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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The Peter Elliott Collection
• Sale Date:
  30 Aug 2015 ~ 6pm - Part 1 (Lots 1 - 193)
  31 Aug 2015 ~ 11am - Part 2 (Lots 194 - 340)
  31 Aug 2015 ~ 2pm - Part 3 (Lots 341 - 511)
  01 Sep 2015 ~ 10.30am - Part 4 (Lots 512 - 754) and 2pm - Part 5 (Lots 755 - 1013)
• Lot #:
  13
• Lot Description:
  Brett Whiteley
  (1939-1992)
  The Blue Garden 1975
  oil and watercolour on canvas
  75.5 x 61 cm
  stamped artist’s monogram lower right; signed, dated and titled verso: brett whiteley 1975, ‘THE BLUE GARDEN’
• Provenance:
  Acquired from the artist
• Exhibited:
  Brett Whiteley - Thirty Six Looks at Four Sights on Three Themes - Recent paintings, drawings and carvings, Bonython Gallery, Sydney, 1975, cat. no. 17, illus. cover in colour; Brett Whiteley - Recent Interiors, Still lives, Windowscapes, Self Portraits, Sculptures and Two Ceramics, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 1976, cat. no. 20, illus. (exhibition label on reverse); Up Close and Personal: Works from the Collection of Dr Peter Elliott AM, S.H Ervin Gallery, Sydney, August-September 2011; Mas
• References:
  Gavin Fry, The Peter Elliott Collection of Australian Art, The Beagle Press 2013, p. 123, cat. no. 122
• Notes:
  Brett Whiteley’s The Blue Garden of 1975 hangs like a screen before the viewer’s eyes. It is the “moonlight sonata” of Australian art – a soft mood matched with a soft tint. The varied washes of ultramarine blue (the artist’s favourite colour) have been thinly applied over the entire canvas to capture a particular “time of day” ambience. The image of the waxing crescent moon in the upper right of the canvas throws an even and shadow-less light upon an enclosed garden scene. The domestic garden is bordered by a brick fence that divides it from an adjacent property; lightly outlined clouds hang over the somnolent scene and the entire surface of the canvas shows signs of rapid execution. It is as though Whiteley was struck by the calmness and uncluttered charm of a night time view from an upper story window.  Whiteley captures in the simple haiku-like restraint of his The Blue Garden of 1975 the almost mesmeric soothing silence about them.  The centrally positioned window and small sections of its two adjacent windows are suggested through a broadly applied aubergine coloured over-painting. This highly uncommon dark tone is repeated in the sky and clouds in the painting’s upper register. This over-painting has the effect of eroding any sense of recessional perspective or pictorial depth, so much so that the scene seems to “hang” on the surface of the window’s pane of glass – it is as though, in his mind’s eye, Whiteley has transferred the exterior scene onto the glass surface of the interior window. The effect of this “compression” of the scene, and of the exterior and interior, lends to the painting the non-recessional qualities of a visual veneer – a type of gossamer-like suspended image. Australian art has very few night landscape paintings; those that do exist are usually based upon literary and poetic themes or are historical and ethnographic documentations – none have anything like the personally sequestered and poetically inflected qualities found in Whiteley’s pensive The Blue Garden of 1975. 
• Estimate:
  A$200,000 - 300,000
• 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.