Sole lot of joy as Brett Whiteley’s Arrival goes to a new home

A joyous painting by Brett Whiteley was sold in Sydney on Tuesday night for more than $1.6m in what is becoming a successful auction format.

Art specialist Brett Ballard and Geoffrey Smith with Brett Whiteley’s The Arrival — A Glimpse in the Botanical Gardens. Picture: Jane Dempster

A joyous painting by Brett Whiteley with boldly saturated colour was sold in Sydney on Tuesday night for more than $1.6m in what is becoming a successful auction format for local house Smith & Singer.

Whiteley’s painting The Arrival — A Glimpse in the Botanical Gardens, painted in 1984 and depicting a fig tree and a white heron, was the sole lot in the private auction, with a pre-sale estimate of $900,000 to $1.2m. It sold for $1,656,250 including buyer’s premium, after determined bidding by three private clients.

Smith & Singer chairman Geoffrey Smith said the private auction format was attractive to some vendors as it put the focus on a single important work, and avoided the public scrutiny of an open auction.

The sale price is not publicly disclosed unless the parties agree.

“We have a single work of art for sale, it’s a democratic process, it is open for people to participate, but it has some of the aspects that particular clients like when one handles a work of art,” Mr Smith said.

“It means we can do in-focus research on a particular work, and it’s been very successful. All of the works that we have had have sold.”

Smith & Singer started the ­single-lot private auction format in May, after Mr Smith and co-owner Gary Singer relaunched the company in their own names after a decade of trading as Sotheby’s Australia under licence from the international auction house.

Their first private auction was of Cressida Campbell’s large woodblock print Night Interior, which doubled its pre-auction upper estimate of $250,000.

Mr Smith said the sale achieved a record price for a living Australian female artist.

Tuesday’s sale was the sixth private auction they have held.

The Whiteley painting was owned by obstetrician and art ­collector Peter Elliott, who bought it when it was first exhibited in 1984.

It was purchased five years ago by art dealer Denis Savill, who loaned it to the Art Gallery of NSW.

Mr Smith said the “beautiful, life-affirming” painting exhibited some familiar Whiteley motifs, including the bird and its elegant flight path, the richly expressive colour that was reminiscent of Matisse, and the curvaceous forms of the Moreton Bay fig.

“It really is a summation of so many things, a synthesis of so many facets that are integral to his image-making,” he said.

“I look at a work such as this, and it is about his identification with the bird.

“He identified with seeing the world from above, and having that aerial perspective, and travelling through life.

“He identified with birds in so much of his iconography.”