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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Fine Australian Art
• Sale Date:
  28 Oct 2014 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  11
• Lot Description:
  Joy St. Clair Hester
  (1920-1960)
  Lovers with Rose circa 1947
  watercolour, pastel and Chinese ink on paper board
  53 x 36.5 cm
  signed 'Joy Hester' lower left; bears Tolarno Galleries label verso
• Provenance:
  Private Collection, Melbourne
• Notes:
  Joy Hester holds an important place in Australian art history. Hester was a founding member of the Contemporary Art Society, which was of critical importance in Australia's modern art movement. She worked within a circle of artists, mentored by John and Sunday Reed at Heide. Hester's work has been widely exhibited and the subject of numerous publications, catalogues and is included in national, state, regional and university art collections. Hester completed two series of works on the theme of love - the Love series (1949) and the Lovers series (1955-56). While Lovers with Rose has been dated c. 1947, Janine Burke noted that Hester rarely dated her works and dating has therefore always been approximated based on stylistic evolutions or the recollections of friends and family.1 This work is most likely associated with the earlier Love series. The year 1947 was a pivotal one for Hester who both left her first husband, the artist Albert Tucker, for the artist and poet, Gray Smith, and discovered she had Hodgkin's Disease, which led to her premature death thirteen years later. While the male figure in Lovers with Rose is assuredly Smith, Hester frequently used his likeness to express particular psychological or emotional states and not necessarily as a literal portrait. However, when Hester began the Love series in 1949, it '...introduced a new level of poetic intimacy that was directly associated with her love for Gray Smith.'3 Hester is also known for drawing prominent, almost hypnotic, primitive eyes. In fact, she said in relation to the stalk eyes she depicted around 1945 that the eyes were the most important starting point for her and in 1947, Hester began her Faces series, which focussed particularly on the subjects' eyes. In Love II, c. 1950 the figure of Smith is portrayed almost identically to that in Lovers with Rose, notably the lines of the head, left eye and ear. Around August 1947, Hester wrote to Sunday Reed, 'How can I love Gray when he is me...He is the 'man' of me and I am the 'woman' of him...part man, part woman...It's like a puzzle piecing oneself together.'4 Another point of interest in this work is the rose, a time-honoured symbol for love. It is believed the rose within the painting is the same symbol of the Joy Hester etched glass panels either side of the front door of Heide I. In 1954 Sunday asked Joy to design a rose pattern for new side lights around the door, replacing the old Victorian ones. Rosa Mutablis, a China rose, was a recurrent theme painted, written and talked about by the artist's throughout the Heide years. Dr Shireen Huda 1 Burke also noted that Hester did not use Chinese ink before 1947. Janine Burke, Joy Hester, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1981, 'Notes to the Catalogue' 2 Kelly Gellatly, Leave no space for yearning: the art of Joy Hester, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Victoria, 2001, p. 51 3 Deborah Hart, Joy Hester and friends, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2001, pp. 69-70 4 Quoted in op. cit., p. 70
• Estimate:
  A$30,000 - 40,000
• 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.