A Great Australian Private Collection

The Peter Elliott Collection of Australian Art
by Gavin Fry
The Beagle Press, 2013, 188 pages, $85

As the London critic David Ekserdjian recently noted in his book A Choice of Art Books, “the inexorable rise of the virtual image on our computer screens, tablets and mobile phones would appear to have done nothing to diminish the flood of gorgeously produced art books being published”. Gavin Fry’s recent book The Peter Elliott Collection of Australian Art is further proof of that happy fact.

Dr Peter Mervyn Elliott AM is a prominent specialist in gynaecology and obstetrics based in Sydney. For his professional work and achievement in his clinical and research contributions to medicine, he has been extensively honoured, in Australia and internationally. In private life, however, he has been a great collector of Australian art including contemporary Aboriginal art, Pacific and Melanesian tribal art, as well as of European sculpture and antiques.

This book is a magnificent volume, lavishly illustrated with very good colour reproductions carefully chosen to illustrate one of the finest private collections of its type to have been assembled by an individual in Australia in the last sixty years or so. Dr Elliott cemented his early interest in art collecting, initially absorbed from his parents, in an exemplary fashion, which he relates as follows:

In 1952, when I was in my final year at University, I met Rudy Komon, who had opened an antique shop in Bronte Road. I went to the shop at the suggestion of my father and the result was the purchase for him of a Gruner painting and some Meissen porcelain. It did not take Rudy long to become one of the great art dealers in Australia. Rudy had an enormous influence on the advancement of contemporary Australian art in the 1960s and ’70s. He encouraged and guided many important Australian collectors who were lucky enough to have walked into his now legendary Paddington gallery.

Komon was indeed a major positive influence on Australian art. He often expressed his views very directly. One fondly recalls, for instance, at the opening of the Australian National Gallery (now the National Gallery of Australia) in Canberra in 1982, he stood, a little apart from the crowd, with his glass of white wine and delivered himself of the judgment that its grey walls were simply “too dark for the pictures to be seen best”. Komon’s influence upon Dr Elliott’s collection is clear from this book. In particular, Dr Elliott himself has noted:

As a collector, I did not go out to chase elusive masterpieces at auction or in the secondary market, but found it more interesting to look at and buy the work of emerging artists in the galleries that supported them [for example, Rudy Komon’s Gallery earlier on,] more recently Utopia Art Sydney, Damien Minton Gallery and Darren Knight Gallery.

Thus Dr Elliott, through Rudy Komon’s gallery, later run by Ray Hughes, met and collected the works of such major Australian artists as Fred Williams, Frank Hodgkinson, Leonard French, Arthur Boyd, Jon Molvig, Bob Dickerson and William Robinson, among many other Australian artists.

The Elliott collection ranges wider than just painting, to include Australian and Asian indigenous art, sculpture and Asian blue-and-white porcelain; but the book focuses upon the collection of Australian paintings, following an exhibition of them at the S.H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney in August 2011. A further exhibition of “Masterpieces from the Peter Elliott Collection”, curated by Dr Lou Klepac, was held at the Maitland Regional Art Gallery during the recent summer. The introductory pages of the book illustrate some of the tribal art objects and Asian porcelain, as well as some of Dr Elliott’s pictures in situ at home. Dr Elliott admits that his wife Jane (also a medical practitioner) “was often critical of my acquisitive nature [but] she accepted that this was an inherited trait and took equal and genuine pleasure in our collection”. The good doctor echoes the situation of many a collector of art and objets—but not all spouses are so amenable. In his scholarly and perceptive introduction, Gavin Fry has recorded:

Peter Elliott, half seriously, suggests the love of and collecting of art is almost a pathological condition within the Elliott family. His grandparents and parents certainly had the bug, he had it in the extreme and his children seem to be afflicted with the condition. Growing up in a house filled with inspiring works of art can predispose a person to a state where the thrill of the chase can sometimes outweigh the final result, the work on the wall or the antique on the mantelpiece. For the true collector it is both an intellectual and an emotional exercise. The presence of certain works in a collection will immediately suggest the next work needed to complement the whole, the missing link required to make the groupings more understandable. At the same time being confronted with a work can bring about an almost visceral need, a desire to acquire and live with that particular picture or object that can overpower good sense, financial rectitude and domestic harmony. For Peter Elliott, that passion reached the point where the latest acquisition remained wrapped up and hidden in an obscure corner of the house, or office, until he could break the news to his forgiving and ever-practical wife.

The tremendous roll-call of Australian artists included in this collection range from Norman Lindsay works, in oils and watercolours, dating from 1918 to 1948 and including not only some of his piratical scenes, but also the very fine Portrait of Rita (1925); to works such as Henry Mulholland’s oil South Coast Painting of 1998 and Kylie Stillman’s paper work Superb Blue Wrens of 2009. In between, one finds a collection of works by other distinguished artists painting in Australia over the past hundred years.

Some of the works that strike me as especially notable and memorable include the luminous oil by Frank Hodgkinson Before the Burn, Arnhem Land 1985 in hues reminiscent of the Scottish Colourists or William Frater, Emily Kngwarreye’s very fine acrylic My Country of 1994, and Rover Thomas’s deft ochre painting Bedford Downs Junction of 1985. Two very good Gruner pastoral landscapes: At Lindisfarne (1920) and Hydes Creek Morning (1938) are reproduced in the generous plates. Lloyd Rees’s wonderful misty-blue view of Morning on the Derwent (1971) captures something of his earlier drawing style and his later diffuse manner, combining these elements into a piece of real magic. Dobell’s Storm, Wangi (1952) and Old Golfer (early 1960s) are typical of his landscape and portrait styles. Drysdale’s pen drawing of Dave (1967) and oil A Study of Andy Mac (1968) are likewise images typical of his portrayals of outback Australians.

Then comes a sequence of remarkable landscapes and seascapes by Lance Solomon, who is perhaps underrated today, but whose Pastoral Coastal Country (1950) and Pleasant Day (1946) must conjure up, for anyone who lived on Australia’s eastern seaboard at that period, memories of hot, golden days and a plenteous, timbered land. Two of Solomon’s seascapes here capture so well not only the distant gradations between sea and sky reminiscent of Gruner’s seascapes, but also the spray and softer sea mist. I first saw these reproductions in this book in a well-lit upper room overlooking Sydney, on a sea-misted day upon the harbour, just as in these works. Worthy also of special mention is the spare but evocative oil by David Strachan, Head of a Child with Bird (1968). Clifton Pugh’s Dance of Crows (1960) is now justly seen as “iconic”. Fred Williams’s Lysterfield Landscape (1966) is not only representative of his interpretation of the Australian landscape, but is, in itself, a warm and appealing work indeed. Charles Blackman’s Jumping Children (1961) is not only an example of his children series, but also itself a delightful study in colour and movement. Len French’s enamel Study for Third Chant No 3 (1965) is another work that is both typical of a series and also a luminous thing in itself. The Brett Whiteley landscapes At the Bottom of the Park Lavender Bay is a Jacaranda Gardenia Tree (1984-85) and 8 Miles Out of Cootamundra 8.28pm 4/1/84 (1984) are major works.

Gavin Fry, who has provided the introductory essay, is a distinguished writer on Australian art, with a track record of scholarly assessments and appreciations of Australian painting. Here he tells us the story of Peter Elliott’s family background, his war service with the Royal Australian Navy and his later medical career and his beginnings and development as a collector of Australian paintings. Fry discusses the various artists, dealers and galleries through whom the collection was assembled, starting with Rudy Komon, giving us an immediate sense of how, where, when and why the collection was formed. One practical collecting point Fry makes is this:

Peter Elliott has stuck to his father’s dictum that “big is not always best”. In his collection there are no really big paintings and fewer larger than 3 by 4 feet [90 by 120 centimetres]. There are a number of good reasons for this. Smaller works tend to concentrate the artist’s ideas and forms, bringing them into sharp focus rather than spreading the gesture wide where often scale alone is the major determinant.

Fry also notes that “there are simple practical reasons too” in that domestic size may require limits, but at the same time it will encourage “close contemplation” of such works. One of Sydney’s art dealers, the fondly remembered Beth Mayne, used to stock mostly, if not exclusively, small works in her studio shop.

In addition to the introductory essay and the some 121 pages of major plates, there are various smaller colour reproductions of paintings in the book, along with some photographs of works in their domestic settings, as well as on public exhibition. Further, at the end, there is an excellent and detailed catalogue with notes on the 172 works in the collection. There are also some pages of professional biographical notes with some photographs and paintings of Dr Elliott, and of his wife, family, naval and university colleagues and other friends depicted over the years.

The standard of the physical production of this art book with its scholarly introduction is of the exemplary style now well established by the Beagle Press as one of Australia’s leading art publishers. It is very well bound, with a distinctive dustjacket illustrating William Robinson’s painting Just before Dark—Kingscliff 1996 with its striking, and most Australian, perspectives of sky, land, beach and water. The essay by Gavin Fry not only illuminates the Elliott collection, but is also a joy to read.

This is a work that is a must for the shelves of all who collect and esteem Australian art. It provides a log of the history of a great collector, who has assembled and achieved a memorable and representative collection of the fine art of painting in this nation over the past century or so. Books recording, illustrating and cataloguing major collections in private hands are important for art history and the appreciation of art, as recognised pioneer works such as Douglas Cooper’s Great Private Collections (1966) and Niels Von Holst’s Creators, Collectors and Connoisseurs (1967) illustrate and attest. Virtual images have their place, but cannot beat a good art book like this, which is a just tribute to Dr Peter Elliott’s long perseverance as an Australian collector.