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Lot #8 - Conrad Martens

  • Auction House:
    Mossgreen
  • Sale Name:
    The Alan & Margaret Hickinbotham Collection
  • Sale Date:
    25 Jun 2017 ~ 2pm (Australian Central Standard Time)
  • Lot #:
    8
  • Lot Description:
    Conrad Martens
    (1801-1878)
    Glenrock [Ascham School], Darling Point, 1855
    watercolour
    45 x 65 cm
    signed and dated lower right: C Martens 1855
  • Provenance:
    Commissioned by Mrs. Smith of Glenrock, 20 March 1855, 20 guineas; Thirty Victoria Street Gallery, Sydney
  • Exhibited:
    A Selection of Paintings and Prints, Thirty Victoria Street, Sydney, Summer 1974 (label attached verso)
  • References:
    A Selection of Paintings and Prints, Thirty Victoria Street, Sydney, 1974 (illustrated), (unpaged)
  • Notes:
    Related Works: There are two related drawings by Martens in the Mitchell and Dixson collections, (refs. ML V*/Sp.Coll./Martens/24 and DGD7, f. 4). Conrad Martens, a founding father of Australian art, was the pre-eminent landscape painter of Colonial Sydney and his work is synonymous with early Australian Romanticism and the Picturesque. He achieved fame and recognition from the moment he landed in New South Wales; he even enjoyed posthumous succèss d’estime for over a century. However, the art of Martens – together with that of his contemporaries, Louis Bouvelot, Nicholas Chevalier and Eugene von Guérard – suffered from critical neglect in mid-twentieth century historiography. There was a time when it seemed as though Australian art history began with the Heidelberg School. Once researchers began to make enquiries about the early painters, Martens et al., were subject to overdue revisionism that re-established their important place in Australian art history. Marten’s association with Australia was a rather unlikely and fortuitous one. Son of a German merchant and diplomat, he was born in London in 1801. The arts were evidently fostered in the domestic environment since he and his two brothers became professional artists. In London, he received a rigorous academic grounding under the instruction of one of the most recognised masters of the time, Copley Fielding. After leaving Fielding’s studio, he singled out Turner, Danby, Stanfield and Cox amongst his greatest influences. ‘Cox above all’, he once recalled, ‘for his wonderful faithfulness in colour, form and texture.’1 Following his father’s death in 1816, Martens moved to Devonshire where he refined his draughtsmanship for another sixteen years. In 1832, for reasons unknown, he boarded the Hyacinth, arriving soon after in Montevideo. When Martens learned that Augustus Earle, the official artist aboard the Beagle, was too ill to carry out his duties, Martens jumped at the opportunity to be the vessel’s topographer. There, for two years, he worked alongside Charles Darwin, filling several sketchbooks with coastal vistas and other curiosities that caught his eye and imagination. His earlier academic instruction was finally being consolidated by experience and access to new and fascinating subject matter. Following a reorganisation and consolidation of the Beagle and its companion ship, the Adventure, Martens was left unemployed. In 1834, he sailed for the South Seas from Valparasio via Fiji and New Zealand, before finally disembarking in Sydney Harbour in April 1835. Although this adventuring wayfarer could not have imagined it at the time, he was to spend the next forty-three years in Australia, becoming its most popular, fashionable and respected artists and art teachers. Unlike the countless amateur painters and sketchers that were deported to the Colony before him, Martens docked into Sydney Harbour a free man. The Australian art market, however, was in its embryonic state, so commissions were few. Part of the problem was in the numbers – in 1836 the non-convict settler population was less than fifty thousand.2 Art was not exactly thriving economy and there was little patronage for a professional artist. A recession in the mid-1840s compounded the situation, relegating the purchase of art as an even more extravagant luxury. Nevertheless, Martens persisted. He soon moved in the right circles of the gentry and became the most sought after artist and teacher by the Ladies and Gentlemen of the colony. In the 1850s, parallel to von Guérard in the southern colony, Marten’s embarked upon an itinerant journey across Country New South Wales, seeking and obtaining commissions to paint homesteads and estates. Lavish villas, which needed something in form of visual decoration, were now being erected. One of the earliest and most distinguished properties Martens ever painted was Glenrock Homestead (since demolished) and Dower House (site of the present Ascham School in Edgecliff) and Ecclesbourne (since demolished). He was probably introduced to its owners, the prominent Smith family, through his patrons, the Morts, who lived not far from Glenrock. It is likely that he was recommended as an art teacher first since he gave a three-month course to Penelope Whistler Smith – a distant relative of James McNiel Whistler.3 Glenrock, seen here on the far right of composition, was a single-storied villetta, built in 1836 by importer and merchant, Thomas Smith Snr and his wife Penelope Whistler, the later responsible for the commission of the present work.4 In the centre of the watercolour, with its Gothic Revival spires, we can easily identify Dower House, the sandstone home built by Thomas Smith Jnr. for his widowed mother Penelope, where she lived until 1859, before returning permanently to England. To the far left of the composition, covered in a dense bushland, we can identify the third and final instalment built by the Smiths, Ecclesbourne. The view is taken from Octagon, once the guard house and thought be the oldest building in Darling Point (now also part of Ascham) and shows Ocean Street in the Background. The land was subsequently subdivided and in the 1870s, and John Marks demolished the original Glenrock, where he built Glenrock II and Fiona. These, together with Dower House survive as important buildings in the shape of Ascham School. The Smiths were evidently keen to have visual records of their founding home, and commissioned another notable artist, George Edwards Peacock, to paint two views, of and from, Glenrock, (Mitchell Library, Sydney).5 Penelope herself produced a number of sketches of the house (Mitchell Library, Sydney). None, however compare with Marten’s rendition. In it, he manages to display, with a fine finish, the growing prosperity of the Smith family in the Sydney environs, whilst maintaining the idyllic and rural charm of the domestic setting. Most importantly, this is not simply a ‘house portrait’ but a work of light and shadow, with a sweeping sky, without doubt a subtle homage Turner and the Romantic School that he adored. The work, still possibly in its original frame, perhaps by Edwin Balwin who was Martens’ preferred frame maker in the 1850s, is here offered for the first time at auction and remains an important pictorial clue in describing Sydney’s early settler history. We are grateful to Elizabeth Ellis for her assistance in cataloguing this work. Petrit Abazi 1 Conrad Martens in a lecture he gave in 1856 titled ‘Lecture upon Landscape Painting’, cited in Lionel Lindsay, Conrad Martens: the man and his art, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1968, p. 2; 2 Total population was at around 77,393 from 1836 data, see Australian Bureau of Statistics, 3105.0.65.001; 3 Susanna de Vries-Evans, Conrad Martens on the Beagle and in Australia, Pandanus Press, Brisbane, 1993, p. 131; 4 There is an entry in Martens’ Account Book (Dixson Library, State Library of NSW, MS 142, p. 106) for this painting: ‘March 20, 1855 View [of Glenrock] [sold to] Mrs Smith [for] 20 guineas’. Elizabeth Ellis, in e-mail correspondence with the author.l 5 The Mitchell work was previously attributed to Martens, but has now rightfully been ascribed to Peacock
  • 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.



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