RUPERT BUNNY

Macquarie Galleries, Sydney (label on the reverse)
Company collection, Sydney
Australian + International Fine Art, Deutscher-Menzies, Sydney, 16-17 June 2004, lot 98, illus.

Australian Blooms: Celebrating 100 years of still life painting and watercolours by important 20^th century Australian artists, Savill Galleries, Sydney, 20 October-16 November 2002
Australian Paintings Summer 2004, Savill Galleries, Melbourne, 26 February-28 March 2004; Sydney, 2 March-3 April 2004, cat.22, illus.

Good condition. Some abrasion bottom centre margin.
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Rupert Bunny's lifelong interest in flowers finds a characteristic expression in Still life of mixed blooms, a painting in which he gave free expression to his interest in vivid colours and lively movement. In one of his earliest paintings, the student work Cactus (1883, Art Gallery of South Australia), bright red flowers are the dominant feature. And in those late 19th century portraits painted in France and England his sitters usually held a rose. Early subject paintings featured roses, white for purity and red for passion, symbols Christian and pagan. They also played a dramatic narrative role in the grand Old Salon painting, Le Roses de Sainte Dorothée of 1892, and added appeal in the more intimate and feminine paintings of la belle époque such as Returning from the garden (circa 1906, Art Gallery of New South Wales). Even in his 1920s landscapes of the south of France, flowers had an ever-present role. There are the spring blossoms of Le Lavandou, and at Bandol a whole composition is devoted to the colourful beauty of a flower farm. It was not until much later in his career that he began painting still life subjects devoted entirely to flowers, mixed bunches in Hungarian vases, nasturtiums, and others in blue jars and green. These first flower paintings were shown in Paris in 1930 in the annual Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. In Australia, he began exhibiting them in 1937 in solo shows at Hogan's Art Gallery in Melbourne's Little Collins Street, giving them the most general titles of 'Mixed Flowers' or Flower Piece'. Our painting would certainly have been included in one of those early shows. A number found their way into major collections of Australian art. The National Gallery of Victoria, through the Felton Bequest, has Mixed Flowers in a Hungarian Jug, the Queensland Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of New South Wales also have mixed bunches, and the Castlemaine Art Gallery treasures its Flower Study. A favourite, Hollyhocks, is in the Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth.

We are grateful to David Thomas for assistance in cataloguing this work.