CLIFTON PUGH 1924-1990

Oil and cement on composition board (two panels mounted on composition board) Signed and dated 'APR 57' lower left; inscribed 'From Clifton Pugh... Cottles Bridge, Vic' on the reverse

Provenance Kym Bonython Collection, Adelaide Bonython Art Gallery, Adelaide; purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 1 October 1968; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection,Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Clifton Pugh, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, November 1957, cat. 11 Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 55, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985-1988, cat. 45, illus. The Sheep Show: Colonial to Contemporary interpretations of the Sheep in Art, Ararat Gallery, Ararat, Vic., 26 October - 2 December 1990 Reference Noel Macainsh, Clifton Pugh, Georgian House, Melbourne, 1962, illus. pl. 11 Kym Bonython, Modern Australian Painting 1950 - 1975, Rigby, Adelaide, rev. edn 1980, illus., p. 24 Traudi Allen, Clifton Pugh, Patterns of a Lifetime, Nelson, Melbourne, 1981, p. 46 Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 53, cat. 55, illus. Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 68-69, illus. pl. 45 Although born in inner city Melbourne and trained at Swinburne and the Melbourne Gallery School, Clifton Pugh identified for most of his life with rural Australia. Having served with the AIF in New Guinea during the Second World War and then with the occupation forces in Japan, he purchased a bush property at Cottles Bridge in 1951 and named it 'Dunmoochin'. There, with his first wife, he built an adobe, mud-brick and timber house and developed the area as a wildlife sanctuary. With its welcoming commune atmosphere, about 33 km north west of Melbourne, many artists worked at Dunmoochin over the years, including John Perceval, Fred Williams, Frank Hodgkinson and John Olsen. Olsen lived there during 1969 and remembered: 'We were all in the landscape, all working together: there are times that are a real artist life - like a Heidelberg School experience'.(1) Pugh would doubtless have worked on Collecting Dead Wool with Tom Roberts's Shearing the Rams and The Golden Fleece in mind. Where, in the nineteenth century, such 'national' images were iconic celebrations of 'strong masculine labour', Pugh portrays necessity and even desperation. Collecting 'dead' wool from the carcasses of sheep that had perished from natural causes was a source of money for those who could earn a living no other way: youths scrounging pocket money, casual labourers, even out-of-work shearers. It was not a pleasant task. Here Pugh includes a pair of crows, attracted by the odour of decay and waiting to share in the spoil. Pugh's biographer, Traudi Allen, relates that this painting was conceived in 1955 and in its first version depicted only a pair of hands taking wool from the dead sheep. In 1957 Pugh reworked the painting, adding a second sheet of hardboard on which he portrayed the man's head and torso and the scavenger crows.(2) He considered it a major work and included it in his 1957 one-man show at Macquarie Galleries. It was then acquired by Kym Bonython for his personal collection. (1) Conversation with Olsen, February 2003. (2) Traudi Allen, Clifton Pugh, Patterns of a Lifetime, Nelson, Melbourne, 1981, p. 46. Pugh painted a larger, somewhat looser version of this subject in 1969.