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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The Alan & Margaret Hickinbotham Collection
• Sale Date:
  25 Jun 2017 ~ 2pm (Australian Central Standard Time)
• Lot #:
  3
• Lot Description:
  Walter Withers
  (1854-1914)
  In Pallid Moon, 1905
  oil on canvas
  39 x 45 cm
  signed lower right, Walter Withers; signed and dated lower left, Walter Withers ’05; inscribed on verso, In Pallid Moon by Walter Withers
• Provenance:
  By 1975 Miss Margaret Paton, Canterbury, Victoria; Thirty Victoria Street Gallery, Potts Point (label verso) ; Private collection, Adelaide
• Notes:
  In 1905 when Walter Withers painted In Pallid Moon he and his wife Fanny had settled permanently in Eltham with their five children, having purchased three years earlier, a small weatherboard house, ‘Southernwood’, on two and a half acres. Withers found inspiration in the local district for his lyrical, atmospheric paintings, focusing on the shifting seasons and weather with a definite predilection for winter and stormy skies, and on the liminal period of dusk and dawn.1 This transitory moment is evoked in Withers’s In Pallid Moon with its restricted, concentration of tones from a palette of mauves, purples and earth colours, applied with deft passages and strokes of paint. The overall effect is to blend the elements and consequently individual components, such as the man within the shed, emerge only gradually. The interest in nocturnes and in particular the effect of the rising moon, was also a major theme for other Australian Impressionist painters working in the Heidelberg district, as evidenced by Moonrise 1894 by David Davies and Moonrise Heidelberg 1900 by Emmanuel Phillips Fox (both Collection National Gallery of Victoria). Born in England, Walter Withers arrived in Melbourne in 1883, and despite the fact that his father hoped that moving to Australia would put an end to his aspiration to be an artist, Withers enrolled in evening classes at the National Gallery School where he be-friended artists Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin. He became part of the group of artists associated with the Heidelberg area and the artists’ camps that they established for plein-air painting aimed at capturing tonal values and the effects of light and atmosphere in the landscape. It was at Heidelberg, and later Eaglemont and Eltham, where Withers painted his most poetic works depicting the seasons and moods of nature. His paintings thus provide a charming re-engagement with the rural characteristics of the environs of outer Melbourne during this period. Walter Withers and Frederick McCubbin became close friends, both settling into family life, teaching, and contributing to the art community in Melbourne; with Withers serving for 23 years on the Council of the Victorian Artists’ Society. He had travelled back to England in 1887 to marry Fanny Flinn, after which they moved to Paris where Withers enrolled in classes for six months at the Académie Julian, where fellow Australian artists, Emmanuel Phillips Fox and Tudor St. George Tucker were studying. Withers and Fanny later visited Étaples, the fishing town on the Picardy coast, which at this time was the ‘Australian artists’ colony’ in France.2 Thus, when they returned to Melbourne in 1889 Withers was well-acquainted with the work of the French Impressionist artists, and was a good fit with the other members of the Australian Impressionists, the so-called ‘Heidelberg School’ and their program of painting directly from nature and capturing its fleeting effects. Frances Lindsay AM 1 For Withers’ history see Andrew Mackenzie, ‘Withers, Walter Herbert (1854-1914) ‘, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 12, 1990, MUP. See also Anne Humffray ‘Tranquillity and Tempest: the paintings of Walter Withers’ in C.B.Christensen ed.,The Gallery on Eastern Hill, The Victorian Artists’ Society Centenary. Victorian Artists’ Society, Melbourne, 1970; 2 Elena Taylor, Australian Impressionists in France, National Gallery of Victoria, 2013. p. 17
• Estimate:
  A$30,000 - 50,000
• 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.