Art Gallery of South Australia finally nets the elusive Butterfly Catcher

The Art Gallery of South Australia has added a ‘missing’ painting by Clarice Beckett to its exhibition of the artist’s works.

Art Gallery of South Australia curator Tracey Lock with the Clarice Beckett painting The Butterfly Catcher, which is included in an exhibition of Beckett’s work. Picture: Roy Van Der Vegt

The painting is called The Butterfly Catcher and it proved to be elusive when curator Tracey Lock was organising an exhibition of Clarice Beckett’s works at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

The exhibition on show in ­Adelaide has about 120 of Beckett’s paintings and is a major new survey of the artist, now regarded as an important pioneer of modern Australian art in the 1920s and 30s. Lock was unable to locate two paintings that she wanted for the exhibition and late last year she put out a call to their unknown owners, via an article in The Australian.

Three weeks ago, the online story came to the attention of a collector in Brisbane who owns three works by Beckett, including The Butterfly Catcher.

The owner, who asked to be identified only as Jon, sent an email to the AGSA. Lock was soon on the phone, and Jon agreed to lend two of his pictures for the ­exhibition, The Butterfly Catcher and Bright Morning.

The Butterfly Catcher is ­unusual among Beckett’s output because it includes a portrait of an identifiable person, in this case Beckett’s niece, Patricia, in the garden of the family home at Beaumaris near Melbourne.

Lock said The Butterfly ­Catcher was a “little gem” of a painting and this week she was able to include it in the exhibition, called Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment. The Australian’s national art critic, Christopher Allen, writing in Review, said the exhibition clearly showed Beckett’s remarkable achievement in her paintings, which was to evoke “the transcendent and spiritual”.

Clarice Beckett’s The Butterfly Catcher.

Jon said The Butterfly Catcher was different from the other two works in his collection, being Bright Morning and Rainy Night.

“I could see that they were good paintings,” he said. “You know you’re on to a winner sometimes.”

Lock said it was difficult to keep track of an artist’s output when ­individual paintings were privately owned. Among other lenders to the exhibition, at the AGSA until May 16, are Russell Crowe and Kerry Stokes.

She has not been able to find the second painting of Beckett’s, called Resting Place, but was thrilled to have The Butterfly Catcher. “I was the catcher and she was the butterfly,” she said.