealing equally to sight and touch. It is one of the transformative features of (Fishing Boats and Jetty, Le Brusc), c.1912 – 13. The richly varied length and thickness of each brushstroke evokes allied associations of the sound of water lapping against boat and jetty, and the movement of the water itself. Beyond, the quiet grandeur of the hills and mountain ranges find harmony in the robust handling of the cumulous clouds above.

All is enveloped in an aqueous atmosphere in which Fox and his fellow Impressionists delighted to excel.

Unlike the bright sunshine that sparkles in Cassis, South of France, c.1912 – 13 (Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 18 April 2018, lot 30) and so many others of these colourful seascapes, in (Fishing Boats and Jetty, Le Brusc) Fox effectively restricted his palette to capture the changing weather effects of a cloudy day. Areas of sunlight contrast with darker ones; the brighter wooden planks of the jetty and white boats leading the eye into the picture and its surrounds. The absence of figures allows for closer involvement of the viewer and the moment captured, as seen in other seascapes such as Rocks and Sea, c.1911 (The University of Melbourne Museum of Art Collection, Melbourne) and Towards Rose Bay, Sydney Harbour c.1913 – 14 (private collection).

1. Fox, E. P., letter to Hans Heysen, 27 September 1912, quoted in Zubans, R., E. Phillips Fox: His Life and Art, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1995., p. 183 2. Ethel Carrick manuscript notes for 1949 Fox retrospective exhibition, Fox file, Art Gallery of New South Wales, quoted in Eagle, M., The Oil Paintings of E. Phillips Fox in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997, pp. 77, 80, footnote 86

DAVID THOMAS

82

83

ELIOTH GRUNER 32 (1882 – 1939) SEPTEMBER MORNING, 1926 oil on plywood 29.0 x 24.0 cm signed and dated lower right: GRUNER / 1926 PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Edwin Geach, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1926 possibly: R. G. Smith, Brisbane, 1953 William S. Ellenden, Sydney, 11 August 1987, lot 92 (as ‘September Morn’) Jan Taylor, Sydney Trevor Bussell Fine Art Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Melbourne Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne estimate :

84

$20,000 – 30,000

EXHIBITED Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Elioth Gruner, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 10 – 21 August 1926, cat. 8, (as ‘Still morning’) Society of Artists’ Annual Exhibition, Education Department’s Art Gallery, Sydney, 10 September – 2 October 1926, cat. 73 (n.f.s.) possibly: Loan Paintings from Brisbane Private Collections, Queensland National Art Gallery, Brisbane, 20 May – 21 June 1953, cat. 71 (as ‘Misty morn’) Fine Australian Paintings: 1815-1965, Trevor Bussell Fine Art Gallery, Sydney, 29 October – 21 November 1987, cat. 48 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, as ‘September Morn’) LITERATURE ‘Oil Paintings. Mr. Gruner’s Exhibition’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 11 August 1926, p. 10 Galway, G., ‘Apostle of Light. Gruner’s Landscapes’, Evening News, Sydney, 12 August 1926, p. 19 We are grateful to Steven Miller, Head of the Art Gallery of New South Wales Research Library and Archive, for his assistance in cataloguing this work.

ELIOTH GRUNER 33 (1882 – 1939) THE POPLARS, c.1926 oil on wood panel 36.0 x 46.0 cm signed lower right: GRUNER EXHIBITED Loan Exhibition of the Works of Elioth Gruner, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 21 December 1932 – 21 February 1933, cat. 31 (as ‘The Two Poplars’) Elioth Gruner 1882 – 1939, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 13 July – 4 September 1983, cat. 50 (label attached verso) Elioth Gruner: The Texture of Light, Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra, 8 March – 22 June 2014; Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle, 26 July – 26 October 2014 estimate :

$20,000 – 30,000

PROVENANCE probably: Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney Mrs John W. Maund, Sydney Australian Art Auctions, Sydney, 25 November 1985, lot 130 Private collection, Sydney LITERATURE Ure Smith, S. and Gellert, L. (eds.), ‘The Recent Works of Elioth Gruner’, Art in Australia, Sydney, March 1929, 3rd series, no. 27, pl. 29 (illus.)

Pearce, B., Elioth Gruner, 1882-1939, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1983, cat. 50, p. 47 Australian Art Auction Records 1984–1987, Australian Art Sales, Sydney, 1987, p. 146 (illus.)

Clark, D., Elioth Gruner: The Texture of Light, Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra, 2014, pp. 45 (illus.), 46, 96 We are grateful to Steven Miller, Head of the Art Gallery of New South Wales Research Library and Archive, for his assistance in cataloguing this work.

85

ALBERT HENRY FULLWOOD 34 (1863 – 1930) NEW TOWN, TASMANIA, 1897 oil on wood panel 26.0 x 26.5 cm signed, dated, and inscribed lower left: A.H. Fullwood / TASMANIA 97 estimate :

$15,000 – 20,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 21 April 1986, lot 20 (as ‘Rural Tasmania’) Private collection, Sydney Sotheby’s Australia, Sydney, 21 July 2015, lot 110 (as ‘Tasmania’) Private collection, Hobart EXHIBITED Collector’s Exhibition 2016, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 6 August – 29 October 2016 (as ‘(The Rivulet at New Farm with Mezger’s Mill)’)

Albert Henry Fullwood made a series of visits to Tasmania during the 1890s and on his first trip in 1893, toured the Derwent Valley, where he produced a number of watercolour sketches which were subsequently lent to the Tasmanian Art Gallery in Hobart. The Art Society of Tasmania, who at the time was extremely active in promoting Tasmania’s role in the arts in Australia, seized the opportunity to engage him as a teacher of landscape painting.1 Later in the year, Society founder Louisa Swan visited Sydney to cultivate a relationship with the New South Wales Art Society. On her return to Hobart, she noted that among Fullwood’s exhibits at the New South Wales Art Society exhibition were several Tasmanian subjects. 2 Among these was Hop Pickers, New Norfolk, Tasmania, 1893, now in the collection of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

Fullwood played an active role in the arts in Tasmania for the rest of the decade. In 1894 he exhibited at the Tasmanian International Exhibition and in 1897 he again visited Hobart. During an interview on ‘The Impressionist School of Painting’ published by the Mercury newspaper that year he was described as being ‘busy with his brush and with teaching’. 3 His art classes were advertised prior to his arrival in Hobart, with students asked to send their names to Louisa Swan for enrolment.4

86

The site chosen for these lessons was the rustic property of New Farm, in the then rural region of New Town. The area had been developed in the early days of the colony by former convict George Gatehouse, and in 1848 was sold to John Mezger, who operated a bone mill on the site.5 By the 1890s, the mill was already in a dilapidated state, however the ruins of Mezger’s Mill proved a favourite subject, and paintings remain by both Fullwood and Swan.6 In this picturesque view dating from 1897, Fullwood depicts the site from further afield, with the agricultural complex partly obscured by the willows growing along the New Town Rivulet.

The mill and its surroundings consequently became popular subject matter for both local and visiting painters, and were depicted by a range of notable artists, including Frederick McCubbin, who produced several views including Mezger’s Mill, near Hobart, Tasmania (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) when visiting the colony in 1899. Later correspondence between McCubbin and Tom Roberts suggests that it was Fullwood, in Hobart again at that time, who introduced him to the site.7 Today, while the core of the property remains intact and surrounded by trees, the outlying land has been engulfed by the suburbs of New Town and Moonah.

1. ‘Epitome of News: The Tasmanian Art Gallery’, The Mercury, Hobart, 27 April 1893, p. 2 2. ‘Progress of Art in Tasmania: The Art Society’s Exhibition’, The Mercury, Hobart, 16 October 1893, p. 4 3. ‘The Impressionist School of Painting: Interview with Mr. A. H. Fullwood’, The Mercury, Hobart, 3 April 1897, p. 1 4. ‘Epitome of News: Mr. Fullwood’s Art Classes’, The Mercury, Hobart, 18 February 1897, p. 2 5. MacKenzie, A (1990), Frederick McCubbin 1855-1917: ‘The Proff’ and his art, Mannagum Press, Melbourne”, p. 98 6. Gray, A, ‘Fullwood in Tasmania’, The Art Bulletin of Tasmania, Hobart, 1984, p. 52 7. ibid. p. 98

PAUL O’DONNELL

87

CHARLES BLACKMAN 35 (1928 – 2018) GIRL HIDING, c.1967 – 68 oil on composition board 136.0 x 120.5 cm signed lower right: BLACKMAN estimate :

$65,000 – 85,000

PROVENANCE Halifax Hayes, New South Wales, a gift from the artist Thence by descent Private collection, New South Wales

In 1966, Charles Blackman returned to Australia after five years in London, a period marked by critical acclaim and increasingly popular success. Following short stays in Melbourne and Brisbane, the Blackmans settled in Sydney at Attunga Avenue, a narrow, steeply inclined road that bisects the genteel suburb of Woollahra. Rich with vegetation – and wealth – it is conveniently located close to numerous schools, beaches and the city, with the harbour a short walk away. In short, it was a perfect location for the family to re-establish themselves.

Their house (at number 12) is near the crest of the hill with expansive views over the area and Blackman soon set himself the task of building his dream studio. Girl Hiding, c.1967 – 68, is intimately tied to the location, having been gifted to Halifax Hayes, a master builder, stonemason and sculptor who assisted Blackman with the renovations at Attunga Avenue and continued as his collaborator on numerous diverse projects over the next decades.

As the artist’s wife Barbara noted, ‘When we returned to Australia in 1966, Charles was famous. Collectors all wanted Blackmans, dealers wanted pictures to sell, galleries wanted shows. We got caught up in the high life: parties, media, photographs’.1 Whilst Charles set about building the studio with Halifax Hayes, Barbara, a noted poet in her own right, turned ‘the new sitting room opening onto the courtyard garden into a venue for dinner parties, musical events, poetry readings and theatrical performances’. 2 Attunga Avenue thus became a home full of creative enterprise and their son, Auguste, recalls that Girl Hiding was one of the first paintings his father painted there, and may be interpreted as his direct response to the unique light of Sydney following five years of English skies. 3 Not surprisingly, the girl is shown shielding her eyes from

88

the glare, surrounded as she is by the warmth of sunshine yellow; but this gesture characteristically echoes many of Blackman’s other signature paintings, where his protagonists shield their identity from outsiders and inhabit their own world of inner thoughts. ‘Charles’ formidable and sensitive understanding of the complex feminine psyche, the tender, human fragility and the potent mythic qualities of the underworld, are touched upon and culminate in this painting. She is vulnerable, but she is not weak. She is casting a spell of her own making’.4 The rapid gestural marks delineating the body further emphasise the girl’s quick movements as if she has just become aware of observers and attempts to block them from her view. Intriguingly, Blackman chose to paint on the reverse, toothed side of the board and the textural pattern provides an optical ‘hum’, not dissimilar to the Op Art movement which had risen in prominence in London during the artist’s last years there. As ever, Blackman found a way to synthesise his individualistic figurative motifs within the aesthetics of otherwise contemporary art movements.

Considering the painting’s personal connection, it is not surprising that Girl Hiding remained with Halifax Hayes for the remainder of his life, a vivid yet intimate talisman of his enduring creative friendship with one of Australia’s most successful and beloved artists.

1. Barbara Blackman, 2010, quoted in Hawley, J., ‘Charles Blackman’, Artists in Conversation, Slattery Media, Melbourne, 2012, p. 280 2. Moore, F. St. J., Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls and Angels, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, p. 23 3. Auguste Blackman, correspondence with Deutscher and Hackett, September 2018 4. Auguste Blackman, op cit.

ANDREW GAYNOR

89

FRED WILLIAMS 36 (1927 – 1982) KARRATHA STATION, c.1979 – 81 gouache on paper 58.0 x 76.5 cm signed lower left: Fred Williams estimate :

$40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne Art Equity, Sydney Private collection, Malaysia Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, signed and dated 29 July 2010.

In 1979, Fred Williams was invited by the chairman of the mining company CRA (now known as Rio Tinto), Sir Roderick Carnegie, to visit the Pilbara region in Australia’s remote north-west. Carnegie, a family friend of the Williams, had been impressed by the artist’s recent aerial paintings of mining operations at Weipa in Queensland and invited him to compare this experience with the awe-inspiring scale and raw elemental power of the Pilbara. Based on visual material gathered during two consecutive trips, Williams produced a remarkable body of work, twelve landscape paintings and a large number of gouaches. These Pilbara paintings were to become his last series – twelve months after their completion, in April 1982, the artist passed away.

Patrick McCaughey, in his monograph on Fred Williams, explained that while CRA made no formal commission for the creation of these landscape paintings, there was ‘a vague idea that he [Williams] should record the Pilbara before it was changed by the effects of mining’.1 CRA had been operating mines in the region for a little over ten years, and the town of Karratha was still young. Flying over the region in a biplane and taking hundreds of photographs, Williams desperately sought to capture the nuances of this foreign landscape, then using the fast-drying medium of gouache to faithfully and immediately transcribe its saturated minerally rich colours. Gouache enabled the creation of a wider range of textures, from thick daubs to wide washes, handled with fluidity and apparent impetuousness.

90

Karratha Station, c.1979 – 81 is one of the gouaches painted either in situ or in a flurry of activity immediately upon the artist’s return to Melbourne. Williams was so impatient to fix the images onto paper that it was only in March of 1981 that he returned to the subject to execute a final series of landscapes in oil – all of these paintings were eventually acquired by CRA (and subsequently donated to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) along with eighteen of the gouaches, many others being purchased by the National Gallery of Australia.

The lands that form the Pilbara region are ancient and rich with minerals.

Residing at Karratha Station, a country property fifteen kilometres from the coast, Williams surveyed the rugged outline of the Hamersley Range enclosing the echoing empty landscape. He studied the nuances of this strange landscape and became fluent in their expression in paint.

Karratha Station incorporates many of the most dramatic features of this other-worldly outback landscape, trees dwarfed by rugged red cliffs, a low horizon buckling under an enormous expanse of blue sky, seams of bright mineral deposits segmenting the landscape into successive layers, interspersed with fields of spinifex and wildflowers. Remarkably detailed and naturalistic while retaining the distinctive Williams brushstroke, Karratha Station is characterised by touches of paint and lines laden with pigment set against a sweeping wash, its delicate tones evoking the overwhelming vastness of the artist’s vista of this timeless and enduring landscape.

1. McCaughey, P., Fred Williams 1927 – 1982, revised edition, 1996, Murdoch Books, Sydney, p. 321

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

91

SIDNEY NOLAN 37 (1917 – 1992) RIVER BANK, 1965 oil on composition board 152.5 x 122.0 cm signed and dated lower left: 18 Jan 1965 / Nolan signed, dated and inscribed verso: E3033 / xREICHART [sic] / Nolan 18 Jan 1965 / … / 18 Jan 1965 / Nolan estimate :

$100,000 – 150,000

PROVENANCE probably: Marlborough Fine Art, London Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED probably: Sidney Nolan: recent work, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd, London, May 1965, cat. 2 RELATED WORK Riverbend I, 1964 – 65, oil on board, nine panels, 152.5 x 122.0 cm each, in the collection of the Australian National University, Canberra

From the earliest days of his painting career in the Wimmera, Sidney Nolan displayed a fascination with landscape in all its myriad forms. An inveterate traveller, he visited every continent, including Antarctica, and the resultant artworks captured an incredible variety of scenes. Through his study and understanding, these ever-changing lands became backdrops for his interwoven narratives, particularly those based around the legend of the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. River Bank, 1965, is closely related to one of the most epic of these, Riverbend I, 1964 – 65 (Australian National University, Canberra), a nine-panel masterpiece set amidst the sodden, muddy banks of Victoria’s Goulburn River.

For Nolan, Kelly was something of a psychic doppelgänger, a flawed hero of grand ambition, class struggle, noble deeds and, for the outlaw at least, a tragic end. Such was his identification with Kelly that Nolan’s colleague Albert Tucker took to calling him ‘Ned’ in their correspondence. In the first Kelly series of 1945 – 47, the protagonist is in control of his lands, jaunty and all seeing. For the second series, painted during the mid-1950s after Nolan had first-hand experience of the devastation of post-war Europe, Kelly is shown wounded on a skeletal horse, navigating salt-pans as he seeks to evade capture. In the late 1950s, Nolan experimented with pigment mixed with polyvinyl acetate, applying it fluidly to his surfaces using squeegees, rags and fingers.

He revisited this technique using oils instead of acrylic in Riverbend I, resulting in a paint application that is made deliberately visceral through

92

vigorous brushwork with the outlaw and his pursuers mired in the result. ‘(H)ere is landscape as enclosing environment … beheld intently by Nolan who knits over and under surfaces so tightly that we are made aware of the microforms of the bush – the layered groves, its vegetable past – as well as the larger interchange of gum tree and undergrowth, dry bush and muddy river’.1 Nolan’s use of the Goulburn River as the setting for these works was tied to his own childhood memories of walking with his father along its inundated banks, past ‘a kind of billabong where the river winds round … very cool and (smelling) of tannin’. 2 Nolan was renowned as an artist who would spend long periods contemplating and absorbing ideas before undertaking his projects in intense bursts of studio activity lasting for months. From August 1964, he painted approximately thirty large-scale ‘Kelly’ images – interspersed with others depicting Burke and Wills – before embarking on Riverbend I; and he continued on afterwards, full of bursting inspiration and ambition, before producing a second version of the masterpiece later in the year.

The painting on offer here is one of the inter-connecting works and relates directly to panels two and four of Riverbend I, both of which feature a lagoon formed by flooding visible through the forest with two prominent trees (the trunks of which are near-identical to the ones in the painting on offer here) marking the submerged bank of the river. It is a vivid and authentically Australian vista, made all the more remarkable for having been painted in the artist’s studio in London by the expatriate artist whose imagination always retained the land of his birth.

1. Clarke, J., Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 12 2. Sidney Nolan, 1969, quoted in Pearce, B., Sidney Nolan, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, p. 55

ANDREW GAYNOR

93

BRETT WHITELEY 38 (1939 – 1992) RABBIT HOLES, BLAYNEY, 1991 charcoal, gouache and collage on paper 56.5 x 76.5 cm signed lower right: brett whiteley dated and inscribed with title lower left: Rabbit holes. Blainey [sic] 91 estimate :

$60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE Estate of the artist, Sydney Thence by descent Estate of Arkie Whiteley, Sydney Private collection, Sydney

‘Of all the subjects Whiteley painted in his career, landscape gave him the greatest sense of release …’1 Awarded the prestigious Wynne Prize for Australian landscape painting in 1977, 1978 and 1984, Brett Whiteley possessed a widely acclaimed talent for capturing the natural environment. As Barry Pearce elaborates, Nature offered Whiteley both inspiration and solace: ‘… if in many of his other themes Whiteley confronted the difficult questions of his psyche, landscape provided a means of escape, an unencumbered absorption into a painless, floating world’. 2 Executed the year before his untimely death in 1992, Rabbit Holes, Blayney pays eloquent homage to the landscape of Whiteley’s childhood where his journey as an artist first began. Following his return to Australia in 1969 after a tumultuous decade abroad, perhaps not surprisingly Whiteley had embarked upon an artistic pilgrimage to rediscover his homeland – captivated afresh by the beauty, vastness and variety of the Australian landscape. Although famously dedicating much of his oeuvre to exploring the chromatic illusions and ‘optical ecstasy’ of Sydney Harbour’s Lavender Bay, he also frequently revisited the landscape of his boyhood in the western New South Wales towns of Oberon, Marulan, Orange, Carcoar and Bathurst. Indelibly embedded in his imagination, thus the gentle vales and hills of the countryside surrounding his boarding school in Bathurst served as not only an important impetus for his precocious endeavours, but an endless source of inspiration over the intervening years. Equally influential were the compositions of Lloyd Rees immortalising this area which Whiteley had first admired at Macquarie Galleries one day after school – landscapes deeply poetic in their contemplation of soft curves and arabesques all rendered with impeccable tonality. As he later recalled in a letter to his artistic mentor, ‘… They contained nature and ideas, they contained naturalism but

94

seemed also very invented, and the adventure of them was that they showed the decisions and revisions that had been made while they had been painted. I had never seen anything like that before … it set me on a path of discovery that I am still on today – namely that change of pace in a painting is where the poetry begins’. 3 Depicting the picturesque region of Blayney, near Millthorpe (where Whiteley’s sister, Frannie Hopkirk and her partner Bob, owned a property), Rabbit Holes, Blayney exemplifies superbly such landscapes of the West – featuring the artist’s signature calligraphic line meandering amidst a sun-parched beige ground, punctuated by the occasional hardy perennial and the witty inclusion of four rabbit holes (actually cut into the painting’s surface to create a three-dimensional sculptural effect). Affectionately described by Hopkirk as ‘… the chronologist of the golden paddocks, sensual hills and willow-strewn rivers of the Central West’4, indeed, Whiteley would frequently escape to this area during his final years to seek solace from the everyday pressures of his life, including a then-turbulent relationship with his former wife Wendy following their contentious divorce proceedings, and his ongoing struggle with addiction. Notwithstanding the artist’s obvious inner turmoil however, these final years also witnessed the culmination of recognition for Whiteley’s extraordinary artistic legacy with the artist awarded an Order of Australia in 1991, and offered a full-scale retrospective by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1992. Moreover, many today widely regard Whiteley’s late landscape works among his finest; as Barry Pearce elucidates, ‘In pure landscape genre particularly, Whiteley [now] reached the most intense level of ecstasy it seemed conceivable, and even then yearned to go beyond’. 5 1. Pearce, B., Brett Whiteley: Art and Life, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1995, p. 196 2. Ibid.

3. Whiteley cited in Klepac, L., Lloyd Rees – Brett Whiteley: On the Road to Berry, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 1993, p. 7 4. Hopkirk, F., Brett Whiteley 1958 – 1989, exhibition catalogue, Orange Regional Gallery, New South Wales, 1990, p. 7 5. Pearce, B. Brett Whiteley: 9 Shades, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, p. 7

VERONICA ANGELATOS

95

WILLIAM ROBINSON 39 born 1936 BELOW SPRINGBROOK WITH LIGHT RAIN, 1995 oil on linen 137.0 x 183.0 cm signed and dated lower right: William Robinson 95 inscribed with title verso: BELOW SPRINGBROOK WITH LIGHT RAIN estimate :

$180,000 – 240,000

PROVENANCE Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Perth Christie’s, Melbourne, 27 November 2001, lot 52 Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED William Robinson, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney, 28 June – 24 July 1996, cat. 3

Below Springbrook With Light Rain, 1995 is a classic example of William Robinson’s painting at its best. He flaunts his skills as a colourist and draughtsman and again uses his device of multiple view points within the one picture plane. Robinson uses vastly different techniques when applying the paint in the major passages of the painting. The meditative application of deep greens and granite greys in the broad right-side of the composition, is used to depict the ancient features of the landscape and evoke the notion of a timeless past. On the left of the painting Robinson deploys a more upbeat, staccato brushwork, where the colour tends to fizz on the surface and evoke a celebratory feel as new growth appears to unfurl from within the ridge line as its sweeps north to envelope the old land.

‘I want to move away from observing the picture as some sort of representation. I want to sweep the observer down gullies and up into the sky. The observer is drawn into the landscape not physically but as a sort of connection to memory. The painting reminds us of experiences we might have had when walking in the bush ... I am only presenting personal experience to be shared, but I would like to give some clues that may help the observer to experience the picture’.1 In relation to a sense of place, Robinson has made a unique contribution to the Australian landscape tradition, moving beyond conventional depictions to encompass a fluctuating environment; of rainforest and ocean, ground and sky, day and night, elemental forces of wind, lightning, rain and fire. His multidimensional grasp of time and space also suggests metaphors for states of mind and being, life and death, continuity and transcendence. The profound spiritual resonances in Robinson’s art remind us of the need to preserve an ancient natural world in the present; ‘to keep the faith’, as Simon Schama wrote in Landscape and Memory, ‘with a future on this tough, lovely old planet.’ 2 1. Seear, L., Darkness and Light, The Art of William Robinson, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2001, p. 118 2. Hart, D., ‘William Robinson’s artistic development: An intimate and expansive journey’ in William Robinson, A Transfigured Landscape, Queensland University of Technology and Piper Press, Brisbane, 2011, p. 38

HENRY MULHOLLAND

In the painting’s title, Below Springbrook With Light Rain, Robinson points us to the actual subject within the broader context of the landscape. The weather plays an important role in Robinson’s works and he observes it very keenly, after all it is the rain, then running water which created the gorges and ravines that he draws on. In the centre of the painting we see light clouds drifting upwards as they deliver the rain. The presence of the mackerel sky indicates a major weather change is coming and you can sense the barometric pressure drop as the vacuum effect draws the viewer’s eye down through the valley. Robinson’s paintings create the sensation of being inside the landscape and in the passage below the artist explains the feeling he attempts to convey:

96

97

GARRY SHEAD 40 born 1942 HOMAGE TO VELASQUEZ, 1999 oil on canvas 122.0 x 91.0 cm signed and dated lower right: Garry Shead 99 inscribed with title on stretcher bar verso: Homage to VELASQUEZ estimate :

$65,000 – 85,000

PROVENANCE Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Garry Shead: Artist and the Muse, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, 8 September – 2 October 1999

Emerging almost seamlessly from the ‘Dance’ series during the late 1990s, the ‘artist and muse’ paintings, superbly encapsulated here by Homage to Velasquez, 1999 pay tribute to the techniques of the great European Masters - Goya, Velasquez and Rembrandt - by capturing a vision of the Muse that inspired their creative journeys. Thus depicting the Masters themselves in the intimate act of creation, the works typically feature the artist accompanied by the mythical muse of poetry, Erato, who appears as something magical, often hovering spirit-like in the studio and bathed in a radiant light. Notwithstanding the ostensibly secular iconography however, the figures seem to inhabit spirituallycharged spaces – there is profound tenderness in the artist’s gaze for whom the Muse is a luminous revelation, guiding the Master’s hands, cradling his palette or even taking brush to canvas.

Elaborating upon the importance of the Muse for Shead in his monograph on the artist, Sasha Grishin suggests, ‘Shead felt himself to be one of the few who consciously sought out Erato, and that at certain periods in his life he felt that he both saw her and heard her and that he in a sense was a willing medium through which her inspiration could act’.1 Accordingly, autobiographical undertones may be discerned in works such as the present, with Shead also paying passionate homage to the most profound source of artistic inspiration in his life, namely his wife Judit. Shead had first met the Hungarian-born Judit Englert, a classically-trained sculptor, during the European winter of 1981 – 82 when he was invited to visit Budapest by the Director of the Michael Karolyi Memorial Foundation in Vence. Drawn to Judit as ‘the woman who is my twin of the same kind’, 2 Shead stayed on in Budapest for a year before the couple eventually returned to Australia and married in June 1983.

98

As testament to their poignant connection, Shead had begun to include the presence of Judit (or her more abstracted role as ‘Muse’) in his work from the early 1990s. Indeed, the protagonist Frieda in his celebrated D.H. Lawrence series bears more than a passing resemblance with to Judit with her fine, aquiline nose, angular features and stylized bobbed hair, and equally, her likeness is apparent in the regal figure of Queen Elizabeth II in the important satirical sequence, The Royal Suite which he produced in 1995 – 96. However, it is not until works such as Homage to Velasquez with their complex labyrinth of ideas, that Shead most fully explores the insights of this deep and poignant source of artistic inspiration in his life. As Grishin elucidates, ‘Shead is an artist who in most instances has to enter the work by putting himself into the composition – whether he be Lawrence, Prince Philip, a dancer or, in this case, an artist. However by entering a composition this does not mean that he ‘owns’ it, as painting grows through its own internal logic and momentum; he enters it to give it life, then participates in the delight and agony of its growth and development’. 3 1. Grishin, S., The Artist and Muse, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2001, p. 164 2. Shead cited ibid., p. 79 3. ibid., p. 174

VERONICA ANGELATOS

99

HAROLD FREEDMAN 41 (1915 – 1999) MAINTENANCE WORK ON A BEAUFIGHTER, 1945 oil on canvas on composition board 104.0 x 76.5 cm bears inscription on old label verso: Maintenance Work on a Beaufighter / F/LH. Freedman / February 1945 estimate :

$20,000 – 30,000

PROVENANCE Officers’ Mess clearance sale, RAAF Frognall, Melbourne Squadron Leader Ray Cowburn, acquired from the above c.1965 Thence by descent Private collection, New South Wales RELATED WORK Maintenance, 1945, watercolour on paper, 30.5 x 43.8 cm, in the collection of the Australian War Memorial, Melbourne

Harold Freedman was a Victorian freelance artist who trained under renowned muralist Napier Waller, and was subsequently responsible for many of Melbourne’s public artworks such as the spectacular mosaic Legend of Fire (Eastern Hill Fire Brigade, Melbourne) and in Canberra, a large mural depicting the history of Australian military aviation for the Australian War Memorial (AWM). However, during World War II he was a war artist attached to the RAAF War History Section, and Maintenance Work on a Beaufighter, 1945, is a fine example of his work from that period. It is also a companion to the numerous Freedman paintings held by the AWM and the State Library of Victoria.1 Once appointed, Freedman was given the honorary rank of Flight-Lieutenant 2 and ‘in December 1944 … travelled to New Guinea. By February 1945, he was attached to the RAAF’s 1st Tactical Air Force, with its headquarters at Noemfoor Island.’ 3 Freedman demonstrated a particular empathy with the troops and many of his detailed images focus on radio operators, the telephone exchange, pilots exchanging yarns in tents, and aeroplanes under repair.

Maintenance Work on a Beaufighter depicts a scene on Noemfoor Island, which had become a key location for the maintenance and repair of Allied aircraft following fierce fighting in July and August 1944. Given the island was almost directly on the Equator, it is not surprising that the mechanics are shown in various states of undress. The extreme weather conditions also made it necessary for aircraft under repair to be protected at all times and, as the painting so vividly illustrates,

100

temporary work shelters were constructed from any scrounged material found at the base.4 Alongside the Kittyhawk and the B-24 Liberator bomber, the Beaufighter was one of the RAAF’s key weapons, a powerful killing machine memorably described by pilots as being ‘two engines closely followed by an airplane.’ The Japanese however called it the ‘Whispering Death’ such was its devastating firepower. In Maintenance Work on a Beaufighter, two teams focus on the repairs, whilst their standing companion is a ‘type’ rather than a direct portrait, reminiscent of the larrikin soldier memorably depicted on screen during the war by Australian actor Chips Rafferty.

In 1946, an exhibition of the RAAF paintings executed by Freedman, Eric Thake and Max Newton toured all major State capitals with the catalogue’s lead image being Freedman’s Fighter Pilot. Of the forty-two works shown by the artist, thirty were oils, many of which were completed following his return to Australia. Also included was a watercolour entitled Maintenance dated February 1945, which is the source for the painting on offer here. It depicts the identical scene of aeroplane and makeshift hanger but does not include the six mechanics who appear in the final oil composition. 5 At the conclusion of World War II, Freedman’s war paintings were distributed between RAAF bases and the Australian War Memorial with Maintenance Work on a Beaufighter finding a home at RAAF Frognall, an Italianate 1880s mansion in Canterbury, Victoria, which eventually closed in 1984, selling off its collection of artwork and general paraphernalia in the process. Purchased from these sales by the then-Commanding Officer, this painting has remained in the same family’s collection ever since.

1. Freedman also painted the Cavalcade of Transport mural for the concourse at the Spencer Street (now Southern Cross) railway station in Melbourne.

2. One of Freedman’s artist companions during this period was (Flying Officer) Eric Thake.

3. Baddeley, C., ‘Harold Freedman (1915-1999)’, in Wilkins, L. (ed.), Artists in Action: from the collection of the Australian War Memorial, Thames and Hudson, Melbourne, 2003, p. 92.

Noemfoor Island is near the northern tip of West Papua.

4. See RAAF war paintings, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (and touring State capitals), 1946 (text under cat.7).

5. Collection: Australian War Memorial, Canberra.

ANDREW GAYNOR

101

GUY GREY-SMITH 42 (1916 – 1981) SWAMP LANDS, 1972 oil and beeswax emulsion on muslin on composition board 60.0 x 90.0 cm signed and dated lower right: G Grey Smith / 72 bears inscription verso: 24 / 66770 estimate :

$20,000 – 30,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Sotheby’s, Perth, 17 September 1990, lot 100 Private collection, Perth EXHIBITION A Festival of Perth Exhibition: Paintings by Guy Grey-Smith, The Old Fire Station Gallery, Perth, 24 February – 16 March 1977, cat. 24 LITERATURE Gaynor, A., Guy Grey-Smith: Life Force, UWA Publishing, Perth, 2012, p. 266

Swamp Lands, 1972, is a key painting from Guy Grey-Smith’s oeuvre marking a point of renewal for the artist following a period of intense personal trauma. It is also highly likely to be one of the first oil paintings he did in the region around Pemberton, a timber industry town in southwest Western Australia that was to become his home for the final years of his life. It is a land thick with Karri trees soaring over a tangled understorey, where patches of blazing light pierce the otherwise dense canopy; and there are extensive swamps in the vicinity of the Warren River which flows through the forests beyond the township. All these contrasting elements may be interpreted as inspiration for this painterly tapestry of interlocking, high-colour planes.

In 1969, Grey-Smith and his artist-wife Helen travelled to Cambodia where he was invited to take up the position of Professor of Fine Arts at Phnom Penh University. Tragically, this appointment was to have a catastrophic effect on him due to a political coup six months after their arrival, an upheaval related to the concurrent Vietnam War. The couple soon became unwilling spectators to atrocities, gunfire and disappearances which reignited debilitating memories for the artist of his own experiences as a P.O.W. during World War II.1 On returning to Perth, and almost incapacitated by Post-Traumatic Stress, Grey-Smith spent the greater part of the next two years painting in acrylics and making silkscreen prints with only staggered attempts at larger works in oil.

Seemingly uncertain of his ability to reconnect with his previous artwork methods, this alternate strategy of exploring different mediums actually opened up new possibilities that he glimpsed in the process. Following

102

the psychologically healing encounter with the forests of Pemberton, his revived optimism is evident in a small body of oil paintings executed in the latter half of the year. To date, only ten oils from 1972 have been identified, mostly depicting plants and still lives, but three, including the work on offer here, are directly related to the region around the township. 2 At first glance, Swamp Lands appears to be simply a richly coloured field of interlocked pigment, but as the artist-critic James Gleeson noted, ‘(Grey-Smith) is at his best when the visual starting point is most remote from the final effect – when one reads the work as an abstract before realising its figurative implications’. 3 It is apparent that Grey-Smith kept the painting in his studio for some years for contemplation as he was soon overtaken by the demands of a proposed retrospective curated by the Art Gallery of Western Australia;4 and the next years saw masterwork after masterwork tumble from his hands. In 1977, he exhibited Swamp Lands at a Festival of Perth exhibition held at Rie Heyman’s Old Fire Station Gallery, ‘an ambitious show … and admirers still talk today of the “glorious colour which seemed to pour out of the gallery as we walked up the street”’. 5 Only one other landscape oil painting from the 1970s has appeared on the Australian auction market in the past five years, indicative of the close connection and enjoyment that owners continue to feel for these evocative works.

1. For more detail on these experiences, see: Gaynor, A., Guy Grey-Smith: life force, UWA Publishing, Perth, 2012, chapters 1 and 5 2. The other two from 1972 are Karri forest II and Untitled (Karri trees), both in private collections.

3. Gleeson, J., ‘Subtracting from Reality’, Sun, Sydney, 12 July 1972, p. 66 4. Guy Grey-Smith Retrospective, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 11 November – 12 December 1976; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 13 January – 15 February 1977 5. Chen V Thomas, 2010, quoted in Gaynor, A., op cit., p. 104

ANDREW GAYNOR

103

LEONARD FRENCH 43 (1928 – 2017) MAN AND WOMAN WITH A BIRD, c.1955 enamel on hessian on composition board 122.0 x 61.0 cm signed lower right: Leonard French estimate :

$20,000 – 30,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 2 May 2000, lot 133 (as ‘Untitled, c.1958’) Dr Jan Altmann, Melbourne Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 26 November 2013, lot 5 Company collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Possibly: Leonard French: Odyssey, Victorian Artists’ Society, Melbourne, April 1955

Leonard French is one of the most distinctive and individualistic artists to gain prominence in Australia during the post-war period. An Abstract Symbolist, his unusual training as a signwriter augmented by part-time art classes informed both his technique and his aesthetics. His utilisation of industrial enamels and glazes gives his paintings an appearance of solidity, even indestructability, and Man and Woman with a Bird, c.1955, is a vividly precise and engaging example from his early years in the local scene.

As part of his sign-writing apprenticeship, French attended Melbourne Technical College1 for trade classes which were held in the same building as the art classes. Noticing his talent, the painting lecturer Victor Greenhalgh ‘took him under his wing, invited him to evening classes and later gave him responsibilities teaching other students of techniques for preparing art materials’. 2 After classes, he became a regular at the Swanston Family Hotel in Swanston Street, a pub also patronised by many of Melbourne’s emerging artists including Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Clifton Pugh, Charles Blackman and future gallery director Laurie Thomas; indeed, given his assertive nature and strongly argued beliefs, this regular gathering became known as ‘Len French’s University’. 3 What this meant was that whilst French was developing a singular understanding of materials and techniques through his teaching and sign-writing studies, he was also honing a particular vision of artistic practice bolstered by his debates with personalities who were largely responsible for setting the course of the Australian art scene for the next decade and beyond. He traveled to London in 1949 and, in the following year, saw a major retrospective of works

by Fernand Léger at the Tate Gallery which had a profound impact,

104

one which went ‘considerably beyond a formal or stylistic influence; what appealed (to French) was the whole philosophy of art into life, of monumental art within architecture’.4 French was also an avid reader and through this confluence of ‘imaginative catalysts’ he developed ‘recurring theme(s) of heroic grandeur and the heroic quest’ 5 in his subsequent exhibitions. Based on Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, these shows featured images rich with an array of personalised symbols including birds, fish and wheels. For Man and Woman with a Bird, French employed a further tactic of covering the board with rough hessian before applying multiple layers of enamel paint, a method which gives the work a surprising tactility balancing the otherwise severe edges of the design. The painting’s smaller scale also provides an intimacy often missing from French’s larger works as the depicted couple engage in a ritual of mutual exchange and care for their avian companion.

Man and Woman with a Bird was for many years a part of the extensive collection of Australian art acquired by John and Jan Altmann, generous benefactors to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Apart from major tapestries by Charles Blackman and John Perceval, the Altmanns also owned a significant selection of paintings by Roy de Maistre, including Portrait of Francis Bacon (1935), The Footballers (c.1938), and Jacob Wrestling the Angel (1958).

1. Later re-named the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

2. Grishin, S., Leonard French, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 15 3. See Heathcote, C., A Quiet Revolution: the rise of Australia art 1946-1968, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1995, p. 63 4. Grishin, S., op cit., pp. 8 – 9. Other influences include Celtic art, and the massed planes, mood and gravitas found in the paintings of Marcel Gromaire and Constante Permeke.

5. Waldren, M., ‘The Renaissance Man’, The Weekend Australian, 13 November 1999

ANDREW GAYNOR

105

BRETT WHITELEY 44 (1939 – 1992) TOWARDS SCULPTURE 2, 1977 lithograph 76.0 x 49.0 cm (image) 90.0 x 63.0 cm (sheet) edition: 9/50 signed, inscribed with title and numbered below image artist’s stamp in image lower right estimate :

106

$15,000 – 20,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Sydney Lawson~Menzies, Sydney, 6 February 2007, lot 307 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Brett Whiteley: Recent Paintings and Drawings, Fischer Fine Art Ltd, London, September 1977, cat. 79 (another example) LITERATURE Brett Whiteley: The Graphics 1961–1992, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 1992, cat. 29, pp. 39 (illus., another example), 111

CLEMENT MEADMORE 45 (1929 – 2005) SCRONCH, 1994 bronze 23.0 x 28.5 x 21.0 cm edition: 5/8 signed, dated and numbered at base: Meadmore 1994 5/8 dated, numbered and inscribed with title on base: ‘Scronch’ / 1994 5/8 / ART estimate :

$20,000 – 30,000

PROVENANCE The Clement Meadmore Foundation, New York David Klein Gallery, Birmingham, Michigan, USA Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, Chicago, USA, 14 December 2017, lot 7 Private collection, Sydney

107

INGE KING 46 (1915 – 2016) UNFOLDING FORM (MAQUETTE), c.1962 painted steel 138.0 cm height estimate :

$30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE Mr Graham Ducker, Sydney, acquired directly from the artist Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney LITERATURE Grishin, S., The Art of Inge King Sculptor, 2014, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, p. 367 RELATED WORK Unfolding Form, 1962, steel painted black, 152.4 cm height, formerly private collection, Adelaide, illus. in Grishin, S., The Art of Inge King Sculptor, 2014, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, p. 94

Inge King, an émigré artist from central Europe, was so moved by the power of the Australian landscape that she sought to create sculptural works expressing her experience of this new place, resistant to and reflective of the heat and light that characterises the land. Unfolding Form (Maquette), c.1962 belongs to an important series of the artist’s non-representational welded assemblages which is characterised by the careful placement of two-dimensional planes to create tension and movement. Taking their visual cues from the prevailing idiom of contemporary constructed sculpture that was pure geometry and gestural expressionism, these works are reminiscent of those by artists such as Lynn Chadwick and Clement Meadmore, particularly his early planar constructions. Within King’s larger oeuvre, the series of planar forms lies between more organic early assemblages and the volumetric explorations of her Boulder series.

Clustered around a central vertical axis, the tightly integrated planes of Unfolding Form (Maquette) seem to do just that – unfold. Unfurling progressively like an accordion, the flat sheets of cut metal are arranged on a base to provide a myriad of disparate viewpoints. The unequal size and height of each plane creates an expanded arena in which to explore the play of light and shadow, producing effects of spatial enclosure and dissection. For King, an artist who remarkably found early public endorsement for monumental works, the creation of maquettes was central to her practice and these now account for a large proportion of her works in private collections. This version of Unfolding Form is significant, not only because it is among the last of her planar works of the early 1960s, but also because it is the last remaining example of this construction. Its related work, the larger Unfolding Form, was unfortunately destroyed by bushfires in the Adelaide Hills in 1984.1 Standing at a mere 12 cm taller than this maquette, Unfolding Form was installed en plein air, atop a naturally formed boulder.

Inspired by the work of her Melburnian peer, Lenton Parr, Inge King took up welding in 1959. Facing not insignificant public hostility to sculpture as well as a local cultural climate sceptical about abstract art, King nevertheless used this new skill to translate the liberated gestures of Abstract Expressionism into three dimensions. Edward Lucie-Smith, in his survey of modern sculpture, was careful to note that this new expressionist style was executed by sculptors with greater difficulty than it had been by painters. 2 As her welding skills developed, King sought out techniques beyond her primary need to join multiple planes of sheet metal, and instead looked for ways of creating visually interesting texture.

Unfolding Form (Maquette) exemplifies this achievement, in spite of its marked restriction of formal means. Balancing vertical and horizontal tension, the visibility of each plane of Unfolding Form (Maquette) relies on the contrast between smooth cut surface and raised beads of molten steel, lying along the edges of each sheet and in the recesses between them. It is through these surprising embellishments and juxtapositions that we feel the presence of the late artist – having left clear traces of her hand burnt into the metal with a fierce oxy-acetylene flame.

1. Grishin, S., Inge King Sculptor, Macmillan Publishing, Melbourne, 2014, p. 367 2. Lucie-Smith, E., Sculpture since 1945, Phaidon, Oxford, 1987, p. 44

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

108

109

JOHN MAWURNDJUL 47 born 1952 BILLABONG AT MILMILNGKAN, 2008 natural earth pigments on eucalyptus bark 182.0 x 76.0 cm (irregular) estimate :

$30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE Maningrida Arts and Culture, Maningrida, Northern Territory (label attached verso, cat. 1432-08) Private collection, Queensland, acquired from the above in 2008 RELATED WORK Milmilngkan, 2008, natural earth pigments on eucalyptus bark, 171.0 x 71.0 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide This painting is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Maningrida Arts and Culture, Maningrida.

‘Milmilngkan is a duwa moiety place belonging to us. This is the place where I live. There is a sacred site, a Djang, near the billabong … Milmilngkan is where the Rainbow Serpent pierced the ground. There is a Rainbow Serpent there that watches over us’.1 Situated sixty kilometres south of Maningrida in central Arnhem Land, Milmilngkan is a spring not far from a billabong where John Mawurndjul has a seasonal camp. As disclosed in the accompanying certificate, Milmilngkan is a site of immense significance within the structures and dynamics of Kuninjku culture, for ‘underneath the waters of Milmilngkan lies the power of Ngalyod the Rainbow serpent’. 2 A familiar subject of contemporary Kuninjku bark paintings, Ngalyod is the protector of all sacred sites and its power is present in each one. Ngalyod has both powers of creation and destruction and is most strongly associated with rain, monsoon seasons and rainbows which are a manifestation of its power and presence. Associated with the destructive power of the storms and with the plenty of the wet season, Ngalyod is a destroyer and a giver of life whose power controls the fertility of the country and the seasons. 3 Guided by his father Anchor Kulunba, elder brother Jimmy Njiminjuma and his uncle Peter Marralwanga, Mawurndjul received a very traditional upbringing that resulted in his extensive knowledge of ritual ceremony and strong interest in cultural heritage. At a young age Mawurndjul was recognised as an exceptional painter of body designs for ceremony.

As the artist recalls, ‘I saw my father doing the rarrk (cross hatching) for the Mardayin ceremony and tried to do it myself with my back all doubled over, I ended up being better than any of them at it. They gave me a job in the Mardayin ceremony to paint some rarrk’.4 Originally painting figures and creatures in Kuninjku mythology, he has over the years developed a more metaphysical representation of specific sites, events and landscape.

Constantly striving for new ways to interpret his country, Mawurndjul’s innovative use of rarrk to map important locations is evident in the fine lineal clan designs spread across the surface of his paintings, creating shifting patterns of grids that are rendered in fine interlocking lines. His paintings pioneered a new interpretation of clan sites and djang that inspired the next generation of bark painters and his influence can be seen in the work of his younger brother James Iyuna, and other artists such as Ivan Namirrikki, Samuel Namundja and Owen Yalandja.

1. The artist quoted in John Mawurndjul, I am the Old and the New, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2018, p. 181 2. Taken from the accompanying certificate of authenticity from Maningrida Arts and Culture 3. ibid.

4. rarrk: John Mawurndjul, Journey Through Time in Northern Australia, Museum Tinguely, Basel, 2005, p. 43

CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE

110

111

PADDY NYUNKUNY BEDFORD 48 (c.1922 – 2007) BUSH TURKEY DREAMING, 2001 ochres and pigment with acrylic binder on Belgian linen 135.0 x 122.0 cm signed with initials verso: PB bears inscription verso: artist’s name, title, date, and Jirrawun Arts cat. PB 8 2001-108 estimate :

$40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE Jirrawun Arts, Kununurra Short Street Gallery, Broome Private collection, New South Wales LITERATURE Storer, R., Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, p. 150 (illus.)

RELATED WORK Lightning Creek, 2004, ochres and pigment with acrylic binder on composition board, 80.0 x 100.0 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, illus. in Storer, R., Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, p. 101 This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Short Street Gallery and a Jirrawun Arts cataloguing sheet.

Typified by bold forms and a balance in composition, the paintings of Paddy Bedford are a combination of modern materials and traditional pictorial conventions, contemporary experience and ancient belief systems. His art evokes the rivers, roads, waterholes, rock escarpments and other features of the Kimberley landscape, reflecting the artist’s knowledge of land he criss-crossed in his former life as a stockman.

Behind the subtlety and harmony of each composition exists a learned and deep knowledge of the land and its creation stories describing how the landscape, plants and animals were created and in which the laws governing much human behaviour were instituted.

Lerndijwaneman or Lightning Creek is in part of the artist’s father’s country and is the home of Birnkirrbal, the ancestral bush turkey. One of the artist’s important Dreamings and a favourite painting subject, Lerndijwaneman lies at the northern end of his country, beside the Wilson River in the shadow of the Durack Range. In mythological times, the site is where Birnkirrbal made camp after she had left the emu at Garnanganyjel (Mount King). As Paddy Bedford narrates the story, ‘The Turkey had travelled a long distance and stopped at Lerndijwaneman to rest and eat a little fruit called gawoorroony. [Here she] … went to sleep on the red ground (indicated by the circle in the upper part of the picture). If the emu had had her way, they would have kept walking and there would have been constant daylight. Without this rule for sleeping made by the turkey there would have been no rest, only constant day …

Because the Turkey did that, we all sleep at night’.1 Lerndijwaneman is also the place where another ancestor, the eagle in the form of a man, flaked stone to make spearheads. 2 1. Storer, R., Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, p. 80 2. Information from the accompanying catalogue notes from Jirrawun Arts

CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE

112

113

ATTRIBUTED TO UTA UTA TJANGALA 49 (1920 – 1990) UNTITLED (YUMARI), 1972 synthetic polymer paint on composition board 48.5 x 36.0 cm estimate :

$30,000 – 50,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Alice Springs, acquired in the 1970s Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 25 March 2009, lot 88 (as ‘Artist Unknown (Pintupi), Untitled (Ceremonial Ground), c.1972’) Private collection, Sydney

There are recurring themes in the art of Uta Uta Tjangala and the best known of these relate to Yumari, a rockhole and important ancestral site in his mother’s country. This early depiction attributed to the artist was painted at Papunya in the later months of 1972, shortly after Geoff Bardon’s departure. A sacred site located in between the communities of Walungurru (Kintore) and Kiwirrkura across the border in Western Australia, Yumari had personal significance for the artist. He was the custodian of this site which is linked to his conception place at Ngurrapalangu through the story of Yina, the ancestral travelling Old Man. His father is buried in the area and it is a place he regarded as home in the sense of the Aboriginal connection to country – Yumari was integral to Tjangala’s personal identity.1

RELATED WORK Untitled (Old Men’s Story), 1972, synthetic polymer paint on composition board, 46.0 x 61.0 cm, Stuart Art Centre cat. 12032, Private collection, Melbourne, illus. in Ryan, J. and Batty, P., Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2011, p. 139 Yumari, 1976, acrylic paint on canvas, 170.0 x 330.0 cm, in the collection of the National Museum of Australia, Canberra

The attribution of both artist and the site depicted have been made independently by R.G. (Dick) Kimber and Professor Fred Myers. Kimber notes that the overall design is a variation of many that the artist painted of Yumari prior to his later depictions of the site as ‘a stylised human figure’ and that the colour palette is one favoured by the artist. 2 Connected to the mythological story of Yina, Yumari, with the literal meaning of ‘mother-inlaw place’, 3 is where the revered ancestor had an illicit liaison with his ancestral mother-inlaw. Yina is described as a sorcerer, possessing supernatural powers, whose testicles and penis repeatedly separated from his body and transformed into features of the landscape.

Rocky outcroppings, a rockhole and various markings found within a few hundred metres of this site are interpreted as being the result of the illicit actions of the mythological beings.

One of the original band of artists that in 1971 initiated the revolution in Australian Aboriginal desert painting at the community of Papunya, Uta Uta Tjangala was a member of the Pintupi, the last group to be brought in to the government run settlement. A man of high ritual status with deep ancestral knowledge, he created some of the great masterpieces of the modern Western Desert painting movement, from his first paintings on composition board to later monumental canvases produced in the 1980s. Two later epic works relate to this site, the first of which, Yumari, 1981, was exhibited at the XVII Biennale de São Paulo. This painting was also shown with, Yumari, 1983, in Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia, the major exhibition that toured through the United States and Australia in 1988 – 89. Another painting related to the site is Old Man’s Dreaming, 1983, now in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, which was included in the exhibition Australia at the Royal Academy, London, in 2013.

1. Myers, F.R., Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2002, pp. 112 – 3 2. Correspondence from R.G. Kimber.

3. Myers, F.R., op. cit. p. 112

CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE

114

115

KITTY KANTILLA 50 (c.1928 – 2003) UNTITLED, 2000 natural earth pigments and synthetic binder on canvas 127.0 x 79.0 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Jilamara Arts and Crafts cat. 138 – 00 PROVENANCE Jilamara Arts and Crafts, Milikapiti Aboriginal and Pacific Art, Sydney Private collection, Sydney estimate :

116

$20,000 – 30,000

EXHIBITED Kitty Kantilla: New Works on Paper and Canvas, Aboriginal and Pacific Arts, Sydney, 6 – 23 December 2000, cat. 14 Meridian: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 28 November – 23 February 2003 Kitty Kantilla Retrospective, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 27 April – 19 August 2007; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 7 December 2007 – 21 January 2008, cat. 64 (label attached verso) LITERATURE Smee, S., ‘The Poet of Small Things’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 22 – 28 December 2000, p. 22 (illus.)

Ryan, J., Kitty Kantilla, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, cat. 64, p. 65 (illus.)

KITTY KANTILLA

51

(c.1928 – 2003) UNTITLED, 2000 natural earth pigments and synthetic binder on canvas 133.0 x 80.0 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Jilamara Arts and Crafts cat. 137 – 00 PROVENANCE Jilamara Arts and Crafts, Milikapiti Aboriginal and Pacific Art, Sydney Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Kitty Kantilla, Aboriginal and Pacific Art, Sydney, November 2001, cat. 9 This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Jilamara Arts and Crafts, Milikapiti. estimate :

$20,000 – 30,000

Lots 50 and 51 were acquired from Kitty Kantilla’s 5th solo exhibition held in December 2000 at Aboriginal and Pacific Art in Sydney.

Painted on contrasting grounds, one black and the other white, these two paintings encompass all the elements of the artist’s lexicon; pwanga (dots), marlipinyini (lines) and turtiyangimari (colours: white, red, yellow and black).

Although seemingly abstract in appearance, Kantilla’s mark making is far from arbitrary, her designs evoke cultural history and ritual, particularly the Pukumani ceremony, where the Tiwi gather to farewell the dead. Here performers in full body decoration participate in a cycle of song and dance.

117

GINGER RILEY MUNDUWALAWALA 52 (c.1936 – 2002) GARIMALA, 1989 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 154.0 x 174.0 cm bears inscription verso: Alcaston Gallery cat. GR41 and AK44 estimate :

$30,000 – 50,000

PROVENANCE Painted at Ngukurr, Northern Territory Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 31 July 2006, lot 96 Private collection, Singapore Joel Fine Art, Melbourne, 3 June 2008, lot 80 Private collection, New South Wales

Ginger Riley’s painting recalls his mother’s country; the landscape and mythology relating to the coastal salt-water area adjacent to the Limmen Bight River some fifty kilometres inland from the south-western corner of the Gulf of Carpentaria. His paintings, characterised by a bold use of colour and the recurrence of certain motifs, can be viewed as a sequence of variations upon the same theme. The most often recurring characters are Garimala, the giant Taipan, and Ngak Ngak, the whitebreasted Sea Eagle.

EXHIBITED Mother Country In Mind: The Art of Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 16 July – 22 September 1997, cat. 11 (label attached verso)

Central to this composition, Garimala, the mythological Taipan, is seen emerging from a lagoon in the form of a rainbow, hovering above the country. According to Munduwalawala’s story, Garimala created the Four Archers, an area regarded as ‘... the centre of the earth, where all things start and finish’1 and where the snake lives in the waterhole close by.

The story continues that Garimala ‘travelled from the Four Archers to Nyamiyukanji in the Limmen Bight River, disappeared under the water and metamorphosed into the Rainbow’. 2 As the rainbow, Garimala is associated with the life-giving properties of fresh water, the monsoon season and the continuing cycle of life.

LITERATURE Ryan, J., Ginger Riley, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1997, p. 52 (illus., detail) RELATED WORK Garimala (The two snakes), 1988, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 178.0 x 177.5 cm, in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Garimala, 1990, synthetic polymer paint on paper, 56.8 x 75.5 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, illus. in Ryan, J., Ginger Riley, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1997, cat. 33, p. 74

Although distinguished by the endurance of a singular narrative, Riley’s iconography is not restrictive, nor is there a lack of innovation.

Rather, the repetition of his mother’s stories allows for a greater depth of exploration and reinvention. Riley employed bold colour, dramatic variations in scale and unusual spatial arrangements for visual impact.

His colour choices were particularly daring and unexpected, intense colour contrasts and silhouetting enabled images to stand out as well as being used to animate and give energy to the story. His technique and aesthetic were truly unique and changed expectations of what characterised Aboriginal painting.

1. Ryan, J., Ginger Riley, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1997, p. 29 2. ibid., p. 30

CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE

118

119

ARTIST UNKNOWN 53 19th century chinese trade painting (RECUMBENT LADY WITH SUCKLING CHILD AND DAUGHTER ON A MARBLE DAY BED) oil on canvas 54.0 x 74.0 cm estimate :

120

$12,000 – 18,000

PROVENANCE Julian and Miriam Sterling Collection, Melbourne Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne

JULIUS VON BLAAS 54 (1845 – 1922, Austrian) ESCAPING HORSE WITH ONLOOKING VILLAGERS, 1893 oil on canvas 111.0 x 181.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed lower right: Julius von Blaas Wien - Februar 1893 bears inscription verso: A708 bears inscription on old label verso: 2109 / 1923 estimate :

$18,000 – 24,000

PROVENANCE Julian and Miriam Sterling Collection, Melbourne Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne

121

LUCIEN PISSARRO 55 (1863 – 1944, French/British) SOLEIL COUCHANT, BORMES (MONT DES ROSES), 1926 oil on canvas 46.0 x 55.5 cm signed with monogram and dated lower right: 1926 bears inscription on stretcher bar verso: Mont Des / Soleil couchant … 1926 bears inscription on label verso: 4252 estimate :

$25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Estate of the artist, The Brook, London (the artist’s family home), 1949 Sotheby’s, London, 9 July 1958, lot 129 (as ‘Soleil couchant’) Gluck, London Sotheby’s, London, 13 July 1960, lot 61 (as ‘Bormes, Mont des Roses, soleil couchant’) The Fine Art Society, London Australian Art Auctions, Sydney, 21 March 1979, lot 139 Kozminsky Gallery, Melbourne Mrs Felix Behan, Melbourne Melbourne Fine Art, Melbourne Julian and Miriam Sterling Collection, Melbourne Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Lucien Pissarro, Leicester Galleries, London, June – July 1927, cat. 25 (as ‘Le Mont des Roses at sunset, Bormes’) New English Art Club, London, 5 – 31 December 1927, cat. 194 (as ‘Les Mont des Roses’) Lucien Pissarro, Charles A Jackson’s Gallery, Manchester, October 1928, cat. 18 (as ‘Le Mont des Roses, Bormes’) Lucien Pissarro, Ruskin Gallery, Birmingham, 12 – 31 May 1930, cat. 17 (as ‘Le Mont des Roses, Bormes’) French Gallery Goupil Gallery Salon, London, June – July 1933, cat. 11 (as ‘Mont des Roses’) Art Exhibitions Bureau Travelling Exhibition of Oils, Watercolours and Drawings by Lucien Pissarro, Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead, then travelling to Belfast, Gateshead, Rochdale, 1935 – 1936, cat. 57 (as ‘Sunset at Bormes’) Autumn Exhibition, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 16 October 1937 – 8 January 1938, cat. 948 (as ’Sunset, Bormes’) Lucien Pissarro, The Art School, Yeovil, 1941 Artists Aid to Russia Exhibition, Public Art Galleries, Brighton, April – May 1942 (as ‘Sunset, Bormes’) Three Generations of Pissarro: Camille, Lucien, Orovida, Miller’s for CEMA, Lewes, 27 February – March 1943, cat. 29 (as ‘Soleil couchant, Bormes’) A Collection of paintings by Lucien Pissarro, Leicester Galleries, London, June – July 1950, cat. 6 (as ‘Soleil couchant, Bormes’)

122

Three Generations of Pissarro, O’Hana Gallery, London, 22 April –15 May 1954, cat. 32 (label attached verso, as ‘Soleil couchant, Bormes’) Early Years of the NEAC, The Fine Art Society, London, 26 February – 29 March 1968, cat. 86 (label attached verso, as ‘Soleil couchant – Bormes, Mont des Roses, 1927’) LITERATURE Thorold, A., A Catalogue of the Oil Paintings of Lucien Pissarro, Athelney Books, London, 1983, cat. 427, pp. 188 – 89 (illus.)

123

LLOYD REES 56 (1895 – 1988) WERRI BEACH, 1955 oil on canvas on board 40.5 x 50.5 cm signed and dated lower left: L. REES / 55 bears inscription verso: A247/ WERRI BEACH. / by LlOYD REES estimate :

124

$12,000 – 16,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Adelaide Shapiro Auctioneers, Sydney, 30 April 2015, lot 40 Private collection, Sydney

JOHN OLSEN 57 born 1928 NIGHT SKY AT RYDAL, 1994 oil on canvas 46.0 x 36.0 cm signed and dated lower left: John Olsen. 94 estimate :

$25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Olsen Carr Art Dealers, Sydney (stamped verso) Private collection, Sydney Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 16 June 2004, lot 165 Private collection, Sydney Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 25 November 2009, lot 40 Private collection, Sydney

125

GARRY SHEAD 58 born 1942 SUSANNAH AND ARTIST, 2000 oil on composition board 75.0 x 59.5 cm signed and dated lower right: Garry Shead 00 inscribed with title verso: 3 / SUSANNAH AND ARTIST estimate :

126

$35,000 – 45,000

PROVENANCE Australian Galleries, Sydney (labels attached verso, stock no. 26666) Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Garry Shead Recent Paintings, Artist and The Muse, Australian Galleries, Sydney, 9 May – 3 June 2000, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, October – November 2000, cat. 13 LITERATURE Grishin, S., Garry Shead and The Erotic Muse, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2001, pl. 101, pp. 170 (illus., as ‘Susanna and Artist’), 200

JAMES GLEESON 59 (1915 – 2008) WITHIN A WAITING GROVE, 1997 oil on canvas 133.0 x 178.0 cm signed and dated lower left: Gleeson ‘97 signed and inscribed with title on stretcher verso: “WITHIN A WAITING GROVE” / James Gleeson PROVENANCE Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne (label attached verso) Derwent Collection, Tasmania Private collection, Hobart estimate :

$25,000 – 35,000

EXHIBITED James Gleeson Behind the Veil of Seeming, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 12 – 29 November 1997, cat. 21 (label attached verso, stock no. 97/24/021) James Gleeson, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, 4 – 27 May 2000, cat. 3 LITERATURE Kolenberg, H., and Ryan, A., James Gleeson: Drawings for Paintings, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2003, p. 119 (illus.)

RELATED WORK Study for Within a Waiting Grove, 1997, charcoal, paper collage on paper, 38.0 x 51.0 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

127

PHILIP WOLFHAGEN 60 born 1963 A SHORT JOURNEY NO. 3, 2010 oil and beeswax on linen 46.0 x 49.0 cm signed with initial, dated and inscribed with title lower right: “a short journey no.3” W 2010 signed, dated, and inscribed with title on stretcher verso: PHILIP WOLFHAGEN – “a short journey no 3.” 2010 estimate :

128

$8,000 – 12,000

PROVENANCE Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Philip Wolfhagen: A Painter’s Landscape, Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne, 22 September – 16 October 2010

RICK AMOR 61 born 1948 STUDY FOR A CURIOUS CASE, 2000 oil on canvas 66.0 x 61.0 cm signed and dated lower left: RICK AMOR ‘00 dated and inscribed with title verso: STUDY FOR / A CURIOUS / CASE / AUG 00 / … estimate :

$20,000 – 25,000

PROVENANCE Niagara Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Niagara Galleries at the Melbourne Art Fair, Melbourne, 4 – 8 October 2000

129

DAVID BOYD 62 (1924 – 2011) THREE FRIENDS IN THE WATTLE GROVE, c.1970s oil on canvas 81.0 x 91.5 cm signed lower left: David Boyd inscribed with title on artist’s label verso: THREE FRIENDS / IN / THE WATTLE GROVE / D. Boyd estimate :

130

$20,000 – 30,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 29 April 2009, lot 145 Private collection, Melbourne

ROBERT DICKERSON 63 (1924 – 2015) SISTERS II, 1963 enamel on composition board 76.0 x 60.0 cm signed lower right: DICKERSON PROVENANCE probably: Bonython Gallery, Adelaide Private collection, Sydney estimate :

$18,000 – 24,000

EXHIBITED probably: Robert Dickerson, Bonython Gallery, Adelaide, 1964 Dickerson Retrospective, Holdsworth Gallery, Sydney, 5 September – 5 October 1983 (illus. in exhibition catalogue as ‘Sisters, 1963’) LITERATURE Dickerson, J., Robert Dickerson: Against The Tide, Pandanus Press, Brisbane, 1994, p. 145

131

ELLIS ROWAN 64 (1848 – 1922) LANCE-LEAVED SAGITTARIA (SAGITTÀRIA LANCIFÒLIA) watercolour and gouache on paper 53.0 x 36.5 cm (sight) signed lower left: Ellis Rowan PROVENANCE M.H. de Young, San Francisco, USA California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, USA, a gift from the above Bonhams & Goodman, Melbourne, 24 November 2009, lot 10 Company collection, Sydney estimate :

$5,000 – 10,000

ELLIS ROWAN 65 (1848 – 1922) SUNFLOWER DAISY (WEDELIA ASPERRIMA) watercolour and gouache on paper 52.0 x 35.5 cm (sight) signed lower left: Ellis Rowan PROVENANCE M.H. de Young, San Francisco, USA California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, USA, a gift from the above Bonhams & Goodman, Melbourne, 24 November 2009, lot 12 Company collection, Sydney estimate :

132

$5,000 – 10,000

ELLIS ROWAN 66 (1848 – 1922) GOLDENROD AND GRASSES watercolour and gouache on paper 53.5 x 36.5 cm (sight) signed lower left: Ellis Rowan PROVENANCE M.H. de Young, San Francisco, USA California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, USA, a gift from the above Bonhams & Goodman, Melbourne, 24 November 2009, lot 15 Company collection, Sydney estimate :

$5,000 – 10,000

ELLIS ROWAN 67 (1848 – 1922) SMOOTH UPLAND SUMAC (RHÚS GLÀBRA) watercolour and gouache on paper 55.0 x 36.0 cm (sight) signed and inscribed with title lower right: Ellis Rowan / Rhus glabra inscribed with title verso: Rhus glabra PROVENANCE M.H. de Young, San Francisco, USA California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, USA, a gift from the above Bonhams & Goodman, Melbourne, 24 November 2009, lot 11 Company collection, Sydney LITERATURE Lounsberry, A. and Rowan E., A Guide to the Trees, Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York, 1900, pl. CLVIII, p. 288 (illus.) estimate :

$5,000 – 10,000

133

EDWARD DAYES 68 (1763 – 1804) A VIEW OF SYDNEY COVE, NEW SOUTH WALES, 1804 hand coloured aquatint engraved by Francis Jukes, London 39.5 x 60.0 cm bears inscription below image: Drawn by E. Dayes from a Picture painted at the Colony. Engraved by F. Jukes. / A VIEW OF SYDNEY COVE, NEW SOUTH WALES / from an Original Picture in possession of Isaac Clementson Esq. / London Published April 10 1804

by F. Jukes / 57 John St Fitzroy Square estimate :

134

$10,000 – 15,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne LITERATURE Flower, C., The Antipodes Observed: Prints and Print Makers of Australia 1788 - 1850, MacMillan, Melbourne, 1975, pl. 18, p. 71 and dust jacket (illus., another example) McCormick, T., The First Views of Australia 1788-1825: a history of early Sydney, David Ell Press in association with Longueville Publications, Sydney, 1987, pl. 55, pp. 89 (illus., another example), 314

J.H. SCHELTEMA 69 (1861 – 1941) PICKING FRUIT, c.1890 oil on canvas 61.0 x 92.0 cm signed lower left: JH Scheltema estimate :

$15,000 – 20,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne

135

EMANUEL PHILLIPS FOX 70 (1865 – 1915)

BY THE SANDS, c.1909 oil on wood panel 16.0 x 22.0 cm signed lower left: E. Phillips Fox bears inscription on frame verso: purchased at Decoration / approx 1952-3 estimate :

136

$14,000 – 18,000

PROVENANCE possibly: Decorations Company, Melbourne Arthur Bent, Melbourne Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Annual Collectors Exhibition 2004, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 26 August – 30 September 2004

PROVENANCE Fine Art Society’s Gallery, Melbourne Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 6 November 1974, lot 256 (as ‘From the Hills’) Private collection, Melbourne

EMANUEL PHILLIPS FOX 71 (1865 – 1915) LANDSCAPE FROM PENNANT HILLS, c.1913 – 14 oil on canvas 38.0 x 45.5 cm signed lower left: E. Phillips Fox bears inscription on stretcher bar verso: Landscape from Pennant Hills estimate :

$20,000 – 30,000

EXHIBITED Exhibition of Oil Paintings by the Late E. Phillips Fox, Fine Art Society’s Gallery, Melbourne, 22 July – 2 August 1919, cat. 48 LITERATURE Zubans, R., E. Phillips Fox: His Life and Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1995, cat. 457, p. 230 (as ‘(From the Hills)’)

137

ALBERT NAMATJIRA 72 (1902 – 1959) MACDONNELL RANGES, c.1955 watercolour on paper on card 26.0 x 37.0 cm signed lower right: ALBERT NAMATJIRA bears inscription verso: A1453 estimate :

138

$18,000 – 25,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, New South Wales, acquired directly from the artist, c.1955 Thence by descent Private collection, New South Wales

ALBERT NAMATJIRA 73 (1902 – 1959) JAY CREEK COUNTRY, early 1950s watercolour on paper 34.0 x 48.0 cm signed lower right: ALBERT NAMATJIRA signed and inscribed with title verso: … / Albert Namatjira / Jay Creek Country / 15 inscribed with title on backing verso: 27023 / Jay Creek Country / 15 estimate :

$18,000 – 25,000

PROVENANCE Acquired by Colonel James F. Martin, a United States Air Force officer on transfer to RAAF Williamtown, New South Wales between 1953 – 1956 Thence by descent Private collection, United States of America

139

JAN BILLYCAN (DJAN NAMUNDIE) 74 (c.1930 – 2016) UNTITLED, 2007 synthetic polymer paint on linen 66.0 x 70.5 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, date, medium, size and Short Street Gallery cat. 24269 PROVENANCE Short Street Gallery, Broome Tony Bond Art Dealer, Adelaide The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Sydney, acquired from the above in April 2008 estimate :

140

$4,000 – 6,000

LITERATURE Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia’s Remote Aboriginal Communities: The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, edition II, Kleimeyer Industries Pty Ltd, Melbourne, 2011, p. 175 (illus.)

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Short Street Gallery that states: ‘”This place is the birth place of my father’s clan. Our clan is also named Kirriwirri, and call each individual members of this clan Kirriwirri. There is a big warla (mud flat) at this place.

This is what this painting is about.” Kirriwirri is in the Great Sandy Desert close to and west of Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route. It is the birth place of Jan and her family.

This work shows tali (sand dunes) and jila (living water).’

DANIEL WALBIDI 75 born 1983 UNTITLED, 2005 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 151.0 x 120.0 cm signed and dated verso: DANIEL WALBIDI / 05 bears inscription verso: artist’s name, date, medium, size and Short Street Gallery cat. 10254 estimate :

$12,000 – 18,000

PROVENANCE Short Street Gallery, Broome Ronald McDonald House Charities WA Ball, Crown Towers, Perth (donated by Short Street Gallery, Broome) Private collection, Perth, acquired from the above in 2007

141

PADDY NYUNKUNY BEDFORD 76 (c.1922 – 2007) WIRWIRJI – DONKEY HOLE, 2000 ochres and pigment with acrylic binder on Belgian linen 80.0 x 100.0 cm signed with initials verso: PB bears inscription verso: To: CHAPMAN GALLERY., and Jirrawun Arts cat. PB 3 2000.68 estimate :

$28,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Jirrawun Arts, Kununurra Chapman Gallery, Canberra Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2000 LITERATURE Storer, R., Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, p. 147 (illus.)

RELATED WORK Ngarrmaliny – Cockatoo at Police Hole, 2003, ochres and pigment with acrylic binder on Belgian linen, 80.0 x 100.0 cm, illus. in Storer, R., Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, p. 97

Catalogued as painting PB 3 2000.68 in Bedford’s chronological index of works, this painting on linen was executed in 2000, and represents the country of Wirwirji. Also named Tea Hole, Donkey Hole and Police Hole

by Paddy Bedford on different occasions, it is located approximately 10 kilometres north east of Bedford Downs homestead adjacent to Horse Creek in his mother’s country and is home to a deep permanent waterhole. It is the place where his mother died when she was only middle-aged and where her body was wrapped in paperbark and placed in caves in the traditional ways of this country.1 Painting his first works in 1997 at the age of 75, Paddy Bedford soon became recognised as an innovator and important artist through his unique depictions of East Kimberley history. He is credited with evolving the artistic tradition forged earlier by Rover Thomas and Paddy Tjaminji.

Crafting his own representations of country, Bedford’s formal language is characterised by the relationship between bold forms and an elegance and balance in composition. Passing on knowledge about his country, it’s features, and the sacred narratives connected to it as well as stories relating to everyday life is a fundamental purpose of his paintings.

Bedford’s paintings recall the country where he grew up and in which he traversed in his everyday life. Rocky escarpments, rivers and other amorphous features of the Kimberley landscape are evident, whilst at the same time containing a learned and poetical knowledge of the land and its creation stories.

1. Kofed, F., ‘Places in Paddy Bedford’s Country’ in Storer, R., Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, p. 135

142

143

PADDY NYUNKUNY BEDFORD 77 (c.1922 – 2007) UNTITLED, 2004 gouache on crescent board 51.0 x 76.0 cm bears inscription verso: Jirrawun Arts cat. PB WB 3 2004-187 PROVENANCE Jirrawun Arts, Kununurra The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Sydney, acquired from the above in April 2004 estimate :

144

$5,000 – 7,000

EXHIBITED Paintings from Remote Communities: Indigenous Australian Art from the Laverty Collection, Sydney, Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand, 15 December 2007 – 24 February 2008; then touring to Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle, 5 July – 31 August 2008 LITERATURE Storer, R., Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, p. 177 (illus.)

Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia’s Remote Aboriginal Communities: The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Hardie Grant Books, Melbourne, 2008, p. 234 (illus.)

Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia’s Remote Aboriginal Communities: The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, edition II, Kleimeyer Industries Pty Ltd, Melbourne, 2011, p. 248 (illus.)

QUEENIE McKENZIE NAKARRA 78 (c.1915 – 1998) KILFOYLE’S VINEYARD, 1997 natural earth pigments with synthetic binder on canvas 120.0 x 150.0 cm signed verso: Queenie bears inscription verso: title, date, size and Warmun Traditional Artists cat. QM0082 estimate :

$8,000 – 12,000

PROVENANCE Warmun Traditional Artists, Turkey Creek Chapman Gallery, Canberra Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1999

145

EUBENA NAMPITJIN 79 (c.1921 – 2013) CHILLA LAKE, IN THE GREAT SANDY DESERT, 1995 synthetic polymer paint on linen 120.0 x 80.0 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Warlayirti Artists cat. R/S 698.95 estimate :

146

$4,000 – 6,000

PROVENANCE Warlayirti Artists, Balgo Hills Gallery Gondwana, Alice Springs (stamped verso, cat. 1829) The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Sydney, acquired from the above in November 1995 This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Gallery Gondwana, Alice Springs.

CHRISTINE YUKENBARRI NAKAMARRA 80 born 1977 WINPURPURLA, 2005 synthetic polymer paint on linen 150.0 x 75.0 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size, Warlayirti Artists cat. 68/05 and Alcaston Gallery cat. AK11713 PROVENANCE Warlayirti Artists, Balgo Hills Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Sydney, acquired from the above in July 2005 EXHIBITED Helicopter Tjungurrayi, Christine Yukenbarri, Carmel Yukenbarri, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, 1 – 23 July 2005 LITERATURE Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia’s Remote Aboriginal Communities: The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Hardie Grant Books, Melbourne, 2008, p. 121 (illus.)

Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia’s Remote Aboriginal Communities: The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, edition II, Kleimeyer Industries Pty Ltd, Melbourne, 2011, p. 132 (illus.) estimate :

$7,000 – 9,000

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Warlayirti Artists that states: ‘Christine has painted some of her mother’s country south of Balgo, in the Great Sandy Desert.

This country is named Winpurpurla after the tjurnnu (soakwater) depicted as the central circle in the painting. Winpurpurla is an inta, or ‘living water’ place so it always has good water. Women often travel to Winpurpurla to collect a variety of seeds including lukarrari which is ground to make damper and kumpupatja (bush tomato). The definite lines in the painting represent the tali (sandhills) that dominate this country.’

147

TJUMPO TJAPANANGKA 81 (c.1930 – 2007) WILKINBA NEAR LAKE MACKAY, 1993 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 120.0 x 59.5 cm bears inscription verso: artist name, size and Warlayirti Artists cat. 151/93 PROVENANCE Warlayirti Artists, Balgo Hills The Robin Beesey Collection of Paintings from Balgo Hills, Victoria Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 24 June 2002, lot 138 The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Sydney EXHIBITED Wirrimanu: Aboriginal Art from the Sandy Desert Region, McClelland Gallery, Victoria, 4 May – 20 July 1997 LITERATURE Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia’s Remote Aboriginal Communities: The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Hardie Grant Books, Melbourne, 2008, p. 136 (illus.) estimate :

$12,000 – 18,000

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Warlayirti Artists that states: ‘This painting from Tjumpo’s country shows a sacred “Law Place” that is connected with senior men’s Law called Tingarri. Back in the Tjukulpa (Dreamtime) serpents were responsible for creating the land, its features and its Law. Miliggi one of these serpents is shown during this creation period. This area has been used to celebrate these events for countless generations. The land has a rugged beauty with endless sandhills, craggy hills and vast salt lakes surrounded by stands of desert oaks.’

148

TIMMY PAYUNGKA TJAPANGATI 82 (c.1942 – 2000) PARAYIRRPILNYA, 1986 synthetic polymer paint on linen 140.5 x 101.0 cm bears inscription verso: Papunya Tula Artists cat. TP860605 PROVENANCE Painted at Kintore in June 1986 Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs Private collection, New South Wales Private collection, Victoria Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 9 July 2001, lot 151 The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Sydney EXHIBITED The Colin and Elizabeth Laverty Collection – a selection of Indigenous and nonIndigenous art exhibition, Geelong Gallery, Victoria, 18 February – 15 April 2012 LITERATURE Laverty, C., ‘Diversity and Strength: Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art – A Private Collection’, Arts of Asia, Hong Kong, November – December 2013, cat. 6, p. 85 (illus.)

Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia’s Remote Aboriginal Communities: The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Hardie Grant Books, Melbourne, 2008, p. 53 (illus.)

Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia’s Remote Aboriginal Communities: The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, edition II, Kleimeyer Industries Pty Ltd, Melbourne, 2011, p. 53 (illus.) estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists that states in part: ‘This painting tells of the mythology associated with the site of Parayirrpilnya near lake Mackay. Many Tingari men travelled here from Western Australia. Kudaitchi men also came to this place but they travelled underground.’

149

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs Private collection, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney

GEORGE TJUNGURRAYI 83 born c.1943 TINGARI AT KIRRIMALUNYA, 2004 synthetic polymer paint on linen 152.0 x 183.5 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Papunya Tula Artists cat. GT0406067 estimate :

150

$8,000 – 12,000

This painting is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists that states in part: ‘An old Tingari Man of the Tjapaltjarri kinship subsection was camped at the claypan site of Kirrmalunya, near two large rocky hills, north of Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay). He later travelled south to Lake Mackay where he was involved in ceremonied related to the site. Since events associated with the Tingari Cycle are of a secret nature no further detail was given.’

PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs Private collection, Melbourne

MAKINTI NAPANANGKA 84 (c.1930 – 2011) LUPULNGA, 2002 synthetic polymer paint on linen 137.0 x 122.0 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Papunya Tula Artists cat. MN0211012 estimate :

$8,000 – 12,000

This painting is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists that states: ‘This painting depicts designs associated with the rockhole site of Lupulnga, south of Kintore Community. The roundel is a rockhole.

The Peewee (small bird) Dreaming is associated with this site. A group of women visited the site before continuing their travels north to Kintore. The lines in the painting represent spun hair-string which is used in the making of hair-belts worn during the ceremonies associated with the area.’

151

SUSAN NORRIE 85 born 1953 VERSAILLES AND THE HALL OF MIRRORS, 2016 – 18 oil on canvas 97.0 x 171.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Susan Norrie / 2016 - 2018 / VERSAILLES / AND The / Hall of MIRRORS estimate :

152

$10,000 – 15,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne, acquired directly from the artist

PROVENANCE Stills Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney Private collection, New South Wales

PETRINA HICKS 86 born 1972 ZARA 1 AND ZARA 2, 2005 Lightjet prints 80.0 x 108.0 cm each 110.0 x 257.0 cm (frame) edition of 8 estimate :

$8,000 – 12,000 (2)

EXHIBITED Untitled, 2005, Stills Gallery, Sydney, 1 April – 1 May 2005 (Zara 1 and Zara 2, another example) In Cold Light, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 17 March – 6 May 2006 (Zara 2 illus. cover of exhibition catalogue, another example) C Photo Magazine, Phillips de Pury & Co, New York, USA, 6 – 26 September 2007 (Zara 2, another example)

PATRICIA PICCININI 87 born 1965 BABY BLUE, 2003 fibreglass, polycarbonate and automotive paint 25.0 x 42.0 x 35.5 cm PROVENANCE Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Patricia Piccinini, Precautionary Tales, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 6 – 30 September 2003 estimate :

$7,000 – 10,000

153

GORDON BENNETT 88 (1955 – 2014) EXPLORER (THE INLAND SEA) CONFRONTATION, 1994 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 92.0 x 65.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: G Bennett / 2-2-94 / ... / EXPLORER (THE INLAND SEA) / CONFRONTATION estimate :

154

$12,000 – 15,000

PROVENANCE Bellas Gallery, Brisbane Company collection, Brisbane Christie’s, Melbourne, 25 June 2002, lot 49 Private collection, Victoria Lawson~Menzies, Sydney, 23 May 2007, lot 21 (as ‘Explorer Confrontation (The Inland Sea)’) Private collection, Perth EXHIBITED Gordon Bennett: Dismember/Remember, Bellas Gallery, Brisbane, 1 – 18 March 1994, cat. 23

ROBERT CAMPBELL JUNIOR 89 (1944 – 1993) THE GHOST OF GRAVELLY HILL, 1986 synthetic polymer paint on canvas on plywood 91.5 x 120.0 cm signed and dated lower right: ROBERT CAMPBELL JR / 8.2.1986 bears inscription verso: 11 estimate :

$12,000 – 18,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, New South Wales, acquired directly from the artist in 1986

155

CRESSIDA CAMPBELL 90 born 1960 VEGETABLE GARDEN, 1988 screenprint in 36 colours 76.0 x 57.5 cm edition: A.P. aside from an edition of 99 signed, dated, numbered and inscribed with title below image estimate :

156

$6,000 – 9,000

PROVENANCE Company collection, Sydney LITERATURE Crayford, P., (ed.), The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures Pty Ltd, Sydney, 2008, cat. S8802, p. 355

AIDA TOMESCU 91 born 1955 VIS IV, 1991 oil on canvas 182.5 x 153.0 cm signed with initials, dated and inscribed with title verso: VIS IV / ACT ‘91 PROVENANCE Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Sydney, acquired from the above in September 1991 EXHIBITED Aida Tomescu Paintings, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 9 – 31 August 1991, cat. 7 estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

DICK WATKINS 92 born 1937 DOCTOR BLUES, 1989 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 152.0 x 107.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: ‘Doctor Blues’ // R. Watkins. 1989 PROVENANCE Yuill/Crowley, Sydney The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Sydney LITERATURE Loxley, A., ‘The Laverty Collection’, Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press Pty Limited, Sydney, Spring 1996, vol. 34, no. 1, p. 72 (illus.) estimate :

$6,000 – 8,000

157

JOHN BRACK 93 (1920 – 1999) STUDY FOR ON THE RINGS, 1975 watercolour and conté crayon on paper 27.0 x 19.5 cm bears inscription on label attached verso: AN UNSIGNED JOHN BRACK SKETCH / FOR A LITHOGRAPH DONE AT CROSSLEY / PRINT WORKSHOP 1974/75 WHEN I / WAS SUPERVISING PRINTING / DURING TATE ADAM’S ABSENCE. / J. CLUTTERBUCK 2008 PROVENANCE Jock Clutterbuck, Melbourne Private collection, Victoria RELATED WORK On the Rings, colour lithograph, 70.0 x 50.0 cm, illus. in Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. II, cat. pr20, p. 259 estimate :

$4,000 – 6,000

BRYAN WESTWOOD 94 (1930 – 2000) PORTRAIT OF A JOCKEY oil on canvas on composition board 106.5 x 31.0 cm signed with initial lower right: W PROVENANCE Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 23 August 1992, lot 39 Private collection, Melbourne estimate :

158

$3,000 – 4,000

RICHARD LARTER 95

(1929 – 2014) FOUR SEATED PATS, 1989 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 176.0 x 122.0 cm signed with initials and dated lower right: RL / 3/4 .1989 signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: RICHARD LARTER / “4 SEATED PATS” / March to April 1989. / Richard Larter / … / Property / of PAT / LARTER PROVENANCE Legge Gallery, Sydney The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Sydney, acquired from the above in July 1990 estimate :

$8,000 – 12,000

EXHIBITED Richard Larter Figurative Works, in conjunction with Watters Gallery and Legge Gallery, Sydney, 19 June – 7 July 1990, cat. 1 An Exhibition At Two Venues – An Exhibition to Celebrate Richard Larter’s Seventieth Birthday, Watters Gallery, Sydney and Legge Gallery, Sydney, 4 – 22 May 1999, cat. 45 Modern Australian Painting, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, 17 March – 9 April 2011, cat. 37 (label attached verso) LITERATURE Dowse, B., Richard Larter: An Artist in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Australian National University, Canberra, 1989, honours thesis, fig. 15, p. 165 (illus.)

159

JOHN PERCEVAL 96 (1923 – 2000) POND AT DUSK NEAR BLACK MOUNTAIN, 1965 oil on board 38.0 x 48.0 cm signed and dated lower right: ‘65 / Perceval signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: “Pond at / Dusk near / Black Mountain” / Perceval ‘65 PROVENANCE South Yarra Gallery, Melbourne (label attached verso) Christie’s, Melbourne, 14 April 1986, lot 262 Private collection Lawsons, Sydney, 26 July 1994, lot 328 (as ‘Little Pond at Dusk Near Black Mountain’) Private collection, Sydney estimate :

$9,000 – 12,000

SIDNEY NOLAN 97 (1917 – 1992) MONKEY AND ACROBAT, 1967 wax crayon and fabric dye on paper 25.5 x 30.5 cm signed with initial lower right: N signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Nolan / 29 July 1967 / Monkey + Actrobat [sic] PROVENANCE John Hull, London Gould collection, Melbourne Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 15 March 2017, lot 71 Private collection, Sydney estimate :

160

$5,000 – 7,000

MIRKA MORA 98 (1928 – 2018) DREAMING IN THE GARDEN, 2007 oil on canvas 65.0 x 181.5 cm signed and dated lower right: MIRKA 07 bears inscription on stretcher bar verso: DREAMING IN THE GARDEN / MIRKA MORA estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

PROVENANCE William Mora Galleries, Melbourne (stamped verso) Private collection, Queensland, acquired from the above in 2007 EXHIBITED Mirka Mora Recent Paintings, William Mora Galleries, Melbourne, 19 August – 12 September 2008

CHARLES BLACKMAN 99 (1928 – 2018) CHILDREN AND DOG PLAYING – GLASSHOUSE MOUNTAINS, 1974 oil on paper on board 19.5 x 27.0 cm signed lower left: BLACKMAN PROVENANCE David Sumner Gallery, Adelaide Dr Rosalind Hollinrake, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1974 EXHIBITED Charles Blackman: Tapestries and Drawings, David Sumner Gallery, Adelaide, March 1974, curated by Rosalind Hollinrake in conjunction with the Adelaide Festival estimate :

$6,000 – 9,000

161

RUSSELL DRYSDALE 100 (1912 – 1981) MOTHER AND CHILD pen and wash on paper 35.0 x 18.0 cm signed with initials lower right: R.D. bears inscription verso: D941/ 457 PROVENANCE Cyril and Alice Schuvater, Sydney Geoff K. Gray, Sydney, 17 November 1981, lot 100 Private collection, Sydney estimate :

$4,000 – 6,000

RUSSELL DRYSDALE 101 (1912 – 1981) THE CUSTOMER pen and ink on paper 34.5 x 28.0 cm signed with initials lower centre: R.D. PROVENANCE Cyril and Alice Schuvater, Sydney Geoff K. Gray, Sydney, 17 November 1981, lot 90 Private collection, Sydney estimate :

162

$4,000 – 6,000

SIDNEY NOLAN 102 (1917 – 1992) GALLIPOLI SOLDIER AND CAMEL, 1966 crayon and fabric dye on paper on composition board 52.0 x 76.0 cm signed and dated lower right: Nolan / 15-7-66 PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne estimate :

$15,000 – 20,000

DONALD FRIEND 103 (1915 – 1989) BOY WITH FIGHTING COCK, 1975 pen and ink and gouache on paper on composition board 78.0 x 57.0 cm signed and inscribed lower right: Donald Friend / Bali PROVENANCE Dr Peter Elliott AM, Sydney, acquired directly from the artist, Bali, c.1975 Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2007 LITERATURE Fry, G., The Peter Elliott Collection of Australian Art, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2013, pp. 67 (illus.) 165 estimate :

$8,000 – 12,000

163

SIDNEY NOLAN 104 (1917 – 1992) NED KELLY, 1971 set of 15 colour screenprints 48.0 x 63.5 cm each (image) 54.5 x 70.0 cm each (sheet) edition: 5/60 each signed and numbered below image published by Marlborough Graphics, London printed by Kelpra Studio, London (each stamped and numbered verso) estimate :

PROVENANCE Marlborough Graphics, London Christie’s, Melbourne, 27 November 2001, lot 113 Private collection, Melbourne Comprising: (I) NED KELLY (II) CONSTABLE FITZPATRICK AND KATE KELLY (III) STEVE HART DRESSED AS A GIRL (IV) QUILTING THE ARMOUR (V) DEATH OF CONSTABLE SCANLON (VI) DEATH OF SERGEANT KENNEDY (VII) THE ALARM (VIII) THE PURSUIT (IX) THE MARRIAGE OF AARON SHERRITT (X) THE DEFENCE OF AARON SHERRITT (XI) MRS REARDON AT GLENROWAN (XII) SIEGE AT GLENROWAN (XIII) BURNING AT GLENROWAN (XIV) GLENROWAN (XV) THE TRIAL

164

$30,000 – 40,000 (15)

165

HILDA RIX NICHOLAS 105 (1884 – 1961) MONARO LANDSCAPE, c.1923 oil on canvas on board 33.0 x 26.0 cm signed lower left: H Rix Nicholas PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection Goodmans Auctioneers, Sydney, 18 October 1993, lot 262 Private collection, Canberra Private collection, Victoria EXHIBITED Hilda Rix Nicholas, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 30 August – 18 September 1978, cat. 21 estimate :

$4,000 – 6,000

ALBERT HENRY FULLWOOD 106 (1863 – 1930) (NEW TOWN, TASMANIA), c.1897 watercolour on paper 16.5 x 24.0 cm signed lower left: A.H. Fullwood PROVENANCE Private collection, Hobart EXHIBITED Collector’s Exhibition 2016, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 6 August – 29 October 2016 (label attached verso) (as ‘(Study for the Rivulet at New Farm with Mezger’s Mill)’) estimate :

166

$4,000 – 6,000

JOHN MATHER 107 (1848 – 1916) PICNIC, PORT PHILLIP BAY FORESHORE, 1903 watercolour on paper 35.5 x 51.0 cm signed and dated lower left: J. Mather. 12. 03 PROVENANCE Geoff K. Gray, Sydney, 21 March 1984, lot 293 (as ‘Beach Picnic’) The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Sydney estimate :

$2,000 – 3,000

JOHN BARR CLARKE HOYTE 108 (1835 – 1913) MARLBOROUGH SOUNDS (PELORUS SOUND), NEW ZEALAND watercolour and gouache on paper 37.0 x 64.0 cm signed lower left: JC Hoyte PROVENANCE Mrs Jagelman, Badgerys Creek, Sydney The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Sydney RELATED WORK New Zealand Coastal Landscape (Marlborough Sounds), watercolour on paper, 22.5 x 39.0 cm, private collection estimate :

$4,000 – 6,000

167

ALBERT NAMATJIRA 109 (1902 – 1959) QUARAITNMA, FINKE RIVER, 1938 watercolour on paper 21.5 x 36.0 cm signed lower right NAMATJIRA. ALBERT bears inscription on old backing verso: 12 PROVENANCE The Fine Arts Society Gallery, Melbourne Edward Adrian Wells, Melbourne, acquired in the 1930s Thence by descent Private collection, Canberra estimate :

$12,000 – 16,000

HANS HEYSEN 110 (1877 – 1968) BUNYEROO, 1927 watercolour on paper 28.5 x 39.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title lower left: HANS HEYSEN. BUNYEROO, 1927 inscribed on old backing attached verso: No 2 / The Wilpenas from Bunyeroo / Flinders Range / HANS HEYSEN / Ambleside / S.A. PROVENANCE Private collection, Sydney Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 13 September 2016, lot 69 Private collection, Sydney estimate :

168

$6,000 – 9,000

EXHIBITED Albert Namatjira: Central Australian Water Colours, The Fine Arts Society Gallery, Melbourne, 5 – 17 December 1938, cat. 12 (the artist’s first solo exhibition) RELATED WORK Quarritana, Finke River (Organ pipes), c.1948, watercolour on paper, 34.5 x 52.0 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

LILLA REIDY 111 (1858 – 1933) OLD HOME – ST NINIAN’S, BRIGHTON, c.1895 oil on canvas 35.5 x 51.0 cm signed lower left: Lilla Reidy. bears inscription on stretcher bar verso: Old home (at Bay Street - Brighton) of Mr Ward Cole, afterwards purchased / by the late Thomas Bent.

PROVENANCE Camberwell Auctions, Melbourne, 25 January 1973 Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Art and Nature: Artists’ Flowers, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria, 4 March – 30 April 1989 Backyards and Boundaries 1840-1930, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria, 27 September – 8 November 1998, cat. 56 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) LITERATURE Topliss, H., The Artists’ Camps: ‘Plein Air’ Painting in Australia, Hedley Australia Publications, Melbourne, 1992, pl. 8, pp. 11 (illus.), 185 estimate :

$8,000 – 12,000

Lilla Reidy was one of E. Phillips Fox and Tudor St George Tucker’s early pupils after Fox and Tucker had established their private art school known as the Melbourne School of Art in the late summer of 1893. Reidy later became Fox’s assistant. She exhibited at the Victorian Artists’ Society from 1895 until 1910 and was based at “Bertrame” Punt Road, Prahran and had a studio at the Cromwell Buildings in Bourke Street where Fox and Tucker had their school.

As Ruth Zubans notes in her major publication on Fox ‘... in 1894 Tucker and Fox established at Charterisville the first summer school of painting in Australia, a major innovation in Melbourne’s teaching practice and offered a sharp contrast to the curriculum offered by the Gallery School. At first, students painted there at weekends, making the stone farmhouse “and the lovely old garden” their base, but from 1897 a camp was held every autumn and they “spent two of the pleasantest months of the year in outdoor painting”’.1 Other art students at this time included Marion Barrett, Violet Teague, May Vale, Ina Gregory, Christina Asquith Baker, Bertha E. Merfield, Mary Meyer, Edward C. Officer, Ambrose Patterson and Albert Enes.

Reidy painted society portraits, still life, interiors and landscapes based in Melbourne, Sydney and Hobart. Phillips Fox painted a souvenir portrait of Lilla Reidy (c.1895) which is featured on the slipcase of Helen Topliss’s The Artists’ Camps ‘Plein Air’ Painting in Australia.

St Ninian’s (10 Miller Street) was one of Brighton’s earliest buildings, built around 1841 and best known as the home of George Ward Cole (1793 – 1879), merchant shipping agent and owner of Cole’s Wharf. Situated on the seafront on the right-hand side of Bay Street, St Ninian’s was known for its Singapore Teak wing. During Cole’s time, it was a fashionable rendezvous for many important identities who shaped Melbourne’s history including Victoria’s first royal visitor, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, who was a guest here in 1867. The property was demolished in 1974.

1. Zubans, R., E. Phillips Fox: His Life and Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1995, p. 85

169

ARTHUR STREETON 112 (1867 – 1943) SANTA MARIA DELLA SALUTE, VENICE, 1908 watercolour and pencil on paper 22.5 x 32.0 cm signed and dated lower right: A Streeton - 1908 PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne RELATED WORK La Salute, from Riva Schiavoni, c.1908, oil on canvas, 28.2 x 38.4 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra estimate :

$6,000 – 8,000

MAX MELDRUM 113 (1875 – 1955) STUDY LE PONT ROYAL (PARIS), 1929 oil on canvas on board 32.5 x 40.0 cm signed lower right: Meldrum signed, dated, and inscribed with title verso: Max Meldrum / STUDY LE PONT ROYAL PARIS / JULLIET 1929 inscribed verso: 53 / LE PONT ROYALE / (PARIS) / 82 PROVENANCE Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne Private collection Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne Private collection Bridget MacDonnell Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Catalogue of Paintings by Max Meldrum, Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne, 24 February – 7 March 1963, cat. 53 19th and 20th Century Australian Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 1 May – 7 June 1996, cat. 22 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) estimate :

170

$6,000 – 9,000

MAX MELDRUM 114 (1875 – 1955) THE COTTAGE, BRITTANY, FRANCE, 1908 oil on canvas 38.0 x 26.5 cm signed lower left: M Meldrum signed and inscribed with title on partial label attached verso: The Cottage / Brittany / France / Meldrum / No 8 LANDUNE inscribed verso: No 8 estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

PROVENANCE Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 1971 Private collection, Melbourne Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 30 November 2011, lot 77 Private collection, Victoria

171

NORMAN LINDSAY 115 (1879 – 1969) SWEET SIXTEEN oil on canvas on board 23.0 x 13.0 cm signed lower left: NORMAN LINDSAY PROVENANCE Rushton Fine Arts, Sydney, 15 July 1986, lot 160 Private collection, Sydney estimate :

$5,500 – 6,500

NORMAN LINDSAY 116 (1879 – 1969) WATER NYMPHS, c.1912 watercolour on paper 28.5 x 22.0 cm signed lower right: NORMAN LINDSAY bears inscription verso: 22 certificate of authenticity signed by Lin Bloomfield, Director, The Bloomfield Galleries attached verso PROVENANCE The Bloomfield Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney estimate :

172

$6,000 – 9,000

NORMAN LINDSAY 117 (1879 – 1969) SPRINGWOOD IDYLL oil on canvas on composition board 29.5 x 25.0 cm signed lower right: NORMAN / LINDSAY certificate of authenticity signed by Lin Bloomfield, Director, The Bloomfield Galleries attached verso PROVENANCE The Bloomfield Galleries, Sydney Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Norman Lindsay Exhibition, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales, 22 April – 24 May 1982, cat. 5 (labels attached verso) estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

NORMAN LINDSAY 118 (1879 – 1969) ROSE, 1912 oil on canvas on wood panel 28.0 x 19.5 cm signed upper right: NORMAN LINDSAY bears inscription verso: “NUDE” / “ROSE” 1912 / Oil by Norman Lindsay certificate of authenticity signed by Jane Bloomfield, Director, The Bloomfield Galleries attached verso PROVENANCE The Bloomfield Galleries, Sydney Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 27 May 1981, lot 627 (as ‘Nude Study (Rose)’) Private collection, Sydney estimate :

$10,000 – 15,000

173

THEA PROCTOR 119 (1879 – 1966) THE HAT SHOP, 1919 colour lithograph 17.5 x 16.0 cm edition of 24 signed and inscribed with title below image PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Senefelder Club, Leicester Galleries, February 1920, cat. 20A (another example) Fine Art Society’s Gallery, Melbourne, December 1921, cat. 10 (another example) LITERATURE Butler, R., Thea Proctor: The Prints, Resolution Press, Sydney, 1980, pl. 10, pp. 42 – 43 (illus., another example) RELATED WORK Other examples of this work are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney estimate :

$3,000 – 5,000

ALISON REHFISCH 120 (1900 – 1975) CAGNES-SUR-MER, c.1937 oil on hessian on composition board 49.0 x 39.0 cm bears inscription verso: 6235 PROVENANCE The Painters Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney LITERATURE Power, R., Alison Rehfisch: A life of art, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2002, p. 44 (illus. as ‘French Village Scene’ c.1937) estimate :

174

$2,000 – 3,000

MARGARET PRESTON 121 (1875 – 1963) AUSTRALIAN FLOWERS, 1927 hand-coloured woodcut 11.0 x 11.0 cm edition of 32 tipped into the deluxe edition of Art in Australia, Margaret Preston Number, No. 22, December 1927 signed with initials in image lower left: MP signed and inscribed with title below image PROVENANCE Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED A Survey of Australian Relief Prints 1900 – 1950, Deutscher Galleries, Melbourne, 13 April – 5 May 1978, cat. 29, (another example) LITERATURE Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston, A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1987, cat. 120, p. 131 (illus., another example) estimate :

$8,000 – 12,000

EVELINE SYME 122 (1888 – 1961) BARWON HEADS, c.1930s colour linocut 16.5 x 20.0 cm edition: A.P. aside from an edition of 25 PROVENANCE Important Women Artists, Melbourne (stock no. 405) Private collection, Melbourne Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity, Important Women Artists, Melbourne, signed and dated 18 September 1977 estimate :

$3,000 – 5,000

175

DANILA VASSILIEFF 123 (1897 – 1958) FIGURES DANCING, 1955 watercolour and gouache on paper 30.0 x 40.0 cm signed and dated upper left: Vassilieff 55 PROVENANCE Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne estimate :

$2,000 – 3,000

WEAVER HAWKINS 124 (1893 – 1977) LANDSCAPE, 1949 watercolour on paper 38.0 x 56.5 cm signed and dated lower right: Raokin / 49 PROVENANCE possibly: Sotheby’s, Sydney, 29 October 1987, lot 349 (as ‘Creek Bed and Bush’) Private collection, Sydney estimate :

176

$1,500 – 2,500

ALAN SUMNER 125 (1911 – 1994) MALLACOOTA ICE WORKS, 1970 oil on canvas on composition board 85.0 x 116.0 cm signed and dated lower right: ALAN SUMNER / 1970 signed and inscribed with title verso: ALAN SUMNER / “ICE WORKS MALLACOOTA” / “MALLACOOTA ICE WORKS” / BY / ALAN SUMNER PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne, acquired directly from the artist in November 1980 (receipt attached verso) estimate :

$8,000 – 12,000

ELAINE HAXTON 126 (1909 – 1999) SAILING ON PITTWATER, 1970 oil and collage on canvas 35.5 x 25.5 cm signed and dated lower left: ELAINE HAXTON 70 bears inscription on stretcher bar verso: Elaine Haxton Sailing on Pittwater PROVENANCE Christie’s, Melbourne, 24 November 1999, lot 352 Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 26 November 2002, lot 126 Private collection, Melbourne estimate :

$2,500 – 3,500

177

BRETT WHITELEY 127 (1939 – 1992) KERRY, 1984 etching 63.5 x 47.5 cm (image) 72.5 x 53.0 cm (sheet) edition: 21/30 signed and numbered below image bears inscription verso: KERRY / BRETT WHITELEY / 1939 - 1992 PROVENANCE John Nicholson’s Fine Art, United Kingdom, 20 June 2018, lot 77 Private collection, Sydney LITERATURE Brett Whiteley: The Graphics 1961–1992, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 1995, cat. 92, pp. 89 (illus., another example), 114 estimate :

$4,500 – 5,500

CHARLES BLACKMAN 128 (1928 – 2018) PORTRAIT OF SYLVIA DELPRAT, 1973 watercolour and mixed media on paper 119.0 x 96.0 cm signed upper left: BLACKMAN signed and dated lower right: BLACKMAN 73. inscribed with title lower centre: PORTRAIT OF SYLVIA DeLPRat PROVENANCE Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 27 November 2002, lot 128 Private collection, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney, acquired in 2008 estimate :

178

$6,000 – 9,000

VARIOUS ARTISTS 129

THE VIRTUOSI PORTFOLIO, 1994 Arthur Boyd, Cressida Campbell, Colin Lanceley, Mandy Martin, George Milpurrurru, John Olsen, Paul Partos, William Robinson, Gareth Sansom, Jan Senbergs, Tim Storrier and Imants Tillers twelve artists’ prints commissioned by Youth Music Australia in collaboration with Sherman Galleries, Sydney 76.0 x 56.0 cm each (sheet) edition: 11/75 each signed, numbered and inscribed in or below image (Two framed: Colin Lanceley and John Olsen) three illustrated PROVENANCE Sherman Galleries, Sydney Private collection, Sydney RELATED WORK Another example of this portfolio is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra estimate :

$4,500 – 6,500 (12)

179

OLD TUTUMA TJAPANGATI 130 (c.1909 – 1987) TJUKULA TINGARI DREAMING, c.1975 synthetic polymer paint on composition board 62.0 x 49.0 cm bears inscription on label attached verso: artist’s name, title, date, medium and size estimate :

180

$5,000 – 7,000

PROVENANCE Billy Marshall-Stoneking, collected when he lived and worked at Papunya in the late 1970s Private collection, Sydney Cromwell’s, Sydney, 21 October 2003, lot 123 (as ‘Untitled’) Private collection, Melbourne Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 28 November 2012, lot 165 (as ‘Tingari at Tjukula’) Private collection, Melbourne LITERATURE Stourton, P.C., Songlines and Dreamings: Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Painting, Lund Humphries, London, 1996, pl. 176, p. 164 (illus.)

JANANGOO BUTCHER CHEREL 131 (c.1920 – 2009) MANYI, 2006 synthetic polymer paint on Arches paper 105.0 x 75.0 cm estimate :

$5,000 – 7,000

PROVENANCE Mangkaja Arts, Fitzroy Crossing Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Groundwork, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 30 July – 23 October 2011, cat. 8

181

KITTY KANTILLA 132 (c.1928 – 2003) UNTITLED, 1999 natural earth pigments on paper 75.5 x 57.0 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, date, medium, Skin: Rain, Dance: Fire, and Jilamara Arts and Crafts cat. KKP-99415 PROVENANCE Jilamara Arts and Crafts, Milikapiti, (stamped verso) Aboriginal and Pacific Art, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1999 Shapiro Auctioneers, Sydney, 20 – 21 July 2004, lot 4 The Austcorp Group Limited Art Collection, Sydney Sotheby’s Australia, Melbourne, 24 November 2009, lot 98 Private collection, Melbourne estimate :

182

$4,000 – 6,000

GULUMBU YUNUPINGU 133 (c.1945 – 2012) GARAK, THE UNIVERSE, 2004 natural earth pigments on bark 166.5 x 40.0 cm (irregular) bears inscription verso: artist’s name and cat. 2470S PROVENANCE Painted for Buku-Larrnggay Mulka in 2004 Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne (cat. AK10492) Joel Fine Art, Melbourne, 3 June 2008, lot 85A Private collection, Melbourne Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 11 October 2011, lot 22 Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED New works by Gulumbu Yunupingu, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, 5 – 27 November 2004 estimate :

$4,000 – 6,000

HARRY J WEDGE 134 (1957 – 2012) SORRY BUSINESS I, 2005 synthetic polymer paint on canvas laid on canvas 79.0 x 198.0 cm signed and dated lower left: H.J. WEDGE. 2005 PROVENANCE Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative, Sydney (label attached verso) Art Images Gallery, Adelaide, (label attached verso) Private collection, Adelaide estimate :

$3,000 – 5,000

EXHIBITED Urban Aboriginal Artists of New South Wales, Boomalli Aboriginal Artist Cooperative, Art Images Gallery, Adelaide, 8 March – 2 April 2006

GERTIE HUDDLESTON 135 (c.1933 – 2013) BUSH GARDEN, 1997 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 73.0 x 116.0 cm signed with initials and dated lower right: G.H. 1997 bears inscription verso: artist’s name, title and Karen Brown Gallery cat. U/Cat 1 PROVENANCE Commissioned by Shades of Ochre Art Gallery/ Karen Brown Gallery, Darwin (stamped verso) The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Sydney, acquired from the above in September 1998 LITERATURE Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia’s Remote Aboriginal Communities: The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Hardie Grant Books, Melbourne, 2008, p. 327 (illus.)

Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia’s Remote Aboriginal Communities: The Collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, edition II, Kleimeyer Industries Pty Ltd, Melbourne, 2011, p. 369 (illus.) estimate :

$3,000 – 5,000

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Karen Brown Gallery that states: ‘The bush around Ngukurr has all kind of flowers and grass. That white grass can look like lines from far away – like in this painting. Butterfly time and flower time is when we look for sugar bag honey.’

183

LYDIA BALBAL 136 born c.1958 JAWANI JAWANI, 2008 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 122.0 x 121.0 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, date, medium, size and Short Street Gallery cat. 25382 PROVENANCE Short Street Gallery, Broome William Mora Galleries, Melbourne (stamped verso) Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Lydia Balbal. Recent Paintings, William Mora Galleries, Melbourne, 11 November – 5 December 2008 estimate :

$4,000 – 6,000

LYDIA BALBAL 137 born c.1958 MARTAKULU, 2008 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 122.0 x 70.0 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, date, medium, size and Short Street Gallery cat. 24311 PROVENANCE Short Street Gallery, Broome Private collection, Sydney This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Short Street Gallery that states: ‘Martakulu is a soak near Punmu near the Canning Stock Route in the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia. It is strong womans [sic] country, it is part of the women’s law line. Long time ago a law man he come up to this country, he went home and left his wife and baby. They make him fire and sit down, cook mayi (food) and then started to cry for her husband.

Her tears that soak. It is important country this one.’ estimate :

184

$3,000 – 4,000

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Short Street Gallery that states: ‘Lydia says: “This big hill with jila (living water). Jawani Jawani that snake he a cheeky one. He lives in that water. He makes rain this country. Can’t make fire there or that snake get angry.”

This country is Mangala Country and is a woman’s place.

It is a twin place, one of two similar places located close to each in the Great Sandy Desert in W.A.’

CHARLIE MARDIGAN 138

CHARLIE MARDIGAN 139

(1926 – 1986) UNTITLED natural earth pigments on eucalyptus bark 57.5 x 20.0 cm (irregular)

(1926 – 1986) UNTITLED natural earth pigments on eucalyptus bark 64.5 x 22.5 cm (irregular)

PROVENANCE Painted at Wadeye (Port Keats), Northern Territory Private collection, Melbourne

PROVENANCE Painted at Wadeye (Port Keats), Northern Territory Private collection, Melbourne

estimate :

$4,000 – 6,000

estimate :

$4,000 – 6,000

end of sale 185

1. PRIOR TO AUCTION CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTIONS Catalogues can be obtained at Deutscher and Hackett offices or by subscription (see the Catalogue Subscription Form at the back of this catalogue or online for more information).

PRE-SALE ESTIMATES The price range estimated against each lot reflects the opinion of our art specialists as to the hammer price expected for the lot at auction and is informed by realised prices for comparable works as well as the particularities of each lot including condition, quality, provenance and rarity. While presale estimates are intended as a guide for prospective buyers, lots can be sold outside of these ranges. Pre-sale estimates include GST (if any) on a lot but do not include the buyer’s premium or other charges where applicable.

prospective buyers and sellers guide ALL PARTIES ARE STRONGLY URGED TO READ THE CONDITIONS OF AUCTION AND SALE INCLUDED IN THIS CATALOGUE

RESERVES The reserve is the minimum price including GST (if any) that the vendor will accept for a lot and below which the lot will not normally be sold.

PRE-AUCTION VIEWINGS In both Sydney and Melbourne pre-auction viewings are scheduled for several days in advance of each auction. Deutscher and Hackett specialists are available to give obligation free advice at viewings or by appointment and prospective buyers are strongly encouraged to thoroughly examine and request condition reports for potential purchases. Pre-auction viewings are open to the public and are free to attend.

SYMBOL KEY ▲ Unless ownership is clearly stated in the provenance, this symbol is used where a lot is offered which Deutscher and Hackett owns in whole or in part. In these instances, Deutscher and Hackett has a direct financial interest in the property or means that Deutscher and Hackett has guaranteed a minimum price. ● Used to indicate lots for sale without a reserve.

EXPLANATION OF CATALOGUING PRACTICE AND TERMS All information published in Deutscher and Hackett catalogues represent statements of opinion and should not be relied upon as fact. All dimensions are listed in centimetres, height before width and are approximate. All prices are in Australian dollars.

ARTIST’S NAMES All reference to artists make use of common and not full names in accordance with the standards outlined in the National Gallery of Australia reference publication Australian Art: Artist’s working names authority list. For instance, John Brack rather than Cecil John Brack; Roy de Maistre rather than Leroy Leveson Laurent De Maistre; Rosalie Gascoigne rather than Rosalie Norah Gascoigne.

Terms used in this catalogue have the meanings ascribed to them below: a. NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work by the artist. b. Attributed to NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, probably a work by the artist, in whole or in part. c. Circle of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work showing the influence and style of the artist and of the artist’s period. d. Studio/Workshop of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work possibly executed under the supervision of the artist. e. School of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work by a follower or student of the artist. f. Manner of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work created in the style, but not necessarily in the period, of the artist. g. After NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a copy of a work by the artist. h. “signed” / “dated” in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, the work has been signed/dated by the artist. i. “bears signature” / “bears date” in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, the work has possibly been signed/dated by someone other than the artist.

186

PROVENANCE Where appropriate, Deutscher and Hackett will include the known provenance, or history of ownership of lots. Non disclosure may indicate that prior owners are unknown or that the seller wishes to maintain confidentiality.

2. THE AUCTION Auctions are open to the public and are free to attend. Deutscher and Hackett may exclude any person at any time in its discretion.

REGISTRATION Bidders must register to bid prior to the commencement of an auction. Deutscher and Hackett may impose other obligations on the registration of bidders in its discretion.

CONDUCT OF AUCTION Lots are offered for sale on a consecutive basis. Deutscher and Hackett will determine the conduct of the auction in its absolute discretion, including the regulation of bidding. Consecutive or responsive bids may be placed by the auctioneer on behalf of the vendor up to the reserve.

ABSENTEE OR COMMISSION BIDS AND TELEPHONE BIDS As a courtesy service, Deutscher and Hackett will make reasonable efforts to place bids for prospective buyers in absentia provided written or verbal instructions (as indicated on absentee bid forms included at the back of this catalogue or online) are received 24 hours prior to auction. Where successful, lots will be purchased at the lowest possible bid and in the event of identical absentee bids, the bid received earliest will take precedence. Deutscher and Hackett accepts no responsibility for errors and omissions in relation to this courtesy service and reserves the right to record telephone bids.

RESERVE Unless indicated otherwise, all lots are subject to a confidential reserve price determined by the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett or the auctioneer may place any number of bids on behalf of the vendor below the reserve price and is not obliged to identify that the bids are being placed on behalf of the vendor.

BIDDING INCREMENTS Bidding usually opens below the listed pre-sale estimate and proceeds in the following increments (the auctioneer may vary the bidding increments at his or her discretion): $500 – 1,000 by $50 $1,000 – 2,000 by $100 $2,000 – 3,000 by $200 $3,000 – 5,000 by $200 / $500 / $800 $5,000 – 10,000 by $500 $10,000 – 20,000 by $1,000 $20,000 – 30,000 by $2,000 $30,000 – 50,000 by $2,000 / $5,000 / $8,000 $50,000 – 100,000 by $5,000 $100,000 – 200,000 by $10,000 $200,000 – 300,000 by $20,000 $300,000 – 500,000 by $20,000 / $50,000 / $80,000 $500,000 – 1,000,000 by $50,000 $1,000,000+ by $100,000 SUCCESSFUL BIDS The fall of the auctioneer’s hammer indicates the final bid and the buyer assumes full responsibility for the lot from this time.

UNSOLD LOTS Where a lot is unsold, the auctioneer will announce that the lot is “bought in”, “passed”, “withdrawn” or “returned to owner”.

3. AFTER THE AUCTION PAYMENTS Payment must be made within seven days of the date of sale in Australian dollars by cash, cheque, direct deposit, approved credit cards or electronic funds transfer. If payment is made by credit card the price will increase by any merchant fees payable

by Deutscher and Hackett (1.15% (including GST) for Visa and Mastercard and 1.65% (including GST) for American Express). In certain circumstances, extension of payment may be granted at the discretion of Deutscher and Hackett. Cleared funds will be held in an interest bearing trust account by Deutscher and Hackett until remitted to the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett will be entitled to retain any interest earned during this period. Payment by the vendor of any charge to Deutscher and Hackett is to be made within fourteen days of invoice.

PURCHASE PRICE AND BUYER’S PREMIUM The purchase price will be the sum of the final bid price (including any GST) plus a buyer’s premium set at 22% (plus GST) of the final bid price. Buyers may be liable for other charges reasonably incurred once ownership has passed.

GOODS AND SERVICES TAX Buyers are required to pay a 10% G.S.T which sum is: a. included in the final bid prices where buying from a GST registered vendor; and b. included in any additional fees charged by Deutscher and Hackett; and c. added to the buyer’s premium.

Where GST applies to some lots the final bid price will be inclusive of the applicable GST. A list of those lots is set out in the catalogue on page 210.

If a buyer is classified as a “non-resident” for the purpose of GST, the buyer may be able to recover GST paid on the final purchase price if certain conditions are met.

COLLECTION Lots paid for in full may be collected from Deutscher and Hackett premises the day after the auction occurs but lots paid for by cheque may not be collected until all funds have cleared. Proof of identification is required upon collection and lots not collected within seven days of the sale may incur costs associated with external storage and freight.

LOSS OR DAMAGE Risk in the lot, including risk of loss or damage, will pass to the buyer on either the date payment is due, whether or not it has been made, or on collection by the buyer, whichever is earlier. The buyer is therefore encouraged to make arrangements to ensure comprehensive cover is maintained from the payment due date.

TRANSPORT AND SHIPPING Deutscher and Hackett directly offers services including storage, hanging and display, appraisals and valuations, collection management and research and in all instances will endeavour to coordinate or advise upon shipping and handling, insurance, transport, framing and conservation at the request and expense of the client. Deutscher and Hackett does not accept liability for the acts or omissions of contracted third parties.

EXPORT Prospective bidders are advised to enquire about export licences — including endangered species licences and cultural heritage permits, where relevant — prior to bidding at auction. Telephone the Cultural Property and Gifts Section, Museums Section, Ministry for the Arts, on 1800 819 461 for further information. The delay or denial of such a licence will not be grounds for a rescission of sale.

COPYRIGHT The copyright in the images and illustrations contained in this catalogue may be owned by third parties and used under licence by Deutscher and Hackett. As between Deutscher and Hackett and the buyer, Deutscher and Hackett retains all rights in the images and illustrations. Deutscher and Hackett retains copyright in the text contained in this catalogue. The buyer must not reproduce or otherwise use the images, illustrations or text without prior written consent.

187

The terms and conditions of business set forth below are subject to amendment by verbal or written notice prior to and during the auction and sale. They constitute the entire contractual agreement with the buyer in respect to any lot offered at auction.

By bidding at auction in any manner compliant with bidding procedures, the buyer and all bidders agree to be bound by these terms and conditions and the terms of the prospective buyers and sellers guide contained in this catalogue, as amended. To the extent that an agent acts on behalf of the buyer, liability for obligations arising from these conditions of business will pass to the buyer. Multiple buyers are jointly and severally liable for obligations arising from this agreement.

DEFINITIONS 1.

conditions of auction and sale ALL PARTIES ARE STRONGLY URGED TO READ THE CONDITIONS OF AUCTION AND SALE INCLUDED IN THIS CATALOGUE

Definition of terms: a. The ‘buyer’ refers to the party with the highest accepted bid for any lot at auction and/or such party’s principal where bidding as agent. b. The ‘vendor’ refers to the party consigning property for sale and/or such party’s principal where acting as agent. c. ‘Deutscher and Hackett’ refers to Deutscher and Hackett Pty Ltd ACN 123 119 022, its subsidiaries, officers, employees and agents. d. The ‘hammer price’ refers to the final bid price (including any GST) accepted by the auctioneer, or in the case of a post-auction sale, the agreed sale price (including any GST). e. The ‘buyer’s premium’ refers to the 22% charge (plus GST) payable by the buyer calculated as a percentage of the hammer price. f. ‘GST’ refers to the goods and services tax imposed by the A New Tax System (Goods and Services) Act 1999 as amended. g. The ‘lot’ refers to the item(s) described against any lot number in the catalogue. h. The ‘reserve’ refers to the minimum price (including any GST) the consignor will accept for a lot.

PRELIMINARY CONDITIONS AND DISCLAIMER 2. Agency: Deutscher and Hackett acts as agent for the vendor and the contract of sale for the lot will be between the buyer and the vendor.

3.

Property is sold ‘as is’: To the extent permitted by law: a. no guarantees, warranties or representations are made (express or implied) by Deutscher and Hackett or the vendor in relation to the nature and condition of any lot; and b. Deutscher and Hackett disclaims liability for any misrepresentations, errors or omissions, whether verbal or in writing, in the catalogue or any supplemental material.

All factual information provided by the vendor is merely passed on by Deutscher and Hackett from the vendor or other source. Deutscher and Hackett has made no attempt to verify this information. All additional statements of opinion represent the specialist opinions of Deutscher and Hackett employees and should not be relied upon as statements of fact.

4. Responsibility to inspect: Responsibility remains with the buyer to satisfy its, his or her self by inspection and evaluation prior to purchase as to the nature and condition of any property.

CONDITIONS AT AUCTION 5. Registration: Bidders must register to bid and obtain a bidder’s paddle prior to the commencement of the auction. Registration requires that bidders provide proof of identity and Deutscher and Hackett may impose other obligations on the registration of bidders in its discretion.

6. Auctioneer’s discretion: Deutscher and Hackett reserves the right to absolute discretion over the conduct of the auction including the regulation of bidding and its increments. This discretion extends to the challenge or rejection of any bid, the right to withdraw any lot and the right to determine the successful bidder or reoffer a lot in the event of a dispute. The prospective buyers and sellers guide details an indicative process for the conduct of auctions. All parties are strongly urged to read the prospective buyers and sellers guide included in this catalogue.

188

7. Bidding: Deutscher and Hackett may sell each lot to the highest bidder at auction provided the reserve price has been met or where the net amount accounted to the vendor is at least equivalent to the net amount that would have been achieved for a sale at the reserve price. The fall of the auctioneer’s hammer marks the acceptance of the highest bid and the conclusion of a contract for sale between the vendor and the buyer. Unless otherwise agreed in writing with Deutscher and Hackett, the individual physically present at the auction who signals the bid accepts personal liability to pay the purchase price, including the buyer’s premium and all additional fees, taxes and charges.

GOODS AND SERVICES TAX 8. Amounts inclusive of GST: Unless otherwise specified, all amounts specified in this section as payable by the buyer, or otherwise used to calculate payment to Deutscher and Hackett, are inclusive of any GST component. Deutscher and Hackett will provide buyers with a tax invoice that meets the requirements of the Australian Taxation Office.

9. Application of GST to buyers: Buyers are required to pay a 10% GST which sum is: a. included in the final bid prices where buying from a GST registered vendor (a list of lots consigned by GST Registered Entities is set out on page 210 of the catalogue); and b. included in any additional fees charged by Deutscher and Hackett; and c. added to the buyer’s premium.

If a buyer is classified as a “non-resident” for the purpose of GST, the buyer may be able to recover GST paid on the final purchase price if certain conditions are met.

POST-SALE CONDITONS 10. Post auction private sale: Should the lot fail to sell at auction, Deutscher and Hackett is authorised to sell the lot privately for a period of seven days in which event this agreement shall apply to the relevant buyer to the full extent of its provisions.

11. Payment: The buyer will not acquire title until payment has cleared in full. Interest at a rate of 17.5% p.a. will be charged over outstanding accounts where no extension of terms has been granted. Interest will be payable from the payment due date. With respect to each lot purchased, the buyer agrees to make the following payments within seven days from the date of sale: a. The hammer price. b. In exchange for ser vices rendered by Deutscher and Hacket t, a buyer’s premium calculated at 22% (plus GST) of the hammer price. c. Post sale packing, handling, shipping and storage where applicable. d. If payment is made via Visa, Mastercard or American Express, any merchant fees payable by Deutscher and Hackett on the transaction as indicated in the prospective buyers and sellers guide.

Payment must be made within seven days of the date of sale in Australian dollars by cash, cheque, direct deposit, approved credit cards or electronic funds transfer using the form and/or trust account details provided at the back of this catalogue. In certain circumstances, extension of payment may be granted at the discretion of Deutscher and Hackett. Once funds have cleared, the proceeds of the sale less the buyer’s Premium, GST and any commission or costs charged as agreed will be remitted to the vendor within thirty-five days of the date of sale provided payment has been received in full. Funds will be held in an interest bearing account by Deutscher and Hackett until remitted to the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett will be entitled to any interest earned during this period. Application for a cultural heritage export licence or any other licence in no way affects the buyer’s obligation to make payment or collection within the periods specified in sections 10 and 13a.

12. Risk and Title: Risk in the lot, including risk of loss or damage, will pass to the buyer on the earlier of: a. the date payment is due, whether or not it has been made; and b. collection by the buyer.

The buyer assumes risk for the property in all respects from this date and neither Deutscher and Hackett nor the vendor will be liable for loss or damage occurring after the payment due date. The buyer is encouraged to make arrangements to ensure comprehensive cover is maintained from this date. Title in the lot does not pass to the buyer, even if the lot is released to the buyer, until the buyer has paid all sums owing to Deutscher and Hackett. If a buyer makes a claim against Deutscher and Hackett for damage or loss after sale, the buyer’s premium and the final bid price shall be payable notwithstanding.

13. Freight: a. The buyer may only remove a lot from the Deutscher and Hackett premises once payment has been cleared in full and must be removed no later than seven days after the date of sale. Should items not be removed by this time, storage and insurance costs may be charged to the buyer. If a lot has not been collected within 30 days after the date of sale and alternative arrangements have not been with Deutscher and Hackett, the lot may be re-sold by Deutscher and Hackett without reserve at the next auction and Deutscher and Hackett may set off any amounts owed for storage and insurance costs and its standard commission before remitting the proceeds to the buyer. b. Buyers are required to make their own arrangements for packing, handling, shipping and transit insurance for their property. Deutscher and Hackett does not accept responsibility or liability for the acts or omissions of any third party, such as a shipping agent, whether or not such a party has been recommended or suggested by Deutscher and Hackett.

14. Limited Warranty of Authorship: If a buyer is able to establish that a lot is a forgery in accordance with these conditions for sale within five years of the date of sale, the buyer shall be entitled to rescind the sale and obtain a refund of the hammer price from the vendor. The buyer must return the lot in the state in which it was sold within fourteen days of notifying Deutscher and Hackett of the forgery allegations.

For a lot to be established as a forgery, the following conditions must be satisfied: a. the buyer must supply two independent expert testimonies attesting to the forgery. Deutscher and Hackett is entitled to request further expert evidence where it deems the evidence provided to be unsatisfactory; b. there must be no conflict of opinion among accepted experts in the field; and c. the forgery must be able to be proven through means that at the time of publication of the catalogue were commonly employed and that will not damage or otherwise put the lot in jeopardy.

The limited warranty and the right to rescind the sale is not assignable and the buyer must have retained title to the lot without disposing of any interest in it up until the buyer notifies Deutscher and Hackett of the forgery allegations. The buyer acknowledges that it has no rights directly against Deutscher and Hackett if a lot is established to be a forgery.

15. Termination, Breach and Legalities: a. Deutscher and Hackett breach: To the extent permitted by law, the sole and maximum remedy to a buyer for breach of warranty is a refund of original purchase price, including buyer’s premium. In such an event the sale contract shall be rescinded and all costs associated with returning the property (in the state in which it was sold) to the premises of Deutscher and Hackett are to be borne by the buyer. Deutscher and Hackett is not liable for any indirect or consequential loss or damage for any matter arising directly or indirectly as a result of the sale. b. Buyer breach: Deutscher and Hackett may, in addition to other remedies available by law, exercise one or more of the following rights or remedies for breach: i.

Cancel the sale and retain any payment or property in Deutscher and Hackett custody as collateral or liquidated damages. ii. Charge the buyer interest at the rate of 2% above the rate fixed under section 2 of the Penalty Interest Rates Act 1984 (Vic). iii. Resell the property without reserve at the next auction or privately on five days notice. Any disparity between sale and resale prices, including associated costs such as, but not limited to, legal, storage and sale expenses, will be to the account of the defaulting buyer. iv. Apply any part payment received from the buyer in respect of any lots at its discretion. v. Retain any of the buyer’s property held by Deutscher and Hackett until the buyer has satisfied its obligations to Deutscher and Hackett. vi. Take any other action Deutscher and Hackett deems necessary or appropriate. vii. Refuse to permit the buyer to participate in future auctions. viii. Provide the vendor with the buyer’s details to permit the vendor to take action against the buyer to recover the money.

16. Governing law and jurisdiction: These terms and conditions and any matters concerned with the foregoing fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of the state in which the auction is held.

17. Severability: In the event that any provisions of this agreement should be found unenforceable in a court of law, that part shall be discounted and the remaining conditions shall continue in full force and effect to the extent permitted by law.

189

“A beautiful wine in all respects, its heart soft and generous, its head stern POINTS and serious, the combination as complete as it is complex. It tastes of an assortment of red and black berries, tobacco and cloves, with tremendously well-integrated smoky oak and plenty of tang, tannin, flavour and run through the finish. An exhibition in both power and elegance.�

97

Halliday Wine Companion 2019

Yalumba The Caley Cabernet & Shiraz 2013 available now. Contact Yalumba Wine Room or buy online.

T: 08 8561 3200 | E: info@yalumba.com

yalumba.com

CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTION FORM ❑ ❑ ❑ ❑

Fine Art (Single issue) $45* Aboriginal Art single issue (Single issue) $45* Annual Fine Art Auctions (3 issues) $120* Annual Fine Art & Aboriginal Art Auctions (4 issues) $160*

❑ Tax invoice required

* Price includes G.S.T. postage and handling. Additional $10 per catalogue for international orders

SALE CODE: MAKIKO SALE NO.: 056 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART MELBOURNE AUCTION 28 NOVEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 139 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

Business name

Address

City

Telephone/Home

State

Business/Mobile

Post Code

Fax

Email

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

Subscription Payment by:

❑ Visa ❑ AMEX ❑ Mastercard

Name on card

Card number

Signature

Expiry date

Date

info@deutscherandhackett.com

191

ATTENDEE PRE-REGISTRATION FORM SALE CODE: MAKIKO SALE NO.: 056 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

Business name

Address

City

Telephone/Mobile

State

Email

Post Code

MELBOURNE AUCTION 28 NOVEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 139 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD 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 we must receive buyer pre-registration forms at least 24 hours prior to the auction

192

TELEPHONE BID FORM SALE CODE: MAKIKO SALE NO.: 056 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART MELBOURNE AUCTION 28 NOVEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 139 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

Billing address (PO Box insufficient)

Address

City

State

Post Code

1.

2.

Telephone numbers for auction date in order of preference

Facsimile

Email

Signature (required)

please email, post or fax this completed form to:

LOT NO.

Date

ARTIST/TITLE

COVER BID*

1.

DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

2.

tel: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344

4.

info@deutscherandhackett.com

5.

we must receive buyer pre-registration forms at least 24 hours prior to the auction

6.

3.

7.

8.

9.

10. *Not including buyer’s premium or GST (where applicable). Bids are made in Australian dollars INTERNAL USE ONLY RECEIVED BY

DATE

TIME

Please refer to the Guidelines for Potential Purchasers and Buyer’s Conditions in this catalogue for information regarding sales.

By completing this form, I authorise DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT to contact me by telephone on the contact number(s) nominated. I understand it is my responsibility to enquire whether any Sale-Room Notices relate to any lot on which I intend to bid. I also understand that should my bid(s) be successful, a buyer’s premium of 22% (plus GST), as described in the Guide to Potential Purchasers and Buyer’s Conditions printed in this catalogue, will be added to the final hammer price.

I accept that DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT provides this complimentary service as a courtesy to its clients, that there are inherent risks to telephone bidding, and I will not hold DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT responsible for any error.

193

ABSENTEE BID FORM SALE CODE: MAKIKO SALE NO.: 056 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

Billing address (PO Box insufficient)

Address

City

State

Telephone

Facsimile

Business/Mobile

Email

Signature (required)

LOT NO.

Post Code

MELBOURNE AUCTION 28 NOVEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 139 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

Date

ARTIST/TITLE

MAXIMUM BID*

1.

2.

3.

please email, post or fax this completed form to: DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

4.

tel: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344

5.

info@deutscherandhackett.com

6.

we must receive buyer pre-registration forms at least 24 hours prior to the auction

7.

8.

9.

10. *Not including buyer’s premium or GST (where applicable). Bids are made in Australian dollars

INTERNAL USE ONLY

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.

RECEIVED BY

Please refer to the Guidelines for Potential Purchasers and Buyer’s Conditions in this catalogue for information regarding sales. By completing this form, absentee bidders request and authorise DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT to place the following bids acting as agent on their behalf up to and including the maximum bid specified. Lots will be bought at the lowest possible bid authorised by a bidder in absentia.

DATE

Should the bid be successful, the buyer will be obliged to pay the final bid price plus buyer’s premium of 22% (plus GST) of the final bid price. DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT provides this complimentary service as a courtesy to clients and does not accept liability for errors and omissions in the execution of absentee bids.

194

TIME

NOW CONSIGNING

FOR 2019 AUCTIONS important australian + international fine art sydney • 02 9287 0600 melbourne • 03 9865 6333

info@deutscherandhackett.com www.deutscherandhackett.com

DAVID GOLDBLATT PHOTOG PHS 1948—2018

19 Oct 2018 – 3 Mar 2019 Exclusive to Sydney

Young men with dompas (an identity document that every black South African had to carry), White City, Jabavu, Soweto, 1972

Tickets at mca.com.au

Strategic Sponsor

Presenting Partner

Principal Exhibition Patrons

Media Partner

Catriona and Simon Mordant AM David Goldblatt, Young men with dompas (an identity document that every African had to carry), White City, Jabavu, Soweto, 1972, silver gelatin photograph on fibre-based paper, image courtesy Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town © The David Goldblatt Legacy Trust

donors are the lifeblood of the gallery

If you are a lover of art, could there be anything more satisfying than giving to the Gallery? It’s a gesture that brings vitality to the heart of our arts culture, and reaches every part of the Gallery’s dynamic functioning body. Your contribution could assist in the acquisition of a work or the development of an exhibition. Supporting the Gallery is also an ideal way to mix with fellow art lovers. Donors are included in Gallery events and can choose to have their generosity publicly acknowledged or remain anonymous.

When you become a donor to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, you are keeping our collection alive with new and significant acquisitions

Donations of money and works of art are tax deductible.

Why not contact us for further information or to discuss your donation in confidence, by phoning Jane Wynter, the Gallery’s Head of philanthropy on 02 9225 1818 or email jane.wynter@ag.nsw.gov.au

Walangkura napanangka Untitled, 1997. gift of Dr Colin and Mrs Elizabeth laverty, 2005 © Walangkura napanangka. licensed by aboriginal artists agency, ltd

B E YO N D BLING Annual Sponsors

– Principal Partner

Art Access Partner

FREE ENTRY Jenny Crisp Ring c1977 (detail, digital manipulation). Sterling silver pearl, 6.2x4x5.5cm. State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased 1982.

McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery, photograph Dan Magree

EXHIBITION

2 December 2018 – 17 March 2019 MCCLELLAND SCULPTURE PARK + GALLERY 390 McClelland Drive, Langwarrin Vic 3910 info@mcclellandgallery.com T: 9789 1671

www.mcclellandgallery.com

CLEMENT MEADMORE

THE ART OF MID-CENTURY DESIGN 20 NOV 2018–3 MAR 2019

The Ian Potter Museum of Art The University of Melbourne Swanston Street Parkville Victoria 3010

Tues to Fri 10am to 5pm Sat to Sun 12 noon to 5pm Monday closed FREE ADMISSION

Exhibition partner

Media partner

Image: Clement Meadmore, Three-legged plywood chair 1955, painted steel, plywood, rubber. Harris/Atkins Collection, Melbourne

ONLY IN MELBOURNE AT NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA PRESENTING PARTNER

PRINCIPAL PARTNER

MAJOR PARTNERS

M. C. Escher Study for Drawing hands February 1948 (detail) pencil.

Escher Collection, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, the Netherlands © The M. C. Escher Company, the Netherlands. All rights reserved LEARNING PARTNER

EXHIBITION PARTNERS

NGV.MELBOURNE

National Collecting Institutions Touring & Outreach Program

International Exhibitions Insurance Program

Experience the work of one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists – master bark painter John Mawurndjul.

26 October 2018 – 28 January 2019 Free entry Art Gallery of South Australia artgallery.sa.gov.au

PRESENTED AS PART OF

PRINCIPAL PARTNER

Exhibition presented by the Art Gallery of South Australia through TARNANTHI in association with Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and Maningrida Arts & Culture.

TARNANTHI is presented in partnership with BHP and with support from the Government of South Australia.

John Mawurndjul, Kuninjku people, Northern Territory, born 1952, Kubukkan near Marrkolidjban, Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Ngalyod, 2012, earth pigments on Stringybark (Eucalyptus tetrodonta), 182.5 x 76.5 x 10 cm; purchased with funds provided by the MCA Foundation, 2015, Museum of Contemporary Art, © John Mawurndjul/Licensed by Copyright Agency, 2018, photo: Jessica Maurer.

A CIVILISATION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

CITY+EMPIRE

Treasures from the British Museum ONLY AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AUSTRALIA, CANBERRA On show until 3 February 2019 nma.gov.au/rome MAJOR PARTNERS

PROGRAM PARTNER

SUPPORTING PARTNERS

The presentation of this exhibition is a collaboration between the British Museum and the National Museum of Australia. Marble statue head thought to be of Messalina, Italy, 55–65 CE. ©Trustees of the British Museum.

Experience A STAY A LITTLE extraordinary Grab life by the horns at The Cullen and leave inspired.

Perfectly positioned opposite Deutscher and Hackett at 164 Commercial Road, Prahran.

Enquire now at 1800 278 468 or thecullen.com.au

COPYRIGHT CREDITS Lot 14 Lot 15 Lot 16 Lot 17 Lot 18 Lot 22 Lot 23 Lot 24 Lot 25 Lot 26 Lot 27 Lot 28 Lot 35 Lot 36 Lot 37 Lot 38 Lot 40 Lot 43 Lot 44 Lot 45 Lot 46 Lot 47 Lot 48 Lot 49 Lot 50 Lot 51 Lot 52 Lot 56

© Cressida Campbell/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Del Kathryn Barton © courtesy of Wendy Whiteley © courtesy of the Joel Elenberg Estate © Yvonne Audette/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Charles Blackman/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Charles Blackman/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Estate of Fred Williams/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Estate of Fred Williams/Copyright Agency, 2018 © courtesy of Helen Brack © Charles Blackman/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Estate of Fred Williams/Copyright Agency, 2018 © The Nolan Trust / Bridgeman Images © courtesy of Wendy Whiteley © Garry Shead © Leonard French/Copyright Agency, 2018 © courtesy of Wendy Whiteley © Meadmore Sculptures, LLC/VAGA. Copyright Agency, 2018 © Inge King/Copyright Agency, 2018 © John Mawurndjul/Copyright Agency, 2018 © courtesy of The Estate of Paddy Bedford © Uta Uta Tjangala/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Kitty Kantilla/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Kitty Kantilla/Copyright Agency, 2018 © courtesy of The Estate of Ginger Riley and Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne © Lloyd Rees/Copyright Agency, 2018

Lot 57 Lot 58 Lot 59 Lot 60 Lot 61 Lot 62 Lot 63 Lot 72 Lot 73 Lot 74 Lot 75 Lot 76 Lot 77 Lot 78 Lot 79 Lot 80 Lot 81 Lot 82 Lot 83 Lot 84 Lot 86 Lot 87 Lot 88 Lot 90 Lot 91 Lot 92

© John Olsen/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Garry Shead © Gleeson/O’Keefe Foundation © Philip Wolfhagen/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Rick Amor/Copyright Agency, 2018 © David Boyd/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Jennifer Dickerson/Licensed Copyright Agency, 2018 © Namatjira Legacy Trust/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Namatjira Legacy Trust/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Jan Billycan/Copyright Agency, 2018 © courtesy of the artist and Short Street Gallery © courtesy of The Estate of Paddy Bedford © courtesy of The Estate of Paddy Bedford © courtesy of The Estate of Queenie McKenzie © Eubena Nampitjin/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Christine Yukenbarri Nakamarra/ Copyright Agency, 2018 © Tjumpo Tjapanangka/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Timmy Payungka Tjapangati/ Copyright Agency, 2018 © George Tjungurrayi/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Makinti Napanangka/Copyright Agency, 2018 © the artist, THIS IS NO FANTASY & Michael Reid © Patricia Piccinini. Courtesy of Tolarno Galleries © Gordon Bennett, managed by John Citizen Arts Pty Ltd © Cressida Campbell/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Aida Tomescu/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Dick Watkins/Copyright Agency, 2018

Lot 93 Lot 94 Lot 95 Lot 96 Lot 97 Lot 98

Lot 136 Lot 137 Lot 138 Lot 139

© courtesy of Helen Brack © Bryan Westwood/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Richard Larter/Copyright Agency, 2018 © John de Burgh Perceval/Copyright Agency, 2018 © The Nolan Trust / Bridgeman Images © The Estate of Mirka Mora.

Courtesy William Mora Galleries © Charles Blackman/Copyright Agency, 2018 © The Nolan Trust / Bridgeman Images © Donald Friend/Copyright Agency, 2018 © The Nolan Trust / Bridgeman Images © Namatjira Legacy Trust/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Hans Heysen/Copyright Agency, 2018 © H.C. & A. Glad © H.C. & A. Glad © H.C. & A. Glad © H.C. & A. Glad © Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency, 2018 © courtesy of Wendy Whiteley © Charles Blackman/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Old Tutuma Tjapangati/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Butcher C Janangoo/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Kitty Kantilla/Copyright Agency, 2018 © courtesy of the artist and Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre © courtesy of the artist and Short Street Gallery © courtesy of the artist and Short Street Gallery © Charles Mardigan/Copyright Agency, 2018 © Charles Mardigan/Copyright Agency, 2018

Lot 64 Lot 65 Lot 66 Lot 67 Lot 90 Lot 106 Lot 130 Lot 132 Lot 133

Ellis Rowan Ellis Rowan Ellis Rowan Ellis Rowan Cressida Campbell Albert Henry Fullwood Old Tutuma Tjapangati Kitty Kantilla Gulumbu Yunupingu

Lot 99 Lot 102 Lot 103 Lot 104 Lot 109 Lot 110 Lot 115 Lot 116 Lot 117 Lot 118 Lot 121 Lot 127 Lot 128 Lot 130 Lot 131 Lot 132 Lot 133

LOTS CONSIGNED BY GST REGISTERED ENTITIES Lot 1 Lot 2 Lot 3 Lot 4 Lot 5 Lot 6 Lot 7 Lot 8 Lot 9

Charles-Alexandre Lesueur Nicolas-Martin Petit Nicolas-Martin Petit Charles-Alexandre Lesueur Nicolas-Martin Petit Nicolas-Martin Petit Nicolas-Martin Petit Nicolas-Martin Petit Nicolas-Martin Petit

RESALE ROYALTY Some lots consigned for this sale may be subject to the Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Act 2009 (Cth). Any payments due under the obligations of the Act will be paid by the vendor.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Photography: Graham Baring Design: Sevenpoint Design © Published by Deutscher and Hackett Pty Ltd 2018 978-0-6483839-0-1

210

Lot 10 Lot 11 Lot 12 Lot 13 Lot 18 Lot 24 Lot 25 Lot 34 Lot 43

Charles-Alexandre Lesueur Nicolas-Martin Petit Nicolas-Martin Petit Nicolas-Martin Petit Yvonne Audette Charles Blackman Charles Blackman Albert Henry Fullwood Leonard French

index A AMOR, R. ARTIST UNKNOWN AUDETTE, Y. B BALBAL, L. BALSON, R. BARTON, D.K. BEDFORD, PADDY NYUNKUNY BENNETT, G. BILLYCAN (DJAN NAMUNDIE), JAN BLACKMAN, C. BOYD, A. BOYD, D. BRACK, J. C CAMPBELL, C. CAMPBELL JUNIOR, ROBERT CHEREL, JANANGOO BUTCHER D DAYES, E. DICKERSON, R. DRYSDALE, R. E ELENBERG, J. F FOX, E.P. FREEDMAN, H. FRENCH, L. FRIEND, D. FULLWOOD, A.H. G GLEESON, J. GREY-SMITH, G. GRUNER, E. H HAWKINS, W. HAXTON, E. HEYSEN, H. HICKS, P. HOYTE, J.B.C. HUDDLESTON, GERTIE

61 53 18

136, 137 19 15 48, 76, 77 88 74 24, 25, 35, 99, 128 22, 23 62 28, 93

14, 90 89 131

68 63 100, 101

17

31, 70, 71 41 43 103 34, 106

59 42 32, 33

124 126 110 86 108 135

K KANTILLA, KITTY KING, I. KOSSOFF, L. L LARTER, R. LESUEUR, C. LIN, R. LINDSAY, N. M MACKENNAL, B. MARDIGAN, CHARLES MARTENS, C. MATHER, J. MAWURNDJUL, JOHN MCKENZIE NAKARRA, QUEENIE MEADMORE, C. MELDRUM, M. MORA, M. N NAKAMARRA, CHRISTINE YUKENBARRI NAMATJIRA, ALBERT NAMPITJIN, EUBENA NAPANANGKA, MAKINTI NICHOLAS, H.R. NOLAN, S. NORRIE, S. O OLSEN, J. P PERCEVAL, J. PETIT, N. PICCININI, P. PISSARRO, L. PRESTON, M. PROCTOR, T.

50, 51, 132 46 21

95 1, 4, 9 20 115, 116, 117, 118

29 138, 139 30 107 47 78 45 113, 114 98

80

72, 73, 109 79 84 105 37, 97, 102, 104 85

57

96 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13 87 55 121 119

R REES, L. REHFISCH, A. REIDY, L. RILEY MUNDUWALAWALA, GINGER ROBINSON, W. ROWAN, E. S SCHELTEMA, J.H. SHEAD, G. STREETON, A. SUMNER, A. SYME, E. T TJANGALA, ATTRIBUTED TO UTA UTA TJAPANANGKA, TJUMPO TJAPANGATI, TIMMY PAYUNGKA TJAPANGATI, OLD TUTUMA TJUNGURRAYI, GEORGE TOMESCU, A. V VARIOUS ARTISTS VASSILIEFF, D. VON BLAAS, J. W WALBIDI, DANIEL WATKINS, D. WEDGE, H.J. WESTWOOD, B. WHITELEY, B. WILLIAMS, F. WOLFHAGEN, P. Y YUNUPINGU, GULUMBU

56 120 111 52

39 64, 65, 66, 67

69 40, 58 112 125 122

49

81 82 130 83 91

129 123 54

75 92 134 94 16, 38, 44, 127 26, 27, 36 60

133

211

212