Private collection, NSW

Jacob Janssen (also known as Jacob Jansen or Jacob Janssens) produced charming and detailed watercolour images of mid-19^thCentury Sydney. Born in 1779 in Prussia, and trained under Signor Piesio Ancora of the School of Naples, Janssen went on to travel extensively and record detailed descriptions of the places he visited in a diary that he kept his entire life. As he gained acclaim as a painter, his landscapes, portraits and portrayals of contemporary political events added to this record of life in the colonies.

In 1807, at the age of just 28, Janssen embarked on his first voyage, which eventually took him to the United States. There he worked as a sign painter and glazier. In 1815 he returned to Germany but by 1819 was aboard a ship bound for Rio de Janeiro, once more destined for the New World. As Candice Bruce has noted in her biography of the artist[1], Janssen remained in Brazil for twelve years, possibly with a connection to the royal court of Dom Pedro. It is also likely that a romantic interest kept him in Brazil during this period, with a telling 1821 reference in his diary to ‘love stealing his heart with a pair of black eyes.’[2]

Australia’s Mitchell Library holds a number of Janssen’s sketches from his time in Brazil, as well as two watercolours from his subsequent visit to Calcutta, India: an undated panorama of that city and A Pepul Tree on Garden Rear of Road(1836).[3]In British colonial India Janssen took a painting commission and taught drawing, before setting sail again for Singapore. An inveterate adventurer, the artist travelled extensively, also visiting Zanzibar and the Philippines.

By 1840, Janssen was aboard the Louisa Campbellsailing for Sydney, where he arrived on the 5^thof December. Here he found acclaim for his watercolour landscapes and portraits, with the Sydney Gazette making note in 1841 of his ‘beautiful specimens of landscape painting in watercolours’.[4]While Janssen painted a small number of oils on canvas in the early to mid-1840s, such as Panorama of Sydney Harbour with Government House and Fort Macquarie from Mrs Macquarie’s Chair(c. 1895, the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia), his most successful pictures were his delicately crafted watercolours.

Views of Sydney were a popular subject for Janssen, who remained in the colony for sixteen years, until his death in 1856. Most are held in public collections and examples do not often appear on the market.

Janssen and his work slipped into relative obscurity following his death at the age of 77. In recent decades, however, fresh interest and research has shown that he was a significant figure in the colonial Sydney art world of his time. Six of his works were included in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ The Artist and the Patronexhibition of 1988, with one selected to feature on the exhibition catalogue cover.[5]A major article on Janssen appeared in Art and Australiain 1989[6]and his watercolour depictions of early colonial life in Sydney continue to fascinate scholars and collectors alike.

[1]Bruce, C., 1992, Jacob Janssen, Dictionary of Australian Artists Online, available: https://www.daao.org.au/bio/jacob-janssen/biography/

[2]ibid.

[3]ibid.

[4]ibid.

[5]McDonald, P.R. and Pearce, B., 1988, The Artist and the Patron, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

[6]Bruce, C., ‘Jacob Janssen in Sydney’, Art and Australia, Vol. 26, No. 3, Autumn 1989, pp. 406 – 411

Private collection, NSW

Jacob Janssen (also known as Jacob Jansen or Jacob Janssens) produced charming and detailed watercolour images of mid-19^thCentury Sydney. Born in 1779 in Prussia, and trained under Signor Piesio Ancora of the School of Naples, Janssen went on to travel extensively and record detailed descriptions of the places he visited in a diary that he kept his entire life. As he gained acclaim as a painter, his landscapes, portraits and portrayals of contemporary political events added to this record of life in the colonies.

In 1807, at the age of just 28, Janssen embarked on his first voyage, which eventually took him to the United States. There he worked as a sign painter and glazier. In 1815 he returned to Germany but by 1819 was aboard a ship bound for Rio de Janeiro, once more destined for the New World. As Candice Bruce has noted in her biography of the artist[1], Janssen remained in Brazil for twelve years, possibly with a connection to the royal court of Dom Pedro. It is also likely that a romantic interest kept him in Brazil during this period, with a telling 1821 reference in his diary to ‘love stealing his heart with a pair of black eyes.’[2]

Australia’s Mitchell Library holds a number of Janssen’s sketches from his time in Brazil, as well as two watercolours from his subsequent visit to Calcutta, India: an undated panorama of that city and A Pepul Tree on Garden Rear of Road(1836).[3]In British colonial India Janssen took a painting commission and taught drawing, before setting sail again for Singapore. An inveterate adventurer, the artist travelled extensively, also visiting Zanzibar and the Philippines.

By 1840, Janssen was aboard the Louisa Campbellsailing for Sydney, where he arrived on the 5^thof December. Here he found acclaim for his watercolour landscapes and portraits, with the Sydney Gazette making note in 1841 of his ‘beautiful specimens of landscape painting in watercolours’.[4]While Janssen painted a small number of oils on canvas in the early to mid-1840s, such as Panorama of Sydney Harbour with Government House and Fort Macquarie from Mrs Macquarie’s Chair(c. 1895, the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia), his most successful pictures were his delicately crafted watercolours.

Views of Sydney were a popular subject for Janssen, who remained in the colony for sixteen years, until his death in 1856. Most are held in public collections and examples do not often appear on the market.

Janssen and his work slipped into relative obscurity following his death at the age of 77. In recent decades, however, fresh interest and research has shown that he was a significant figure in the colonial Sydney art world of his time. Six of his works were included in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ The Artist and the Patronexhibition of 1988, with one selected to feature on the exhibition catalogue cover.[5]A major article on Janssen appeared in Art and Australiain 1989[6]and his watercolour depictions of early colonial life in Sydney continue to fascinate scholars and collectors alike.

[1]Bruce, C., 1992, Jacob Janssen, Dictionary of Australian Artists Online, available: https://www.daao.org.au/bio/jacob-janssen/biography/

[2]ibid.

[3]ibid.

[4]ibid.

[5]McDonald, P.R. and Pearce, B., 1988, The Artist and the Patron, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

[6]Bruce, C., ‘Jacob Janssen in Sydney’, Art and Australia, Vol. 26, No. 3, Autumn 1989, pp. 406 – 411

Previously Veda Swain collection, Adelaide;

Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne;

Private collection;

Bonhams and Goodman, Bay East Art, Sydney, 21 September 2008;

Private collection, Sydney 

Sydney Ball, Greenhill Gallery, Adelaide, 1974.

The Stain Paintings 1971-80, Sydney Ball, Sullivan + Strumpf, 22 October – 16 November 2013

Referring to his Stain series Ball stated: 

“I see it as a continuation of the early Cantos. I’ve never deviated from the original intentions of the early Cantos to what I’m doing now. For me, the whole problem of a painting is the importance of colour. Style for me is quite secondary. I think you can break across styles… like Hans Hofmann or Matisse or even Picasso. You can go through a number of ways of getting to that final painting; through the way in which you put on the paint, the physicality of putting it on, the process, the surface that’s attained. Its all of these things”.

Sydney Ball, Ten Australians, ten-part ABC documentary series, Sydney, 1975, produced and directed by Stafford Garner and Dale McCrae, with the support of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council.

The estate of art critic and publisher Jacques Damase, Paris, a close friend of the artist who promoted her work in the last 16 years of her life.

The career of Russian-born colourist Sonia Delaunay spanned seven decades, from the Belle Epoque to the 1970s. After studying in Germany, in 1905 she settled in Paris,where she would remain for most of her life. From around 1911, along with her husband,Robert Delaunay, she pioneered a particular branch of Cubism known as Simultanism (or Orphism, as it was termed by Apollinaire), which was based on the colour theory developed in the nineteenth century by Michel Eugène Chevreul (De laloi du contraste simultanée des couleurs, Paris, 1839).In this abstract style, form is subjugated to colour: the vital rhythm of a work is created by the interaction of overlapping and juxtaposed contrasting colours.

Macquarie Galleries, Sydney;

Purchased from the above, private collection, Sydney

Macquarie Galleries, 1970, cat. 7.

Following schooling in Britain and Switzerland, Fairweather served in the First World War where he was captured and interned in a German POW camp. He passed the time learning to draw. Returning to the Hague after the armistice in 1918, he took up a four-year course of study at the Slade School in London under Henry Tonks, while spending his evenings learning Japanese and Chinese at the School of Oriental Studies at the University of London, which led him to question the primacy of the western visual tradition. During the 1930s and 40s Fairweather lived a nomadic existence, travelling extensively in Canada, China, Indonesia and Australia. From 1949 he also regularly exhibited at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney, where his work impacted local artists, including Tony Tuckson, whose own abstract painting has echoes of Fairweather’s calligraphic style.

By 1969 Fairweather was at the height of his investigations into pictorial abstraction. Composition with Figures is perhaps the finest of these late period works. The painting is an amalgamation of a lifetime of Fairweather’s combined experiences and explorations into art. It is also a celebration of the physical act of painting, which sustained Fairweather in his final years of self-imposed isolation. Drips of paint are visible throughout the work, culminating in a curtain of drips at the bottom of the canvas, which have been left unconcealed by the artist. A central group of figures, reduced to their barest forms and painted in simple cream lines, emerge from Fairweather’s multi-layered background. Using a limited colour palette in shades of navy, umber and cream, typical of this period, Fairweather’s signature layering upon layering of paint offers only hints of a hidden, earthy background.

Composition with Figures was painted on Bribie Island in 1969. This work was featured in the artist’s exhibition at Macquarie Galleries in 1970. In the view of Murray Bail this painting is Fairweather’s “last great painting.”1,2

1. Murray Bail, Fairweather, 2009, Murdoch Books, Sydney, p. 224-225

2. Essay provided by the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Galleria Schettini, Milan, Italy; 

Galleria Michelangelo, Bergamo, Italy; 

Private collection;

Sotheby’s, Modern and Contemporary, Sydney, March 2005, lot 60;

Company collection, Sydney;

Deutscher Hackett, Important Australian and International Fine Art, Sydney, April 2019, lot 55;

Private collection, Sydney 

“Yvonne Audette holds a unique position in twentieth century Australian art as one of the few female artists of her generation to have maintained a long and successful career working in an abstract mode. She left Australia to further her studies in late 1952, however unlike most of her peers, headed to New York, influenced by her American-born parents’ agreement to provide financial support if she went there rather than to Europe. While her training had been traditionally academic, with an emphasis on the figure, Audette’s first-hand exposure to the work of artists including Willem de Kooning (whose studio she visited in 1953), Robert Motherwell and Mark Tobey brought her face to face with the burgeoning New York School of Abstract Expressionist painting and she began to move confidently towards abstraction, developing a unique visual language that merged a lyrical use of colour with dextrous mark-making and the textural layering of line and abstract form.

After travelling in Europe, Audette settled in Florence, establishing a studio there in 1955. Against the backdrop of Italy’s rich culture and artistic past, she was welcomed into a community of professional artists (including Arnaldo Pomodoro and Lucio Fontana), who encouraged her and provided an aspirational example. Focussed and determined, Audette worked hard, holding commercial exhibitions in Florence, Milan, Paris, Rome and London.

While Audette’s work was rarely seen in Australia during her expatriate years, it has since been recognised for its important contribution to the history of twentieth century art in this country. Acquisitions by major public galleries were followed by a series of institutional exhibitions – Queensland Art Gallery (1999), Heide Museum of Modern Art (2000), National Gallery of Victoria (2008), Ian Potter Museum of Art (2009) and the Art Gallery of Ballarat (2016) – and the publication of a major monograph in 2003.

Audette was awarded Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the June 2020 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for significant service to the visual arts as an abstract painter.”

– Kirsty Grant for Deutscher and Hackett, April 2019

Ray Hughes Gallery

Private collection, Sydney

‘The Private Collection in Brisbane’, Brisbane City Hall, Art Gallery and Museum, June 1 – 30, 1990

The Estate of Edith Lawrence (Edith Lawrence was the life-partner of Claude Flight. Flight founded the Grosvenor School of Modern Art with Iain MacNab, Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews, and taught there from 1926-1930. The Grosvenor School artists include Cyril Power, Sybil Andrews, Eileen Mayo, Lill Tschudi, Ethel Spowers, Dorrit Black, and Eveline Symes)

Private collection, Sydney

Dorrit Black is known as a pioneer of Australian modernism. She is also known for her progressive artistic practice, which was well versed in modern and cubist movements that were taking place in London and Paris in the late 1920s. It was after her European travels to both cities between 1927 and 1929 that Black returned as an accomplished modernist linocut artist, exhibiting her first solo show of cubist-inspired works at Macquarie Galleries, Sydney in 1930.

Significant to note prior to the European turning point of her career were her works that reflected her inspiration of modernist and cubist artistic ideals at the time. Before going to study modernist prints with Claude Flight at Iain MacNab’s Grosvenor School of Modern Art, London in 1927; and then going to study cubism at Andre Lhote’s academy in Paris, Corner of the Garden was created. The linocut is a quintessential reflection of Black’s inspirations for modernist and cubist forms. Printing from five blocks Black was able to establish a multi-dimensional composition of a garden through the use of hard edge geometrical shapes speaking strongly to cubist constructs. The artwork marks a significant starting point of Black’s career in linocut printing. She produced linocuts from about 1927 to about 1951 but most intensively during the late 1920s and early 1930s.

In 1931 Dorrit Black established the Modern Art Centre Margaret Street, Sydney, a commercial art gallery, which she ran through to 1933. Black gave lessons in linocuts at the Modern Art Centre and assisted Claude Flight in the promotion of the artistic medium in England.

Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso);
Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited:
Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 23 October – 22 November 1995 (label attached verso);
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Margaret Olley Retrospective, 25 October 1996 – 5 January 1997, Sydney, Brisbane, Newcastle (label attached verso)