The Artist's Wife on a Green Sofa c1902

RUPERT BUNNY (1864-1947)

The Artist's Wife on a Green Sofa c1902

oil on canvas
65.0 x 72.5 cm; 90.0 x 98.0 cm (framed)
signed upper left: R.C.W. Bunny

Provenance:
Private collection, United Kingdom
Whitford and Hughes, London, 3 April 1986
The Collection of John Schaeffer AO, Sydney
Sotheby's, Important Australian Paintings from The Collection of John Schaeffer AO, Sydney, 25 August 2003, lot 9 (as Mrs Bunny (On a Green Sofa))
Private collection, Sydney
Sotheby's, Sydney, 26 November 2007, lot 70 (as Mrs Bunny (On a Green Sofa))
Private collection, Sydney
Estate of the above

Reference:
Thomas, D., The Life and Art of Rupert Bunny: A Catalogue Raisonné in Two Volumes, Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2017, vol.2, cat.O172, p.30

Estimate: $100000 - 150000

The Artist’s Wife on a Green Sofa c1902 was likely painted in the year of Rupert Bunny’s marriage to Jeanne Heloise Morel, a fellow artist and model who would become one of his most prolific and celebrated subjects. 

Born in Paris in 1871, Jeanne Morel was the daughter of an unmarried servant and completed her initial artistic training in a Parisian orphanage.(1) By the mid-1890s, she was exhibiting her work with the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts – the ‘New Salon’ – and had met Bunny, who painted his first portraits of her in 1895.  In each case, it is not hard to appreciate the source of their mutual attraction: in his mid-20s, Bunny was described as ‘six foot tall [with] curly blond hair, pointy bold beard and moustache (in the French style) … and congenial.’(2) Jeanne, meanwhile, possessed a certain elegance and mystique; with dark curly hair, large blue eyes, and an aristocratic bearing that belied her humble origins. Bunny rapturously described his wife as having ‘the most beautiful mouth I have ever seen.’(3)

Jeanne would become Bunny’s ultimate muse, appearing as the central figure in many of his most important paintings of this period – from large-scale allegorical scenes like Dolce Farniente c1897 (private collection, Melbourne); to his later subject paintings of women at leisure, such as Returning from the Garden 1906 or A Summer Morning 1908 (both in the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection, Sydney).  As David Thomas observes, ‘Bunny was entranced by her beauty and it shone throughout his work.’(4)   

In The Artist’s Wife on a Green Sofa, Jeanne presents an ideal of the modern bourgeois woman – an embodiment of feminine grace and charm.  She wears a dress of muted turquoise and white lace, draped with a black shawl.  A single rose serves as a tangible symbol of her beauty.  Jeanne’s slender fingers clasp a leather-bound book in one hand; a fan in the other.  Her pale clothing and complexion are dramatically juxtaposed against a dark tonal background.  Every element of Bunny’s image has been deliberately composed; yet the atmosphere of this painting remains intimate and informal. 

The turn of the twentieth century marked a particularly auspicious stage of Bunny’s career. As an expatriate Australian artist living between France and England, Bunny achieved success on a scale that was truly unprecedented.  In 1890, Bunny became the first Australian artist to receive an honourable mention at the Paris Salon, and was awarded a bronze medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle.  Bunny held his first solo exhibition in May 1903 at the Galerie Silberberg, Paris, which was a critical and commercial success. The following year, Bunny’s painting Angels Descending c1897 was purchased by the Art Gallery of South Australia – the first Australian institution to collect his work.(5) The acquisition of Bunny’s Après le Bain for the French State in 1905 (now in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris) signified a level of official recognition that was denied to so many of his peers: Bunny was the first expatriate artist to have his work purchased by the French Government.(6) 

Moreover, the first years of the twentieth century saw a profound shift in the character of Bunny’s art, as he abandoned religious and allegorical imagery in favour of subject paintings, landscapes and portraiture.  This change was associated with Bunny’s departure from the Old Salon (Academie des Beaux-Arts) – which had become notoriously conservative – for the New Salon in 1901.  As Mary Eagle notes, Bunny’s membership of the New Salon was accompanied by various stylistic developments: ‘the key to changes in subject – and the move to tonalism – that characterised his art from 1900 to 1911.’(7)  With its looser brushwork and restrained tonal palette, The Artist’s Wife on a Green Sofa is highly characteristic of Bunny’s ‘new’ style during this period. 

The present work also bears the influence of English portraiture and subject painting during the Edwardian era.  The Artist’s Wife on a Green Sofa was likely painted in London, where Bunny and Morel were married on 1 March 1902. Bunny and his new wife stayed at various addresses in London over the next two years, when his work was shown at the Royal Academy with some regularity. The ‘society portrait’ was then at its height, and Bunny completed several major commissioned portraits of prominent Australians, including opera singers Nellie Melba and Ada Crossley, and the composer Percy Grainger.(8) Bunny’s 1902 portrait of Melba is now held in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. Ironically, two of the most prominent figures in British portraiture at this time were American expatriates: James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). The influence of both artists can be keenly felt in Bunny’s portraiture from the early 1900s, including The Artist’s Wife on a Green Sofa. 

The present work carries an illustrious provenance. David Thomas notes that when the painting surfaced at auction in London during the mid-1980s, it was ‘previously unknown’, having been held in a private collection for many decades.(9) The painting was purchased at that time by John Schaeffer AO; perhaps Australia’s most distinguished collector of Victorian- and Edwardian-era art.  Schaeffer was the owner of several important paintings by Bunny, including The Hours c1902 (which appears as the preceding lot in this sale), and Portrait of Mlle Morel – one of Bunny’s earliest and best-known portraits of Jeanne, which was exhibited at the Old Salon in 1895.(10)     

Footnotes

1. Eagle, M., The Art of Rupert Bunny, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1991, p.8
2. Edwards, D., ‘Rupert Bunny: Enigma and Success,’ in Edwards, D. et al, Rupert Bunny: Artist in Paris, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2009, p.13
3. Rupert Bunny, quoted in Reddin, C., Rupert Bunny Himself: His Final Years in Melbourne, self-published, Melbourne, 1987, p.154
4. Thomas, D., ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, Jeanne Morel c1902,’ in Important Australian + International Fine Art, Deutscher + Hackett, Sydney, 28 August 2013, lot 79
5. Thomas, D., Rupert Bunny 1864-1947, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1970, p.48
6. Edwards, D., op. cit., p.18
7. Eagle, M., op. cit., p.14
8. ‘Biographical Notes,’ in Edwards, D., op. cit., p.193
9. Thomas, D., op. cit. (2013)
10. ‘Portrait of Mlle Morel (1895),’ in Important Australian & International Art, Smith & Singer, Sydney, 18 November 2020, lot 15

Catherine Baxendale

• 

  Cameron Menzies, Chairman & Head of Private Sales

  cmenzies@menziesartbrands.com
  +61 (0) 466 636 142 

• 

  John Keats, Chief Executive Officer

  jkeats@menziesartbrands.com
  +61 (0) 3 9832 8700
  +61 (0) 403 159 785

• 

  Catherine Baxendale, Senior Art Specialist

  cbaxendale@menziesartbrands.com
  +61 (0) 2 8344 5404
  +61 (0) 423 067 180

• 

  Asta Cameron, Art Specialist

  acameron@menziesartbrands.com
  +61 (0) 3 9832 8700
  +61 (0) 400 914 088

• 

  Clementine Retallack, Art Specialist

  cretallack@menziesartbrands.com
  +61 (0) 2 8344 5404
  +61 (0) 478 493 026