Albert Namatjira paintings auctioned by son of late mining millionaire

Washington, England: Three distinctive watercolour landscapes by pioneering Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira, once owned by an eccentric Australian media and mining millionaire, have sold at auction in a rural English village.

The paintings, thought to have been personally bought by Sir John Galvin from Namatjira in the 1950s, were sold on Wednesday to a mystery online buyer for a combined £61,000 ($120,000). One of the three works, titled Australian Landscape with Ghost Gum Tree and Mountains, went for £26,000 – well above the pre-sale estimate of £12,000.

Three paintings by Albert Namatjira, pictured in 1954, were auctioned in England on Wednesday.Credit: Alan Lambert

Namatjira’s work, which helped to spearhead contemporary Indigenous Australian art and bring it to light in the Western world, is still rarely found in Britain besides the one gifted to the late Queen Elizabeth II on her 21st birthday in 1947.

Seven years later, the first Indigenous artist to receive international acclaim met the young Elizabeth during her 1954 coronation tour and presented her with another work.

Galvin was also the previous owner of a Namatjira painting, Waters of the Finke, which sold at Smith & Singer, Double Bay, in 2022 for $200,000 and set a record price for his work.

Tim Williams, a fine art consultant for Toovey’s auction house at Washington, about 80 kilometres south-west of London, said it was a rare opportunity for collectors to acquire pieces that embodied the spirit and beauty of the Australian landscape, as seen through the eyes of one of the country’s most important artists.

This Albert Namatjira painting of a central Australian landscape sold at auction in a rural English village this week for £26,000.

“Outside of the examples owned by the late Queen Elizabeth II, it is extremely rare to find Albert Namatjira’s work in the United Kingdom, let alone available to purchase on the British art market,” Williams said.

The three paintings were put up for auction by one of Galvin’s sons, who lives in West Sussex and inherited them from his father, a self-made multi-millionaire who amassed his wealth through ventures in media and mining.

Born one of seven children in a Tasmanian Irish Catholic family in 1908, Sir John Galvin was once reported to have a fortune that “equals, if not exceeds” that of American-born British petroleum industrialist J. Paul Getty, who was at that time regarded as the richest man in America. Galvin’s own fortune was estimated at $150 million in the 1960s.

Media and mining millionaire Sir John Galvin championed Albert Namatjira’s work.Credit: UPI Photo

As a teenager, he moved to Sydney and worked as a messenger boy. After stints in marketing and journalism in Melbourne, Galvin moved to Hong Kong to seek his fortune and later founded his own English-language newspaper in Shanghai.

He became one of the few Westerners to interview Mao Zedong in the 1930s, some years before the revolutionary founded the People’s Republic of China.

Time magazine reported he somewhat mysteriously found his fortune after World War II in the vague area of “mining and transportation”, potentially leveraging contacts he’d made in British intelligence during the war with his company in Malaya, Eastern Mining and Metals Co. Ltd.

A passionate patron of the arts, Galvin sponsored Australian artist Leonard Long’s first international trip and donated other Namatjira paintings to the National Art Gallery of Malaysia.

Galvin relocated to California in the 1950s and started a family, moving his Irish-born wife and five children to a 140,000-hectare farm near Santa Barbara. He had a keen interest in horses and sponsored the US equestrian teams at the 1960 Olympics, even providing training grounds for them.

He once gifted a multimillion-dollar 16-storey building in San Francisco to his daughter, Patricia, for her birthday.

But by the mid-1960s, amid claims he owed the US tax department more than $US21 million, he moved his family to Ireland. Before Galvin died in 1991, he lived on a large property, Corkagh, outside Dublin. Two of his daughters married members of French and Hungarian aristocratic families.

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