Conrad Martens

Purchased from the artist by John Campbell; thence by descent to the present owners

Joan Kerr & Hugh Falkus, From Sydney Cove to Duntroon: a family album of early life in Australia, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. 1982, p. 50 (illus.)

There are small areas of paint loss, lower left; two visible, one very minor. There is fine crazing to the gum arabic which is consistent with age (lower left). There is fading to the sky and a couple of very minor foxing spots in the sky. There are no tears. The work is not laid down and is in good condition.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

At the second exhibition of the New South Wales Academy of Art, in 1873, J.H. Carse and John Deering were each awarded 25 guinea prizes for best oil and best watercolour. These awards, the first in Australia's long and continuing line of monetary art prizes, were provided by the Sydney merchant and philanthropist John Campbell (1802-1886). Campbell was the eldest son of Robert Campbell, founder of Campbell & Co., one of the earliest and most successful trading houses in New South Wales (in 1825 his name was placed at the head of the membership list of the Sydney Chamber of Commerce), Legislative Councillor, pioneer pastoralist and generous religious and educational benefactor. The family was socially (and later maritally) connected to the military engineer and accomplished watercolourist Edward Close (see lot XXX), and John was apparently something of a sketcher in his own youth. With this background of wealth and culture, it is not surprising that John Campbell should have become an active patron and 'a friend to art.'¹
The Campbell clan was particularly supportive of Conrad Martens, 'the preferred local artist of the ruling elite of New South Wales.'²  From the late 1830s the names of John, his younger brother and business partner Robert and even their sister Sophia Ives ('Miss Campbell') appear regularly in the pages of Martens's account books; Sophia is also believed to have taken lessons from the artist in the late 1840s. Indeed, some of Martens's best-known works were painted for the Campbells, including such pictures as Sydney Harbour from Vaucluse (1840, private collection) and View from Rose Bank (1840, National Gallery of Australia). The family even commissioned him to memorialise their dynastic history with a posthumous portrait of Robert Campbell Sr, and a view of Sydney Harbour in 1804 (the era of the family company's first great commercial success).³  In the later 1850s, with the economy turning up after the long drought and recession of the 1840s, the Campbells were notably expansive; Martens's accounts record no fewer than six separate purchases between December 1856 and August 1857. One of the most remarkable of these is the present work, a view of the family's economic, social and familial heartland, Campbell's Wharf, on the west side of Sydney Cove.

Campbell's Wharf was sold to John Campbell for £20 on 2nd April 1857. With this terminus ante quem, and with reference to the Sydney Shipping Gazette⁴, we can venture an identification of the largest of the boats docked at Messrs Campbell's facility. The vessel at the centre must be the Dundonald, the Europa or the Star of Peace, the three big (1,000 ton plus) ships which berthed at Campbell's Wharf in (respectively) early January, early February and late February 1857. The three figures in the foreground, conceivably members of the family, look across the Cove, past the crush of maritime traffic, through the bush of their masts, towards the Campbell heritage: the dock itself, with the old family home Wharf House in the centre, the row of profitable warehouses on the right and the philanthropic project of the new Palladian Mariners' Church on the left, with the imposing late Georgian township behind. Amongst the jumble of buildings which makes up The Rocks, two are clearly discernible and particularly notable: the impressive, four-storey Miles Building in the centre of the picture and, on the skyline on the right, yet another Campbell-built property, the gabled Cumberland Place. In 1857 Cumberland Place was occupied by Dr James Mitchell and his family, including the young David Scott Mitchell.

The view westward from Bennelong Point is a particularly unusual one in colonial art, as is the image of Sydney as a bustling, thriving trading port. Within Martens's oeuvre, which consists mainly of broad harbour or pastoral vistas or celebratory 'house (and garden) portraits', the present work is a significant rarity, one which clearly owes it inspiration to the Campbell family's maritime trading interests.

Nevertheless, Campbell's Wharf is a great deal more than a statement of mercantile achievement, or a collective ship portrait, or a piece of historical cityscape. It is a highly romanticised Picturesque construction which ranks amongst the artist's most handsome watercolours. As well as having a capacity for military-scientific topographical accuracy, Martens was well-versed in the language of European classical landscape, the manner adopted from the 17th century Franco-Italian painters Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin and famously translated into imperial English by J.M.W. Turner.

Turner was a particularly important influence. In the inaugural lecture of the Sydney Sketching Club in 1856, Martens warmly recommends Turner's great compendium of landscape compositions, the Liber Studiorum, as 'a book to be studied with the greatest advantage. Here will be found breadth, grandeur, and a total absence of all petty details... (emphases in original).'⁵  Indeed, the present work is strikingly similar to one of the prints in the Liber, that of Norham Castle, though Martens's foreground water is a harbour rather than a river, his staffage bourgeois rather than bovine. Campbell's Wharf also demonstrates a more general Picturesque device, the contre-jour or view directly into the sunlight. As Martens noted in his lecture, 'It is very good to have the sun in the picture, for besides it being of necessity either morning or afternoon, which are always the most picturesque times, it at once gives a focus of light. It was a favourite effect, both with Claude and Turner, than whom it must be acknowledged there are no higher authority in landscape.'⁶

The present work is a triumph of landscape chiaroscuro, a sunset-twilight poem of light and dark, from the cobweb tracery of waves and ripples in the water to the soft indigo shadows of The Rocks, from the scattered, glittering white highlights and reflections to the sleek black hulls protecting Campbell & Co.'s cargoes.

We are most grateful to Elizabeth Ellis for her assistance in cataloguing this work.

1.  Sydney Mail, 19 April 1873
2.  Elizabeth Ellis, Conrad Martens: life and art, Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press, 1994, p. 40
3.  The copy portrait of 'Mr Campbell' referred to in Martens's account book for 8 February 1847 could possibly be the unattributed oil after Charles Rodius now in the Mitchell Library; the 1804 retrospect (after an engraving by Alexandre Lesueur) is probably the 'Campbell's Wharf from Old Print' painted for Robert Campbell and listed in the artist's accounts for 14 April 1857.
4.  Shipping Gazette and Sydney General Trade List, vol. XIV, 1857
5.  Conrad Martens, lecture to Sydney Sketching Club, Australian Subscription Library, 21 July 1856, reprinted in Lionel Lindsay, Conrad Martens: the man and his art (rev.ed.), Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1968, p. 30
6.  ibid., p. 38