Room with a view makes Brett Whiteley top seller

A large Lavender Bay picture by Brett Whiteley has broken the auction record for an Australian painting selling for $6.1m.

Menzies head of art Justin Turner with Brett Whiteley’s painting Henri’s Armchair, which sold on Thursday for a record $6.136m. Picture: Britta Campion

A large Lavender Bay picture by Brett Whiteley broke the auction record for an Australian painting on Thursday when it sold for $6,136,000 — and knocked Ned Kelly off his horse.

Henri’s Armchair, intimate and monumental, is an interior of Whiteley’s home at Lavender Bay with Sydney Harbour glimpsed through the windows.

It was the sole lot at the Menzies sale in Sydney, where a few telephone bidders pushed up the bids in $100,000 increments. There were no bids from the floor, and it was all over in four minutes, the hammer coming down bang on the painting’s lower estimate, $5m ($6.136m including buyer’s premium).

The successful bidder is a private buyer from Sydney.

 

Whiteley was again Australia’s most expensive artist. For the past decade, the distinction was Sidney Nolan’s. His Ned Kelly painting First-Class Marksman has held the auction record since 2010, when it was sold to the Art Gallery of NSW for $5.4m.

The Whiteley picture, painted in tones he described as “Brahmsian plum” and “stinging clean” ultramarine, was bought from the artist by defamation lawyer and gallery owner Clive Evatt. It is dated and inscribed on the back, “To Clive Evatt/ 12/March/75.”

For years it dominated a living room at Evatt’s home in Turramurra, in Sydney’s north. After he died in 2018, his widow Elizabeth decided to sell.

In an impromptu speech before the sale, Ms Evatt told how her husband had visited Whiteley, intending to buy the picture, with cash from the races loaded in his car boot. “Clive said: ‘I will take it off your hands’,” she recalled. The pair sat on the floor to count the money.

Ms Evatt said the painting was part of the couple’s home, and their lives, for 35 years.

“To have had this amazing painting in my life every day was wonderful,” she said. “Clive considered it one of the greatest works of art in Australia.”

Auctioneer Justin Turner, Menzies’ head of art, said the rare opportunity to buy a “showstopper” Whiteley, and the buoyant mid-pandemic market for pricey assets, were optimum conditions for the sale.

“This is possibly the best Whiteley to come onto the secondary market (since) The Jacaranda Tree on Sydney Harbour, that was sold in 1999,” Turner said. “People say once in a lifetime, but it is highly possible that we won’t see another painting come onto the market again in our lifetime.”

He said people responded to Whiteley’s “deeply personal paintings’’ because he “is almost letting you into his home”.