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Antiques&world
FEBRUARY – AUGUST 2013 ISSUE 84AUSTRALIA $16.95 NZ $20.95SINGAPORE $20.00 UK £7.00
US $13.00 €10.50
of
PHOTOGRAPHY: SEEING AND VISION Photojournalism in 1950s London
Man Ray’s portraits
RESEARCH Rescued from obscurity theornithological wonders of Neville Henry Cayley
OBJECTS AS ART Mediaeval unicorn tapestries
Jingdezhen porcelain
Bejewelled cosmetic boxes
ART THROUGH TIME AND SPACEIce Age art and the modern mind
Picasso’s early figure paintings
The boundaries betweenpainting and performance art
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118 AROUND THE AUCTIONSAuction highlights
ART30 A sense of design: the art of A.B. Webb
Dr Dorothy Erickson
50 The artist and the priest: Murillo and Justino de Neve
Their remarkable 17th century partnership on show
at Dulwich Picture Gallery
Dr Xavier Bray
62 Ice Age art and the modern mind: exploring our artistic
heritage from the earliest time to the present day
Dr Jill Cook
68 Neville Henry Cayley lauded as the consummate bird
artist in the 19th century rediscovered in the 21st century
Dr Mark R Cabouret
104 From the Hermitage to London: One of Britain’s greatest
collection of Old Masters returns to Broughton Hall
Matilda Bathurst
78 ARTNEWSA selection of international events to diarise
127 CONTRIBUTORS
DECORATIVE ARTS AND DESIGN44 A major gift of Harvey School pottery
Timothy Roberts
93 China’s white gold: Jingdezhen porcelain
Dr Victoria Avery
99 Bejewelled cosmetic boxes:
crafted by jewellers and goldsmiths
Amanda Stücklin
4 EDITORIAL
HERITAGE110 The transformation of La Maison Basse
Caia Hagel
113 Resurrecting Stirling Castle’s mediaeval
unicorn tapestries
Will Bennett
128 INDEX OF ADVERTISERS
PHOTOGRAPHY8 Two Australian photojournalists David Moore and
David Potts and their journey through 1950s London
Gael Newton
56 Celebrating the photographic portraits of Man Ray
The first European survey at the National Portrait
Gallery, London
Terence Pepper
REVIEWS24 Expatriate art dealer Richard Nagy achieves a new
threshold in the international market
Terry Ingram
38 The boundaries between painting and performance art at
Tate Modern
Matilda Bathurst
88 Picasso’s early figure paintings at the Courtauld Gallery
Elspeth Moncrieff
COVERDavid Potts (Australian 1926-2012), Epstein retrospective,
Tate Gallery, 1953, gelatin silver photograph,
printed image 37.2 x 27.2 cm, sheet 37.2 x 27.2 cm.
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1989
2 World of Antiques & Art
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CONTENTS
Matilda Bathurst
For T.S. Eliot, a poet was a person who
could somehow connect ‘the noise of the
typewriter’ and ‘the smell of cooking’ —
someone who could ingeniously compress
degrees of separation to serve their own artistic
ends. We must then be glad that so many Tate
curators are poets, wielding an almost superhuman
force of connectivity, to provide curatorial
narratives worthy of the raciest melodrama.
Take, for instance, the sudden blossoming of
the relationship between Hockney and Pollock in
the Tate Modern’s current exhibition, Painting
After Performance. The exhibition is well-tuned to
contemporary enthusiasms and reservations about
art. In 2012, the Turner Prize announced Spartacus
Jack Smith, Untitled,c. 1958–1962,
printed 2011© Jack Smith Archive
THE BOUNDARIES BETWEENPAINTING ANDPERFORMANCE ART
A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance is the Tate Modern’s attempt toimpose a narrative on the disparate elements of post-war performance art
Mark R Cabouret
Born on 29 May 1854 in the city of
Norwich, England, the reasons for the
immigration to Australia of Neville
Henry Penniston Caley (as his surname
was originally spelt) may never be known;
however it is known that his prodigious skills
were largely self-taught.
In his relatively short life and the twenty-five
year period during which he became the pre-
eminent resident ornithological draughtsman in
Australia, he accomplished more than any other
single artist and, arguably, more than John Gould
himself, in familiarising and enhancing an
appreciation of Australian avifauna.
Contemporary references to Cayley made many
superlative statements about his work and described
him as ‘Australia’s bird painter...’ (The Richmond River
Times 22 March 1822) and ‘The most celebrated
living bird painter...’ (The Argus 9 May 1894)
Cayley grew up in privileged circumstances
and his family epitomised the accomplishments
and aspirations of the wealthy middle class.
Natural history and related art, popular with the
gentry at that time, may initially have been an
amateur interest for him.
On 21 July 1867, five months after his father’s
death, Cayley wrote to his mother in anticipation
of returning home from his private school to
NEVILLE HENRY CAYLEYAUSTRALIA’S FORGOTTENBUT BRILLIANT BIRD ARTIST
During the 1880s and 1890s, Neville Cayley waslauded as the consummate ‘bird artist of Australia’
Top: This is the first publication of the studio portrait photographof Neville Henry Cayley, c. 1890. Author’s collection
Above left: Good Jack Weeping (n.d.), watercolour drawing of alaughing kookaburra signed ‘N. Cayley’. Author’s collection
Left: Letter from 15 year old Neville Henry Caley to his motherdated 21 July 1869
Norwich for the summer holiday, the last before
leaving school. This is the only known document
in which he signed his surname using the
original spelling of ‘Caley’ rather than ‘Cayley’.
Having explored the beautiful gardens
surrounding his home, a short walk would have
brought the youth to the shops and workrooms of
some of the finest exponents of Victorian
taxidermy and to the game dealers in the
Norwich market place. Here he would have seen
braces of game hanging like trophies from nails
and pegs and masses of birds strewn across the
wicker baskets and tables. No doubt these
experiences left an indelible impression and
inspired his vocation as an artist and naturalist,
for whom field sports and the collection of
specimens were an integral part.
Cayley arrived in Australia aged 23 with his
younger brother William Herbert on 20
September 1877 at the Port of Melbourne on the
iron clipper Sir Walter Raleigh. Both were
described in the shipping records as having ‘no
occupation’. The first known reference to his
change of surname (with the ‘y’ added) and being
recognised as an artist appeared in the form of an
advertisement placed in The Argus in Melbourne
on Saturday, 5 April 1879 requesting him to
contact an ‘artists’ colourman’ in Swanston Street.
At this time he lived in the Gippsland area but
unable to generate sufficient income, Cayley
moved to Sydney in late 1880 seeking better
income opportunities, where it was reported in
The Bulletin on 8 January 1881: ‘... Mr Neville
Cayley, an artist, who has settled in Sydney,
whose forté is animal subjects, has exhibited
some capital sketches in water colours. He gives
a faithful picture of many well-known and
richly-plumaged birds of Australia.’
One of these paintings was almost certainly of
that depicting two wild sulphur-crested
cockatoos which he titled A Bush Lecture; the
subject being explained in The Sydney Morning
Herald on 29 January 1881 when the painting
could be viewed at the establishment of Mr
Clarke, a ‘picture dealer’ in Pitt Street.
The reviewer interpreted this scene as one of a
domestic dispute or more specifically a ‘curtain
lecture’, a term more often applied to a wife’s
reprimand to her husband for infidelity, but here,
presumed to indicate the agitated state of a
cuckolded husband.
‘... a couple of sulphur-crested cockatoos
are perched on a bough, above a sea of tree
tops. Monsieur, with his beak open, his crest
up, and his feathers ruffled, is evidently
administering a sharp curtain lecture to
Madame, whose upturned eyes and
deprecating attitude show that she has no
defence to make. The figures are full of life,
the treatment of the foliage is delicate, and the
colouring is true, so that the picture is
altogether a piquant little study.’
A further painting among some private
commissions he obtained in Sydney and perhaps
his second whimsical study was an intimate
study of a pair of Welcome Swallows at their
empty nest which is sheltered beneath the
Below left: A Bush Lecture,c.1880–1881, watercolour,diam: 20 cm. The MitchellLibrary, State Library NSW
Below: Pair of WelcomeSwallows at their vacatednest, 1881, watercolour,20.5 x 28 cm. Author’s collection
Pablo Picasso(1881–1973),
Seated Harlequin,1901, oil on canvas,
83.2 x 61.3 cm.The Metropolitan
Museum of ArtNew York
In 1901, twenty-year old Pablo Picasso held his first Parisian exhibition, a momentous year in the artist’s early career
THE EARLY YEARSBECOMING PICASSO
Elspeth Moncrieff
As cameo exhibitions go, they don’t come
much better than this. Twenty superb
paintings from one year of Picasso’s life
illustrate his transformation from
adapter and imitator of the French post-
impressionists to a mature artist emerging into his
‘blue period’, exploring fundamental issues of the
human condition. Looking at these works, it seems
as if Picasso burst onto the scene as a fully-fledged
artist with no fumbling juvenile period. The list of
lenders to the show includes some of the great art
institutions of the world, although interestingly
many of these early works are also still held in
private collections. Had Picasso died in 1901, he
would have been remembered as a precocious
interpreter of the post-impressionist idiom who
took elements of the style and made it his own,
borrowing and adapting with consummate fluency.
The exhibition’s curator estimates that Picasso
painted about 300 paintings in a single year. One
is literally dumbstruck at this extraordinary
artistic outpouring and the range of works he
painted. When could he have slept? Especially
when his painting was combined with a hard
drinking Bohemian lifestyle in the Montmartre
cafés. He arrived back in Paris from Barcelona
in May of that year, only two months before his
first exhibition with Ambroise Vollard and
painted some sixty paintings in the space of six
weeks, often as many as three in a day. His
subjects covered the whole of Parisian life,
adapting and assimilating the work of the post-
impressionists. But this was not enough for the
young Picasso. Throughout his life he conquered
an artistic summit only to move on into the next
phase of his development, paintings like the
Harlequin, The Mother or Absinthe Drinker are
still considered some of the most profound and
haunting works the artist ever painted, stemming
from his deepest convictions.
The show focuses only on the figure paintings;
its starting point is the Child with a Dove, the
only Picasso once owned by Samuel Courtauld
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), The Mother, 1901, oil onboard, 74.0 x 52.1 cm. The Saint Louis Art Museum
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Child With A Dove, 1901, oil on canvas, 73 x 54 cm. Courtauld Institute
It has taken twelve years to weave a new set of medievalunicorn tapestries, once the finest part of the sumptuousRenaissance furnishings of Stirling Castle in Scotland
FROM THE MEDIEVAL TOTHE MODERN
THE ART OF TAPESTRY WEAVING
Above: Tapestry, Stirling Castle: The Unicorn is Found, 2008, wool, cotton and gold thread,330 x 340cm © Crown Copyright reproduced courtesy of Historic Scotland
World of Antiques & Art 113
Will Bennett
Tapestries played an important role in the
royal courts of medieval Europe. These
intricately woven wall hangings were
prized for their beauty but they were
fabulously expensive because of the time that
they took to make and the materials used.
Tapestries became a way for a monarch to
demonstrate wealth and power and so it is not
surprising that James V, King of Scotland from
1513–1542, ordered the best when he built the
Royal Palace in Stirling Castle to mark his
marriage to his second wife Mary of Guise. The
Scottish monarch wanted his newest residence to
be as fine as any she would have known in her
much wealthier home country of France.
The palace was designed to display James V’s
learning and sophistication as well as asserting
his right to rule and impress his new Queen. Its
elaborate decorative scheme, inside and out, was
inspired by the Renaissance and the interiors and
exteriors were painted in bright colours decorated
with plenty of gilding. Arranged around a
courtyard known as the Lion’s Den, the palace
had separate apartments for James and Mary,
each with an outer hall, an inner hall and a
bedchamber. Access to these rooms was restricted
according to the importance of visitors and the
degree of royal privilege accorded to them.
Above: Mary of Guise altarpiecetriptych, oil and tempera on panel,81.5 x 120 cm © Crown Copyright reproducedcourtesy of Historic Scotland
Left: Mary of Guise prayer table and triptych © Crown Copyright,reproduced courtesy of Historic Scotland
These pieces will be among a numberof other works from Stirling Castle inthe exhibition
The Queen’s Inner Hall in the Royal Apartments at Stirling Castle © Crown Copyright, reproduced courtesy of Historic Scotland
Chair of State and bed in the Queen’s Bedchamber at Stirling Castle © Crown Copyright, reproduced courtesy of Historic Scotland.
114 World of Antiques & Art
The many aspirations and influences on young Australian photojournalists are exemplified in theexperiences of iconic photographers David Moore and David Potts
TWO AUSTRALIANPHOTOJOURNALISTSTHEIR JOURNEYTHROUGH 1950s LONDON
David Moore, Henry Moore in his Much Hadham studio,c. 1955 gelatin silver photograph
8 World of Antiques & Art
World of Antiques & Art 9
Gael Newton
In the nineteenth century ‘Australian’
photographers were usually British immigrants
or from the legion of itinerant young men
circling the globe in search of camera trade. A
generation of native-born photographers emerged
in the 1890s and would dominate the profession by
World War I.
Images of Australia were, of course, exported in
their hundreds of thousands from the 1850s on,
often to lure immigrants and investors, but few
locally-trained photographers departed to conquer
the old world.
Debonair Melbourne-born professional
H. Walter Barnett (1862–1934) was exceptional in
seeking training in American studios in the mid-
1880s, but more so for parlaying his success in
several Australian studios into a rapid rise as a high
society portraitist and socialite in London from
1897 to 1920.
Above: David Moore, Sisters of Charity,Washington DC, 1956, gelatin silver photograph
Above right: David Moore, Surry Hills, 1948
Right: David Potts, The Three Graces, Epstein Retrospective, Tate Gallery London, 1954,
gelatin silver photograph
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FEBRUARY – AUGUST 2012 ISSUE 82AUSTRALIA $16.95 NZ $20.95SINGAPORE $20.00 UK £7.00
US $13.00 €10.50
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