In a private transaction the Art Gallery of NSW has purchased from Melbourne's Bridget McDonnell Gallery a large J H Carse oil painting of the NSW South Coast, Creek Scene, Tilba Tilba last on the market in 1998 for a sum thought to be in the vicinity of $55,000.
Garling (1806-1873) was a customs official and marine artist whose work has sold for considerably more than this (up to $66,528 at auction in London) while the later Carse (1850-1898) was an Anglo-Australian multi- prize winning artist authoritatively described in his lifetime as "the best artist in Australia".
Both artist's work sold especially well in the 1980s boom time (and Carse's for all but his late lifetime). The Carse just purchased was a prime time chef d'oeuvre from the still not recovered market's post eighties write-downs, and is thought to have been sold for about the unfulfilled estimates when it last appeared in public in 1998 at Deutscher-Menzies. The estimates were $50,000 to $60,000.
The Hobartville work (estimated at $6000 to $10,000) was from a small consignment of early watercolours and miniatures which had originally come down from Edward Cox, an early occupant of the villa which was one of the most ambitious houses of settlement in colonial NSW in the Hawkesbury area.
The property was built for William Cox Junior, one of the early members of a cattle grazing dynasty. Cox (1764-1837) oversaw road developments in the Blue Mountains.
It adds to the extensive collection of watercolours by Garling already in the collection thanks to its past collecting which was boosted by a bequest of author Jean Garling who died in 1998.
At the same auction the Mitchell also secured two watercolours from the same batch of work also relating to the Cox dynasty, which had branched out in Tasmania where they built the now National Trust protected property Clarendon and from which state they were recently consigned.
The portrait of William Cox, founder of Hobartville went for $38,000 plus premium (estimate $8000 to $12,000). The auctioneers, Leonard Joel had attributed the portrait to the miniature painter Frederick Buck. The attribution, however, was withdrawn by an announcement to that effect before the sale.
The image was very similar to the portrait bought by the Mitchell Library at a Wemyss auction in Sydney in the 1990s, finally ordained as the important William Cox of Hobartville, not the older William of Clarendon. .
That Wemyss portrait sold for $16,825 and has been stated by the Mitchell to be an original of William Cox who arrived in the colony in 1800 and became magistrate at Hawkesbury in 1810, and not the older but lesser William Cox of Clarendon as at first thought.
The 9.5 by 7.5 cm framed miniature remains without a firm attribution as to the artist but there is seems no doubt about the sitter, just about when and under what circumstances it was painted. It appears to be a copy/replica/other version of a work already in the library. Miniatures have proven even bigger sleepers as Neville Healy showed when he bought Liotard's portrait of George III at the same auction house.
The Mitchell had no doubt that the image is of William Cox Junior, builder of historic "Hobartville" in NSW and therefore important to NSW.
Hobartville is a Francis Greenway-designed house near Windsor. A copy made in pastel by Herbert Beecroft for the Australasian Pioneers Club in the early 1900s has always had a label identifying the sitter as William Cox Junior.
The library, at the time of the Wemyss sale also had a photograph of a copy (or another version of the original it is difficult to tell which from the reproduction) identified as the same person and given by a family member some years ago.
With its latest purchase of the Carse, the Art Gallery of NSW has continued its acquisitive quest of colonial art that recently netted it the portrait of the young boy The Vagabond by Florence Fuller.
This is a very prospective area with the generational change in the art market relieving older collectors and dealers of their much loved stock while younger buyers, with no feeling for colonial and Victorian art chase the modern and contemporary.
J H Carse's Creek at Tilba Tilba an 1875 an oil on canvas 61 by 107 last appeared on the market earlier this year at Bridget McDonnell Gallery in Carlton, Victoria.
The Art Gallery of New South Wales confirmed this week that while the Carse is currently not on view it has been acquired for an undisclosed sum.
The painting has a good provenance being signed and dated 1875; Inscribed on reverse 'Tilba Tilba/J. H Carse artist/348 George Street/Sydney' and recorded as commissioned by the owners of the property of that name and coming down through the owners of the property until 1985.
It was shown at the Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition 1875, preparatory to the Philadelphia Exhibition 1876, Exhibition Buildings, Melbourne 1875, cat. 3089 and went on to win a first class certificate there. It was also exhibited at other major shows.
As a work of art and or a topographical record the painting might have been well at home in ant of several libraries and art museums in Australia.
Sad to say it did not find a buyer in any of its several appearances on the colonial art market. It was offered in a studio sale in 1876 and at auction in 1878. But he hung on to this chef d'ouevre obviously valuing it highly while his other paintings were not so sought after because he had departed from his more delicate Flemish technique that had appear to justify asking price of up to the then almighty sum of £30 each.
Natalie Wilson, curator of Australian and Pacific Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, told the Australian Art Sales Digest that it was thought the painting remained in the artist's possession until the 1880s or 90s when it reportedly was acquired by a Mr Richardson of Murawombie Station near Burke as payment to the artist for funds to buy alcohol.
Acquired in 1985 by the Tom Silver Gallery it went unsold at an estimate of $50,000 to $60,000 at Deutscher-Menzies on August 10, 1998.
Wilson said the oil was a striking example of Carse's landscape work of the 1870s. It had the “refinement and subtlety of colouration for which his finest works are known.”
It joins a painting of Burragorang Valley near Picton of 1879, donated in 1968 and has found a fitting home, Carse being in a B+ class of colonial artists who has played a now understated role in the development of taste in Australia.
The Australian Art Sales Digest records show that in recent times 369 works by Carse have been auctioned. He was much favoured by the collector George Cowlishaw whose auction dispersals set in motion the boom in the colonials under the aegis of Robert Bleakley in Sydney as he developed Sotheby's in Australia. The sale contained 88 Carses. Some are still in stock. Sydney dealer Edward Barkes bought 28 and has sold about half.
The colonial boom came to an end at the Dallhold sale in 1993. The discreet dealer Stephen Scheding had helped put the artists back on the map with an article in Art and Australia making him one of the most worthy “dug ups” of the boom time.
The acquisitions by the State Library of New South Wales and the Art Gallery of New South Wales might not have been made if Ron Radford were still at the National Gallery of Australia. He has recently retired. Both as director of the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of South Australia before that, he would not be defeated on works of the colonial period, in particular having been the man who purchased the Thomas Watling Early View of New South Wales for South Australia when it should have come to New South Wales.
A further indication of the action taking place in the art world outside Melbourne for works offered within it, is the sale of six large oils on card by James Cant which had been exhibited at the Berkeley Galleries in London in 1950.
They were done after the Ohlyi Cave paintings illustrated in James Mountford's exhibition catalogue of the paintings discovered on the Arnhem Land Plateau by C P Mountford in 1949..
This was in the wake of the war time discoveries of the Lascaux caves.
They paintings were sold to the National Gallery of Australia by Melbourne dealer Charles Nodrum presumably for around the $8000 to $20,000 each at which they were available at an exhibition in his Richmond Gallery in June. Nodrum declined top be drawn on the price paid.
The works measuring as much as 72 by 101 cm were personally recovered by Nodrum after his gallery had traced them down to the Abbey Arts Centre, a one time rambling artists' colony at New Barnett in London which received a stream of Australian art expatriates in the late 1940s.
The colony had thrived under the patronage of William Ohly who was the founder of the Berkeley Art Gallery in Mayfair.
On Cant's return to Australia he was commissioned to produce mural and fabric designs and book covers using Aboriginal motifs, some of which were used on the liner Orcades.
This was all part of the popularisation and commercialisation of aboriginal symbols during the post war period and concern establishing national identity.
“The paintings show genuine appreciation of the beauty and spiritual cast of indigenous art and culture and might be seen as bridging the ethno-aesthetic boundaries of Aboriginal art as it entered the modern white modern white man's world", cultural historian Sheridan Palmer observed in an essay accompanying the catalogue for the exhibition at the Charles Nodrum Gallery.
