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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Fine Australian & International Art
• Sale Date:
  21 Nov 2016 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  14
• Lot Description:
  William Delafield Cook (Jnr)
  (1936-2015)
  (A Sofa with Cushions on Top), 1969
  charcoal on paper
  79 x 130 cm
  signed and dated lower left: W.Delafield Cook '69
  § - Resale Royalty of 5% will be applied to the hammer price of this work.
• Provenance:
  Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne; Private Collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above circa 1980; Australian and International Paintings, Christie's, Melbourne, 19 April 2005, lot no. 4; The Australian Art Collection of Sandra Powell & Andrew King, Mossgreen Auctions, Melbourne, 19 March 2014, lot no. 21; The Eric & Jacquie Selwood Collection, Sydney
• References:
  D. Hart, William Delafield Cook, Sydney, 1998, fig. 11, p. 67 (illustrated)
• Notes:
  (This drawing is also known as A Settee with Three Cushions on Top) William Delafield Cook's approach to composition as a painter of heightened realism, involves a distillation of acute observation wherein a subject is isolated and detailed, seemingly frozen in time as in a photograph, while also being endowed with a tension and drama that draws on aspects of filmmaking and editing. His close focus and protracted concentration on an object or a landscape feature, invests the subject with an intensity that enables it to become almost surreal. While his subjects are realistic, familiar and at times ordinary, under Delafield Cook's rigorous inspection and detailing they take on a wider and more ambiguous context, becoming invested with an almost 'metaphysical significance'.1 Such is the case with the charcoal drawing, A Sofa with Cushions on Top, 1969, where the hero of the composition is not only the couch, but the cushions that are animated by their indentations and the rippling effect of the fabric patterning. Moreover, the imprint of humans who have sat on the sofa and adjusted the cushions is still palpably evident and this human presence - implied rather than seen - is characteristic throughout the artist's oeuvre. It is this suggestion of a wider context that makes Delafield Cook's work so compelling, as Marina Vaisey has commented, 'The conflict, the tension is also apparent between moments of stillness that he commands; and the implication that stillness always contains for movement'.2 A Sofa with Cushions on Top belongs to a group of contŽ and charcoal drawings that Delafield Cook produced in the late 1960s of pieces of furniture in the West Hill house in Putney, London where he lived with his family. The desire to work with black and white was conceived from his admiration for the work of the photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot (1800 -1877), whose home Lacock Abbey, was located not far from the Bath Academy of Art where Cook studied painting and photography (1960-62). He noted later that he had wanted, not only "to assume the manner of a photographer of 1840 but also to get something of the quality of the prints. I love that granular texture of the calotypes. That was Henry Fox Talbot's thing - using paper as a negative so that when you contact-print it you get the texture of the paper itself slightly distressing the image. That blurred, fuzzy, textured image I tried to get in these charcoal drawings".3 William Delafield Cook was born in 1936 in Melbourne, where his grandfather, William Delafield Cook senior had been an artist associated with the leading painters of the plein-air movement. After attending art school at Caulfield and RMIT, he was awarded an Italian Scholarship that enabled him to study in Rome for two years (1959-60); after which he studied painting and photography at the Bath Academy, Corsham. Having settled in Putney, London with his wife Sally Bovington, he and the family spent the next 50 years living between Australia and London. His highly prized, meticulous landscape paintings are almost entirely Australian scenes, but painted in the UK. Frances Lindsay AM 1 Graeme Sturgeon, 'William Delafield Cook', Art and Australia, April-June 1976, p.345 2 Marina Vaisey, Introduction, William Delafield Cook Mid-career Survey, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 4 June - 19 July, 1987, p.8 3 Deborah Hart, Artist Statement in, William Delafield Cook, Craftsman House, 1998, p. 66
• Estimate:
  A$12,000 - 18,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.