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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

´´

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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