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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Fine Australian & International Art
• Sale Date:
  29 Aug 2016 ~ 6.30pm - Part 1 (Lots 1 - 78)
  30 Aug 2016 ~ 2.30pm - Part 2 (Lots 79 - 328)
• Lot #:
  65
• Lot Description:
  Jessie Traill
  (1881-1967)
  (Logging) 1913
  oil on canvas on board
  56 x 81.5 cm
  signed and dated lower right: Jessie Traill 1913
• Provenance:
  The Artist's Studio; Elizabeth Rankin Collection - the artist's niece; Leonard Joel, Australian, British, New Zealand & European Historical and Contemporary Paintings, etc., Melbourne, 12/4/1989, lot no. 120, (illustrated); Private collection, Melbourne
• Notes:
  Jessie Traill's highly accomplished Logging of 1913 has been held in only two collections since it was created one hundred and three years ago. The Brighton-born Traill was one of Australia's most extraordinary women artists. Like her teacher, the famous Frederick McCubbin and her life-long friend Tom Roberts, Traill harboured a deep and poetically inflected lifelong love of the Australian bush. Emeritus Professor Sasha Grishin perceptively called her "one of the great Australian artists of the 20th Century". Both he and Roger Butler, the Senior Curator of Prints at the National Gallery of Australia, have quietly championed her work for decades.1 Justifiably, there are as many as one hundred and two works by Traill in the National Collection in Canberra. The present mid-career painting, Logging of 1913, was created when the artist was thirty-two in the year of her first solo exhibition in Melbourne just one year before she left to take on voluntary work during World War I - to help "Our Boys" as she called them. Logging of 1913, is a hallmark painting that provides a revealing insight into this remarkable woman's aesthetic leaning at a pivotal time in her life. The present work exemplifies Traill's two most characteristic pictorial attributes: those of poeticism and environmentalism. Firstly, the painting is of an Australian bush setting that is depicted in gossamer-like swathes of colouristic flourish, without any hint of flashiness or expressionistic flair. It is Australian Impressionism of a sort, but not the type that is Nationalistic or pastoralist in its pictorial features. This painting arises not from any distant observation, but rather from a lived-in, more poetically engaged interpretation of a semi-rural Australian landscape. Unlike many of the works of male artists of the time Traill's impressionistic bush scene is close-up, felt through and personal in its aesthetically dappled visual effects. It is suffused with lilting light and radiates personally felt sensation. Secondly, the scene is one of environmental lament. The foreground tree has been felled and lies ready for splitting - a log splitter stands by its charred stump. Lightning has damaged the tree; it seems riddled by termites and to have succumbed to a natural death. By contrast, the felled tree in the centre right background has died from strangulation by ringbarking - its fallen trunk lies bare; it's all but dead leaves hang in the last rosy flush of life before succumbing to an unnatural death. All is caught in that curious crisp stillness found only in the Australian Bush. Considered in this way Traill's Logging of 1913 is an allegory in paint. There is subtle meaning in this deeply contemplative visual feast of a painting - a meaning that speaks in a visual language that is direct yet softly spoken. Like most of Traill's best works, Logging 1913 is felt into life rather than observed into existence. Ken Wach 1 Grishin, S., Etcher saw Beauty in nature, industry, Canberra Times and Sydney Morning Herald, 23 March 2013
• Estimate:
  A$12,000 - 16,000
• 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.