The price for the Fuller is the second highest priced work by the artist at auction.
Both were exceptional works which critics of the time might have described as chefs d'ouvres but only economically besieged Tasmania managed to stop its fine specimen leaving the state.
It was purchased by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. (TMAG).
The Florence Fuller left West Australia for Canberra after being purchased by the National Gallery of Australia (NGA). It was knocked down to art curator/consultant Barbara Chapman bidding in the auction room.
This large painting of a standing couple in a landscape with a gum tree and other typical WA vegetation joins a group of half a dozen major West Australian works purchased by the NGA from WA property investor Mary-Louise Wordsworth last year.
Both the latest works sold were oils on canvasses, the 20 year earlier Fuller a much bigger work at 108 x 133 cm compared with the Lahey at 40 by 50 cm.
At such a size it was more obviously a trophy picture of the kind that continue to be keenly sought after around the world by the super rich even in the present uncertain financial environment.
WA has surprised by not producing buyers of this type for the more pricey overseas works as it did during the 1980s boom when Robert Holmes a Court and Alan Bond were competing for international Impressionist works.
Now the local tycoons appear to be not even pursuing key works by local Impressionist artists. The NGA's director, Mr Ron Radford, by contrast has a reputation for refusing to be outbid.
Any other institutional counter bidder for the Fuller might have been have been taken off guard by the soaring price as the estimate was only $25,000 to $35,000.
Despite the absence of formal estimates, any counter bidder for the Lahey had a more secure idea of what it was worth. Its companion piece showing the other end of Hobart's major stretch of water as Salamanca Quayside, Hobart sold for $36,800 IBP at Davidsons Auctions in Sydney in November last year.
The Davidson offering had lifted Lahey into a new price range and buyers may have been reticent to ratchet her values up yet again so soon, especially as it could have been assumed that the TMAG would have been keen to secure it.
That it did so despite being in the middle of major renovations of its building and functions in a state had been hit by the decline in national tourism (it is so much cheaper to head overseas with the Australian dollar at its present level) is a credit to the gallery's commitment. With so much money sloshing around in WA, the Art Gallery of Western Australia might have been thought to have been easily able to nail the Fuller.
Instead the offering most keenly sought by locals at the sale appeared to be a total bling Rolex wristwatch which sold for $21,500 plus the BP. The Leopard Cosmograph Daytona unisex watch was made around 2007 and had a face with eight diamonds.
It was at least under the $22,000 to $32,000 estimate (which also excludes BP).
"I'm really surprised that the Fuller was not secured by a local gallery given its extraordinary provenance," the auctioneer, Mr Peter McKenzie told AASD's special correspondent. The work's departure also comes as Wesfarmers prunes its collection albeit as a prelude to replacing the sales, to be made through Deutscher and Hackett, with more pertinent acquisitions.
The Fuller was a delightful sunny work which could claim to be the West's equivalent of Sir Arthur Streeton's magnum opus Golden Summer.
The Fuller appears to have been the gift made by the trustees of the Western Australian Museum to Professor W.D.L. Ride AM, upon his retirement as director of the Museum,.
The oil initially had belonged to the family of Sir John Winthrop Hackett. A related work, a portrait of Deborah Vernon Hackett of around the same date was sold in the same rooms in 2005 and is now also in Canberra at the National Portrait Gallery.
The Fuller was also more desirable locally than the Lahey in that Fuller was very much a WA artist. She was born in South Africa and went to Melbourne as a child. After studying at the Academie Julian in Paris from 1894 to 1901, she returned to Australia and settled in Perth in 1904.
McKenzie quoted in its catalogue the understanding of the vendors that the figures in the picture are Sir Winthrop and his wife. He was then owner of the West Australian newspaper which gave the painting a presumably arms length glowing critique on October 31 of that year calling it the piece de resistance of an exhibition of Fuller's work then taking place in Perth.
Vida Lahey (1882-1968) is very much a Queensland identity. Born at Pimpama, Queensland, daughter of David Lahey, Irish-born farmer and timber-miller, and his wife, Jane Jemima, and educated at Goytelea School, Southport, she learnt to paint through Godfrey Rivers.
Her connection with Tasmania was through the forceful post impressionist views of the state. She exhibited at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney in 1925. These works were heartily praised by the critics.
It was from this exhibition that her two most highly priced works came.
McKenzie Gallery achieved two other outstanding results at its latest auction. A Portrait of St Mary McKillop by Robert Juniper went to the Monks of New Norcia, the Benedictine Mission for $13,500 plus the 16.5 per cent buyers premium while a painting done in 2003 by local contemporary realist artist Leigh Hewson-Bower (born 1947) sold for $10,250 plus the premium. Hewson-Bower's Kings Park, a panoramic oil on canvas 91 by 216 cm, had the added value of being a local view The McKillop, irregularly shaped in that it has a pointed top, joins a celebrated collection of Old Master orientated paintings at the monastery 132 km north of Perth. .
The 139 works included many lesser works, such as sketches from the studio of the late WA academic and artist Hal Missingham. These were only tentatively sought in line with general buyer resistance at the lower level.
