This was in line with the subject matter which included a drawing of a man on a horse with a whip chasing an emu. The buyer, Blue Mountains, NSW dealer Vincent Day, said he was extremely pleased with the offering although he had to compete with other interested parties (including a mystery buyer with a big bushy beard and a hat approaching a topper) and another bidder to secure it. The estimate was $2000 to $3000. Institutions had been alerted to their presence after not knowing over a long period what to do with the drawings.
The seller had despaired at doing so and was very happy with the result, said Lawson's Annandale's managing director Mr Martin Farrah. The drawings were fully catalogued, each initialled lower left A.G.B. The provenance is said to have been their discovery in Bath through civil engineering channels in line with Ball's own occupation. Mr Day said he had purchased them in conjunction with his brother Christopher Day who was expected to list at least one in his impending summer catalogue exhibition.
The drawings included the outback homestead, kangaroo nesting and indigenous subjects which Ball would have been able to have observed first hand in his occupation as a civil engineer. According to Design and Art and Australia Online (www.daao.org.au): "Like so many artists of the period, Ball's job as a civil engineer allowed him to travel throughout South Australia recording scenes of outback life and the Australian landscape.
He was a sketcher, explorer and civil engineer, and was born on 7 April 1821 in Dublin, third son of Major Benjamin Ball of the 40th Regiment of Foot. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. Early in 1839 he came to Sydney where he practised his profession of civil engineer for eight years. Ball's lifestyle was bohemian and somewhat nomadic, unlike his elder brother, the Right Honourable J.T. Ball, whose distinguished career included the position of Lord Chancellor of Ireland."
According to the Days' own website, Dayfineart.com, Ball exhibited with the Society of Arts at Adelaide in 1859 and 1860. Many of his sketches were reproduced as photographs by Townsend Duryea and G.J. Freeman in the 1860s and early 1870s and apparently sold well.
Notably, a photograph of a pencil drawing of the death of the Victorian explorer Robert O'Hara Burke carrying these initials and titled 'When I am Dead, Place My Revolver in My Hand and Leave Me Unburied as I Lie' (1871, Mitchell Library) was included in Duryea's Adelaide Album (1866), otherwise filled with photographic views of Adelaide.
The offering comprised more than the total of eight works listed by the Australian Art Sales Digest that have been sold since 1970, of which the highest price attached to a 40 by 60 cm pencil on paper, Aboriginal Family Group estimated at $3,000-4,000 and which sold for $4600 by Deutscher~Menzies, at the 19th and 20th Century Australian & International Paintings, Sculpture and Works on Paper, Melbourne, sale of 10/08/1998.
