JOHN PERCEVAL Australian, 1923-2000

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne

Collection of Ted Lustig, Melbourne

Spring Exhibition 1975, Recent Acquisitions, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 14 - 30 October 1975, cat. 42, illus. 

On loan to the Geelong Art Gallery, Geelong, Victoria, 6 December 2005 - August 2006

Traudi Allen, John Perceval, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1992, p. 158

Katrina Strickland, 'New bloom - a change of perspective', The Australian Financial Review, 7 September 2006, p. 20, illus.

Born in Western Australia, John Perceval moved to Melbourne as a boy and by the 1940s he had met Sidney Nolan and the progressive group of artists centred on John and Sunday Reed’s ‘Heide’. Perceval showed radically modernist figure subjects with the Contemporary Art Society during the war years and John Reed wrote an appreciation of the young artist’s work for the Angry Penguins magazine in 1943. Perceval had joined the extended Boyd family household at ‘Open Country’, Murrumbeena. He married Arthur Boyd’s younger sister, Mary, in 1944 and worked prolifically in the family pottery until around 1954 when he moved with his young family to Canterbury. The 1950s saw some of his most important series of landscape subjects, discovered as he travelled around in his old but newly-acquired Volkswagen ‘Beetle’. In 1956 and 1959 he exhibited his now well-known paintings of Williamstown and Gaffney’s Creek. However he kept other landscapes and streetscapes, such as Autumn Leaves, in his own collection for some years.

Like many of his paintings at this time, Autumn Leaves is deliberately naïve in style. It is closely related to the earlier Breughelesque Children playing on a railway line of 1948-49, also a lively suburban streetscape (Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 28 April 1997, lot 188). Perceval and Arthur Boyd had experimented together with the old master techniques of tempera and resin as well as oil media and Perceval had been especially inspired by the rollicking street scenes of Breughel, Bosch, Hogarth and others. Autumn Leaves, with its cheerful characters and warm russet and blue palette, was doubtless partly inspired partly by drawings he had made at Murrumbeena and the charming Edwardian streetscapes around his family home in Wentworth Avenue, Canterbury. However, he also said that visual memories lingered of the Melbourne home where he lived earlier with his mother, beside the railway line in Warra Street, Toorak.¹

The atmosphere here is village-like, with family life spilling out into the street. It is evening, still warm in Melbourne at that time of year and filled with the haze and smokey smell that was so distinctive throughout autumn in those days. A small boy attempts to fly his kite – despite the tree branches and telegraph wires overhead! A woman rakes fallen leaves for the bonfire behind her, tended by a bowler-hatted figure curiously and amusingly reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin. Perceval had made a delightful series of drawings of Chaplin in 1949 as well as painted plates and a ceramic-tile painting entitled Chaplin in Easy Street - with a very similar row of rooftops - in 1952.² The element of fantasy and wit which Perceval brings to scenes of local landscape and daily life is a hallmark of his mastery as an artist.

1. The Age, 19 March 1997, p. 5.

2. See Allen, T., John Perceval, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 120ff.