Capon unveils Olley tribute at AGNSW
MARGARET Olley would have approved, says Edmund Capon.
MARGARET Olley would have approved, says Edmund Capon.
The Art Gallery of NSW's outgoing director yesterday unveiled the Sydney museum's latest acquisition, a $610,000 Emanuel Phillips Fox painting purchased to honour Olley, who died in July.
Nasturtiums (1912) was acquired by the Art Gallery Society of NSW on behalf of the museum in August.
"It is a wonderful acquisition and a perfect memorial," says Capon. "Oll' loved the Foxes (Emmanel Phillips and his artist wife Ethel Carrick) and had works by them."
Olley, who during her lifetime donated more than 130 works to the AGNSW - a contribution worth an estimated $7 million - was part of the fabric of the gallery, Capon says.
"She was a remarkable person. And I know she would have loved this painting."
Despite Nasturtiums's price tag, Capon says the gallery secured the 99-year-old work at a good price.
"It's always good to get a bargain. But, really, if you're after bargains, you're in the wrong game," says Capon, who announced his retirement in August after 30 years with the AGNSW.
"This work perfectly reflects Olley's beliefs, her commitment to the arts and to this gallery."
John Masters, the Art Gallery Society of NSW president, says the group's 500-member Collection Circle was proud to have raised the funding for the purchase. "Fox and Olley aspired to the same artistic outcomes," Masters says.
Deborah Edwards, senior curator of Australian Art at the AGNSW, says Nasturtiums, which hangs in the gallery's Grand Courts alongside a Rupert Bunny and beneath another Phillips Fox, is an important work.
"It belongs to a period of production, from around 1909 to 1914, acknowledged as the finest in E. Phillips Fox's oeuvre," she says.
Nasturtiums's provenance is an interesting one. It was presented as a gift in 1912 from Phillips Fox to Edith Anderson, herself an artist and the painting's young, behatted subject.
Anderson married landscape artist Penleigh Boyd in 1912, and the painting remained in the Boyd family - which includes architect Robin and, by extension, notable plein air painter Arthur - until its sale at a Deutscher and Hackett auction in August.
Nasturtiums featured recently in Art, Love and Life. Ethel Carrick and E. Phillips Fox at the Queensland Art Gallery. On the eve of that exhibition in April, just months before she died, Olley donated a work to QAG. Believed to represent one of Olley's last acts of giving, Carrick Fox's On the Beach (c.1909) remains on display in the QAG permanent collection.
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