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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 #:
  18
• Lot Description:
  Godfrey Clive Miller
  (1893-1964)
  Old Houses, Paddington 1954
  oil on canvas on board
  43.5 x 60.5 cm
  initialled lower right: GCM; bears Darlinghurst Galleries, Sydney certificate of authenticity verso
• Provenance:
  Artarmon Galleries, Sydney
• Exhibited:
  Godfrey Miller, Back Room, Darlinghurst Galleries, 1967; Godfrey Miller Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1996, toured to National Gallery of Victoria, cat. no. 45; Up Close and Personal: Works from the Collection of Dr Peter Elliott AM, S.H Ervin Gallery, Sydney, August-September 2011
• References:
  Deborah Edwards, Godfrey Miller, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1966, p. 66, illus. p. 54 (colour); Gavin Fry, The Peter Elliott Collection of Australian Art, The Beagle Press 2013, p. 49, cat. no. 20
• Notes:
  Godfrey Miller’s influential place in Australian art is well established. His dedicated and inspiring teaching at East Sydney Technical College, now The National Art School, still stays fresh the minds of former students.  Miller was an extremely modest and intellectual man who was a member of both the British Institute of Philosophy and the Anthroposophical Society. His self-effacing discernment meant that he often worked on a painting for years and he did not exhibit until 1952.  Miller held only four solo exhibitions and this work is one of only forty paintings exhibited in his lifetime. Miller’s Old Houses, Paddington is typically refined and belongs in the company of important paintings held in private collections and public institutions, such as: Madonna 1962 (former Grundy Collection); Unity in Blue 1952 (Art Gallery of New South Wales); Summer 1959 (Private Collection, Sydney); Figure Group 1957 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) and Still Life 1952 (National Gallery of Victoria). Miller’s Old Houses, Paddington uses a domestic landscape as a starting point for a prismatic reconstitution of its colouristic effects. It is as though Miller considered the environment as the visible emanation of the invisible force of Nature – his semi-mystical view often, as in the present painting, combined Cezannesque colours and tones with Theosophical theories about colour “shapes” and wave lengths. A view of trees and a domestic dwelling was for Miller not a scene to be recorded but more like a “symptom” of Nature, that was to be first recognised and read and then understood. For him, the essential aim of the true artist was to “elevate” a view through an artistic structure that “lifted” it from the mundane to the arcane – that is, from the realm of the ordinary to the realm of the extraordinary. Miller considered the artist to be a type of human antenna who “read” signals and recorded them in an almost seismographic fashion. Always, with him, the quivering brush and the delicate touch responded to the mind more than to the eye. One senses all of this in Miller’s Old Houses, Paddington. The painting’s rectilinear forms echo the angles of the rooflines; the green boughs bend in unison; chimney smoke blends into clouds and the lower register of earth tones mimics the colours of the mid-ground houses. All is caught in a harmony of parts that act in unison to produce a shimmering surface - he would have called it “symphonic”. 
• Estimate:
  A$40,000 - 60,000
• 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.