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.
They certainly were not aware of it 21 years ago, despite the painting being very much in the news because it was the subject of one of Australia's major art crimes.
The painting was one of five paintings stolen and then after several years, mysteriously returned then to the gallery.
A sketch of an identical image that clearly related to the work was taken around public galleries by the Financial Review on their “junk days” when curators face the public to asses the artistic, scholarly or visual importance – but not the value – of works about which their owners may not have a clue.
This is done as a service to the public and to help ensure that none of Australia's portable visual heritage gets thrown away or lost.
Curators have mixed feelings about these days as the nickname given to the days suggest. Those galleries which do not have such days will usually see a work by appointment if they are approached.
The sketch was taken around anonymously and the reaction reported in the Australian Financial Review. (May 4.1984.)
Less than half the staffers who examined the work related it, even as a copy, to the oil painting in the Manly Art Gallery.
Only one, Ron Radford then director of the Art Gallery of South Australia dismissed the one most likely convincing possibility that it was a fake.
It had been purchased by a puzzled antique dealer at a Friday auction at Lawson's in Sydney for $55. The Friday sales usually comprised a miscellany of household objects of various ages.
At that time a number of sketches which appeared to have been done for noted Australian Impressionist paintings began appearing at suburban or other second rank auctions.
The sketches were later credited to Mr Bill Blundell who called them his “innuendos.”
After the exercise, when asked if he had painted, it Mr Blundell was non-committal.
The National Gallery of Victoria had just dismissed as of 'no interest', a masterpiece that had been offered in similar but genuine circumstances.
The copy/study/fake that was carted around the galleries by its buyers in September-October was done in October 1984 to test the reliability of the service after a leading curator failed to identify a major American painting that was taken in for identification.
The masterpiece worthy of 'no interest', a portrait of an Afro-American boy playing soldiers had come up in a Tasmanian auction selling for $350.
Sydney antique dealer Bert Johns and Hobart's Charles Bremer had acquired this work in the early 1970s at the Hobart auction on the hunch that it had some potential.
When the work was submitted for assessment by the National Gallery of Victoria, the owners were told they could take it away. It was of little interest.
Undeterred the owners sent it to Sotheby's New York where it made $US67,500, finding its way into the Amon Carter Museum of American Western Art in Fort Worth, Texas. It is hanging in the museum as Attention Company! Front Face.
The curator, Dr Ursula Hoff, could easily have been forgiven. Her forte was European art and she had instituted some of the NGV's best acquisitions in that area.
Attention Company! Front Face was not just a great painting in its own right.
It turned out to be a missing work by William Harnett, a leading 19th century American painter famous for his tromp l'oeil work.
The responses from the curators to the sketch hawked around by the Australian Financial Review were extraordinary, for the image or a copy was clearly unknown to them although galleries were notified, or would have been aware through newspaper reports of the fact that the painting was the prize art work of the seven stolen from the gallery.
Bill Blundell's unsigned “innuendoes” had been finding their way into suburban and other secondary auctions and reports of their sighting appeared in the press.
The innuendoes appeared to be studies for, or early unfinished copies of major art works by members of the Australian Impressionist schools.
Sketches for major art works fetch good money because apart from any aesthetic appeal they also throw insight into an artist's working style. A knowledgeable person may well have thought that the sketches could be by the artist themselves.
Mr Blundell, however, said that he had not put committed works in this manner to auctions. Obviously his unknown buyers had.
The sketch circulated the galleries without any one chancing on this possibility until the director of the NGA, Mr Ron Radford, looked at it and without a moment's hesitation declared it was a fake.
From the Queensland Art Gallery came the suggestion that it was painted between 1890 and 1910 and in the style of Charles Conder or Ethel Carrick Fox.
If it was a Conder it was an Australian work. The curator did not say so but this was not as imaginative as it seemed. The parasol was a shock of red in the painting and Conder had painted works including one called That Fatal Color (sic) with such highlights. The Fatal Color was the red of the parasol in a field where there was a bull.
The Manly Art Gallery oil has also found its original title. Up until the theft it was simply known as The Flower Sellers.
The title was very Conder-ish and Wilde-ean.
The NGV referred the “owner” to the European and American art department post 1800.
Its representative concluded that the treatment suggested that it had been painted in the 1930s but followed the styles of the late 19th century, as indicated by the costumes.
It appeared to be from the hand an Edwardian artist such as Rupert Bunny or Phillips Fox.
The Art Gallery of NSW said the painting was probably European and turn of the century. It was not easily recognisable as the work of a well known artist.
This was almost absolutely accurate, of course, but it did relate to one.
The NGA does not waste taxpayers money on such inspections, it made clear. Just send in a photograph and let them know about it.
The Art Gallery of WA was also close to the mark. It was either an early study for The Flower Sellers or a more likely a copy.
When faced with the work, Blundell, who was also an auction habitué, said he "could not rule out the possibility" that he had painted it.
But he added it was painted on Richmond River Cedar and done recently because it appeared to have been done over house paint.
Since being returned to the Manly Art Gallery, the original painting has been on many trips including a 1999 global exhibition called 1900 Art at the Crossroads.
The Manly Art Gallery's senior curator told the Australian Art Sales Digest that as a result of that exhibition, and the subsequent demand for the work by curatorial borrowers it was the only one in the collection that had its own special travelling box.
That said, it was the Ethel Carrick Fox Manly Summer that was borrowed for the Australia exhibition at the Royal Academy three years ago. Some of the British press did not think highly of the choices for that exhibition and panned it.
Because of its subject matter – Manly and the beach – it is the most institutionally borrowed of Manly's art works.
According to a statement from the Guggenheim Museum in New York which organised the show 1900: Art at the Crossroads which it held from May 19-September 13, 2000, the exhibition, organised by the Guggenheim Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts, London in conjunction, this exhibition surveyed the year 1900 and providing a radical reassessment of artistic cross-currents at the turn of the century.
It featured works by established artists and great masters of the period, including Bouguereau, Burne-Jones, Degas, Eakins, Gauguin, Klimt, and Munch, as well as artists who were just emerging as revolutionary figures, such as Balla, Kandinsky, Matisse, Mondrian, and Picasso.
These works were presented alongside the paintings and sculptures of lesser-known artists whose achievements are only now being acknowledged.
Maybe “only now” still applies.
Elspeth Pitt, who wrote the Tom Roberts catalogue entry for the c 1999 work says that while some have suggested George Street as the site of the painting it was originally exhibited as Flower Sellers, Kent Street.
Many newspaper columns and a magazine article published in 1899 document the tribulations of the King Street flower sellers , many of whom were men in reduced circumstances.
The Sydney city council was trying to have them removed.
Public opinion won out pointing out that Melbourne, London and Paris all had flower sellers.
Ms Pitt suggests it may have been commissioned by The Sydney Mail in which it was reproduced as a colour lithograph in 1899 in its Christmas edition, under current title.
Donated by a Colonel A. Spain to the Manly Art Gallery in 1940 it was stolen on May 24 1976.
There is a Santa Claus, for it was recovered in a raid on a Darling Point house in December. The Australian Financial Review "sketch" is in a garden shed somewhere in Australia.
The parties involved in the robbery have never been identified. Physical damage that occurred during the episode has been repaired.
