JOHN PERCEVAL

Mrs Margaret Carnegie, 'Kildrummie', Holbrook, New South Wales
Private collection, Sydney
Anonymous gift to the Art Gallery of New South Wales
Art Gallery of New South Wales

VII Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil, 1963, cat. 22 (as Prazer)
The Antipodeans, Victorian Artist's Society, 4 - 15 August 1959, cat. 45 (as 'Williamstown - Pleasure Craft')
John Perceval: Canberra Exhibition 1966, Albert Hall, Canberra, 14 - 27 July 1996, cat. 50
Exhibition of Paintings from the Collection of Mr and Mrs Douglas Carnegie, National Gallery of Victoria, 27 October - 30 November 1966, cat. 67

VII Bienal de São Paulo (exh. cat.), Fundaçao Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, 1963, p. 56
Barbara Blackman, 'The Antipodean affair', Art and Australia, vol. 5 no. 4, March 1968, p. 607 (illus.)
Traudi Allan, John Perceval, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1992, p. 160

This work is presented in a gold painted timber frame with linen slip. A small amount of surface dirty on impasto areas are consistent with the painting's age. Vertical intermittent scratch upper left hand corner, approximately 7cm in length. Overall it is in good condition with no visible defects.
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John Perceval's first Williamstown series of 1956-59,¹ with its 'colouristic and textual [sic] exuberance'² was immediately welcomed by the Melbourne art scene. Margaret Plant has noted that 'the... exhibitions of Williamstown... were indeed events of some importance. Perceval's work then commenced to be collected both by individuals and public galleries. A rare phenomenon took place: an artist came to be viewed with affection.'³

The present work is a particularly joyful example of his work from the period, and a particularly important one, having been exhibited in the landmark Antipodeans exhibition, in the São Paulo biennale of 1963 and in Perceval's Canberra retrospective of 1966, and having been owned for many years by the noted collector Mrs Margaret Carnegie (1910-2002).

Unlike other paintings from this first series, the present work does not focus on the chaotic maritime-industrial environment of piers and boatsheds, cranes and buoys, hulks and tugs. This work is painted from a little further up The Strand, looking north-east across Hobson's Bay towards the Melbourne city skyline, with the only evidence of Williamstown's operational harbour being the dark silhouette of a navigation marker and  just one steamship funnel visible on the right-hand edge of the picture. In Pleasure Craft the forms do not bob and jostle against one another in a flat frontal plane, as in paintings such as Tugboat in a Boat (1956, National Gallery of Victoria), Floating Dock (1959, Newcastle Region Art Gallery)  or Yankee Boats in Drydock (1956, Bendigo Art Gallery). Here, more than two dozen little yachts float separately at anchor, articulating empty space as they recede perspectivally into the distance of the bay. Instead of the rusty browns and greasy blacks of steel-hulled working vessels, Perceval gives us, as the title says, pleasure craft, a flotilla of brightly-painted, clinker-built wooden dinghies in red and blue and yellow and green and wave-like sweeps of white.

Painted on the spot, rapidly and expressively, the painting evokes a mood both of calm and of delight, or rather of delighted calm. As Barrett Reid has observed: 'the vigour of [Perceval's] direct way of painting does not preclude a great delicacy and variety of brush stroke and breathtaking mastery of subtle transitions of colour....'⁴ Beneath a softly scrubby sky of blue and mauve and pink and gold, the play of sunshine on the sea is variously described in firm horizontal strokes of bright middle distance light, choppy dabs of wind on water in the middle ground and calligraphic squiggles of wavelets in the near shallows.

At once bold and tender, descriptive and decorative, Pleasure Craft is a rare and exquisite painting, from a key period in the work of one of Australia's foremost figurative expressionists.

1. He was to return to the subject again twice, in 1967-68 and again in 1988-90
2. Franz Philipp, 'Antipodeans Aweigh', Nation, no. 25, 29 August 1959, p. 18
3. Margaret Plant, 'John Perceval – In Retrospect', in John Perceval: A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings (exh. cat.), Heide Park and Art Gallery, Melbourne, 1984, p. 17
4. Barrett Reid, Of Dark and Light: the art of John Perceval, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1992, p. 26