JOHN PERCEVAL

Probably Andrew Ivany Gallery, Melbourne,
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above circa 1975
Fine Australian Paintings, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 24 July 1988, lot 349
Private collection, Sydney

Exhibition of paintings by John Perceval, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, November 1956, cat. 13
John Perceval, David Jones' Art Gallery, Sydney, 29 May - 7 June 1957, cat. 9

Trudi Allen, John Perceval, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1992, p. 156

Minor drying cracks to small areas of impasto darker paint on the chimney. Abrasions to impasto area lower right. Overall this work appears in very good original condition.
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In the mid-1950s, after five years' dedicated attention to work at the Murrumbeena Pottery, John Perceval returned to full-time painting with an explosive series of alla prima marines, the much-celebrated Williamstown series. In thirty works painted over three years, he created what Margaret Plant has described as 'among the most jubilant landscapes to be painted in Australia, bearing the marks of the post-impressionist, expressionist and fauvist landscapes of Europe. It is clear that the painter intends his audience to enjoy his painting, to respond to the warmth and blueness of the scene, to want to mess around in boats, to enjoy the vigour and spontaneity...'¹

The present work's 'pure colour and swinging line'²  may have something to do with all that time Perceval spent with clays and glazes: the broad, rapid sweepings of blue, the scrubbings of clouds or smoke, the pebble-blobby enamel accents and the sgraffito scratching-out are all related to the disciplines of tin-glaze technique. However, in 'finding Venice'³ on the bay Perceval had already travelled a long way from Murrumbeena. Paintings such as the present work are not so much decorative fantasies as they are rigorous, plein-air transcriptions of observed reality, albeit rendered with great expressive freedom. The dotty breakwaters are an accurate presentation of Williamstown's rock-built harbour walls. Details of ships' masts and rigging, funnels and portholes, swans and seagulls, oil-scummed water and rust-scarred hulls are noted with a child's or an autist's total absorption. In the present work, the old pilot boat Akuna is recognizable as an actual hulk, with its nameplate clearly legible.⁴

Despite the dynamic optimism of the work, its 'roly-poly...gusto and bounce,'⁵ there are nevertheless deep shadows beneath its bright blue sky and water, echoes of Perceval's earlier, darker symbolism. The row of redundant, dead or dying vessels floats in front of a Golgotha of three smoking chimneys, while the dinghy that sits on the picture's bottom edge is another unsettling device: a skeletal fragment, a jawbone, the pink crescent of its stern like the red mouths in Albert Tucker's Images of modern evil. This is certainly a happy picture, but its smile shows expressionist teeth.

The first Williamstown series⁶ was immediately recognized as a major achievement, with the National Gallery of Victoria purchasing Tugboat in a boat (1956) from its first showing in November 1956. The following year Gannets diving (1956, National Gallery of Victoria) won the John McCaughey Memorial Art Prize and the Bendigo Art Gallery bought Yankee Boats at dry dock (1956), while in 1959 Floating dock was acquired by the Newcastle Region Art Gallery. The present work, formerly known as Boats at Williamstown - Akuna, is here identified as Ships' Graveyard, from the original 1956 Australian Galleries exhibition.

1.  Margaret Plant, John Perceval, Lansdowne, Melbourne, 1978, p. 52
2.  ibid.
3  the phrase is Perceval's own, quoted ibid.
4.  Originally the Komet, a German Navy steam yacht used by the Administrator of German New Guinea, the vessel was captured at the start of WWI, reflagged and renamed the HMAS Una. Sold by the RAN to the Williamstown Pilot Office in 1925, the again-renamed Akuna served in Port Phillip Bay as a pilot cutter until 1953.
5.  Robert Hughes, The Art of Australia, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1970, p. 235
6. The artist was to return to the site and the subject on several occasions: in 1959, 1967 and 1988.