Hunting & Collecting - The Trophy Room 2007

KATE BERGIN born 1968

Hunting & Collecting - The Trophy Room 2007

oil on canvas
168.0 x 198.0 cm; 171.5 x 202.0 cm (framed)
signed lower right: Kate Bergin
signed, dated and inscribed verso: "HUNTING & COLLECTING - THE TROPHY ROOM"/ 2007/ oil on canvas/ 198 x 168 cms/ KATE BERGIN

Provenance:
Mossgreen Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne

Estimate: $50000 - 70000

Result Hammer: $77500

Australian contemporary artist Kate Bergin’s practice seeks to reveal the unexpected and the unusual. On first impression her abundant still-life paintings appear conventional, but upon further examination they reveal pleasing oddities and subversions of the genre. As one notices wild animals lounging in domestic settings, birds wearing glasses or holding cutlery, Alice’s famous phrase ‘curiouser and curiouser’ springs to mind. Indeed, the artist has cited Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as an ongoing source of inspiration.

A device often employed in Bergin’s still-lifes is that of the ‘picture within a picture’ – again, a very Alice in Wonderland trope as it toys with our perception of reality. Bergin has been incorporating what she calls ‘meta painting’ in her work since studying at the Victorian College of the Arts ‘as a way of acknowledging the past and the tradition of painting.’(1) Bergin’s incorporation of historical landscape paintings into her compositions has allowed her to expand the genre of still-life painting while also merging realism and fiction, the traditional and the contemporary. John Brack’s Unstill Life series of the 1970s resonates strongly with Bergin’s work and her desire for ‘still life painting to become something more animated, complex and bristling with life.’(2)  

In the background of Hunting & Collecting - The Trophy Room, Bergin has depicted Hunting in the Fontainebleau Forest 1824 by French court painter Carle Vernet (1758-1836). While the original painting now hangs in the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Museum of Hunting and Nature) in Paris, Bergin’s replica appears as wallpaper in a trophy room, coming unstuck at the base. Fox hunting originated in England in the sixteenth-century, however its depiction by a French court painter underpins it as a sport exclusively for the nobility.

The landscape portrays a fox hunt taking place in the Forest of Fontainebleau, 60 kilometres outside Paris. When Bergin painted her work, she was living at Mount Macedon in central Victoria, not far from Frederick McCubbin’s (1855-1917) summer house which he called Fontainebleau. From this timber cottage and its environs, McCubbin painted some of his best-known works of the Macedon bush, including The Pioneer 1904 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne).(3) Of this fascinating historical link, Bergin comments, ‘McCubbin painted The Pioneer here in 1904 and [over] 100 years later I’m painting a fox hunt; I enjoyed the irony and the circular twists that life and art can present to us.’(4)

Bergin first moved to Mount Macedon in 2003, the same year that the region’s landmark historic mansion, Drusilla, was sold into private hands. According to local rumours, the new owners were conducting fox hunts on the 14-hectare property, complete with red hunting jackets, in the English tradition. Generations of Mount Macedon residents have created beautiful English style gardens in the unruly Australian bush setting, including those surrounding Drusilla. It was this enduring fascination with old world English traditions and aesthetics, despite the true nature of the harsh Australian environment, that inspired Bergin to create Hunting & Collecting - The Trophy Room.

The central character of the mise en scène is the fox himself, gazing out at the viewer, aloof, intelligent and slightly bemused. The flying duck, another favourite target of the English hunting tradition, holds a pair of gold spectacles, again suggesting intelligence. In this scene, the prey seem to be having the last laugh. In Bergin’s words, ‘the Hunt seems to have been outfoxed, suggesting that we can all redefine our roles in life and perhaps achieve the unexpected.’5

Footnotes

1. Kate Bergin in email correspondence with the author regarding Hunting & Collecting - The Trophy Room, January 2025
2. Ibid.
3. Coslovich, G., ‘McCubbin’s Retreat is Crumbling’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 24 April 2010, accessed February 2025: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/mccubbins-retreat-is-crumbling-20100423-tjdr.html
4. Bergin, K., op. cit.
5. Ibid.

Asta Cameron

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