(Mother and Child) 1958

IAN FAIRWEATHER (1891-1974)

(Mother and Child) 1958

gouache on cardboard
52.5 x 37.0 cm; 85.5 x 68.0 cm (framed)

Provenance:
Private collection, Brisbane
Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane
Private collection, Melbourne
Ruth Prowse Collection, Canberra
Thence by descent, private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited:
Ian Fairweather, Museum of Modern Art of Australia, Melbourne, 19-29 August 1958, cat.19 (illus. exhibition catalogue, as Figures)
Ian Fairweather, 1891-1974: Tenth Anniversary Exhibition, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, 19 May - 14 June 1984, cat.59 (label attached verso, illus. exhibition catalogue, p.27, pl.59)
Ian Fairweather: Paintings and Drawings, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 3-24 October 1985, cat.38 (label attached verso, illus. exhibition catalogue, pl.11)
Blue Chip XIV: The Collectors' Exhibition, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 6 March - 28 April 2012, cat.3 (label attached verso, illus. exhibition catalogue)
Blue Chip XX: The Collectors' Exhibition, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 6 March - 7 April 2018, cat.25 (label attached verso, illus. exhibition catalogue)
Niagara Galleries at Sydney Contemporary, Carriageworks, Sydney, 13-16 September 2018 (label attached verso)
Blue Chip XXIII: The Collectors' Exhibition, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 24 March - 17 April 2021, cat.27 (illus. exhibition catalogue)

Estimate: $70000 - 90000

Result Hammer: $72500

Ian Fairweather’s art is an attractive maze of contradictions: intricate, sophisticated, influential and yet individual. Rejecting all convention in both his life and his art, the paintings he produced in sometimes precarious circumstances represent a total contrast to his family heritage in Edwardian Scotland. He initially thought he would study medicine, then forestry, however World War I interrupted, and 2^nd Lieutenant Fairweather spent four years in a prisoner of war camp in Germany. This provided him with the ‘leisure’ to draw and sketch as well as to study Chinese, an interest that remained with him his whole life. On release he continued drawing with studies in Holland, four years at London’s Slade school, and later in Münich providing him with a basis on which he could build a career in art.  He left Europe to pursue his interest in Chinese calligraphy and spent the next 25 years in Asia zigzagging about like a character from a Joseph Conrad novel. He lived in Peking, and made visits to the Philippines and Indonesia before finding himself in Melbourne in 1934. For the moment, he stayed, encountering sympathetic company among the modernist artists of the George Bell School. In a letter to his friend Jim Eade, a curator at the Tate, he wrote: ‘ In six long years of wandering it is here for the first time I feel I am not a criminal – trying to make a living by painting. They have been very kind.’(1)

Fairweather combined what he had learned from Cézanne and Bell with influences from Chinese calligraphy and in the following years, having resumed his restless journeying through Asia, he continued to paint, his art slowly shedding all but the last remnants of figuration.  Mother and Child, painted in 1958, demonstrates this transition.

The painting shows fractured and reassembled figures, whose faces and hands are suggested rather than drawn. Fairweather cleverly conveys some of the intimacy of the subject, maternal calm as well as the fidgety nature of the child. Throughout his travels Fairweather had sought to acquire an understanding of whatever art he encountered and assimilate it with his modernist training, resulting in his unique style that was well suited to his circumstances, to his temperament and to his urge for development. Resourcefulness, it could be argued, was a basic driver of his work. The scarred and weathered surfaces, cracks, drips and coarse rendering, were all important ingredients. Finished works acquired another layer from exposure to the elements and haphazard handling.  

Fairweather settled in Australia permanently in 1953. The last twenty years of his life were spent living and painting in the isolated bush hut he built by hand, using found materials on Bribie Island, not far from Brisbane. He died there in 1974.

In his last years, with his eccentricities undiminished, he gradually came to the attention of the mainstream art world, and gained recognition for his work as well as the circumstances in which it was created. His reputation as Australia’s leading abstract painter – ‘the most gifted painter who has so far appeared in Australia’ – was confirmed.(2)

Footnotes:

1. Letter from Ian Fairweather to Jim Eade, quoted in McLean, I. Double Nation: A History of Australian Art, Reaktion Books, London, 2023, p.239 

2. Hughes, R. The Art of Australia, Penguin, London, 1970, p.288

Tim Abdallah

Tim Abdallah is a fine art consultant with more than thirty-five years of experience working in auction houses, public museum and commercial art galleries in Australia, the UK, Germany and Italy.  He joined Lawsons Auctioneers in 2002 as Head of Art and until 2017 was Head of Art at Menzies.

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