‘Hobart Town’ painting by Knut Bull expected to a huge sum at Smith & Singer auction

An exquisite painting of Hobart by a Norwegian-born former convict is going under the hammer this month and is tipped to attract an eye-watering price.

Artwork recopy of a Knut Bull coloured lithograph, 1855. A separate work by Bull will be put up for auction in Sydney later this month.

An exquisite and historically significant painting depicting Hobart in the mid-nineteenth century is expected to fetch up to $500,000 at auction this month and will be among four prized masterpieces of Australian art to go under the hammer.

Entitled ‘Hobart Town’, the oil painting by the Norwegian-born Knut Bull (1811-89), a former convict, renders Hobart as it appeared in 1855, showing kunanyi/Mount Wellington looming over the settlement and boats navigating rough conditions on the River Derwent.

It is one of four works belonging to the late Graham Joel that will go up for auction. Joel died in 2019 at age 90 and was a key figure in the art collecting world.

Smith & Singer (formerly Sotheby’s Australia) will auction the lots in Sydney on August 21 and is estimating the total proceeds to reach up to $1.9m.

KNUT BULL (1811-1889), Hobart Town, 1855, oil on canvas, 55 x 81.5 cm. Estimated price: $300,000-$500,000. This historic work is up for auction via Smith & Singer. Picture: Supplied

The Bull painting is expected to attract a price between $300,000 and $500,000.

Bull worked as an artist in Norway, Dresden, Copenhagen, and Stockholm before moving to London in 1845, where he was soon convicted for forging a promissory note and transported to Norfolk Island.

He was later sent to the Saltwater River penal settlement in Van Diemen’s Land, where he was granted probation for good conduct in 1849. Thereafter, Bull worked as a farm hand and served as a private art tutor.

The artist received his ticket of leave in 1852 and a conditional pardon in 1854. He was Hobart’s only professional landscape painter in the early 1850s and his surviving works depicting Hobart and its surrounds have taken on immense historical significance.

Art historian John McPhee has said the scene in Bull’s ‘Hobart Town’ “is not benevolent nature but one imbued with the sense of God’s ominous power”.

Smith & Singer chairman, Geoffrey Smith, said Graham Joel’s private collection was one of the most important in the country.

Geoffrey Smith of Smith & Singer. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Luis Ascui

“He provided me with unparalleled access to his collection and archive and I will cherish our weekly meetings over many years in which he confided detailed and unique insights into the history and development of the art market in Australia that spanned the majority of the twentieth century,” Mr Smith said.

From 1951, Joel was the head of his father Leonard Joel’s auction house.

The other works up for auction from Joel’s private collection are Nicolas Chevalier’s ‘Lake Colac and the Warrior’s Hill, from Corangamorah’ (1863) and ‘Mount William and Mount Nelson, Sierra Ranges’ (1862), as well as Eugene von Guérard’s ‘From Our Apartment in Collins Street, Melbourne’ (1854).