Breathtaking bargains are rare in the expensive field of fine art purchasing (there are never any Boxing Day sales). But the Canberra Museum and Gallery (CMAG) is rejoicing over the the sweet frugality of its newest purchase.
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CMAG has just paid $8000 at a Melbourne auction (an auction CMAG only heard about at very short notice) for an oil painting by the revered Ethel Carrick Fox (1872-1955). Painted probably in 1944 it is of Saint John's picture-postcard-perfect sandstone Anglican church and gay springtime cemetery in Reid. And so of course it is exactly the kind of Canberra treasure that CMAG is always shopping for.
But as we ogled the painting at CMAG on Wednesday, CMAG's art curator Deborah Clark enthused over what an appropriate treasure, what a bargain, we were ogling.
"It's one of our CMAG briefs to collect historical paintings of the Canberra region and we have a delicious handful of them. She is an exceptional ... first-rank Australian artist (we claim Ethel as an Australian) who has painted Canberra subjects, so this painting is wonderful for us," she said.
"And it's always interesting to me that Canberra subjects are less favoured and therefore are much more affordable for us. I mean an Ethel Carrick Fox painting like this [of this size and quality] of a flower market in Nice [the France-based artist loved to paint brilliantly bright scenes of South of France bustle] would be 10 times the price of this painting of Canberra.
"It just popped up in an auction in Melbourne. We only knew about it a few days beforehand. It really was a stroke of luck that we came across it. It seems to have belonged to a man with a property in the Dandenongs."
Deborah Clark has just made a visit to Saint John's and its cemetery and said she found almost everything exactly as it was on the Spring day perhaps 72 years ago when the artist took her easel there. A cheerful graveyard sounds like an oxymoron but the artist has captured a cemetery in cherry-blossom bloom, a church of glowing sandstone beneath a blue sky in which whirly, frothy, post-Impressionist clouds are floating gaily.
CMAG's bargain is not yet on display because, bright and cheerful as it looks already to the lay eye the curatorial eye can see that it has become a little dingy and is need of a good clean.
Ethel Carrick Fox was the wife of the more illustrious painter Emanuel Phillips Fox (1865-1915) but was a considerable talent in her own right. She was known for joyful paintings full of human bustle, bright flowers and brilliance of colour. Long widowed, Mrs Phillips Fox painted up a storm of 62 flattering oil paintings of Canberra for a wartime September 1944 exhibition and sale to raise funds for the Red Cross and the Services Welfare Association. CMAG's prize is probably one of the 62.
The exhibition was set up in the Masonic Hall. There was nowhere to hang the pictures and so they were propped up on chairs, below everyone's eyelines. People had to stoop to see them. The Canberra Times reported the artist and others deploring the fact that, shamefully, the national capital lacked a gallery in which to properly display artworks.
