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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Important Art
• Sale Date:
  20 Nov 2017 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  13
• Lot Description:
  Arthur Streeton
  (1867-1943)
  Wollstonecraft, (1914)
  oil on board
  17 x 62 cm
  signed lower left: A. Streeton
• Provenance:
  Mr & Mrs Arthur Baillieu, Melbourne; Thence by descent; Mr. Everard Baillieu, Melbourne; Mrs. Irene Chartres ; Mrs. Sarah Kirkham; Australian Paintings, Christie's, Sydney, 5 October 1971, lot 119 (illustrated) as ‘Wollstonecroft’; Sir Leon and Lady Trout Collection, Brisbane; The Collection of Sir Leon and Lady Trout, Christie’s, Brisbane, 6 June 1989, lot 169 (illustrated), catalogued as ‘circa 1913-14’; Private collection, Queensland
• Exhibited:
  (Probably) Royal Art Society of New South Wales, Sydney, August-September 1914; (Probably) Fine Art Society Galleries, Melbourne, September 1914; Master Works from the Collection of Sir Leon and Lady Trout, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 21 September–21 November 1977, cat. no. 58
• References:
  Arthur Streeton, The Arthur Streeton Catalogue, Osboldstone & Co., Melbourne, 1935, cat. no. 507, pp. 59 (illustrated), 125; Bettina MacAulay, Master Works from the Collection of Sir Leon and Lady Trout, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1977, p. 21
• Notes:
  In 1914, Arthur Streeton left London and embarked on an eight-month Australian sojourn. The brief homecoming was, in most part, a successful one. He compressed a great deal of work in that time, staging four solo exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney. One hundred and seventy European pictures were exhibited in his first Melbourne show, with another twelve Sydney Harbour scenes added into his August and September adaptations. His guest appearance in his native land, following seven years in England, injected a fresh dose of income and publicity for the doyen of Australian landscape painting. In a letter to his wife Nora, he wrote how Australia was ‘full of money’ and that ‘so far the war news hasn’t upset people too much.’1 He sold ‘many pictures’2 to private collectors and galleries, including Corfe Castle (1909) to the National Gallery of Victoria and Malham Cove (circa 1911) to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.3 This commercial success, however, only lasted as long as the peace did in Europe. The crack of war in August quickly curtailed art sales. One commentator, after recognising Streeton’s initial success, noted how, ‘since the war began there is no sale of pictures. Dr. Gill, of Melbourne, who has been the agent for so many artists – and there is no better salesman in Australia – says that things are not too good, and that during the past three weeks he has not sold a single picture … When it is over’, to end with a touch of ambitious optimism, ‘he will make enough boodle to have a trip round the world.’4 The war did not end by mid-September as Streeton or others had predicted. Amidst growing anxiety from being away from his wife and son in uncertain times, he left Australia as quickly as he could. By the time his ship sailed, Streeton had produced a small but noteworthy body of work representing landscapes around Mt Buffalo in Victoria, the Blue Mountains in New South Wales as well as a new series of Sydney Harbour views. Arthur Streeton and Sydney Harbour, it could be said, enjoyed a symbiotic relationship; while Streeton built his artistic reputation on those deep blue waters and chain of leafy headlands, his pictures promoted and popularised the area in the collective Australian imagination. Of course, the geo-iconography of Sydney Harbour had a well-established tradition in Australian art history. Even before Streeton was born, Conrad Martens, with his ‘colonial eye’, recorded the area more exhaustively than any other artists of the nineteenth century. However, it is the ‘blue and gold’ Naturalist works of Streeton that captured the foreshore more characteristically, and consistently, than any of his predecessors, or followers.5 His many views of the harbour throughout his career are important snapshots that capture the change and growth of the city. The rapid development evidently bothered him somewhat. In 1907 he found Cremorne ‘still wild & thick as ever & one can paint all day & never see a soul.’6 However, by 1926 he noted the pace at which Sydney’s coastline was transforming when he grumbled, ‘…lord, how the staring white flats have cropped up in 2 years time: it’s a hardship to one in revealing the beauty of Sydney.’7 Yet, around 1914 he identified several spots along the harbour that struck the right balance between rugged bushland and a realistic depiction a city heading toward modernity. He spent most of the cooler months of 1914 in Melbourne and Sydney. ‘It is midwinter’, he wrote to Nora’, ‘the most perfect warm days, gorgeous light and colour everywhere.’8 This milder weather would have been met with enthusiasm by the artist who preferred painting en plein air. He rested his easel at various points of the harbour, capturing nature in its hourly moods. The present work is taken from a high vantage point near Greenwich peninsula, looking east toward Wollstonecraft in the near middle-ground where Federation villas have sprouted. Waverton and Blues Point reserve weave and recede into the horizon, covered by the North Shore skyline and chimney smoke, all crowned with a sliver of a blazing purple sunset sky that sets the tone for the whole composition to great pictorial effect. Despite the hints of modernisation and maritime activities, the water is as still and calm as Streeton painted it twenty years earlier. The ‘impression’ is painted in Streeton’s distinct network of broad, broken and squiggly brushwork. The panoramic-type layout of the panel, one of Streeton’s trademark formats, is entirely suitable for the area, giving a broader view of the harbour that would otherwise be omitted. When Streeton exhibited these works in Melbourne that year, one review noted how ‘the atmosphere and the colour [represents] the artist in his happiest and least studied attitude to the subjects in hand. Streeton is always vigorous but the vigour of these panels, suggesting a highly trained coordination of brain and hand, is something to wonder at.’9 Wollstonecraft 1914, like the rest of the series, may have been painted quickly, but they are not hurried sketches. They remain amongst the most memorable and convincing impressions we have of Sydney Harbour. Wollstonecraft, 1914 comes with a distinguished provenance record. It was first owned by his old friend and lifelong patron Arthur Sydney Baillieu (father of modern arts patron Sunday Reed). It was probably purchased by Arthur in 1914 when it was first shown in Melbourne. Streeton told Nora how ‘the Baillieu brothers & their wives are buying well.’10 It passed down the family and was eventually purchased by Sir Leon and Lady Trout and exhibited in at the Queensland Art Gallery before their collection was sold in the historic Christie’s sale of 1989. The work has remained in the same collection since then. We are honoured to have been entrusted with the sale of this outstanding work by Arthur Streeton. Petrit Abazi 1 Arthur Streeton, in a letter to Nora Streeton, dated 2 August 1914, cited in Ann Galbally and Anne Gray, Letters from Smike: the letters of Arthur Streeton 1890-1943, p.135; 2 Art Notes’, The Mail, Adelaide, 25 October 1914, p. 4; 3 ‘Art Gallery Purchase’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 23 September 1914, p. 14; 4 ‘Art Notes’, The Mail, Adelaide, 25 October 1914, p. 4; 5 In 1919, Lionel Lindsay defined Streeton's harbour paintings as 'pictures patent' – as though he had discovered the place and made it his own. Cited in Mary Eagle The Oil Paintings of Arthur Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, p. 155; 6 In a letter to Tom Roberts, cited in Robert Croll, Smike to Bulldog: Letters from Sir Arthur Streeton to Tom Roberts, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1946, p. 90; 7 Cited in Christopher Wray, Arthur Streeton: Painter of Light, Jacaranda Wily, Brisbane, 1993, p. 165; 8 Arthur Streeton, referring to Melbourne weather, in a letter to Nora Streeton, dated 2 August 1914, cited in Ann Galbally and Anne Gray, Letters from Smike: the letters of Arthur Streeton 1890-1943, p.133; 9 ‘Miss Stella Roland, Hostess, Punch, Melbourne, 15 October 1914, p. 35; 10 Op. cit., Galbally and Gray, p.133
• Estimate:
  A$120,000 - 180,000
• 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.