JOHN PERCEVAL

The artist
Australian Galleries, Melbourne
State Bank of Victoria; purchased from the above in May 1979
Corporate collection, Sydney

John Perceval: Canberra Exhibition 1966, Albert Hall, Canberra, 14 - 27 July, 1966, cat. 34 (as Collection: The artist)

Margaret Plant, John Perceval (rev. ed.), Lansdowne Editions, East Melbourne, 1979, p. 52, illus. p. 37, pl. 11
Traudi Allen, John Perceval, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1992, p. 155

This work is presented in a gold timber frame with linen mount. There appear to be several light surface scratches and scuff marks to the surface of the picture. Overall good original condition.
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Between 1949 and 1955, John Perceval virtually abandoned painting, concentrating instead on throwing and decorating ceramics at the Murrumbeena Pottery, and caring for his young and growing family. When in 1956 he re-entered the fray of solo painting exhibitions, it was with the explosive success of his Gaffney's Creek and Williamstown landscape show at Australian Galleries, and his career took a rapid upward trajectory.

Less familiar than the perennially popular Williamstown series is a small but important group of works painted immediately prior, between 1952 and 1954, paintings which depict Perceval and his wife Mary's three children: Matthew (b. 1945), Tessa (b. 1947) and Winkie (Celia, b. 1949). These works, a necessary prelude or testing ground for his full return to painting, are emotionally motivated, reflecting both the tenderness of parenthood and (through the figure of Matthew) Perceval's nostalgia for his own small, blonde, naughty childhood self. The series included such paintings as Children in the Sea (1952, lost), Tessa and Winkie in Blackman's Chair (1952, private collection), Matthew and Tessa playing Cat's Cradle (1954, private collection), and (immediately related to the present work), Tessa and Winkie in a Field of Flowers (1954, private collection).

While these works contain some echoes of the war-threatened, original-sinning expressionist children of the early 1940s, and anticipate the twisted, cold-war bomb-fear ceramic angels of the later 1950s, they are altogether different in mood. Maragaret Plant sees them as resolutely optimistic: 'Nothing remains of the claustrophobia of the forties suburbs; now the children... play unrestrained in settings of sea and gardens.'¹ As wide-eyed, fair-haired and innocent as Charles Blackman's Alice-girls (the two artists were very close at this time, and often painted together), Perceval's children frolic naked amongst Blackmanesque daisies. Behind them, the world speeds past: on its bicycle, by train, in an old Tin Lizzie and in two 'Rabelaisian humps'², proud signifiers of Perceval's own recently-acquired Volkswagen beetle.

That the Tessa and Winkie paintings, and this work in particular, were of some personal importance to the artist is shown by the fact of the painting's being featured in the triumphant retrospective which followed Perceval's return from London and appointment as Australian National University Creative fellow in 1965. At that time, it was still in the possession of the artist himself, a familial-sentimental talisman.

1. Margaret Plant, John Perceval (rev. ed.), Lansdowne Editions, East Melbourne, 1979, p. 52
2. ibid.