The Hours c1902
(also known as Les Heures, Rite of Spring, La Ronde des Heures and Fête Champêtre)

RUPERT BUNNY (1864-1947)

The Hours c1902
(also known as Les Heures, Rite of Spring, La Ronde des Heures and Fête Champêtre)

oil on canvas
93.0 x 131.0 cm; 113.0 x 153.0 cm (framed)
signed lower left: Rupert C.W. Bunny

Provenance:
Private collection, South America
Whitford and Hughes, London, February 1988
The Collection of John Schaeffer AO, Sydney
Sotheby's, Paintings from the Collection of John Schaeffer, Sydney, 28 August 2003, lot 4
Private collection, Sydney
Estate of the above

Exhibited:
Galerie Silberberg, Paris, May 1903, cat.2 (as Les Heures aux pas Agiles) or cat.3 (as Les Heures)
Société Lyonnaise des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, 1905, cat.98 (as La Ronde des Heures)
Salon d'Automne, Grand Palais des Champs Elysées, Paris, 1905, cat.269 (as Les Heures)
Carnegie International Exhibition, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, 11 April - 13 June 1907, cat.75

Reference:
Marx, R., 'Exposition Rupert Bunny', La Chronique des Arts et de la Curiosité, Supplément de la Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 16 May 1903, no.20, p.163
Bouyer, R., 'Expositions et Concours - Rupert Bunny', Bulletin de l'Art Ancien et Moderne, Paris, 30 May 1903, no.182, p.173
Journal des Débats, Paris, 17 October 1905, p.3
Revue Universelle, Paris, 18 October 1905, p.628
Thomas, D., Rupert Bunny 1864-1947, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1970, p.48
Edwards, D. et al, Rupert Bunny: Artist in Paris, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2009, p.122 (as Les Heurs [sic])
Gerard-Austin, A., 'The Greatest Voyage: Australian Painters in the Paris Salons, 1885-1939,' [doctoral thesis], Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne, March 2014, vol.2, pp.16, 79, 122 (illus.)
Thomas, D., The Life and Art of Rupert Bunny: A Catalogue Raisonné in Two Volumes, Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2017, vol.2, cat.O162, pp.29-30

Estimate: $300000 - 400000

Result Hammer: $300000

The Hours c1902 is a joyful and ambitious work, created when the artist Rupert Bunny was at the height of his powers and fame.  The painting was exhibited in Bunny’s first solo exhibition and was later owned by the highly respected Sydney collector John Schaeffer AO, renowned for his impressive collection of pre-Raphaelite and 19^th-century painting and sculpture which was considered to be one of the finest outside Britain.

Born in Melbourne, Rupert Bunny moved to Paris aged twenty and lived in France for the next five decades. He is considered the most successful of the expatriate turn of the century artists, exhibiting and selling regularly in France and Britain with occasional forays to his native Australia. 

Although he studied at Melbourne’s National Gallery School with Emmanuel Phillips Fox, Frederick McCubbin and Louis Abrahams, and was of the same generation as Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, Bunny’s work is not connected to the antipodean blue and gold bushscapes, abundant livestock, heroic settlers and themes of gritty urban progress embedded in the nationalist school.  His early mythological works are tied to European tradition and the languorous paintings of women, elegant portraits and silvery landscapes of later mature years strike a different, more cosmopolitan mood and, in their images of intimate sophistication, perhaps even a contemporary note.

Around 1900 Bunny updated his palette and subject matter, abandoning the flute-playing satyrs painted in an academic style for a vision (admittedly idealised) of modern life that paid homage to the heightened colours of Impressionism, while retaining the tonal values of academic realism.  His paintings of this time often depicted groupings of languid and dreamy female figures, exemplified by works such as Endormies 1904 (National Gallery of Victoria collection, Melbourne) and Summertime c1907 (Art Gallery of New South Wales collection, Sydney).  While those charming interludes of feminine beauty freeze time, describing an endless summer idyll, the present painting is dynamic and ambitiously aims for a thoughtful and deeper poetic.

Bunny was keenly aware of the changing fashions of the art world and his interest in Symbolism (then currently in vogue) may have prompted him to attempt an allegory of Time.  Characteristically he draws on tradition and modernity to propel his allegory, coupling traditional peasant dance with the modernist momentum of the wheel.  Circle dance has long been a theme in art: the rhythms of circles and lines of dancers have inspired paintings as different in spirit as the rowdy Flemish kermess painted by 17^th century artists Pieter Bruegel and Peter Paul Rubens, and Henri Matisse’s lyrical Dance of 1910.  The round dance is considered a symbol of order and unity and is often steeped in nostalgia for an imagined golden age. Horae Serenae 1894 by Edward John Poynter is a fine example of this and was displayed at the Royal Academy in London in 1894.  It is very likely this painting would have been seen by Bunny, an inveterate networker and frequent visitor to London, as the exhibition included fellow Australian artists John Longstaff, Abbey Altson, and Bertram Mackennal.

Bunny may also have been aware of the vitality of contemporary practitioners of traditional Breton dance, celebrated by the artists of the Pont Aven School (notably Paul Gauguin) or the Ukrainian dance troupes who performed folk dances in Parisian cabarets such as the Folies-Bergère and Moulin Rouge during the 1890s and early 1900s.  These were much admired by Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who made them the subject of several drawings, prints and paintings.

Conventionally the circle of dancers would be shown firmly on the ground in perspective to form an ellipse, rather than the upright wheel of The Hours. It is interesting to speculate that there might be a connection with this unusual format to the opening of Wallace collection in 1900, given Bunny was regularly in London and would have been aware one of the key works of the collection, now known as A Dance to the Music of Time 1640 by French artist Nicholas Poussin.(1) In this painting, allegorical figures dance hand in hand in a circle, as dictated by convention, but above them in the sky the sun god Apollo rides a wheeled chariot. Apollo holds a large ring representing the Zodiac and is accompanied by the Horae, or the Hours.  In any case, Bunny depicts the Hours rolling like a wheel across a bucolic French landscape.  The Horae ‘were the goddesses of the seasons and the natural portions of time.’(2) The circle of twelve interlinked dancers represents the twelve hours, divided into light and shadow zones, an allegory of time in its reference to the changing seasons, day and night and the hours on a clock face. It is a surprisingly dynamic composition for Bunny with its rolling wheel - literally an allusion to time rolling on and also to the wheel of fortune, a classic symbol of luck or chance.  Against this exuberant ‘dance of Time’ is a contrasting background of day-to-day activities, symbolic of the endless human cycle: a peasant on the soil, youths washing clothes, a courting couple, a fisherman and in the shade, an older woman toting a burden.

Bunny describes the scene in loose, confident brush strokes in the modern manner, employing a near pastel palette of soft blue, pink and lilac figures against a pared back green and gold landscape. He had absorbed the lessons of the Impressionists, demonstrating an easy mastery of colour harmonies. The usual languorous calm of Bunny’s women is not here; instead the relentless energy of Degas’ Ukrainian dancers combines with the romanticism of Renoir’s couples. The figures of the Hours themselves are highly stylised: their pre-Raphaelite faces and long graceful dresses are neither wholly antique nor purely contemporary.(3) Indeed, the painting describes two gears of time: hours contrasted with years. Timeless moments defer to the inevitability of time. 

When The Hours was shown in Bunny’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Silberberg in Paris in 1903, the writer for La Chronique des Art noted that ‘Amid the annual throng of exhibitions Mr Rupert Bunny’s paintings were from the first distinguished by their superior quality’.(4) The review further praised The Hours for its ‘originality of conception and easy style for his particular use of light and harmony of colour’.(5) Two years later on the occasion of a second solo exhibition in Paris, the same reviewer noted that Bunny had ‘the gift of a refined colourist’ and ‘enjoys discovering to what extent he can combine realism and poetry.’(6)

The Hours is an impressive, engaging work.  The painting is very much a public demonstration of Bunny’s sophistication and skill as an accomplished colourist but also, as an allegory of time, likely to have held great resonance for the artist himself.  In 1902, Bunny was on the cusp of turning forty.  He had just married his ‘eternal muse’, Jeanne Morel, who appears in many of his works. He was at the height of his powers, well connected to bohemia and high society with an enviable reputation and acceptance by patrons including the French state. His first solo exhibition was just around the corner. The 19^th century had just concluded, Australian Federation had just taken place, and the death of Queen Victoria would usher in the Edwardian era. In the last few years there had been remarkable advances in transport (the car and powered flight), communication (the telephone and wireless), social change (including votes for women in Australia) and even the arts (the first retrospective of the works of Vincent Van Gogh was held at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in 1901). The past was being left behind for a positive and fulfilling future. A new era was emerging and Bunny, sensing this zeitgeist, was riding his own wheel of good fortune. 

The Hours, in its restless energy and rosy palette, announces the beginning of Spring and the start of an endless summer.

Footnotes

1. ‘Nicolas Poussin: A Dance to the Music of Time,’ The Wallace Collection, London, accessed March 2025: https://wallacelive.wallacecollection.org:443/eMP/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=65042&viewType=detailView
2. ‘Horae,’ Wikipedia, accessed March 2025: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horae.  The article also provides many examples of artists interpreting the Hours as female figures in elegant Grecian styled dress.
3. As curator Mary Eagle notes, ‘The encounter between antiquity and modernity is crucial to the way Bunny’s pastorals were conceived and the feelings they evoke’. See Eagle, M., The Art of Rupert Bunny, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1991, p.30)
4. ‘Exposition Rupert Bunny,’ La Chronique des Arts et de la Curiosité, Paris, vol. XXIX, 16 May 1903, p.218
5. Ibid.
6. La Chronique des Arts et de la Curiosité, 4 March 1905, pp.67-68, quoted in Thomas, D., Rupert Bunny 1864-1947, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1970, p.48

Michael Desmond

Michael Desmond worked in the museum sector for many decades: as Deputy Director of the National Portrait Gallery; Senior Curator of International Paintings and Sculpture at the National Gallery of Australia; inaugural Manager of the Drill Hall Gallery the Australian National University; and Manager of Collection Development and Research at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.

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