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CATALOGUE: FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05, Melbourne 06:30 PM.
PURCHASE CATALOGUE ABSENTEE BID FORM CURRENCY CONVERTER (Enter a keyword to find specific lots in this sale)
LOTS PER PAGE SORT BY DISPLAY
JUMP TO 1 - 20 of 70 lots PAGE 1 2 3 4 Next or LOT
Lot # Description Estimate
1 EUGENE VON GUERARD 1811-1901, CUMBERLAND 70,000 - 90,000 AUD CREEK, NEAR LORNE, VICTORIA
2 CONRAD MARTENS 1801-1878, SYDNEY HARBOUR 200,000 - 300,000 AUD FROM VAUCLUSE
3 JOHN SKINNER PROUT 1805-1876, ABORIGINE 80,000 - 120,000 AUD STALKING - WILLOUGHBY FALLS, NEW SOUTH WALES
4 ALEXANDER SCHRAMM C. 1814-1864, ADELAIDE, A 400,000 - 600,000 AUD TRIBE OF NATIVES ON THE BANKS OF THE RIVER TORRENS
5 W. C. PIGUENIT 1863-1914, NEAR LIVERPOOL, NEW 80,000 - 120,000 AUD SOUTH WALES
6 JOHN GLOVER 1767-1849, HOUSE OF THE DERWENT, 700,000 - 1,100,000 VAN DIEMEN'S LAND AUD
7 EUGENE VON GUERARD 1811-1901, MOUNTAIN 250,000 - 350,000 AUD SCENERY NEAR JAMBEROO, NEW SOUTH WALES
8 HENRY GRITTEN C. 1818-1873, MELBOURNE 200,000 - 300,000 AUD
9 W. C. PIGUENIT 1863-1914, CUMMING'S PEAK, 50,000 - 70,000 AUD WESTERN BLUFF, TASMANIA
10 CONRAD MARTENS 1801-1878, VIEW ABOVE 90,000 - 120,000 AUD RUSHCUTTERS BAY, NEAR SYDNEY, N.S. WALES
11 EUGENE VON GUERARD 1811-1901, ST AGNES HEAD, 150,000 - 250,000 AUD SOUTHERN SIDE OF PHILIP ISLAND
12 AFTER WILLIAM LIGHT 1786-1839, DISTANT VIEW OF 90,000 - 125,000 AUD THE LANDING PLACE AND THE IRON STORES AT PORT ADELAIDE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA
13 WALTER WITHERS 1854-1914, RICKETT'S POINT, 80,000 - 120,000 AUD VICTORIA
14 ELIOTH GRUNER 1882-1939, IN MORNING SUNLIGHT, 30,000 - 50,000 AUD RICHMOND, NEW SOUTH WALES
15 ARTHUR STREETON 1867-1943, 'SUNLIGHT SWEET', 1,800,000 - 2,500,000 COOGEE AUD
16 W. B. MCINNES 1889-1939, LANDSCAPE WITH HAY 50,000 - 70,000 AUD WAGON
17 RUPERT BUNNY 1864-1947, HOUSES AT LE LAVANDOU 50,000 - 70,000 AUD
18 WALTER WITHERS 1854-1914, BEACH SCENE AT 45,000 - 65,000 AUD COWES, PHILIP ISLAND
19 ETHEL CARRICK FOX 1872-1952, ARABS BARGAINING 150,000 - 200,000 AUD
20 FREDERICK MCCUBBIN 1855-1917, EVENING IN THE 1,200,000 - 1,600,000 BUSH AUD
JUMP TO 1 - 20 of 70 lots PAGE 1 2 3 4 Next or LOT
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART SALE AU0698
DATE & TIME BROWSE CATALOGUE Session 1: Monday, 23 May 05, 6:30 PM PURCHASE
CATALOGUE LOCATION MELBOURNE ABSENTEE BID FORM
RELATED DEPARTMENTS CONTACTS From: Australian Art Absentee Bids, Melbourne Tel: 61 3 9509 2900 Fax: 61 3 9509 2051 To:
Mark Fraser Managing Director Tel: 61 3 9509 2900 Fax: 61 3 9563 5067 [email protected]
Jane Clark Event Name or Sale # Deputy Chairman Tel: 61 3 9509 2900 Fax: 61 3 9563 5067 [email protected]
Copyright © 2005 Sothebys.com LLC All Rights Reserved. | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Contact Us | Site Map http://search.sothebys.com/jsps/live/event/EventDetail.jsp?event_id=2737220/05/2005 11:17:37 AM Sotheby's - Buy Catalogues - Individual Catalogues - Foster’s Collection of Australian Art
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART
AU0698 | Melbourne 23 May 05 Foster's Collection of Australian Art 0 items View Contents
Publication Code: AU0698 Delivery Information Price: Sotheby's catalogues are shipped 3-4 weeks before US Domestic: 28.00 USD each sale. Please allow 3- US Int'l: 36.00 USD 10 days for shipping. For
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CATALOGUE: FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05, Melbourne 06:30 PM.
PURCHASE CATALOGUE ABSENTEE BID FORM CURRENCY CONVERTER (Enter a keyword to find specific lots in this sale)
LOTS PER PAGE SORT BY DISPLAY
JUMP TO 21 - 40 of 70 lots PAGE Prev 1 2 3 4 Next or LOT
Lot # Description Estimate
21 ELIOTH GRUNER 1882-1939, PORT SAINT TROPEZ 20,000 - 30,000 AUD
22 W. B. MCINNES 1889-1939, COUNTRY BOY AND TOWN 40,000 - 60,000 AUD GIRL
23 HANS HEYSEN 1877-1968, THE SOUTH COAST 120,000 - 180,000 AUD
24 FREDERICK MCCUBBIN 1855-1917, YARRA RIVER 700,000 - 1,000,000 FROM KENSINGTON ROAD, SOUTH YARRA AUD
25 ARTHUR STREETON 1867-1943, THE OAK, VANCOUVER 50,000 - 75,000 AUD ISLAND
26 EMANUEL PHILLIPS FOX 1865-1915, THE CORN FIELD 250,000 - 350,000 AUD
27 HILDA RIX NICHOLAS 1884-1961, THE SHEARERS 8,000 - 12,000 AUD
28 WILL ASHTON 1881-1963, NEW GROWTH AFTER 5,000 - 7,000 AUD BUSHFIRE
29 WILL ASHTON 1881-1963, SPRINGTIME, THE RIVER 12,000 - 18,000 AUD SEINE, PARIS
30 J.J. HILDER 1881-1916, HILLSIDE IN THE EVENING 3,000 - 5,000 AUD LIGHT
31 LANCE SOLOMON 1913-1989, SHELTERED PASTURES 2,000 - 3,000 AUD
32 ARTHUR GREGORY 1867-1957, CECILIA SUDDEN 3,000 - 4,000 AUD No Image Available
33 ARTHUR GREGORY 1867-1957, THE KASSA 3,000 - 4,000 AUD No Image Available
34 HANS HEYSEN 1877-1968, MORNING LIGHT AFTER 15,000 - 25,000 AUD FROST
35 CLIFTON PUGH 1924-1990, COLLECTING DEAD WOOL 40,000 - 60,000 AUD
36 WILLIAM DOBELL 1899-1970, WANGI GIRL (RATTAILS) 200,000 - 300,000 AUD
37 FRED WILLIAMS 1927-1982, FORKED TREE AND KITE 300,000 - 400,000 AUD
38 LLOYD REES 1895-1988, CALABRIAN VISION 40,000 - 60,000 AUD
39 ARTHUR BOYD 1920-1999, MINING COUNTRY 70,000 - 90,000 AUD
40 SIDNEY NOLAN 1917-1992, GALLIPOLI 80,000 - 120,000 AUD
JUMP TO 21 - 40 of 70 lots PAGE Prev 1 2 3 4 Next or LOT
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CATALOGUE: FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05, Melbourne 06:30 PM.
PURCHASE CATALOGUE ABSENTEE BID FORM CURRENCY CONVERTER (Enter a keyword to find specific lots in this sale)
LOTS PER PAGE SORT BY DISPLAY
JUMP TO 41 - 60 of 70 lots PAGE Prev 1 2 3 4 Next or LOT
Lot # Description Estimate
41 ALBERT TUCKER 1914-1999, INTRUDER AND PARROTS 250,000 - 350,000 AUD
42 JOHN OLSEN B. 1928, FLOODED RIVER & WATTLES 180,000 - 250,000 AUD
43 FRED WILLIAMS 1927-1982, HILLSIDE AT ANAKIE 250,000 - 350,000 AUD
44 ARTHUR BOYD 1920-1999, IN THE GRAMPIANS 150,000 - 250,000 AUD
45 WILLIAM DOBELL 1899-1970, HORSES IN LANDSCAPE 70,000 - 90,000 AUD
46 SIDNEY NOLAN 1917-1992, MINER 40,000 - 60,000 AUD
47 ARTHUR BOYD 1920-1999, NEBUCHADNEZZAR UNDER 120,000 - 160,000 AUD A WATERFALL
48 RUSSELL DRYSDALE 1912-1981, JOE RESTING (FIRST 200,000 - 300,000 AUD VERSION)
49 IVOR HELE 1912-1993, COASTAL LANDSCAPE, PORT 50,000 - 70,000 AUD WILLUNGA, SOUTH AUSTRALIA
50 KENNETH JACK B. 1924, URANDANGI, QUEENSLAND 8,000 - 12,000 AUD
51 SIDNEY NOLAN 1917-1992, AMERICAN LANDSCAPE 8,000 - 12,000 AUD
52 KENNETH JACK B. 1924, GNARLED VETERANS 2,000 - 3,000 AUD
53 KENNETH JACK B. 1924, ARKAROOLA RANGES 2,000 - 3,000 AUD
54 KENNETH JACK B. 1924, ULURU (AYERS ROCK) 2,000 - 3,000 AUD
55 DAVID DRIDAN B. 1932, CURTAIN SPRINGS 2,000 - 3,000 AUD
56 DAVID DRIDAN B. 1932, LATE AFTERNON, COORONG 2,000 - 3,000 AUD
57 DAVID DRIDAN B. 1932, WAUKARINGA 3,000 - 5,000 AUD
58 HUGH SAWREY 1923-1999, THE TAIL-END OF THE 12,000 - 18,000 AUD MOB, WEST QUEENSLAND
59 GEORGE FEATHER LAWRENCE 1901-1981, DRY 5,000 - 8,000 AUD SEASON, UPPER HUNTER
60 SALI HERMAN 1898-1993, BUKA STORE 15,000 - 25,000 AUD
JUMP TO 41 - 60 of 70 lots PAGE Prev 1 2 3 4 Next or LOT
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CATALOGUE: FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05, Melbourne 06:30 PM.
PURCHASE CATALOGUE ABSENTEE BID FORM CURRENCY CONVERTER (Enter a keyword to find specific lots in this sale)
LOTS PER PAGE SORT BY DISPLAY
JUMP TO 61 - 70 of 70 lots PAGE Prev 1 2 3 4 or LOT
Lot # Description Estimate
61 GEORGE FEATHER LAWRENCE 1901-1981, COASTLINE 2,500 - 3,500 AUD FROM SADDLEBACK
62 GEORGE FEATHER LAWRENCE 1901-1981, NEUTRAL 2,500 - 3,500 AUD BAY, SYDNEY HARBOUR
63 GEORGE FEATHER LAWRENCE 1901-1981, OLD HOUSE 3,500 - 4,500 AUD THROUGH SAPLINGS
64 ROBERT JOHNSON 1890-1964, MORNING, GLEN ALICE, 2,500 - 3,500 AUD CAPERTEE VALLEY, NEW SOUTH WALES
65 ROBERT JOHNSON 1890-1964, CAPERTEE VALLEY 2,500 - 3,500 AUD
66 ROBERT JOHNSON 1890-1964, FARM BUILDING, 2,500 - 3,500 AUD CAPERTEE
67 WILLIAM DOBELL 1899-1970, SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE, 1,000 - 1,500 AUD 1969
68 DARYL LINDSAY 1890-1976, TONY 500 - 800 AUD
69 JACQUELINE HICK 1919-2004, BLACK DUMPS 5,000 - 8,000 AUD
70 FRASER FAIR B. 1949, KATHERINE GORGE 3,000 - 5,000 AUD
JUMP TO 61 - 70 of 70 lots PAGE Prev 1 2 3 4 or LOT
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 1 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
PLACE ABSENTEE BID LOT 1 PURCHASE CATALOGUE
EUGENE VON GUERARD 1811-1901 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A CUMBERLAND CREEK, NEAR LORNE, VICTORIA FRIEND 70,000—90,000 AUD KEY TO LETTER SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 22.9 by 18 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on artist academy board Signed lower right Painted c. 1865 Drawing 'Cumberland Creek', in von Guérard sketchbook '1859 New South Wales; 1862 Cape Otway', DGB16 vol.10, f.34, Mitchell Library, Sydney Provenance Clune Galleries, Sydney, 1968-69; purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 12 February 1969; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection,Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Eugène von Guérard, 1811-1901, an exhibition of paintings and prints, Clune Galleries, Sydney, October 1972, cat. 25 Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 39, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985-1988, cat. 23, illus. Reference Candice Bruce, Edward Comstock and Frank McDonald, Eugène von Guérard, a German Romantic in the Antipodes, Alister Taylor, Martinborough, NZ, 1982, p. 239, illus., cat. 102 Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 22, cat. 39, illus. Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, p. 35, illus. pl. 23 Johann Josef Eugen (Eugène) von Guérard's earliest artistic training came from his father Bernhard, a miniaturist at the Court of Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies. It was with his father that he rambled on sketching tours throughout Sicily and Southern Italy, and probably from his father that he developed a lifelong habit of sketching directly from nature, a technique later reinforced by his landscape teachers at the Düsseldorf Academy. A collection of his sketchbooks, located by Sydney art dealer Frank McDonald in London in the 1970s, and now in the Mitchell Library in Sydney, has given historians invaluable information about von Guérard's many sketching trips: those undertaken in the almost three decades he lived in Australia, as well as the periods before and after. In April 1862 von Guérard and fellow artist Nicholas Chevalier joined the meteorologist and hydrographer, Georg von Neumayer, and telegraph engineer, S.W. McGowan, on a short trip to Cape Otway and Lorne, while the latter inspected the Loutit Bay telegraph line. It was von Guérard's second trip to the area which was rapidly gaining a reputation as place of exceptional scenery and extraordinary vegetation. The rocky cliff above Cumberland Creek is described in a number of tourist publications from the later nineteenth century.(1) Giant messmate, blue gum, mountain grey gum and mountain ash grew in the forests of the area, along with the smaller blackwood, satinwood and tree ferns: this was once home to reputedly the tallest living tree in Victoria, a 92 metre (301 ft) mountain ash. However, even at this early stage timber fellers were beginning to work their way through the area, shipping quantities of logs by small ocean-going vessels from the beach at Loutit Bay, Lorne, to Geelong and Melbourne. Von Guérard perhaps had a sense that, under such pressures, the area could not maintain its pristine and untouched quality for too much longer. At first sight, the composition of this work appears unnaturally dramatic - the foreground seems too foreshortened and the many steep diagonals seem to compete with one another - but then we notice that the eye is drawn back repeatedly to the rocky outcrop in the upper middle of the canvas with quite dizzying effect. We begin to feel dwarfed - as are the foreground figures of a man and his dog - by the cliff and the immensely tall trees on the right hand side of the canvas which are realised with an almost theatrical execution. Dr Candice Bruce (1) For example, Pen & Ink Sketches at Lorne, Fergusson & Mitchell, Melbourne, 1890.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 2 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
PLACE ABSENTEE BID LOT 2 PURCHASE CATALOGUE
CONRAD MARTENS 1801-1878 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A SYDNEY HARBOUR FROM VAUCLUSE FRIEND 200,000—300,000 AUD KEY TO LETTER SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 59.5 by 87.3 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on canvas Signed, dated 1840 and inscribed 'Sydney' lower right Provenance Robert Campbell, Sydney: Martens's Account Book, 5 June 1840 Sir Daniel Cooper (1821-1902),NSW Parliamentarian John Young, Sydney; until his sale at Lawson's, Sydney, 7-8 May 1929 as 'Sydney from above Sandy Bay' [i.e. Rose Bay] Telford Simpson, Sydney;his son, Philip Simpson Clune Galleries, Sydney;purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 28 March 1967; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection, Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Exhibition of Past Australian Painters Lent from Private South Australian Collections, Adelaide Festival of Arts, John Martin & Co., Adelaide, 8-29 March 1974, cat. 77 Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 21, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985-1988, cat. 20, illus. Reference Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 10, cat. 21, illus. Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 32-33, illus. pl. 20 Elizabeth Ellis, Conrad Martens: Life and Art, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 1994, pp. 90, 148 Sydney Harbour from Vaucluse is Conrad Martens's largest painting; and, when he sold it to Sydney merchant Robert Campbell in 1840, was his most expensive.(1) Most of Martens's views of Sydney, in oil or watercolour, were commissioned by patrons wishing to convey the peace and prosperity of this great new city with its fine climate, picturesque topography and extraordinarily beautiful harbour. They were personal statements about possession and progress. Martens's great gift was his ability to incorporate minutely observed effects of nature into compositions which embodied all the precepts of landscape art as he - and his patrons - understood it. By 1840, he was 'the preferred local artist of the ruling elite of New South Wales'.(2) Trained in England by the fashionable landscape watercolourist Copley Fielding, Martens set sail in 1832 for three years in India. However in 1833 he left that first ship in South America and there joined the Beagle, travelling with the young Charles Darwin and Captain Robert FitzRoy. During his 1833-34 voyage aboard the Beagle, from Montevideo to Valparaiso, Martens learned all he could about geology, botany, and meteorology - a relatively new science and a special interest of FitzRoy; studies which informed his depiction of land, sea and sky for the remainder of his career. He left the Beagle in October 1834; and, early the following year, sailed for Tahiti and finally Australia. He remained in Sydney for almost 43 years -- the rest of his life. Sydney Harbour from Vaucluse is one of the artist's most majestic views. A traveller with his dog pauses to survey the scene from the still comparatively untouched wilderness of Vaucluse. Massive rocks, verdant native undergrowth and a mighty gum tree surround him in this shadowed foreground section of the composition. In contrast, the water of the harbour shines with reflected sunlight. In the middle distance are Clark Island, Garden Island and Pinchgut. One large ship, with billowing sails, moves forward, while other vessels sit at anchor further away; and substantial buildings punctuate the opposite shores. The mood is genial; the atmosphere airy and warm. At this date, the property 'Vaucluse', first settled in 1803 had already changed hands twice. Its owner in 1827, Captain John Piper, had been forced to sell after an accusation of fraud in his role as Comptoller of Customs. In 1840 the owner was W. C. Wentworth. (1) Account Book, June 1840, 30 guineas, the painting was originally entitled 'Sydney from above Sandy Bay [an old name for Rose Bay]', Dixson Library MS142; this information kindly supplied by Elizabeth Ellis, Mitchell Librarian. (2) Elizabeth Ellis, Conrad Martens, Life and Art, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 1994, p. 40; see also pp. 90, 148.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 3 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
PLACE ABSENTEE BID LOT 3 PURCHASE CATALOGUE
JOHN SKINNER PROUT 1805-1876 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A ABORIGINE STALKING - WILLOUGHBY FALLS, NEW FRIEND SOUTH WALES KEY TO LETTER 80,000—120,000 AUD SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 66.5 by 90.5 cm DESCRIPTION Watercolour and gouache on paper Signed lower centre Painted c. 1845 Provenance Original owner unknown; at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery; until Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 8 November 1973, lot 282 Clune Galleries, Sydney, 1973-1974 as 'Cascade Falls, Hobart';purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 25 January 1974; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection,Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 32, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985-1988, cat. 15, illus. Reference Ingram, T., A Matter of Taste, Collins, Sydney, 1976, p. 27, illus. pl. 1 Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 9, cat. 32, illus. Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 22-23, illus. pl. 15 Correspondance in Foster's Collection archive Skinner Prout had established a successful career as a painter, lithographer and art teacher in England before his decision to emigrate in 1840. First recorded as a drawing teacher at the age of twenty-two in Penzance, where he had moved from Plymouth, he came from an artistic family. However, there is no evidence that he was trained by his uncle, the celebrated English watercolour painter Samuel Prout (1783-1852). During the 1830s, Prout worked in Bristol and London but, with eight children to support and relations already living in New South Wales, Sydney must have seemed attractive. Prout soon found employment for his various skills. He lectured several times at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts, collaborated in the production of a four-part set of lithographed views of Sydney, worked as Drawing Master at Sydney College, and briefly painted scenery at the Olympic Theatre.(1) As well as sketching around Sydney and its harbour, from 1841 to 1843 Prout undertook extensive sketching tours: south to the Illawarra district in July 1841; west to the Jamieson Valley; north to Newcastle; and again south to Wollongong and Illawarra at the end of 1843. There, during a family holiday, he drew his first recorded portraits of Aborigines - probably the source of the imagined figure portrayed here in Aborigine Stalking - Willoughby Falls. When this beautiful watercolour first entered the Elders Collection, having been held at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery for many years, it was believed to be a Tasmanian subject. In fact, the landscape is clearly that of New South Wales, with dry schlerophyll forest and 'blackboys' or 'kangaroo tails' (genus Zanthorrea). 'The wallabies are a type common in new South Wales but not found in Tasmania; and the birds, though occasionally in Tasmania, are not seen with mating plumage as here'.(2) The area around Willoughby Falls, at Flat Rock Creek on Sydney's North Shore, was originally occupied by the Cammeraygal people. The picturesque waterfall, with its narrow torrent coursing down a sheer rock face, became a popular picnic spot in the early days of white settlement and Prout had already published a lithograph of a different view, titled Lower Fall, Willoughby, North Shore, Sydney in 1842. He also produced an oil painting very close in composition to the present work, probably after his return to England (now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales). Prout moved with his family in January 1844 to Van Diemen's Land, where he spent four years before leaving Australia. However he was not forgotten, for he had many loyal pupils, especially in Tasmania, and the local press occasionally reported on his continuing career. He died in London in 1876. Skinner Prout was one of the first European artists working in Australia to appreciate the unique light and atmosphere of his new homeland. From small on-the-spot sketches to highly finished exhibition watercolours such as the present work, his paintings exhibit an airy freshness quite unusual for his time. (1) These biographical details are indebted to Tony Brown in Joan Kerr (ed.), The Dictionary of Australian Artists to 1870, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 644-46. (2) Dr W. D. Jackson, Professor of Botany and Dr O. Buchmann, lecturer in the Zoology Department, University of Tasmania; information from Tony Brown in the Foster's archive.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 4 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
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ALEXANDER SCHRAMM C. 1814-1864 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A ADELAIDE, A TRIBE OF NATIVES ON THE BANKS OF FRIEND THE RIVER TORRENS KEY TO LETTER 400,000—600,000 AUD SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 86.7 by 130.2 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on canvas Signed and dated 'Adelaide 1.50' lower right Provenance Chard & Rabbitts, Adelaide; purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 16 December 1966; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection,Foster's Group Limited Exhibited The Australian Aboriginal portrayed in Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 8 March - 7 April 1974 Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 34, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985-1988, cat. 1, illus. Treasures from Private Collections, National Gallery Women's Association, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 5-12 September 1993 Reference Ron Appleyard, 'Alexander Schramm, painter', Bulletin of the Art Gallery of South Australia, vol. 37, 1979, pp. 26-41 Geoffrey Dutton, White on Black, the Australian Aboriginal portrayed in Art, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1974, pl. XVII Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 15, cat. 34, illus. Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 6-7, illus. pl. 1 Although Alexander Schramm had studied at Berlin Academy of Art, worked in Italy and Poland and exhibited successfully in Germany, he decided in 1849 to try his fortune as an emigrant to South Australia. Perhaps the move was for his health; or due to the political unrest in Berlin in 1848. During his fifteen years in Adelaide he seems to have lived very humbly -- possibly working as a mattress-maker as well as a painter. He won prizes at the South Australian Society of Arts, received a number of commissions and is also known to have produced sculpture and lithographs. However, as his first biographer related in 1898, he often parted with paintings for 'far beneath their real value'. He was 'an artist by nature and training, small in stature, dark, and somewhat retiring in disposition, he made but few intimates'. He died of tuberculosis in 1864, a pauper with no family, aged only fifty.(1) Schramm's life story is a sad one but his contribution to Australian art was unique. Schramm was the first professional artist to depict the dry local landscape and sparsely foliaged gum trees of his adopted South Australian homeland. Indeed, at the Society of Arts' sixth annual exhibition, one reviewer wrote that his depictions of Australian scenery were better than those of any other artist. Of the very few of his paintings that survive, the Foster's Adelaide Tribe of Natives is among the finest and is the largest depicting Aborigines in their natural setting. Here Schramm has recorded, with great sympathy, a quite extensive encampment of the Kaurna Tribe who, in the 1850s, still inhabited the Adelaide Plains. Historians have observed that such a large congregation of the Tribe would have been unusual -- perhaps even unlikely -- for family groups were mostly small and formed sporadic camps. However, this is not a nostalgic depiction of Aboriginal life before European settlement -- such as John Glover's Arcadian scenes. Rather, Schramm tellingly portrays the contemporary interrelationship between white and black. A group of settlers has arrived on horseback. Several of the Aboriginal people wear European clothing and smoke tobacco; one woman is looking at a mirror; and their numerous dogs are a wide variety of introduced mixed breeds. These people appear peaceful, even contented, but their existence is totally circumscribed and Schramm shows clearly that their indigenous way of life has gone for ever. Schramm's work is now almost all held in public collections and is not only rare but often fragile -- perhaps due to his poverty whilst in South Australia. One painting in the Art Gallery of South Australia, now entitled A scene in South Australia, shows a cheerful encounter between settlers at a thatched cottage and the original inhabitants of the district. Other recorded titles suggest an element of narrative: for example, Bushing It, Civilization versus Nature, and Aborigines with Dogs on the Tramp. His paintings are only extremely rarely seen in the market. (1) Mary Overbury, 'Early Colonial Art and Artists', Adelaide Observer, 12 November 1898, is quoted by Ron Appleyard in Joan Kerr (ed.), The Dictionary of Australian Artists to 1870, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992,pp. 700-2. We are much indebted to the research of Mr Appleyard, formerly Deputy Director at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 5 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
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W. C. PIGUENIT 1863-1914 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A NEAR LIVERPOOL, NEW SOUTH WALES FRIEND 80,000—120,000 AUD KEY TO LETTER SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 74.2 by 125 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on canvas Signed lower right Painted c. 1895-1910 Provenance Clune Galleries, Sydney; purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 26 December 1972; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection,Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 30, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985- 1988, cat. 35, illus. Reference Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 35, cat. 30 The Australian, 7 March 1984, illus. Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, p. 55, illus. pl. 35 As guest speaker at the annual banquet of the Art Society of New South Wales in 1891, W. C. Piguenit told his audience that Australian scenery was 'well worthy of the highest efforts of the artist's brush and of the poet's song'.(1) It is likely that his expansive panorama, Near Liverpool, New South Wales, may originally have had a less topographically descriptive title. It is closely comparable with the slightly larger and rainier landscape with cattle, entitled Thy clouds drop fatness, that Piguenit showed at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales in 1903.(2) The Liverpool Plains, bounded on all sides by sheltering ranges, is a pastoral district blessed with some of the richest soil in Australia. In this painting, much of nature's drama is played out in the sky, which occupies some two thirds of the canvas. A roadway leads the viewer into the scene, with grazing cattle marking the route almost as far as the eye can see. Piguenit made many sketches and watercolours on his travels; and also took photographs which he sometimes may have used later as raw material for his paintings. 'He made only the barest entries in the diaries he kept on his trips but he always recorded the weather in detail. Winds and their direction and strength, sunshine, mist, drizzle and rain - he seems never to have tired of observing their effects'.(3) Near Liverpool, New South Wales probably dates from Piguenit's later career, after he had visited Europe and won the 1901 Wynne Prize for landscape painting at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. His most successful paintings are those of towering mountains, grand sweeping panoramas and seemingly endless plains. (1) Reported in The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 September 1891, p. 8. (2) See Christa E. Johannes and Anthony V. Brown, W. C. Piguenit 1836-1914, Retrospective,Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 1992, cat. 52, illus. p. 66. Piguenit sourced the quotation, 'Thou crownest the year with thy goodness: and thy clouds drop fatness' from the Prayer Book of 1662. (3) Johannes and Brown, op. cit., p. 20.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 6 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
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JOHN GLOVER 1767-1849 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A HOUSE OF THE DERWENT, VAN DIEMEN'S LAND FRIEND 700,000—1,100,000 AUD KEY TO LETTER SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 48.2 by 98 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on canvas Painted c. 1835 Provenance Private collection, United Kingdom Clune Galleries, Sydney, as 'Farmhouse with Cattle, Van Diemen's Land';purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 8 January 1971; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection,Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Exhibition of Past Australian Painters Lent from Private South Australian Collections, Adelaide Festival of Arts, John Martin & Co., Adelaide, 8-29 March 1974, cat. 7 Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide,2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 7, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985- 1988, cat. 2, illus. Treasures from Private Collections, National Gallery Women's Association, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 5-12 September 1993 Great Australian Paintings from Melbourne Private Collections, a fundraising exhibition for Brainwave: Royal Children's Hospital Neurology Unit, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 30 May - 15 June 1997 Reference Art and Australia, June 1971, illus. Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 8, cat. 7, illus. Pamela Luhrs, Ron Radford et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 10-11, illus. pl. 2 John Glover is undoubtedly the greatest painter of the early colonial era in Australia. Indeed he is ranked as one of the most important landscape artists of his generation working outside Europe. House on the Derwent, Van Diemen's Land is among the earliest and loveliest 'country estate portraits' in Australian art. Born in Leicestershire in 1767, a contemporary of both John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, Glover enjoyed a highly successful career in England painting landscapes, most often in an idealised classical style but also at times in a realist mode. In 1830 three emigrant sons were already farming near Hobart in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) and he resolved to join them: 'The expectation of finding a new Beautiful World -- new landscapes, new trees, new flowers, new Animals, Birds &c &c is delightful to me.'(1) He reached Van Diemen's Land on his sixty-fourth birthday, 18 February 1831. During his first year in Van Diemen's Land he lived in Hobart while selecting landholdings. In March 1832 he shifted with two sons to a farm at Mills' Plains on the Nile River near Evandale in the north of the colony. His direct, unmediated experience of the unfamiliar environment, as both a pioneering settler and an artist, lent his imagery freshness and vitality. As well as selling paintings locally, he sent many others back to London for exhibition, 'descriptive of the scenery and customs of the inhabitants' in his 'new Beautiful World'. His production virtually ceased after 1841 and he died at Mills' Plains, at the age of eighty-two, in 1849. The source for the present painting is a pencil drawing, the 27th image in Glover's Sketchbook no. 102, begun on 19 December 1834 and now held by the National Library of Australia, Canberra (NLA RNK 644.27). On the previous opening of the sketchbook is a landscape (NLA RNK 644.23) that probably contains a distant view of the same house; an artist's inscription can be read as either 'Mrs Robinsons' or 'Mr Robinsons'. It has been tempting to associate the painting with George Augustus Robinson, the celebrated Conciliator of the Indigenous Tasmanians; he visited Glover at Mills' Plains in January 1834 and in November 1835 Glover gave him a painting, of Aborigines dancing. However, the Robinsons' home was in the centre of Hobart, on the corner of Elizabeth and Warwick Streets (and Mrs G. A. Robinson did not have property of her own). The red-brick house was once wrongly identified as Cormiston, where there is a building of similar form but later date, beside the Tamar estuary on the outskirts of Launceston. In fact the site is beside the Derwent estuary on the outskirts of Hobart, and the building apparently does not survive. Glover's skylines are always topographically accurate guides to his landscape sites. David Hansen, the artist's most recent biographer, has identified the central peak in the 'Mr/Mrs Robinsons' sketch as Collins Cap, and the slope rising out of the sketch to the left as the northern base of Mount Wellington; it is a view looking westwards from the present-day suburbs near Derwent Park, perhaps across Prince of Wales Bay or Elwick Bay, perhaps a distant first sight of the house travelling out of Hobart.(2) The uninscribed sketch, the basis of the painting, shows no readily identifiable skyline features, but in the painting there are additions: the view is now framed on the left, across the water, by Mount Direction; on the right, hidden by the trees, Mount Wellington now rises steeply, preceded by a small outlier that is probably the hill called Knocklofty. The additions confirm that the view looks eastwards, back towards Hobart. They also give the painting the same extended horizontal format as the 'Robinsons' sketch. Glover employed such formats only rarely in paintings, to accommodate panoramic views that swivel, like this, through 180° rather than gaze directly ahead. Mr or Mrs Robinson would not have been substantial pastoral landholders like the Reids of Ratho, the Langdons of Montacute or the Marzettis of Cawood, whose exceptionally sun-drenched country- house portraits show numerous outbuildings and expansive flocks of sheep. Those three works were painted immediately after a special sketching campaign inland to Bothwell and Ouse in the summer of 1837-- 38, the artist's only long excursion to new country after he had settled at Mills' Plains. The farms along the main road north out of Hobart were in country very familiar to Glover, who often passed that way; they were small and more likely to run dairy cows than sheep. Half a dozen Robinsons can be found in Hobart in the mid-1830s. The style 'Mrs Robinson' might indicate a widow or an innkeeper. David Hansen has discovered a George William Robinson who owned the Black Snake Inn on the main road at Bridgewater (now Granton) in 1834- 36 and the Fox Inn at Glenorchy in 1838. His wife née Elizabeth Presnell) was not yet a widow in 1835, which is probably when the present painting was executed, and it does not correspond with known images of the Black Snake. Nevertheless, the unusual balcony verandahs are perhaps for an inkeeper's guests and the Robinsons' ownerhip of the Fox Inn is worth pursuing; it is the most likely subject of the painting. On the other hand, since Glover was a decidedly casual speller it is possible that his 'Robinson' was really 'Robertson'.(3) The house in the present painting is elegant and substantial, two storeys built in brick, with the airy verandahs opening on to a park-like vista, outbuildings on the right and a herd of cattle grazing peacefully in the foreground. As in all his greatest works, Glover here captures the unique qualities of the local light and landscape. Subtle shades of gold and blue, soft olive-greens, russet and ochre, glazes of mauve and grey, combine to delineate the scene. The sky is luminescent; the encircling hills are drenched in warm sunlight; and majestic eucalypts stand as witness to the artist's wonder at and respect for Australia. Glover wrote of 'the remarkable peculiarity in the Trees in this Country; however numerous they rarely prevent your tracing through them the whole distant Country'.(4) It is possible that the great fallen trunk in the left foreground is intended to symbolise the past, whereas the recently constructed 'home in the wilderness' is a man-made presence adding beauty to the natural world. Glover came to love Tasmania deeply. Although he regretted the loss of its Arcadian qualities with the coming of European settlement - 'the gay happy life the natives led before the White people came here' -- his vision remained an optimistic one of peace and prosperity in a new Eden.(5) Daniel Thomas
We are most grateful to Daniel Thomas for advice on cataloguing this work and for contributing this catalogue essay. Generous assistance with our research has also come from David Hansen, Mary Eagle; and Sylvia Carr and Wendy Morrow, Picture Librarians at the National Library of Australia.
(1) Quoted in David Hansen, John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, Art Exhibitions Australia and Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, Hobart, 2003, p. 86.
(2) David Hansen in correspondence with Jane Clark, 3 February 2005.
(3) A Catalogue of Sixty eight Pictures descriptive of the scenery and customs of the inhabitants of Van Dieman’s Land, together with views in England, Italy, &c. painted by John Glover Esq…., London, 1835, note on no. 36; quoted in Hansen, op. cit., p. 98.
(4) John McPhee, ‘The Symbolic Landscape’, in Hansen, op. cit., p. 114. McPhee is currently preparing a new edition of his monograph, The Art of John Glover.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 7 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
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EUGENE VON GUERARD 1811-1901 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A MOUNTAIN SCENERY NEAR JAMBEROO, NEW SOUTH FRIEND WALES KEY TO LETTER 250,000—350,000 AUD SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 28.8 by 44.4 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on artist academy board Signed lower left Painted c. 1860 Drawings '6 Mai von Jamberoo. 9th Dec 1859'[6 miles from Jamberoo]; 'Jamberoo from Mrs Pontley's farm'; 'Jamberoo Minnamurra Creek & [illegible] Mountains', in von Guérard sketchbook '1859 New South Wales; 1862 Cape Otway', DGB16, vol.10, ff.44-47, Mitchell Library, Sydney Provenance Original owner unknown; 'A.W.F. Fuller -- 10 Dec. 1930' (inscription on the reverse) Sotheby's, London, 22 June 1967 as 'Morning' Clune Galleries, Sydney, 1967;purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 22 November 1967; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection, Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Victorian Exhibition of Fine Arts, Melbourne, 1860, cat. 28 as 'Mountain Scenery near Zamberoo [sic], N.S.W.' Eugène von Guérard, 1811-1901, an exhibition of paintings and prints, lent to Clune Galleries, Sydney, October 1972, cat. 11, illus. Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 37, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985-1988, cat. 17, illus. Illawarra: The Garden of New South Wales, Wollongong City Gallery, Wollongong, 1994-1995 Reference Candice Bruce, Edward Comstock and Frank McDonald, Eugène von Guérard, a German Romantic in the Antipodes, Alister Taylor, Martinborough, NZ, 1982, p. 211, illus., cat. 53 Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 19, cat. 37, illus. Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, p. 25, illus. pl. 17 Ken Orchard, Michael Organ and J.Walsh, Illawarra: The Garden of New South Wales, Wollongong City Gallery, Wollongong, 1994 Between 1855 and 1876, von Guérard undertook sixteen known sketching trips from his base in Melbourne. He travelled throughout Victoria, to New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. A skilled outdoorsman, he walked and rode, camping out at night under the stars, or sleeping at various homesteads when he was lucky enough to come upon them, the hospitality of the bush being such that no stranger was ever turned away. On all these trips he sketched in small leather-bound books, meticulously naming and dating his whereabouts, and usually numbering each page. He used these preliminary sketches as the basis for all his future work, continually combing back through them for ideas, compositional elements and exacting detail. In late November 1859 von Guérard undertook his one and only trip to Sydney. After sketching views in Darling Point (including 'Carthona', Sir Thomas Mitchell's house), Double Bay, Middle Harbour and Parramatta, he headed south for a brief visit to the Illawarra district. Arriving at Mt Kiera on 4 December, he spent a week around Wollongong and Kiama, making many sketches of the rainforest vegetation - fig trees and cabbage-tree palms - that distinguish that landscape. On 10 December he took a one-day side trip to the pretty valley of Jamberoo, where he made several sketches of the Minnamurra River and the mountain ranges to the west (now part of the Budderoo National Park and the Barren Grounds Nature Reserve) and south-west to Saddleback Mountain. About six oil paintings of the Illawarra are known to have resulted from this trip. This small but important landscape contains all the pictorial elements that made von Guérard's work so popular in 1860s Melbourne: majestic mountains which serve as an inspiring backdrop to a large flat foreground, complete with meandering stream; detailed and recognisable botany; small figures of two Aboriginal men to give scale and local interest, and a general ambiance of pastoral serenity. The painting was exhibited at the Victorian Exhibition of Fine Arts in Melbourne in 1860 and possibly acquired at that point by a Melbourne collector. It emerged a little over one hundred years later to be sold at Sotheby's in London, whereupon it entered the Elders Collection, Adelaide. Dr Candice Bruce
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 8 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
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HENRY GRITTEN C. 1818-1873 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A MELBOURNE FRIEND 200,000—300,000 AUD KEY TO LETTER SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 59.5 by 90 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on canvas Signed and dated 1867 lower right Provenance Probably Alan R. MacDonald in the 1860s Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 1986 Private collection, Melbourne; Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne; purchased by Elders IXL, 31 May 1989, to mark the 150th year of Elders Exhibited Probably Art and Art Treasures Exhibition, Melbourne Public Library and Museum, Melbourne, March - May 1869, cat. 304 as 'Melbourne lent by Alan R. MacDonald' Australian Colonial Fine Arts, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, October - November 1986, cat. 20, detail illus. on front cover Committee for Melbourne Exhibition, Government House, Melbourne, September 1992 On long term loan to the National Gallery of Victoria, October 2002 - March 2005 (label on the reverse) Reference Catalogue of the Works of Art: Ornamental and Decorative Art exhibited by the Trustees of the Melbourne Public Library and Museum, Firth & Co., Melbourne, 1869, cat. 304 Australian Colonial Fine Arts, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 1986, cat. 20 Born in London, Henry Gritten began to paint when he was fourteen years old. He exhibited successfully in London and, according to later reports, 'enjoyed the favour of Prince Albert, the Duke of Norfolk and the Marquis of Westminster'.(1) He travelled through Northern Europe before departing for New York, where he exhibited at the National Academy of Design from 1849 to 1853. Gritten arrived in Melbourne in 1853, to seek his fortune on the goldfields. Like his contemporary von Guérard, he had before long returned to his first profession and he painted in Sydney and Tasmania before settling in Melbourne from 1863. His work was included in the first exhibition of Australian painting at the new National Gallery of Victoria in 1864; the Gallery acquired one of his landscapes in 1866; and in 1870 he became a founding member of the Victorian Academy of Arts. Sadly, he died only three years later, in Launceston. Melbourne is one of Gritten's largest and most important paintings. During the 1860s his work was much admired for being 'carefully circumstantial in local details'.(2) Here he not only presents a fascinating historical and architectural record of Melbourne in the year 1867, but also evokes a romantic vision of the city's power and potential, celebrating the exciting new and picturesque skyline created during that decade. To the left may be seen the old single-span Princes Bridge, with old St Paul's Church across the road. Beyond is Swanston Street, with the tower of the old Town Hall set back from the Collins Street intersection. From left to right, silhouetted against the sky, are a series of church spires: St Enoch's in Collins Street East (since demolished); the old Scots Church at the corner of Collins and Russell Streets; then the Wesleyan Church, still standing in Lonsdale Street; the Independent Church (now St Michael's); and in the far distance on the horizon, the Gaelic Church in Rathdowne Street. (3) The large building in front of the Independent Church is a bonded store, newly built on the corner of Russell and Flinders Streets for the Hon. W. Degraves, MLC, in 1865 (4); the building on the opposite corner was possibly a hotel. To the right of the panorama, the House of Parliament is partly obscured by the foliage of the foreground tree, perhaps because it was still incomplete in 1867 and subject to some public controversy. The classical silhouette of the Treasury Building is clearly visible; and to the far right sits the bulk of St Patrick's Cathedral, begun to the design of William Wardell in 1863 (and without the spires which were added as late as the 1930s). Gritten has deliberately juxtaposed images emblematic of past and present. The burgeoning city, only three decades old, is contrasted with the still rural Domain on the southern side of the River Yarra. A steam train races through Richmond Park, taking passengers further afield into the expanding metropolis. Grand new buildings dominate the horizon, whilst a humble settler's cottage nestles amidst scrubby vegetation on the banks of the lagoon (contemporary maps clearly show the swamps and lagoons bordering the Yarra before its course was altered in 1897). The old and broken gum tree in the foreground, emblematic of indigenous vegetation, and perhaps even the indigenous way of life so dramatically displaced, is surrounded by strong young trees. This area had frequently been described in the goldrush years as neglected and even dangerous. However by the 1860s, Dr Ferdinand von Mueller, director of the Botanic Gardens, had begun a program of improvements in this part of the Domain, known as Princes Bridge Reserve, planting blue gums and introducing the European conifers seen here. The cattle lend Gritten's scene a tranquil air, consciously evoking the English 18th-century pastoral landscape tradition. Interestingly, although stock had been banned in the Domain since 1861, the Crown Lands Officer made a note in 1863 of 'portions of the Government House Reserve' where the Superintendant of Immigrants now grazes a few cows'.(5) Gritten's views of early Melbourne, the dynamic city, the Yarra, several delightful views of the Botanic Gardens, are among the most beautiful and important urban landscapes in Australian art. Many are now in public collections. Melbourne is unique for its detailed composition, its ambitious scale and its outstanding quality. (1) The Argus, Melbourne, 16 January 1873, p. 5. (2) The Illustrated Melbourne Post, 22 December 1864, p. 3. (3) Notes by Leigh Astbury in Australian Colonial Fine Arts, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 1986,to which this catalogue entry is greatly indebted. (4) The Illustrated Melbourne Post, 25 August 1865; information from George Tibbits, cited by Astbury, op. cit. (5) R. T. M. Pescott, The Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne: a history from 1845 to 1970, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1982, p. 45; and information from Mr Richard Aitken, cited by Astbury, op. cit.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 9 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
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W. C. PIGUENIT 1863-1914 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A CUMMING'S PEAK, WESTERN BLUFF, TASMANIA FRIEND 50,000—70,000 AUD KEY TO LETTER SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 46.2 by 61 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on artist academy board Signed and dated 1877 lower left Provenance Clune Galleries, Sydney;purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 13 January 1970; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection,Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Probably Sixth Exhibition of the New South Wales Academy of Art, Elizabeth Street, Sydney, May 1877, cat. 62 as 'Cumming's Peak, from Stocker's Plains, Tasmania' Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985-1988, cat. 34, illus. Reference Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, p. 54, illus. pl. 34 Christa E. Johannes and Anthony V. Brown, W. C. Piguenit 1836-1914, Retrospective, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 1992, p. 53 Hailed by Australia's first art historian, William Moore, as 'the first Australian-born professional painter', William Charles Piguenit was born in Hobart into an English family of French extraction. For twenty-three years he worked as a draughtsman with the Lands Department in Hobart before resigning to paint full time. In 1871 he explored the Valley of the Huon; in 1873 Lake St Clair; and Lake Pedder and the Western Highlands of Tasmania the following year. In 1875 he joined an artists' camp organised by Eccleston du Faur, one of the trustees of the new Art Gallery of New South Wales, in the Grose Valley near Hartley. He exhibited in Sydney that year but continued to paint Tasmanian scenes as well, even after settling in Sydney in 1880. Cumming's Peak, or Head, is part of the Great Western Tiers in northern Tasmania, seen here from Stocker's Plains. Now known as 'Mother Cumming's Peak', the area has been the site of recent confrontations between forest workers and wilderness groups. Piguenit was there in November 1874, on his third trip into the Western Highlands, when the area was still extremely remote. On this occasion he accompanied a party led by the amateur explorer James R. Scott, an old friend, and Robert Mackenzie Johnston, who later used Piguenit's sketches to illustrate his Systematic Account of the Geology of Tasmania, 1888.(1) The body of water seen here is probably the Meander River. In 1877, a writer for The Launceston Examiner wrote of Piguenit: 'No other person, with the exception of that thorough bush traveller the late Mr. Scott...knows more of Tasmania. He has traced the valleys of the Rivers Derwent, Huon, Davey, Gordon and Pieman to their sources; has eaten his damper on the shores of Lakes Pedder, Marie and St. Clair; has tunnelled through miles of horizontal scrub...and has travelled on foot thousands of miles, frequently with a knapsack of over 56 lbs weight on his back'.(2) Piguenit is considered the last of the great landscape painters of the colonial period in Australia. He was a romantic realist, deeply inspired by nature's power and beauty. Uninterested in the younger generation's 'impressionism', he sought in his own art to portray both the majesty and the details of God's handiwork. Cumming's Peak is a rare large image of this landmark in its unspoilt state, just as pastoralists were beginning the transformations that have continued to the present day. Much of Cumming's Peak was clear felled in the 1990s; and there are currently plans to dam the Meander River. (1) R. M. Johnston, Systematic Account of the Geology of Tasmania, W.T. Strutt, government printer, Hobart, 1888, includes a wood engraving by George Collingridge after Piguenit of Cumming's Head from Stocker's Plains; titled 'Group of cattle in rural setting with Cumming's Head in background' and slightly differing from the present painting in its foreground details (State Library of Tasmania). See also Christa E. Johannes and Anthony V. Brown, W. C. Piguenit 1836-1914, Retrospective, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 1992, p. 18. (2) Quoted in Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Image, Australain Painting 1800-1880, Ellsyd Press, Sydney, 1987, p.108.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 10 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
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CONRAD MARTENS 1801-1878 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A VIEW ABOVE RUSHCUTTERS BAY, NEAR SYDNEY, N. FRIEND S. WALES KEY TO LETTER 90,000—120,000 AUD SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 41.1 by 57.3 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on canvas Signed and inscribed 'Sydney' lower right; signed, dated August 1846 and inscribed with title on label on the reverse Provenance Painted for William Broughton, the Bishop of Australia and taken to England by Francis Russell Nixon, Bishop of Tasmania: Martens's Account Book, 1846 Christie's, London, 20 April 1965, lot 98; purchased by Frank Sabin, a London dealer Telford Simpson, Sydney;his son, Philip Simpson Clune Galleries, Sydney (label on the reverse);purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 23 August 1971; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection,Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Exhibition of Past Australian Painters Lent from Private South Australian Collections, Adelaide Festival of Arts, Adelaide, 8-29 March 1974, cat. 78 Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 22, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985-1988, cat. 21, illus. Reference Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 11, cat. 22, illus. Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 32-33, illus. pl. 21 Martens's View above Rushcutters Bay delightfully combines scientific observation with artistic vision. The composition, with its golden light and framing trees, follows the classical landscape tradition he had learned from his first master Copley Fielding, and so admired in the art of Claude and J. M. W. Turner. However the painting was also intended to be an accurate topographical record, purchased by Bishop William Grant Broughton and taken to England by the Bishop of Tasmania, Francis Russell Nixon.(1) A devout Anglican, Martens served as rector's warden at St Thomas's Church of England, St Leonards (later North Sydney); and previously, in 1840, had made a drawing of St Andrew's Cathedral for Bishop Broughton, to be sent to England for lithographic reproduction. Martens would have been especially glad of the large, important commission for the present oil, as the Sydney economy was severely depressed from 1843 and Martens would soon be obliged to supplement his reduced income by taking pupils. As Martens's biographer Elizabeth Ellis explains, 'Although few New South Wales settlers in the first half of the nineteenth century were highly intellectual, a small number were well educated and aware of currents of contemporary thought. For them, an artist like Martens was reassurance that they were not exiled in a cultural desert and helped to create mental bonds with the new land, based on traditional imagery'.(2) Here Martens depicts a happy, village-like scene. Women, children and horsemen make their way down New South Head Road, from near Mona Road, to Rushcutters Bay. Beyond is the hill of Darlinghurst with its windmills and handsome villas set against the sky. (1) Martens's Account Book, 4 May 1846 'Rushcutters Bay The Bishop [i.e. [Broughton] 10.10 [pounds] Cathedral [Elizabeth Ellis suggests this may mean St Andrews Cathedral, Sydney paid for the work] / taken to England by Bp of Tasmania [i.e. Nixon] - Augst. 18th /46 - 23 x 16', Dixson Library MS 142; this information kindly provided by Elizabeth Ellis. (2) Elizabeth Ellis, Conrad Martens, Life and Art, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 1994, p. 36.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 11 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
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EUGENE VON GUERARD 1811-1901 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A ST AGNES HEAD, SOUTHERN SIDE OF PHILIP ISLAND FRIEND 150,000—250,000 AUD KEY TO LETTER SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 29.4 by 45.7 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on artist academy board Signed and dated 1873 lower right DRAWINGS 'Phillips [sic] Island St. Agnes Head, Abend [evening] 16 Dec. 1869' [further notes in German], pencil, 30.5 by 51 cm, PXX16, f.10, Mitchell Library, Sydney; 'From the Quoin Phillips [sic] Island 16 Dec '69', von Guérard sketchbooks 'Mt Macedon, Beleura, Woodlands, Cape Woolamai', DGB16 vol.14a, unnumbered folios, 1867-1869, Mitchell Library, Sydney Provenance Original owner unknown; sold at auction in Victoria Clune Galleries, Sydney, 1968-9; purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 12 February 1969; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection,Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Fourth Exhibition of the Victorian Academy of Arts, Melbourne, 1874, cat. 75, as 'St Agnes Head, North end of Phillip Island' [sic] 'The Colonial Eye', Views of Australian Life, Clune Galleries, Sydney, December 1968 Eugène von Guérard, 1811-1901, an exhibition of paintings and prints, Clune Galleries, Sydney, October 1972, cat. 21, illus. Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 41, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985-1988, cat. 25, illus. The Artists' Journey: Discovering the Victorian Coastline 1840-1910, Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery, Mornington, Vic., 2003 Reference The Argus, Melbourne, 11 August 1873, p. 5; 30 July 1874, p. 6 The Age, 30 July 1874, p. 3 Candice Bruce, Edward Comstock and Frank McDonald, Eugène von Guérard, a German Romantic in the Antipodes, Alister Taylor, Martinborough, NZ, 1982, pl. 40, pp. 148-9, 261-262, illus., cat. 147 Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 60, cat. 41, illus. The Australian, 7 March 1984 Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, p. 37, illus. pl. 25, as 'St Agnes Head, north end of Phillip Island' Information on the McHaffie family and Phillip Island from N. A. Davies, Phillip Island and District Historical Society; see also entries on J.B. Henderson and Euphemia Henderson in Joan Kerr (ed.), The Dictionary of Australian Artists to 1870, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 355-357 Phillip Island is located 124 km east of Melbourne in the large bay of Westernport, so named by explorer George Bass in 1798 as it was then the most westerly known harbour on the coast. The island has gone through many name changes from the original indigenous one of Beang Gurt, to Snapper Island (it was thought by some to resemble the head of a snapper), Grant's Island (in honour of Lieutenant James Grant who made the first known passage through Bass Strait from the west in 1800), the Island of the English (presumably to distinguish it from the smaller island nearby, French Island, so named by the French explorer, Nicholas Baudin) and lastly, Phillip Island (in honour of Governor Phillip). For many years it was used as a seasonal base by sealers and whalers. In 1842 John and William McHaffie, two brothers from Galloway, Scotland, became the first permanent settlers when they took up a pastoral lease covering almost the entire island. The McHaffies bred sheep, cattle and horses, though the lack of fresh water on the island somewhat inhibited their activities and William soon left his brother to pursue richer pastures on the mainland. In 1861 John McHaffie married Georgiana Henderson, a sister to artists John Black and Euphemia Henderson who had all migrated to Victoria from the Isle of Guernsey. J.B. Henderson's album of views in the Mitchell Library contains a number of sketches of Phillip Island, including one from the same beach as this view by von Guérard; a second copy by Henderson exists in the Port Phillip & District Historical Society. When von Guérard visited Phillip Island in December 1869, the McHaffies had bought a property, 'Yanakie', in south Gippsland after the Victorian Government cancelled their exclusive lease in 1868 and opened up the island to free selectors. Von Guérard stayed on Phillip Island for a week, from 12 to 19th December, sketching the coastline, in parts both rugged and gentle. He seems to have caught a boat from the Mornington Peninsula to Rhyll in the north of the island where a new jetty was built the year before, and travelled down the western side of the island sketching the Nobbies and Seal Rocks, before heading east to Cape Woolamai. While we know he sketched a view from the McHaffies' verandah, it is unclear whether he met them: there is no mention of the artist in Georgiana McHaffie's diaries (still held by descendants of the family). Von Guérard first drew this view into his sketchbook from the top of Quoin Hill, completing a larger drawing later on the same day (both in the Mitchell Library). Now known as Helen's Head, the beach is one of several on the southern coast of the island looking east to Pyramid Rock, not on the north coast as previously thought and as erroneously stated in the 1874 Age newspaper review. The work is typical of von Guérard's coastal views from the 1870s in being both smaller and quieter than his grandly sublime mountain views of the decade before. It shows a deeper interest by the artist in the geology of the area, also seen in other paintings that resulted from this trip, such as View of the Granite Rocks at Cape Woolamai, c. 1872 (Australian National Gallery, Canberra), although in both composition and sentiment it relates more closely to a smaller work of Phillip Island painted for and given to von Guérard's old friend and patron, James Dawson.(1) Waterbirds share the foreshore with three figures, one apparently a woman with her skirt hitched up to keep dry. Dominating the composition is the blunt bluff of the head which protrudes into the centre of the canvas with almost anthropomorphic force, as if it were a large profile jutting into the waves below. Dr Candice Bruce (1) See Candice Bruce et al., Eugène von Guérard : a German Romantic in the Antipodes, Alister Taylor, Martinborough, NZ, 1982, cat. 121.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 12 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
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AFTER WILLIAM LIGHT 1786-1839 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A DISTANT VIEW OF THE LANDING PLACE AND THE FRIEND IRON STORES AT PORT ADELAIDE, SOUTH KEY TO LETTER AUSTRALIA SYMBOLS 90,000—125,000 AUD CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 32.2 by 43.7 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on cedar panel Quantity: 4 Related works Distant View of the Landing Place, and Iron Stores at Port Adelaide, with the South Australian Company's Storeship 'Sir Charles McCarthy' at Anchor, watercolour, 21.1 by 31.8 cm, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide J. Grieve after William Light, Distant View of the Landing Place, and Stores at Port Adelaide, lithograph on zinc, London, 1838-39 Provenance Clune Galleries, Sydney; the set of four purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 14 February 1969; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection,Foster's Group Limited Exhibited The set of four at Clune Galleries, Sydney, November 1970 Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985 - 1988, illus. Reference Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 16, cat. 13, illus. Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 12-13, illus. pl. 6 See David Elder, Art of William Light, City of Adelaide and Wakefield Press, Adelaide 1987 pp. 126-7, illus. for the watercolour version VIEW AT YANKALILLA, SOUTH AUSTRALIA Oil on cedar panel 32.1 by 43.8 cm Related works View at Yankalillah, watercolour, 20.9 by 31.1cm, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide J. Grieve after William Light, View at Yankalillah [sic], lithograph on zinc,London, 1838-39 Reference Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 16, cat. 14, illus. Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 12-13, illus. pl. 5 See David Elder, Art of William Light, City of Adelaide and Wakefield Press, Adelaide 1987 pp. 110-111, illus. for the watercolour version VIEW IN PORT ADELAIDE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA Oil on cedar panel 31.9 by 44.1 cm Related work J. Grieve, View in Port Adelaide, South Australia, lithograph on zinc, London, 1838-39 Reference Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 17, cat. 15, illus. Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 12-13, illus. pl. 3 See David Elder, Art of William Light, City of Adelaide and Wakefield Press, Adelaide 1987 pp. 130-131, illus. for the lithograph VIEW NEAR ADELAIDE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA Oil on cedar panel 32.2 by 43.8 cm Reference Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 17, cat. 16, illus. Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 12-13, illus. pl. 4 (4) Colonel William Light, founder of Adelaide, is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating and romantic figures in Australian art history. Born in Malaya, reputedly the son of a Malay princess (more probably a Portuguese Eurasian with links to the royal court) and an English naval captain, young William was sent 'home' to England for his education. He too joined the navy and later the British Cavalry, was on the staff of Wellington's headquarters in 1812 and survived more than forty engagements before selling his commission in 1821. During the 1820s he travelled extensively in Europe and published two volumes of Italian scenic views taken from his own sketches. In the 1830s he ventured as far as Egypt and then, after separating from his wife, set sail for Australia in May 1836.(1) Skilled in drawing from his boyhood and probably trained as a military draughtsman, Light's duties as surveyor-general of South Australia entailed selecting the site for Adelaide and laying out its plan. He kept a journal, accompanied by sketches and drawings, throughout his life but much of this material was destroyed by fire in Adelaide in January 1839. He died of tuberculosis in October that same year. The present rare and beautiful set of four views of early Adelaide derive from images of the city and its environs in the 1830s. Light's original watercolours for Distant View of the Landing Place... and View at Yankalillah are held by the Art Gallery of South Australia (a gift from the South Australian Company in 1931). At least three of the views were published as lithographs in London between 1837 and 1839. Yankalilla is south of Adelaide on the Fleurieu Peninsula; and printed inscriptions on the lithographed version of View at Yankalillah [sic], South Australia, state that the landscape was 'drawn' by Light, 'printed from zinc' by J. Grieve and published by J. C. Hailes.(2) The titles to the lithographed View in Port Adelaide, South Australia reveal that the ships at anchor in the Port River are the David, the Henry Porcher, Goshawk, Eden and Emerald Isle (they were all there in July or August 1838); whilst Distant View of the Landing Place, and Stores at Port Adelaide includes the South Australian Company store ship Chas McCarthy. View near Adelaide is somewhat comparable with Light's oil painting, View of Proposed Town of Adelaide, 1834-38, now in the State Library of New South Wales, which in turn was later engraved in London by Robert Havell. Although it is not known whether the present set of four was painted from Light's originals or from his lithographs, experts on South Australian historical painting including Ron Radford (formerly director of the Art Gallery of South Australia and now of the National Gallery of Australia) and Jane Hylton (formerly Art Gallery of South Australia), believe them to date from around 1860. Some of Light's own collection of paintings and drawings survived the devastating fire in his hut: a number of these are now in the State Library of South Australia. Others were sent to England. Certainly his work was studied and admired for many years after his sadly early death. As Louis McCubbin (son of Frederick and director of the Art Gallery of South Australia) once observed: 'There is little doubt that had Colonel Light decided to devote his genius and energies to painting he would have achieved as great a fame as the one he achieved as the founder of Adelaide'.(3) (1) David Elder in Joan Kerr (ed.), The Dictionary of Australian Artists to 1870, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 472-74; and see Elder's Art of William Light, City of Adelaide in association with Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1987, pp. 110, 126. We are grateful for additional information from Jane Hylton, who is currently researching Light again. (2) Reproduced in Cedric Flower, The Antipodes Observed: Prints and Print Makers of Australia 1788-1850, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1975, pl. 27. (3) Adelaide Advertiser, 28 June 1948; quoted by Elder (1992), op. cit., p. 473.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 13 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
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WALTER WITHERS 1854-1914 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A RICKETT'S POINT, VICTORIA FRIEND 80,000—120,000 AUD KEY TO LETTER SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 30 by 50.1 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on canvas Signed and dated 91 lower right Provenance Leonard Joel, Melbourne (part label on the reverse) Dudley Cain, Melbourne Clune Galleries, Sydney;purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited 24 February 1972; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection, Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 42, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985-1988, cat. 30, illus. Reference Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 28, cat. 42, illus. Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, p. 45, illus. pl. 30 Walter Withers first came from England to Melbourne because his father hoped to discourage him from art as a career. He arrived on 1 January 1883, to work on the land for eighteen months. Instead, he soon found work as a lithographic draughtsman. He signed up for life classes at the Gallery School in Melbourne; and joined the local young artists' 'Buonarrotti Society' - named for Michelangelo - where he met Frederick McCubbin, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and many others. He returned to England in 1887, married; then enrolled at the Académie Julian in Paris. In France he met a number of the leading expatriate Australian painters, including Emanuel Phillips Fox and John Longstaff. By late 1888 he was back in Australia - where he would live for the rest of his career. Withers was one of the two painters - along with Arthur Streeton - whom the visiting American critic Sidney Dickinson had in mind when he coined the term 'the Heidelberg School' in 1891. Reviewing studio exhibitions held by the two artists, Dickinson wrote that both had recently been working in the still rural outer Melbourne suburb of Heidelberg, where, 'with others of like inclination, they have established a Summer congregation for out-of-door painting'. Their pictures 'had shown in marked degree the qualities of originality and individual treatment - and afford a hopeful augury for the future development of Australian art'.(1) Living in Kew, Withers painted regularly at the old Eaglemont homestead that Streeton had discovered in Heidelberg. His nickname there was 'the Orderly Colonel' because of his efficient and organized habits. In September 1890 he took over the lease of the nearby mansion, 'Charterisville'. However, by 1891 when Dickinson drew attention to these open-air 'camps', the original group at Heidelberg had largely disbanded. The present painting was completed on the beach at Ricketts Point, on Port Phillip Bay. Roberts and McCubbin had earlier, and now famously, painted on Melbourne's bayside beaches in the summer of 1886-7. They first met Streeton painting out on the rocks at Mentone. Charles Conder also joined them, and painted his own Rickett's Point on the long stretch of beach midway between Sandringham and Mordialloc in 1890 (now in the National Gallery of Victoria). Withers always loved the breezy atmosphere of the beach. His gentle impressionist style is more subtle than the bravura Streeton's and less overtly decorative than Conder's. Here he portrays a group of children exploring tidal pools in the shelter of the ti-tree. The white sails of small yachts stand out against pearly water and the warm blond tones of the sand evoke vivid memories of summer family holidays by the sea. (1) The Australasian Critic, 1 July 1891, p. 240; see Jane Clark and Bridget Whitelaw, Golden Summers: Heidelberg and beyond, National Gallery of Victoria and ICCA, Sydney, 1985, pp. 28-29, 90.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 14 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
PLACE ABSENTEE BID LOT 14 PURCHASE CATALOGUE
ELIOTH GRUNER 1882-1939 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A IN MORNING SUNLIGHT, RICHMOND, NEW SOUTH FRIEND WALES KEY TO LETTER 30,000—50,000 AUD SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 60.2 by 45.3 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on canvas Signed and dated 1917 lower right Provenance Clune Galleries, Sydney; purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 14 August 1967; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection,Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 8, illus Potrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985-1988, cat. 40, illus. Reference Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide 1984, p. 40, cat. 8, illus. Rod Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Potrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, p. 62, illus. pl. 40 Born in New Zealand, Gruner arrived in Sydney with his parents in 1883 and trained as an artist under Julian Ashton. He met and admired George Lambert and saw Arthur Streeton's 1907 Sydney exhibition. Both Streeton and Hans Heysen were to be strong formative influences on Gruner's vision of the Australian landscape. In 1915 Gruner visited a farm owned by a Mr Innes on the Emu Plains, at the foot of the Blue Mountains.(1) For the next few years, from a cabin he rented on the property, he would produce some of his most beautiful paintings. His Morning Light, a lyrical panorama with cattle grazing around the farm homestead, was purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and awarded the Wynne Prize for landscape in 1916. In 1917 he also visited Prospect and Windsor, still seeking tranquil settled pastures as subject matter - in part, at least, as an antidote to the reported horrors of the First World War. Gruner enlisted in the army in June 1918 but, the War having ended by November, was discharged at the end of the year. In 1919 he received the Wynne Prize (his second of seven) for Spring frost, now perhaps his best known work: another Emu Plains landscape with cattle. n Morning Sunlight is typical of Gruner's smaller, more intimate landscapes from this time. Its subject is sunlight and airy atmosphere as much as landscape, for Gruner was, arguably, Australia's most dedicated plein-air painter. Gruner was one of the most popular and successful painters of the inter-war years. In 1932 a major exhibition of his work at the Art Gallery of New South Wales was critically acclaimed; a memorial exhibition followed in 1940; and he was honoured again by a retrospective in 1983. (1) For the best account of Gruner's life and work see Barry Pearce, Elioth Gruner 1882-1939, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1983.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 15 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
PLACE ABSENTEE BID LOT 15 PURCHASE CATALOGUE
ARTHUR STREETON 1867-1943 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A 'SUNLIGHT SWEET', COOGEE FRIEND 1,800,000—2,500,000 AUD KEY TO LETTER SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 90.2 by 49.5 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on canvas Signed lower right; inscribed 'Coogee'lower left and lower right; dated 90 and 1890 lower left Provenance Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer, Melbourne, by 1907; until The Baldwin Spencer Collection of Australian Pictures and Works of Art, Fine Art Society Galleries, Melbourne, 19 May 1919, lot 35; purchased by Mr George Kettlewell Mr and Mrs Charles and Emily Ruwolt, Mulwala, New South Wales; until The Charles Ruwolt Collection of Australian Paintings, Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 17 November 1966, lot 13, as 'Coogee', illustrated; purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection,Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Spring Exhibition, Art Society of New South Wales, Sydney, 6 September 1890, cat. 169, £30.0.0 Pictures of Fd. McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, Gemmell, Tuckett & Co., Melbourne, 5 December 1890, cat. 12 as 'Holiday at Coogee' Pictures by Arthur Streeton Prior to his Return to Europe, Hibernian Hall, Melbourne, 20 April 1907, cat. 71 Sir W. Baldwin Spencer's Collection, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, December 1916, cat. 24 as 'Coogee' Sir Arthur Streeton Exhibition, Adelaide Festival of Arts, John Martin & Co., Adelaide, 6-23 March 1968, cat. 68 Exhibition of Past Australian Painters Lent from Private South Australian Collections, Adelaide Festival of Arts, John Martins & Co., Adelaide, 8-29 March 1974, cat. 101 (label on the reverse) Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 36, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985-1988, cat. 28, illus. Arthur Streeton 1867-1943, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and tour to Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, 8 December 1995 - 3 November 1996, cat. 26, illus. Great Australian Paintings from Melboune Private Collections, a fund-raising exhibition for Brainwave: Royal Children's Hospital Neurology Unit, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 30 May - 15 June 1997 Reference Streeton letter to Roberts with sketch of composition, Summer Hill, Sydney, [begun 30 June 1890], Tom Roberts Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney, in Ann Galbally and Anne Gray (eds), Letters from Smike: The Letters of Arthur Streeton 1890-1943, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p. 19 The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 September 1890, p. 6 Illustrated Sydney News, 27 September 1890, p. 19; 1 August 1891, p. 6 Centennial Magazine, vol. 3, no. 2, September 1890, p. 99 Table Talk, 28 November 1890, p. 5 The Age, 18 November 1966, p. 6 Australasian Antique Collector, February - May 1967, p. 37, illus. Ursula Hoff, 'Arthur Streeton at Coogee',Art and Australia, June 1967, p. 388, illus. Ann Galbally, Arthur Streeton, Lansdowne, Melbourne, 1969, no. 38 Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 26, cat. 36, illus. The Australian, 7 March 1984 Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 42-43, illus. pl. 28 Helen Topliss, The Artists' Camps: 'Plein Air' Painting in Australia, Hedley Australia, Melbourne, 1992, pl. 190 Christopher Wray, Arthur Streeton: Painter of Light, Jacaranda Wiley, Milton, Qld, 1993, p. 55 Mary Eagle, The Oil Paintings of Arthur Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, pp. 20, 66, 104 Geoffrey Smith, Arthur Streeton 1867-1943, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1995,pp. 70-71, illus. Geoffrey Smith and Oliver Streeton,Arthur Streeton and the Australian Coast, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Mornington, Vic., 2004, pp. 13-14 Sir Arthur Streeton is arguably the most important artist of the Australian impressionist generation, a founder of the 'Heidelberg School', and painter of some of the most familiar and popularly loved images of this country. Golden Summer, Eaglemont, Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide, The purple noon's transparent might are now in national or state public collections. 'Sunlight Sweet', Coogee, one of the artist's most idyllic and most accomplished figure-in-landscape subjects, is also the most important of his paintings still available to collectors of Australian art. Born in 1867 near Geelong, Victoria, Streeton trained at the National Gallery of Victoria's art school but soon tired of academic instruction and joined the open-air painting camps established by Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin. In 1888 he discovered the old house that became the home base for the group of artists now famous as the 'Heidelberg School' of Australian impressionists. From 1890, he divided his time between Melbourne, Sydney and the heroic landscape of inland New South Wales, before departing for Europe. He exhibited in London, Paris and America, served as an official war artist during the First World War; and returned to become one of Australia's most acclaimed and influential artists until his death at the age of seventy-six in 1943. Streeton was knighted in 1937. 'Sunlight Sweet', Coogee was painted on the spot, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. As in the iconic Golden Summer, Eaglemont, completed just the year before, a youthful figure looks out across the blue and gold surrounds of the Australian landscape. Then it was the rolling hills of Heidelberg; here the sparkling water and opalescent cliffs near Sydney. In a letter to his old friend Tom Roberts, Streeton sketched the composition and described working on the upright canvas, partly inside a boathouse. He had come to Sydney from Melbourne at the beginning of June, 1890, having just sold his large and poetic Still glides the stream... to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He was twenty-three years old; described by fellow artist Julian Ashton as 'a slim, debonair young man... with a little gold pointed beard and fair complexion. When he wasn't painting, he was quoting Keats and Shelley'.(1) Streeton deliberately chose Coogee as his first plein-air painting spot in Sydney. He knew that Roberts and Charles Conder had painted there together, just after their first meeting in 1888 (their two Coogee paintings are now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales and National Gallery of Victoria respectively). 'What a lovely little place', he wrote to Roberts in September 1890, 'Sand, bananas, empty bottles & color & pretty children. Shall do some good work here I think'. Here in 'Sunlight Sweet', Coogee the brilliant colour harmonies and broad brushwork reveal Streeton at his very best. His bravura paint handling was a revelation to the Sydney critics of the day - who found the work almost too radical. Indeed Mary Eagle has observed that this was the first of Streeton's vertical images to be composed from the sides of the image, 'rather than according to the conventional pictorial sequence of ground, horizon and sky'.(2) Even on a spring day in September, Streeton found the Sydney foreshore crowded with holiday makers - and bathed in colour and light. From the delightful vignette of the young girl in the foreground looking out to sea, to the lightly clad figures on the beach and the picnickers near the 'Ladies Baths' amongst the trees, he evokes the essence of Australia. Streeton returned to Coogee over and over again in later years. (1) Quoted in Jane Clark and Bridget Whitelaw, Golden Summers: Heidelberg and beyond, National Gallery of Victoria and ICCA, Sydney, 1985, p. 150. (2) Mary Eagle, The Oil Paintings of Arthur Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, p. 104.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 16 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
PLACE ABSENTEE BID LOT 16 PURCHASE CATALOGUE
W. B. MCINNES 1889-1939 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A LANDSCAPE WITH HAY WAGON FRIEND 50,000—70,000 AUD KEY TO LETTER SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 49.7 by 59 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on canvas Signed lower right Painted c. 1915 Provenance Mr and Mrs Charles and Emily Ruwolt, Mulwala, New South Wales (inscriibed 'Mr Ruwolt' on the reverse);until The Charles Ruwolt Collection of Australian Paintings, Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 17 November 1966, lot 3, illus. Purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection,Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Exhibition of Past Australian Painters Lent from Private South Australian Collections, Adelaide Festival of Arts, Adelaide, John Martin & Co., 8-29 March 1974, cat. 81 Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 20, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985-1988, cat. 39, illus. Reference Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 39, cat. 20, illus. Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, p. 61, illus. pl. 39 Ian Burn, National Life and Landscapes, Australian Painting 1900-1940, Bay Books, Sydney, 1990, pp. 46-47, pl. 30 illus. Seven times winner of the Archibald Prize and in 1918 also the Wynne Prize for landscape painting, William Beckwith McInnes was among the most highly regarded Australian painters of the early twentieth century. His landscapes are powerful and yet poetic, reflecting the charm and sensitivity of his character: he was one of the most popular teachers at the Gallery School in Melbourne from 1917 until his death in 1939 and served as Acting Director of the National Gallery of Victoria. McInnes's local landscape subjects were the cleared, worked pastures of Victoria. After three years in Europe, he built a house at Alphington in 1912 and the picturesque lucerne farm nearby became his favourite painting spot. In the words of Ian Burn, 'His Landscape with hay wagon demonstrates a strong grasp of formal construction and his ability to block landscape elements together into broad masses, leaving open expanses of fields which enhance the feeling of light and space. Perhaps more than any other Australian artist of the period, McInnes gave a strength and vitality to the image with the sheer physical energy of his brush technique'.(1) Both Landscape with hay wagon and the delightful Country Boy and Town Girl were first owned by Charles and Emily Ruwolt, leading patrons of their day. Their famous collection, dispersed in 1966, also included Arthur Streeton's 'Sunlight Sweet', Coogee and Heysen's South Coast (Lots 15 and 23 in this catalogue). (1) Ian Burn, National Life and Landscapes, Australian Painting 1900-1940, Bay Books, Sydney, 1990, p. 47.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 17 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
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RUPERT BUNNY 1864-1947 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A HOUSES AT LE LAVANDOU FRIEND 50,000—70,000 AUD KEY TO LETTER SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 59 by 72.2 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on canvas Signed with the artist's monogram lower left Painted c. 1923 Provenance The artist until 1947; Trustees of his Estate, Sir Daryl Lindsay and Mr James S. Reid; the artist's niece, Mrs J.S. Reid until 1969; Clune Galleries, Sydney; purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 27 August 1969; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Exhibited Possibly in Rupert Bunny, Anthony Hordern Galleries, Sydney, 1925 Rupert Bunny, The New Gallery, Melbourne, 1-13 November 1926, cat. 16 Rupert Bunny, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 15-30 April 1942, cat. 2 Aspects of the Work of Rupert Bunny, Clune Galleries, Sydney, September 1969, cat. 7 Exhibition of Past Australian Painters Lent from Private South Australian Collections, Adelaide Festival of Arts, John Martin & Co., Adelaide, 8-29 March 1974, cat. 5 (label on the reverse) Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 2, illus. Rupert Bunny's Landscapes of the South of France, Bendigo Art Gallery and Castlemaine Art Gallery & Historical Museum, 5 June-11 August 1991, cat. 2 Reference David Thomas, Rupert Bunny, Lansdowne, Melbourne, 1970, cat. 0228, illus. pl. 24, pp. 82, 84 Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 33, cat. 2, illus. When Rupert Bunny arrived in Paris in 1886, the belle epoque was at its height. Trained first in Melbourne and then under the French academic painter Jean Paul Laurens, Bunny soon achieved success with his large figure compositions and elegant portraits. Several of his works were purchased by the French government and he became the first Australian painter to receive an Honorable Mention at the Old Salon. Increasingly in the early years of the twentieth century his art took a modernist turn, influenced by French post-impressionism and, in particular, the colour and dramatic movement of the Ballets Russes. By the 1920s, having lived through the horrors of the First World War, landscape was his favourite subject. He exhibited in Australia as well as in Europe, returning on several occasions and finally, after his wife's death, to resettle in Melbourne in 1933. After the First World War, Bunny and his wife had spent increasing amounts of time in the country. They found a cottage, which they first rented and later bought, at Les Landes, near Suevres, Loir et Cher. Bunny added a studio and his painting excursions took him south to Le Lavandou and Bormes in the winter and spring of 1923-24, and also to Avignon, Sanary and Toulon and later Cassis, Ceret and Bandol. He made dozens of vibrant oil sketches on the spot and then, in the peace of his studio at Les Landes or back in Paris, worked these up into fully resolved compositions such as the Foster's Houses at Le Lavandou. Here the immediacy of his first sketched impressions, the Mediterranean colour, crisp light and warm atmosphere of the scene, are retained in the large canvas. However Bunny has also introduced a hint of narrative, with a local couple at their traditional seasonal labours in the foreground. The vines have been pruned, a harvest is being stored away and the soft greenery of the coming spring spreads its way tentatively across the rich tilled soil. When Bunny first showed his French landscapes in Australia, conservative local critics found them too avant garde. His Sydney exhibition of 1925, in which Houses at Le Lavandou is believed to have been included, was described as an 'art sensation'. Initially considered something of an outsider because of his long expatriate status, by 1935 he was exhibiting with Arnold Shore and George Bell in the Contemporary Art Group. In 1938 he became an inaugural member and artist vice-president of the Contemporary Art Society and came to be regarded by younger artists - including, for example, Sidney Nolan - as a forerunner of modernism in this country. His retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1946 was the first such tribute to a living Australian painter.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 18 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
PLACE ABSENTEE BID LOT 18 PURCHASE CATALOGUE
WALTER WITHERS 1854-1914 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A BEACH SCENE AT COWES, PHILIP ISLAND FRIEND 45,000—65,000 AUD KEY TO LETTER SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 16.9 by 49.3 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on canvas Signed and dated 1910 lower left Provenance Clune Galleries, Sydney; purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 26 December 1972; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection,Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Exhibition of Past Australian Painters Lent from Private South Australian Collections, Adelaide Festival of Arts, John Martin & Co., Adelaide, 8-29 March 1974, cat. 122 Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 43, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985-1988, cat. 29, illus. The Artists' Retreat: Discovering the Mornington Peninsula 1850s to the present, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Mornington, Vic., 1999 Reference Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 29, cat. 43, illus. Geoffrey Dutton, Sun, Sea, Surf and Sand, the Myth of the Beach, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, pp. 34-5 Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, p. 44, illus. pl. 29 Withers moved to the old goldfields town of Creswick to paint and teach in 1893, settled in Heidelberg in 1894 and moved permanently to Eltham in June 1903. However, he also painted frequently along the coast at beaches from Phillip Island, at the entrance of Westernport Bay, to Geelong. This sparkling beach scene was painted at Cowes Beach on Phillip Island in 1910.(1) Withers was a consummate plein-air impressionist, largely completing smaller works such as this in one sitting to capture the rapidly changing effects of light and atmosphere. Even in his larger canvases, he always sought to preserve those fleeting effects. Here his composition is boldly divided by the diagonal line of the waves on the sand: blue and gold, warm sand in the foreground (as though beneath our feet) and blue-green sea beyond. Looking across to Shoreham on the Mornington Peninsula, vivid streaks of blue and yellow mark the horizon. The whole scene is animated by figures, yachts and seagulls, brushed in with great delicacy. The seaside resort of Cowes, named by the Victorian government surveyor after the port on the Isle of Wight, is the main town on Phillip Island, on its northern side. A jetty was built before 1870 and early colonial artists, notably von Guérard, were attracted by its scenic attractions (see Lot 11). By the 1880s the island was a popular holiday destination and Cowes a thriving township. Withers would have come via the ferry service that operated from Stony Point, for a bridge was not constructed until 1940. Withers was awarded the inaugural Wynne Prize for landscape painting at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1897; and received the another in 1900. He was a founding member of the Australian Art Association in 1912 and a trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria from 1912. He died at Eltham in October 1914. (1) We are most grateful to Andrew Mackenzie for identifying the location of this work and providing the recently-discovered accompanying photograph of Withers painting at Cowes.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 19 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
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ETHEL CARRICK FOX 1872-1952 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A ARABS BARGAINING FRIEND 150,000—200,000 AUD KEY TO LETTER SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 63.5 by 80 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on canvas Signed lower left Painted in 1911 Provenance Clune Galleries, Sydney; purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 30 October 1974 (label on the reverse); transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Exhibited Salon d'Automne, Paris, 1912, cat. 299 as 'Marché à Bou- Saada' Paintings by Mrs E. Phillips Fox (Miss Ethel Carrick), Melbourne, 1913, cat. 4 as 'Arabs bargaining' Exhibition of Pictures by Mrs E. Phillips Fox (Miss Ethel Carrick), Sydney, 1913, cat. 3 as 'Arabs bargaining' Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français, 21e Exposition, Grand Palais, Paris, 2-28 February 1913, cat. 150 as 'Le Marché de Bou-Saâda' Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 4, illus. Capturing the Orient: Hilda Rix Nicholas and Ethel Carrick in the East, Waverley City Gallery, Melbourne, 16 July - 29 August 1993, cat. 32 (label on the reverse) The Edwardians: Secrets and Desires, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 12 March - 14 June and Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 9 July - 12 September 2004, cat. 17, illus. Reference Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 34, cat. 4, illus. John Pigot, Capturing the Orient: Hilda Rix Nicholas and Ethel Carrick in the East, Waverley City Gallery, Melbourne, 1993, p. 29 Susanna de Vries, Ethel Carrick Fox: Travels and Triumphs of a Post-Impressionist, Pandanus Press, Brisbane, 1997, illus. p. 66 Anne Gray et al., The Edwardians: Secrets and Desires, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2004, p. 64, fig. 60, p. 151, cat. 17 illus. Trained in London, at the Slade School under Philip Wilson Steer and Henry Tonks, Ethel Carrick met her future husband Emanuel Phillips Fox when they were both at the plein-air (open air) painting colony in St Ives, Cornwall. They married in May 1905 and, settling in Paris, came increasingly under the influence of modern French painting with its vibrant colours and lively brushwork.(1) In fact, Carrick's colour sense was more adventurous than her husband's, as seen clearly here in Arabs bargaining. Her first visit of many to Australia during her long and successful career was for several months in 1908. In the late winter and early spring of 1911, 'determined to get some settled sunlight', the Foxes travelled with a painting pupil 'across to Algiers from there South into the interior a place called Bou Saada - where [they] stayed six weeks - then back to Algiers - then to Tangiers & on to Cadiz'.(2) They returned home through Spain. Carrick sent paintings of scenes from this North African journey for exhibition in the Autumn Salon in Paris that year and the present work in 1912; and also to the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français in 1913. She was made a sociétaire of the Salon d'Automne in 1911. By the time Carrick and her husband were in Bou Saada, many western artists had travelled to North Africa in search of exotic oriental subject matter. Monet and Renoir had come from France; the English John Lavery and American Henry Tanner were among notable artist visitors; as well as Australians including Hilda Rix Nicholas, Margaret Preston, Bessie Davidson and William Beckwith McInnes. 'For Carrick, the intense light and colourful costumes of the Arab people provided a rich visual spectacle that allowed her to experiment with ever more intense blocks of colour and pattern in her work. In Arabs bargaining, Carrick's interest is as much in describing this commonplace market scene as in constructing a painting of abstract elements and high- keyed and vibrant colours'.(3) Dr Ruth Zubans has suggested that this is possibly the same locality depicted by Fox in his painting A market in the desert 1911 (New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale)'. Arabs bargaining is among Ethel Carrick Fox's largest and most important works. We are grateful to Dr Ruth Zubans for her assistance in cataloguing this work. (1) See Ruth Zubans, E. Phillips Fox, his Life and Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 121-23. (2) Letter from E. P. Fox to Hans Heysen, 13 September 1911, quoted op. cit., p. 159. The pupil was probably Herbert Daly, a talented amateur artist who had taken part in the now famous '9 by 5 Impressions Exhibition' of 1889. (3) Elena Taylor in Anne Gray et al., The Edwardians: Secrets and Desires, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2004, p. 151.
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FOSTER’S COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN ART AUCTION DATE LOCATION
SALE AU0698 SESSION 1 | 23 May 05 6:30 Melbourne PM.
LOT 20 (of 70) Jump PREVIOUS LOT | NEXT LOT to:
PLACE ABSENTEE BID LOT 20 PURCHASE CATALOGUE
FREDERICK MCCUBBIN 1855-1917 EMAIL THIS LOT TO A EVENING IN THE BUSH FRIEND 1,200,000—1,600,000 AUD KEY TO LETTER SYMBOLS CURRENCY CONVERTER
MEASUREMENTS 89 by 151.5 cm DESCRIPTION Oil on canvas Signed and dated 1911 lower left Provenance Purchased from Clune Galleries, Sydney, 23 August 1971, by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, Adelaide (label on the reverse); transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection,Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Catalogue of Pictures by Fred and Louis McCubbin, Athenaeum Art Gallery, Melbourne, 1 September 1912, cat. 12, 250 guineas Exhibition of Past Australian Painters Lent from Private South Australian Collections, Adelaide Festival of Arts, John Martin & Co., Adelaide, 8-29 March 1974, cat. 79 Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 17, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985-1988, cat. 36, illus. The Art of Frederick McCubbin, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and tour to other state galleries, 1991-92, cat. 42, illus. (label on the reverse) Reference Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 37, cat. 17, illus. Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 56-57, illus. pl. 36 Bridget Whitelaw, The Art of Frederick McCubbin, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1991, pp. 6, 18, 104-5, 135, illus. The Art of Frederick McCubbin Of all the Australian impressionist painters, McCubbin - for his images of pioneering pastoral life - is the most recognised and well loved. From Lost of 1886 and A Bush Burial, 1890, to The Pioneer of 1904 and here in Evening in the Bush, his great achievement was to tell stories set in the Australian landscape with both a contemporary and a timeless relevance. Evening in the Bush was painted, like The Pioneer, at Macedon, where McCubbin completed his largest and most lusciously painterly impressionist canvases in the later years of his career. McCubbin was born in Melbourne in 1855 and studied, whilst also working, at the National Gallery of Victoria's school of art. From the mid-1880s he joined Tom Roberts and others on outdoor painting excursions and camps in the still rural outskirts of Melbourne: at Box Hill, Hawthorn, Mentone, Blackburn and sometimes around Heidelberg with the younger Arthur Streeton. He also became a very popular drawing master at the Gallery School. McCubbin remained in Melbourne, tied by his growing family and teaching duties, when most of the other 'Heidelberg School' artists departed for Sydney or Europe in the 1890s. However he kept up with international art trends through extensive reading - his nickname amongst his artist friends was 'the Prof' - and on his one visit to Europe was especially excited by the light and colour of J. M. W. Turner and Monet. In 1901 McCubbin and his wife Annie purchased a property at Mount Macedon which they named 'Fontainebleau', after the forest outside Paris where Millet, Corot and their plein-air confreres had worked in the earlier nineteenth century. The rambling garden and surrounding bushland were to provide settings for many paintings. As his son, Alexander, once explained, 'Macedon meant that Frederick McCubbin was left to work undisturbed. He could develop his art in his own fashion, without being distracted by the hostile and friendly theories of other artists. He, therefore, commenced to work with increasing vigor, entering undoubtedly upon the most fertile...period of his life'.(1) The theme of the herdsman, wending his way home at day's end, has a long pedigree in the history of western art: from Medieval 'labours of the months', to Claude Lorraine, Samuel Palmer and J. F. Millet. In Australia, both McCubbin and Tom Roberts were already renowned for their images of rural workers - shearers, drovers, timber-getters and so on. Here in Evening in the Bush McCubbin depicts a distinctly Australian herdsman, evoking pioneering life amidst heroic sentinel eucalyptus trees. The composition, with its framing trees and peaceful rural theme, is quite classical. However, the technique is adventurous. The entire canvas shimmers with colour, layer upon layer of pigment and translucent glaze creating a luscious web of pinks and blues, green and gold. The central group is subsumed into the landscape and indeed into the very paint. McCubbin believed that a painting should affect the spectator's emotions by its poetry and truthfulness. In later works such as Violet and Gold and here in Evening in the Bush, completed after his return from Europe, his stylistic innovations were balanced by increasing simplicity in his choice of subject. Evening in the Bush is one of his most poetic works, and arguably the most important and beautiful of his paintings still outside a public collection.
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