RUPERT BUNNY 1864-1947

Oil on canvas
Signed lower left; bears inscription on stretcher on the reverse 'Two ladies in Garden'

Painted c. 1913-16
PROVENANCE
H. D. L. Thompson, Merricks, Victoria Thirty Victoria Street, Sydney, 1983
Private collection, Sydney
EXHIBITED
Possibly in Rupert Bunny, Anthony Hordern's Gallery, Sydney, 8-22 September 1925, cat. 17 as 'In the garden - 70 guineas'
REFERENCE
Clive Turnbull and Tristan Buesst, The Art of Rupert Bunny, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1948, as 'In the Garden - H.D.L. Thompson'

David Thomas, Rupert Bunny, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1970, cat. 0150, as 'Two Ladies in a Garden'

Phipps, J., Artists' Gardens, Flowers & Gardens in Australian Art 1780s-1980s, Bay Books, Sydney, 1986, pp. 98-99, illus. p. 99, as 'Deux Courtesanes'

One of Australia's most internationally successful artists, Rupert Bunny was born in Melbourne and first trained at the National Gallery School. He travelled to Paris in 1886, when the belle époque was at its height, exhibited both there and in London, and soon achieved success with elegant portraits and large figure compositions. The theme of beautiful women at leisure brought Bunny particular acclaim in the early years of the twentieth century. His Après le Bain (After the bath), was purchased by the French Government from the New Salon of 1904 and now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay. Bunny's chief model at this time was his beautiful wife Jeanne. They had met as art students in Paris in the 1890s, when the young Jeanne Heloise Morel was already exhibiting as a professional artist herself, and they married in 1902. Madame Bunny had a complete understanding of her husband's work and is relaxed and natural in the many and various poses in which he portrayed her over the years. Around the turn of the century she could evoke an opulent, often indolent, Edwardian elegance; whilst by the first years of World War I Bunny's paintings of women were evolving 'slowly towards a modern notion of a busy woman's life, as she sewed, worked in the garden, or chatted to a friend'. As Mary Eagle has observed, 'Bunny modified his imagery just sufficiently to hint at the change. His women were still softly pretty, still enclosed within room or garden, but their clothes were less hampering and their expressions slightly more alert. His most summery and light-filled pictures ever were painted between 1912 and 1917'.(1) The French critic Gustave Geffroy described Bunny's paintings in 1917 as 'studies of colour and light, which are also true and seductive portrayals of real women observed by the painter at home - all this poetry mixed with everyday life'.(2) Here Madame Bunny, on the right, is seated in the corner of a garden fragrant with summer flowers. She wears a loose white 'tea gown' and shades herself with a lace parasol, while her companion sits on a folding chair and is dressed in a very informal kimono-style matinee jacket. The whole palette is exquisitely airy and light, with the verdigris louvred shutters set against warm-toned rendered walls behind a sunlit pastel harmony of pink roses, pale yellow hollyhocks and blue and mauve silk fabrics. The painting has usually been called Two ladies in a Garden but may well have been first exhibited by the artist as 'Two ladies in Garden' or 'In the Garden'. It was possibly exhibited in Sydney in 1925 as 'In the Garden', a painting of this size priced at 70 guineas; although, interestingly, Dame Nellie Melba lent a picture, at present unidentified, titled 'Two ladies in a garden' to that same exhibition.(3) The figure on the right is very close in posture and costume to a seated woman in the painting A Sunny Day, now in the Howard Hinton Collection. The same silk kimono jacket appears in a similar garden setting in The Letter of 1914-16 (formerly Orica Collection) and worn indoors - by a different model - in Girl at window (National Gallery of V