Julian Bowron, General Manager of the Mildura Arts Centre, discusses the Elliott collection, a remarkable collection of Australian and British art bequeathed by R.D. and Hilda Elliott.

In Wine Brangywn has paid a powerful homage to the Velázquez’s Los Borrachos (The Feast of Bacchus), 1628-29, at the Museo del Prado, Madrid. Velaquez was admired, above all, tonal brilliance of his paintings and his still-life genre skills, and was venerated in by artists in England in the latter part of the nineteenth century through to the Edwardian period.

Wine is a study in dramatic light and shade, most potently captured in the inebriated central figure, his brilliantly illuminated and glistening torso contrasted with the enamel-like black surface of the flask he unsteadily grasps. This contrast echoes throughout the painting, even, in a virtuosic display of still-life genre, on the moist surfaces of the individual grapes. Brangwyn has moved beyond the sense of restraint, of Catholic gravitas, in Velázquez’s painting. The revellers in Wine are stripped of any dignifying religious readings. Here we simply view the grape gatherers insensately luxuriating, literally, in the fruit of their labours.

Oil on canvas; 114.5 x 154.7 cm; M67

Degas was born in Paris on 19 July 1834. At twenty he began his training in the studio of Louis Lamothe (1822-1869) who impressed upon him the necessity of developing classical drawing skills and line work, lessons which Degas would retain all his life.

In the early 1880s Degas began his studies of nude females at their bath. Initially inclined toward realist depictions Femme à la baignoire, one of over 700 Degas pastel works, shows his increasingly abstract modelling of the female body, and structurally, the model is anatomically impossible. Degas’ overwhelming interest here lies more in composition and colour than the subject, where the vertiginous diagonal of the bath, the dramatic foreshortening of the bath and the placement of the figure define a restrictive pictorial space.

Degas has employed a virtuosic range of strokes: parallel hatching, truncated marks, stripes, zigzags and cursive loops are drawn over the sinuous charcoal lines outlining the bather’s form. The whole surface is rapidly but minutely worked over; blurred passages probably the result of smudging the pastel with cloth.

This work shows Degas as an unrivalled colourist. Subtle variations of blue, purple, green, orange, yellow and brown resonate through the work. In other areas the layered pastels create lustrous tones too ambiguous to define, giving us an image of rich luminosity and glowing beauty.

Femme à la baignoire is truly the chef d’oeuvre of the Elliot collection.

Pastel on paper signed lower right: Degas; 6.6 x 7.2 cm; M51

Howard Ashton was born in London, 9/8/1877, and arrived in Melbourne the following year with his parents. His father, Julian Rossi Ashton (1851-1942), had been offered a position as illustrator with The Illustrated Australian News. In 1883 Julian Rossi moved to Sydney, where, over the next two decades, he became perhaps the most influential art teacher working in the country. After teaching at the Art Society of New South Wales School, he established his own art school, which still survives today.

Howard Ashton trained in his father’s art school from 1896-1903, where he met Mary Ethel Roberts, whom he married in 1908. Ashton had some success as a landscape and seascape painter, but family commitments obliged him to pursue a career as a journalist. It was not until 1946, a year after his wife’s death, that Ashton retired from journalism to return to painting. He died on 30 April 1964.

Ashton worked along the traditional lines he had learnt as a young man in his father’s art school. As this fine pastel shows, Ashton was a natural landscape artist, skillfully capturing the sense of temporary calm before a storm breaks. A rough dirt track directs the viewer’s gaze to the threatening sky. The foreground palette is darkened as the muted browns and greens absorb, in advance, the lowered tones of the imminent tempest. In a landscape of this emotional resonance one would expect some mark of human life, but not even a solitary traveller lingers in this powerful nature piece.

Pastel on paper signed and dated lower left: Howard Ashton 1917; 46.5 x 74.1 cm; M84

Penleigh Boyd was born in Wiltshire, England, in August 1890, the son of Arthur Merric (1862-1940) and Emma Minnie Boyd (1858-1936). With his brothers Martin (1893-1972) and Merric (1888-1959), he belonged to the second generation of Australia’s most creative artistic family.

He studied at the National Gallery of Victoria School between 1906-09, and in 1911 Boyd went to Europe for two years, where met his future wife, the Australian painter Edith Susan Anderson (1880-1961). After serving in WW1, Boyd brought an exhibition of modern English and European art to Australia in 1923, but was tragically killed in a car accident that same year, at 33 years of age.

Edward, the Prince of Wales visited Australia in 1920 as a ‘thank you’ for support in WW1, charming the Australian public. In this painting, Boyd’s reference to the visit is highly allusive: only the fluttering festoons of street decoration, mere flecks of high colour, refer to the historic occasion. He captures a reflective tone, Melbourne in its post-celebratory phase. Boyd has worked up his image with rapid brushstrokes to create a sketch-like impression, the figures are quick painterly marks, and the buildings converge together as tremulous, elaborate facades. The rather bodiless pastel shades of the palette further enhance the scene’s air of transition.

An urban scene such as Queen Street is unusual in Boyd’s oeuvre. He is best known for his landscapes of Warrandyte, and coastlines of Port Phillip Bay.

Oil on panel signed and dated lower left: Penleigh Boyd 20; 28 x 44.5 cm; M65

Frank Brangwyn was in 1867, in Bruges, Brussels. His father was an ecclesiastical architect and textile designer, and Brangwyn received his initial artistic instruction in his father’s workshop. Brangwyn pursued formal training at the South Kensington Art Schools, London; influences included William Morris (1834-1896), with whom he had worked, and Italian Renaissance art.

His international reputation began to flourish in the 1890s, and after 1900 Brangwyn became increasingly occupied with large scale mural commissions in Britain and the US. In his later years his art was dominated by religious themes. He was knighted in 1941, and died at 89 in 1956.

The Torn Shirt is a study for a figure in Brangwyn’s large scale oil panel, Modern Commerce, 1900-06, at the Royal Exchange Building, London. The male figure, squared up for transfer, has been faithfully transcribed in the lower right part of Modern Commerce. In the muscular figure, Brangwyn has created a virile, heroic form that has its antecedents in the Italian High Renaissance. The figure, drawn from life, is built up with rich contours, parallel and cross hatching lines, and the use of white highlights. Brangwyn’s focus is on the sheer physicality of his subject; his face pointedly turned away, underlines his machine-like working power.

Brangwyn, as in many of his other scenes of industrial England, transforms the manual worker, supporting the mercantile might of the Empire, into a god-like figure.

Conte on paper signed lower right: F B; 45.3 x 35.3 cm; MD49

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, in June 1865, Cameron was the son of a minister. In the early 1880s he trained at the Glasgow School of Art, and in 1887 he dedicated himself to printmaking, issuing his first suite of etchings, the Paisley Set, a group of seven prints which included an interior of Paisley Abbey. Cameron’s early specialisation in ecclesiastical architecture provided the foundation for his reputation as one of Scotland’s leading printmakers and he was an integral figure in the revival of the etching medium in that country.

In the twentieth century, Cameron moved away from architecture to the Scottish landscape as his chief source of inspiration; at the same time he began to establish himself as an oil painter. He was elected to the Scottish Royal Academy in 1918, and the Royal Academy two years later. This was followed by his appointment, in 1923, as the King’s Painter and Limner in Scotland, and a knighthood in 1924.

Approaching Storm, Stirling Castle meshes Cameron’s primary interests of architecture and landscape. Flushed with a creamy light, the castle acts as a brief illuminated counterpoint to the real subject of the painting: the brooding atmosphere of the setting; the oppressive mood powerfully captured in the greys of the vast sky and the browns of the mountains and trees, their repetition in the reflecting water ensuring compositional dominance. Even the greens of the grass have been leached, enervated by the pervasive wintry gloom.

Oil on canvas signed lower right: D. Y. Cameron; 39.5 x 49.5 cm; M27

Born at Uxbridge, Sussex, in 1872, Ethel Carrick was the daughter of an English draper. She was trained at the Slade School of Art, London, under Henry Tonks (1862-1937) and Frederick Brown (1851-1941) between 1899-1903. Carrick first exhibited her work in London in 1903, and in 1904 commenced exhibiting in Paris, which she continued to do for many years. She married Emanuel Phillips Fox in London in 1905. She travelled extensively, visiting Europe, Africa and Australia.

This painting of Balmoral Beach dates from 1908 or from 1913 to 1916. The subject is a quintessentially Impressionist theme: a middle class family enjoying leisure hours beyond the urban reach. Carrick Fox’s treatment, however, is Post-Impressionist, with its two-dimensional arrangement of forms and emphasis on abstraction. Specificity is sacrificed under the broad, flattening, applications of colour.

The artist focuses on the rhythmic interplay of forms and building up a rich textured surface through broken and vigorous brushwork. The family group, washed in the deep tones of late afternoon shadow, contrasts strongly with the high key of the middle and backgrounds: the brilliant cream sand and dazzling blue sea. Carefully placed yellow, red and purple accents add decorative notes to the secondary figures. The horizon line is high; tilting up the scene and flattening out the perspective, ensuring that visual attention returns to the primary motif of the picnicking family group.

Oil on canvas; 37 x 45 cm; M36

Gruner was born in 1882 in New Zealand, his family migrating to Sydney the following year. As a child he showed precocious drawing skills and his mother took him, aged twelve, to meet Julian Ashton (1851-1942) at the Art Society of New South Wales. He studied under Ashton whenever the time allowed, as at this early age it fell upon Gruner to support his family as a draper’s assistant at Farmer’s emporium, where he met Jack Lecky, a fellow employee, and commenced a lifelong relationship.

Gruner exhibited his first work in 1901 and from 1908 he began to receive laudatory press notices, by 1913 his career began to move quickly.

Gruner was the greatest plein air painter of his generation, creating landscapes that remain instantly recognizable. By 1912 Gruner was receiving recognition for his coastal views, but the modest Fading Light indicates how he could take an unprepossessing scene and transform it into a minor masterpiece of mood. Leafless, decaying gum trees dominate a desolate landscape, over which surges an oppressively cloudy sky; the melancholy enhanced by monochromatic colours and weighted brushstrokes. The small scale, the tone, the seeming artlessness of the composition, all indicate the personal, intimate nature of this painting. As the inscription ‘To my friend R. D. Elliott Esq.’ indicates, the painting was a gift, acknowledging kindnesses received, as Elliott was certainly one of the artist’s most dedicated early supporters.

Oil on board inscribed lower left: To my friend R. D. Elliott Esq signed and dated: E. Gruner 1912; 36 x 24 cm; 99/14

This magnificent panorama depicts the landscape of the Hawkesbury River, in New South Wales.

The impressive compositional breadth in the Upper Reaches of the Hawkesbury is seen in much of Gruner’s work from the 1920s onwards. Gruner based his painting on an amalgam of working on location (he was a tireless outdoors painter) and a much earlier unique experience: in 1920 went flying and made aerial sketches.

The horizontal format of the painting, the elevated view point, the central motif of the meandering river gradually dissolving into the background, the measured progression from shaded foreground to luminous distances, all articulate the sense of depth and scale of the landscape.

The painting is also remarkable for its sense of poetic stasis, its quality of timelessness. Norman Lindsay’s comments are illuminating here:

I saw very little of Gruner in those last years…In one of those meetings he said to me, "The only thing that interests me is the anatomy of the earth’. One can see the analysis of that structural formation of the earth in those paintings where the hills are simplified to smooth rhythms, flowing one into the other, and from which all dissonances of form have been excluded. They are the lands of the afternoon, with the long shadows creeping towards evening". [ Norman Lindsay, Elioth Gruner, Sydney, 1947, n. p.8]

Oil on canvas signed lower right: E. Gruner; 71 x 102 cm; M7

Heysen was born in Hamburg, Germany, on 8 October 1877 and emigrated to Adelaide with his family in 1884. He studied at the Norwood Art School in Adelaide in the 1890s. In 1899 four wealthy Adelaide men sponsored him to undertake a study tour of Europe, where he studied at the École des Beaux Arts and Colarossi’s Academy.

In 1908 his first solo exhibition, which was held in Melbourne, was a great success. He went on to enjoy one of the most illustrious careers of any Australian artist, winning the Wynne Prize for landscape painting nine times. He was knighted in 1959 and died on 2 July 1968.

Hans Heysen is best known for his iconic renderings of the gum tree, elevating it to a symbolic, indeed spiritual, level.

In 1912 Heysen bought a property called ‘The Cedars’ at Hahndorf, a small German settlement. Richly wooded with gum trees, cedars and pines, it inspired his series of pastorals; At the Panels, painted in the early morning light, is one of these. Heysen had been deeply impressed by the naturalism of the mid-19th century French painters of the Barbizon school, especially in their transformation of quotidian rural scenes into powerful subjects. Locally, Heysen had also absorbed the lessons of the Heidelberg School artists as interpreters of light, and here captures the early morning atmosphere with remarkable clarity. This watercolour, like so much of his work, is Heysen’s paean to the natural world.

Watercolour on paper signed and dated lower left: Hans Heysen 1920; 31.7 x 39 cm; M53

Born 13 September 1873 in St. Petersburg, Lambert was the son of an American engineer working on the Tsar’s railway system, and an English mother. After his father’s death, the family moved to Wurtemberg and then to Somerset, England, before arriving in Australia in 1887. Lambert had a late artistic training under Julian Ashton at his Académie Julien in Sydney, and in 1900 won the first New South Wales Society of Artists’ Travelling Scholarship. He enrolled at Colarossi’s in Paris for one year, and then moved to London, in 1902, where he lived until 1921.

In 1917 he was appointed an official Australian war artist with the Australian Imperial Force and travelled to Egypt and Palestine. The following year he painted a remarkable series of paintings at Gallipoli.

Anzacs Bathing in the Sea is a unique depiction of Australian soldiers at the Front during the First World War. Three young men frolic in the foaming blue sea, in a break from the brutalities of battle; the light gilds and defines, in scrupulous detail, the musculature of the soldiers’ bodies. Given its date of 1914, Anzacs Bathing is probably the progenitor of subsequent images and literature in which the Anzacs are compared to the Greek heroes of antiquity. In 1914 the war, which had only begun in August, was still for many a marvellous adventure, when mere mortals could achieve heroic deeds, and Lambert’s joyous paean to masculinity could only have been painted in this context.

Oil on canvas signed lower left: G. W. Lambert; 26.3 x 36 cm; M31

Long was born in Goulburn, New South Wales, in August 1871, and studied at the Art Society of New South Wales in the early 1890s. Long was a precocious painter, producing his most famous images within a span of ten years, from 1894, Tranquil Waters, to 1904, The Music Lesson.

In his forties he travelled to London, and set about retraining himself, enrolling in three different art schools: Kennington in 1911, City Guild in 1912, and London Central in 1915 to study printmaking. He returned to Australia in 1921 to pursue a career in printmaking but only enjoyed modest success, the lyricism of his work at odds with Modernism, the movement about which he became increasingly embittered.

The strongest demand for Long’s work was from the Australian market and for the lyrical works he had produced in the 1890s and early 1900s. Whilst abroad, Long kept re-painting these decorative subjects to supply his Sydney dealer, Aldolp Albers. Dawn is one such watercolour.

Dawn possesses all the evocative qualities that make Long’s work so unique. The flat expanse with its vast skyscape and the towering gums evokes Australia, diminutive nude figures, humans or bush nymphs, lounge along the edge of an immense sheet of water. The sinuous tree trunks twist, in classic Art Nouveau patterning, vertiginously towards the sky. In a signature Longian image, the delicate, lace-like foliage of the gums is blurred and out-of-focus, the artist’s debt to Jean-Baptiste Corot (1796-1875).

Watercolour on paper signed lower left : Sid Longinscription: reverse has old label ‘317 a Dawn’; 30.5 x 42.6 cm; 70/39

McCubbin was born 25 February 1855, the son of a West Melbourne baker, and was educated at St. Paul’s Grammar School, Swanston Street, Melbourne. In 1872 he enrolled at the National Gallery of Victoria School of Design, working under Thomas Clark (1814-1883), fellow students included Tom Roberts (1856-1931) and Louis Abrahams (1852-1903). In 1885, along with Roberts and Abrahams, he established the first of the artists’ camps at Box Hill that would culminate in the movement now known as the Heidelberg School. In 1889 McCubbin contributed five paintings to the famous 9 x 5 Impression Exhibition, at Buxton’s Gallery in Swanston Street.

In 1895 McCubbin moved his wife and three children to Brighton, a seaside suburb close to Melbourne which had attracted a virtual colony of artists in the mid 1890s. The large scale Brighton Beach is one of McCubbin’s most impressive works from this period. The colours are shot through with a soft luminosity, pastel blues, pinks and greens dominate. The scene is intimate and poetically charged. The feathery foliage, bent tree trunks and limbs are highly evocative of the French painter Jean-Baptiste Corot (1796-1875); McCubbin had came very much under the influence of Corot’s lyricism, but, interestingly, his knowledge of the artist was second hand, having only middling quality reproductions to consult, and it was not until 1907, on his only trip to Europe, that he could study Corot’s work at first hand.

Oil on canvas signed and dated lower right: F. McCubbin 1896; 76 x 114 cm; 70/11

In 1901 McCubbin purchased a picturesque English style cottage, which he called ‘Fontainebleau’, and its surrounding four acres, on the north side of Mount Macedon, Victoria. McCubbin considered it a perfect retreat for his sometimes ailing wife, Annie (1865-1928). The setting greatly appealed to McCubbin who now wished to devote himself primarily to grand landscape painting, and it was at ‘Fontainebleau’ that McCubbin painted his most famous work, The Pioneer, in 1904.

Mount Macedon had formerly been covered with magnificent trees, but settlement had seriously depleted its forests: as early as 1879 there had been public outrage when the greater part of the Mount Macedon State Forest was opened for selectors. McCubbin’s Road to Braemar depicts a landscape of trees being dramatically cleared for settlement; the slab hut of the woodcutter a testament to this activity.

The paint here is more richly applied than in the earlier Brighton Beach, a combination of brush and palette knife has been used to break up the pictorial surface and create more allusive imagery. Similarly, there has been a shift in artistic influence. Where Corot was acknowledged in Brighton Beach, here McCubbin refers to the English artist, J. M.W. Turner (1775-1851), whose influence is particularly evident in the painting’s epic, overarching skyscape, and gathering storm clouds flushed with the colours of the setting sun.

Oil on canvas signed and dated lower right: F. McCubbin 1907; 68.6 x 86.3 cm; 70/12

This large scale painting depicts Robert Charles Dunlop Elliott (1884-1950) at his peak; probably painted in the late 1930s, when Elliott had well and truly established himself in business, political and cultural circles. Elliott himself was born in Kyneton, Victoria, but is here proudly costumed in the dress of his mother’s Scottish - Inverness – forebears. His grocer father was from Northumberland, England.

Elliott had only the slightest formal education, but was a natural entrepreneur, and by 1911 had established himself as a successful business agent. He married Theodore Fink’s daughter, Hilda, in 1913, and their marriage was highly successful, with Hilda becoming very active in her husband’s political, cultural and business ambitions. In 1924 he commenced his connection with Mildura by buying into the Sunraysia Daily. He was elected a Senator for Victoria in 1929, serving until 1935. ‘R. D.’ was a passionate art collector, playing an important role in Melbourne’s cultural life, and was a trustee of the Public Library, Museums and National Gallery of Victoria.

McInnes’ portrait appears unfinished, with generous areas of exposed canvas, and its thin, wash-like applications of paint. Elliott is depicted in an informal, though none the less, imperious pose. In its construction and sitter’s air of patrician negligence, the painting takes its tone from the grand portraits of later eighteenth century British painters, such as Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792).

Oil on canvas; 154 x 109 cm; M41

William Orpen met Grace Knewstub whilst holidaying with Augustus John (1878-1961) and Charles Conder (1868-1909) at Vattetot-sur-mer, France, in the summer of 1899. Grace was the daughter of the minor Pre-Raphaelite figure, John Knewstub, and Orpen and Grace married in London in August 1901.

Portrait of Grace was painted whilst the Orpens were holidaying in the seaside resort of Margate, east of London, with their friends, William Nicholson (1871-1945) and his wife Mabel, in the summer of 1907. The Nicholsons had a passion for elegant costumes and their interests strongly informed this painting.

The elaborate costume Grace wears - as well as a homage to the Nicholsons’ friendship and in particular, William Nicholson’s fondness for gloves - illustrates her penchant for hats. Here she wears an elaborate arrangement: a large, stiff brimmed hat decked with either roses or peonies and a transparent veil, which cascades seductively over her face. She wears an extravagant trimmed with black satin, and the whole ensemble denotes elegant Edwardian living. Grace’s face is caught by a flush of light from below, creating an arresting portrait.

Portrait of Grace is one of Orpen’s finest paintings, executed at the height of his powers. Orpen’s contentment is perfectly articulated in this sensitive portrait of his wife. The years of domestic harmony, however, were not to last. In 1908 Mrs. St George (1870-1938) became his mistress, and usurped Grace’s role in Orpen’s life.

Oil on canvas signed lower right: Orpen; 90 x 70 cm; M72

Self-portrait with Glasses was painted in 1907, the same year as Orpen’s Portrait of Grace. It was inspired by the bohemian life style the Orpens and their good friends the Nicholsons were then enjoying, the immediate inspiration for the painting being the occasion of a fancy dress party.

The portrait also demonstrates Orpen's long-standing admiration of Jean Pierre Chardin (1699-1779), drawing on Chardin’s Self-portrait with Pince-nez, 1771, Louvre, Paris. However, Self-portrait with Glasses goes well beyond a visual eulogy of the French master. It is a highly charged declaration of Orpen’s own position as an artist. In his choice of the half-length format Orpen provides himself with greater possibilities than the restrictive head and shoulder views that Chardin’s self-portraits allow, enabling him to create a truly bravura passage of paintwork in the sumptuous, fur-like softness of the dressing gown, described in an icy palette of white, blue and grey. The painter addresses us with his paintbrush in his left hand, looking over his lowered glasses, his eyes and lips glistening. It is full of the expectant sensibility, and is an exercise in self-glamourisation. It is a manifestation of his obsession with his status; tellingly revealing of how he wished to present himself to posterity.

Oil on canvas signed lower right: Orpen; 77 x 56 cm; M8

Such a genre scene is unusual in Orpen’s oeuvre. As Orpen became more successful, especially after 1910, he dedicated himself to portrait painting and rarely departed from the profitable genre, but his extraordinary success as a society portraitist overshadowed that he had a real talent for painting what were then considered low-life scenes.

In The Circus there is the rich imprint of the work of Walter Sickert. For Sickert’s High Victorian audience, circuses and music halls were vulgar, lower class entertainments, and indecorous subjects for art. By the Edwardian period some of this prejudice would have shifted, but the circus still retained its reputation as a place of somewhat dubious entertainments.

Orpen underlines this by emphasizing the gloom of the interior, particularly in the foreground where individual objects are difficult to read. A murkiness saturates the foremost space with the circus spectators and the musicians, while in the middle ground is the brilliantly lit passage of the ‘jockey’. The garish, lurid green of the arena floor is reflected by the tent roof, so that a lugubrious pall hangs over the scene. At the far side of the tent, in a slice of brilliant light, the scene dissolves into a beautiful arrangement of luminous vertical stripes. In his unusual off-centre, from ‘behind the scenes’ viewpoint, and the powerful display of chiaroscuro, Orpen pays a pictorial bow to Sickert.

Oil on board signed lower right: Orpen; 56 x 62 cm; M22

Between 1902 and 1914 Orpen worked part-time as a teacher at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. During his stays in Dublin he became very attached to Howth, fifteen kilometres north east of Dublin, often renting a house on the peninsula for the summer. It was one of his favourite painting spots and he did several views of Howth which often included members of his family.

In Rocky Coast Scene at Howth the figures of his wife, Grace, and one of his youngest children are depicted on the windswept foreshore.

Howth has rich associations with the Irish poet, W. B. Yeats, who lived there as a child. When he was courting the great love of his life, the legendary beauty and radical Maud Gonne, he would revisit Howth with her to explore the prelapsarian world of his childhood.

The two men did know one another within the small compass of Dublin’s cultural world although their relationship remained remote. But there was at least one commonality: their mutual passion for the landscape of Howth.

Oil on canvas; 85 x 90 cm; M46

Madame Errazuriz, née Huici, was born in Valparaíso, Chile, in 1860, the daughter of a wealthy silver mining family. She was educated in a convent run by English nuns where she was instilled with strict religious principles and became fluent in English and French. The young girl evolved into one of the beauties of the day and in 1880 she married the wealthy diplomat José Tomás Errazuriz.

Eugenia Errazuriz was a favourite subject of John Singer Sargent, but was also painted by Giovanni Boldini, Augustus John, Charles Conder and, of course, William Orpen. Her most famous admirer, however, was Picasso with whom she had a friendship lasting some thirty years.

When Orpen painted this magnificent portrait Errazuriz was in her late fifties, and a central figure in London’s cultural and social world. Orpen did a series of narrow format full-length female portraits at this time, but Madame Errazuriz is arguably the most striking. The painting is a veritable symphony in hectic red, from the rouged cheeks and glistening lips, through the splendid low cut gown, and down to the stockings and low-heeled shoes. Despite the outré colour of her ensemble Madame Errazuriz retains an air of diffidence, almost self-deprecation, as she gazes at the viewer.

Oil on canvas signed lower right: Orpen; 197 x 91 cm; M66

William Orpen was born the son of a solicitor in Oriel, Blackrock, County Dublin, on 27 November 1878. From 1890 to 1897 he studied at the Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin, where he was later to work as a teacher. After the Metropolitan School, he settled in London, studying at the Slade School - well known for its drawing masters - from 1897 to 1899. Orpen extraordinary drawing skills were broadly admired and he soon immersed himself in the lessons of the Old Masters, such as da Vinci and Chardin, as well as Rembrandt, Goya, Velázquez, Chardin, Hogarth and Watteau.

Although he painted impressive landscapes and genre scenes, it was his portraiture that brought him fame, becoming one of the most successful, and most honoured, portrait painters to work in Britain.

He was appointed Official War Artist in 1917, but his war experiences had a profoundly disturbing effect upon him. He was knighted in 1919 and elected to the Royal Academy in 1921. Whilst he remained highly productive, his later life became increasingly destabilised, due, in part, to his war experiences. He died on 29 September 1931, in London, at the relatively early age of fifty-three.

The biography of Mrs. Melvill is unknown but she appears here as a young woman fashionably coiffured; confidently posed before the painter with her arms akimbo, she glances to the left in a purposeful manner. She is possibly in fancy dress, or is a dancer as suggested by her elegant form and attenuated fingers.

Oil on canvas signed lower right: Orpen; 125 x 100 cm; M48

Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1851. He exhibited his first painting at the age of twenty at the Royal Scottish Academy Schools, Edinburgh, where he was trained. In his second trip to Melbourne in 1884, Paterson became associated with the Heidelberg School, and exhibited at the famous 1889 9 x 5 Impression Exhibition. He was a founding member of the short lived Australian Artists’ Association (1886-87) and the more successful Victorian Artists’ Society (established 1888), exhibiting with them for over twenty years.

Until now this painting has been catalogued under the descriptive title of Seascape with Fisherman, but in fact it was displayed in the 1887 summer exhibition of the Australian Artists’ Association as Half-moon Bay – Trawling by Midnight and priced at £12. Half Moon Bay, Black Rock, located between Brighton and the more remote Sandringham was popular with artists at the time.

In the 1890s nocturne paintings became so popular as to become a sub-genre in Australian art, and Paterson anticipates this romantic ‘movement’ by some years. Undoubtedly, he was inspired by the master of the nocturne himself, James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). The nocturne remained a favourite subject with Paterson and he continued to paint this theme until his death in 1912.

Oil on panel signed and dated lower right: John Ford Paterson 1887 inscription: The property of J. S. McDonald; 34.2 x 51cm; 70/23

Born in Melbourne (22/6/1897), Arnold Shore began his apprenticeship with the leading stained glass company, Brooks Robinson Studios, in 1911. In 1912 he enrolled at the National Gallery of Victoria School, where he was instructed by both Bernard Hall (1859-1935) and Frederick McCubbin (1855-1917). In 1914 William Frater (1890-1974) also joined Brooks Robinson Studios and commenced a long and important friendship with Shore, introducing Shore to Modernism.

From 1926 Shore exhibited, along with a small core of modernists, in the group shows of the Twenty Melbourne Painters, and in 1929 held his first one-man exhibition at the Athenaeum Galleries in Collins Street.

Somewhat surprisingly, ‘the strongest single influence in his conversion to modernism’, was the London magazine, Outline of Art, and in one of the last issues he was introduced to French Post-Impressionism.

The work of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was to remain Shore’s artistic touchstone for the rest of his career. Bush Garden, painted in 1962, the penultimate year of Shore’s life, perfectly demonstrates the longevity of van Gogh’s influence. The oil pigment is extravagantly applied so that the painting appears to be as much modeled as drawn. The thick, rich impasto builds up the imagery in almost sculptural low relief. The broad brushstrokes allow for little delicacy of detaill, only the foliage and flower heads of Iris Germanicus, another reference to Van Gogh, are clearly delineated.

Oil on composite board signed and dated lower left: Shore 1962; 33 x 43 cm; 70/16

At the age of seven the young Streeton and his family moved from Mount Duneed, Victoria, to Melbourne. Though he had a comprehensive education as a student of drawing, Streeton studied only briefly in the National Gallery of Victoria School of Painting and had minimal formal training as an oil painter. By 1886 he was working with the Collins Street lithographer George Troedel.

Along with Tom Roberts (1856-1931), who had returned to Melbourne from Europe in 1885, and Frederick McCubbin (1855-1917), both of whom were to remain lifelong friends, Streeton painted en plein air at Box Hill, becoming one of the founders of the Heidelberg School. Streeton contributed forty works to the famous 9 x 5 Impression Exhibition held in Melbourne in 1889.

On the way to England in 1897, Streeton spent over one month in Cairo where he was inspired by the exotic architecture, sun drenched colours, and fascinating culture. When Allegory from ‘Omar’ was displayed in Melbourne in April 1907 it was priced at the high figure of £78.15.0. ‘Omar’ refers to the twelfth century Persian poet, Omar Khayyam, whose poem the Rubáiyat became an integral part of the English cult for the exotic from the latter part of the nineteenth century. Edward FitzGerald (1809-1893) had famously translated this philosophical poem into English in 1859 and it became probably the most popular poem of the Victorian era.

Oil on canvas inscription on back two labels: ‘A page from Omar’ Arthur Streeton; 50.8 x 76.2 cm; 70/13

Streeton arrived in London in May 1897, but his early years there were impoverished ones as he found it difficult to establish himself. He must have found consolation, however, in the vigorous demand for his works in Australia.

In April 1907 his large solo exhibition opened at the Upper Hibernian Hall in Melbourne and enjoyed unprecedented success with sales grossing £2000, with the Hay Barges modestly priced at £15. 15. 0.

Two years later, in 1909, the painting enjoyed a more particular encomium when it was illustrated in full colour in the prestigious London art magazine, The Studio, signaling Streeton’s greater acceptance in the London art world. [W. K. West, ‘An artist from Australia: Mr. Arthur Streeton’, The Studio, London, November 1909, Vol. 47, No. 198, p. 263.]

Streeton had moved to Chelsea in late 1902, where the Thames was virtually on his doorstep, and hay barges were a common sight. Broad and flat-bottomed to handle the shallow Thames estuary, piled with golden hay harvests, their decorative reddish brown sails sailed up the river, resembling a kind of rustic Armada.

Oil on wood panel signed lower left: A. S.; 17.7 x 22.8 cm; M38

In Australian art, sacred narratives are few and Blamire Young’s depiction of the Holy Family on their journey remains virtually a unique image in our pictorial history.

When this watercolour was first exhibited in 1914 in London, critics were quickly polarized by the artist’s interpretation of the theme. For some, it was almost blasphemous, for others, it was an acceptable, even humorous, modernization of the Gospel narrative.

The setting here is an English one, the family group moves across a verdant, daisy-covered field, where motifs such as the shepherd and his flock, and the windmill appear to reference John Constable (1776-1837), and the mystical Victorian artists such as Edward Calvert (1799-1883). In addition there are no traditional religious signifiers within the central figure group: Mary is attired as a gypsy, Joseph as a prosperous Victorian gentleman.

Blamire Young was born on 9 August 1862 in Yorkshire, and was educated at Cambridge University. In 1885, he took up a teaching position (mathematics) at Katoomba College in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, where he pursued his interests in the arts. He moved to Melbourne in 1897. From 1901-07 Young exhibited watercolours at the Victorian Artists’ Society; holding his first successful exhibition in 1910 at Guild Hall, Melbourne.

Watercolour on paper signed lower right: Blamire Young; 63 x 64 cm; M56