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The Manly Art Gallery is finding it owns one of the globally best known paintings, which was memorably overlooked by forgetful curators some years ago.
The painting is Christmas Flowers and Christmas Belles, a 52 by 36 cm oil on canvas borrowed by the National Gallery of Australia for its Tom Roberts exhibition in Canberra.
No curator of Australian art should now be unaware of this delightful painting of the poor unemployed selling flowers to ladies in long dresses and parasols in Sydney.
The total turnover of the art auction market in Australia ground ahead by a modest 3.2 per cent or $3 million to $109.25 million in 2015 and the ranking of all the major players were unchanged.
This was despite extra exertion by action staff as 567 more lots than in 2014 were catalogued and sold by the major auction houses, publicised in a flood of thicker and often larger catalogues to impress clients.
Sydney will get light rail and the NBN will be rolled out before the market returns to its heady $175.6 million turnover achieved in 2007 at the current rate of increase.
The surprise star of the last big auction of 2015 was Thomas Tyrwhitt Balcombe (1810 – 1861), a little-known colonial artist whose work from the 1850s is extremely rare to market. Menzies offered not one or two, but seven of these rarities, two small oil paintings of Aborigines, and 5 mixed media works on paper passed down through the artist’s family.
Heavily contested by several bidders in the room and on the phone, the two oil paintings set new auction records for Balcombe, selling for hammer prices of $70,000 (lot 60) and $80,000 (lot 61) on estimates of $16,000-$24,000 to the Mitchell Library.
The 5 works on paper equally smashed their pre-sale estimates of between $2,000 and $5,000, selling for $13,000 (lot 62), $18,000 (lot 63), $24,000 (lot 64), $36,000 (lot 65) and again $24,000 (lot 66) – not as assumed to another public institution, but to a private collector from Victoria with a passion for mid-19th century Australian art.
Several predominantly South Australian rare and collectable modernists comprise the majority of a boutique selection of early 20th century art that goes under the hammer from 2pm Thursday December 10 at Leonard Joel 333 Malvern Road, South Yarra.
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They will analyse the available data and put your artwork into perspective by giving you a price range of comparable works sold by the artist.
