Proteas and Desert Roses 1980

MARGARET OLLEY (1923-2011)

Proteas and Desert Roses 1980

oil on board
75.0 x 121.0 cm; 90.0 x 136.0 cm (framed)
signed lower right: Olley

Provenance:
Holdsworth Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso)
Private collection, Sydney
Sotheby's, Melbourne, 27 August 2007, lot 91
Private collection
Fellia Melas Gallery, Sydney, 2020
Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited:
Margaret Olley, Holdsworth Galleries, Sydney, 18 October - 6 November 1980, cat.6
The Still Life, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, 19 August - 14 October 2017, cat.31
Collector's Exhibition, Fellia Melas Gallery, Sydney, September - October 2020

Reference:
This work has been catalogued by The Olley Project (courtesy of The Margaret Olley Art Trust & Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane)

Estimate: $70000 - 90000

Result Hammer: $70000

Still-life and interior paintings are an integral part of the oeuvre of celebrated Australian artist and benefactor Margaret Olley AC. With more than 90 solo exhibitions in a career that stretched over six decades, Olley was famous for her singular focus in re-examining a subject over time, from multiple angles and in different lights.

It has been said of revered French still-life painter Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin (1699–1779) that through his art ‘we have learned … that a pear is as living as a woman, that an ordinary piece of pottery is as beautiful as a precious stone;’(1) that his primary aim was to convey the visual pleasure he experienced looking at familiar studio objects. Olley was a great admirer of Chardin and her work took a similar course. Olley’s muse was nature – she was inspired by flowers and her garden, along with the multitude of things with which she surrounded herself. By focusing on her immediate environment, Olley was able to breathe new life into the everyday and create an enduring sensuality in her art.

Olley produced Wallflowers and Quinces 2000 late in her career when she was 77 years of age. Her painterly approach is on display in a work full of activity and movement; yet at the same time, it relies on great poise and comportment. The painting’s composition is anchored by a bowl of quinces at the front and centre, with this motif repeated to the left and right. An eye-catching bouquet of wallflowers brings a freshness and exuberance to the arrangement, while two other jugs sit at the edge of the cascading blue-green drapery, rounding out the composition. The even light shining from the front of the painting sets the background ablaze, animating each golden brushstroke. The viewer is left with a reassuring sense of warmth, abundance and tranquillity in the afterglow of this exquisite work.

Margaret Olley experimented with countless arrangements of the same subject over decades. The wallflowers and quinces motif can be seen in 1991 and 1993; these same flowers appear in different combinations with lemons, apples, walnuts and pears in earlier iterations as far back as the 1970s. Olley was not unhappy with her earlier efforts; once she found a subject she liked, she reworked and expanded upon it in new ways. Sometimes variations in the choice of subject were simply dependent upon the availability of items and what plants were in season in her garden.

In 1980, proteas were a feature of Olley’s show at Sydney’s Holdsworth Galleries and a sell-out exhibition at Solander Gallery in Canberra, where each artwork enabled the viewer to ‘experience fresh delights by looking at these works in different lights and from different angles.’(2) In contrast to the fullness of the later Wallflowers and Quinces, Olley’s Proteas and Desert Roses 1980 was more pared back. The resulting composition is reduced to three solid vessels, two bunches of flowers, a group of apples and a single apple that has seemingly fallen away from the others. Olley worked diligently to create a realistic space, one in which each vessel is carefully modelled and weighted down on a table that recedes convincingly into space.

There is a very distinct look and feel to Proteas and Desert Roses. Olley uses the colours and forms of the flowers and fruit to set up and orchestrate what follows. Instead of the golden tones of Wallflowers and Quinces, she has painted on a pink and green ground, an unusual combination which she continued into the colours of the jug and vase. The odd one out is the blue and white platter; it too has a very distinct purpose, though – to enliven the composition by adding variation and depth. It is a bold but successful addition. The overall impression is of a highly considered and balanced work, where small and apparently incidental elements, such as the placement of the solitary apple and more delicate broken branch on the right, add a new element to the story and to the viewer’s appreciation of the work.

Though painted 30 years apart, Proteas and Desert Roses 1980 and Wallflowers and Quinces 2000 reveal a consistency of purpose honed over decades of painting. Exemplary picture-making skills and a zest for life carried Margaret Olley’s chief motivation: to realise variations of harmony and contrast that exist in nature, reassembled and constructed through accomplished paintings of interiors and still lifes.

Footnotes:

1. Marcel Proust, quoted in ‘Jean-Siméon Chardin,’ J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, accessed October 2024: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/103JYN

2. Kaleski, S., ‘Energy in Still-Life’, Canberra Times, Canberra, 28 March 1980, p.9

Rodney James

Rodney James is an independent art consultant who specialises in collection management, valuations, exhibitions, research and writing, and strategic planning for art galleries and museums.

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