ROY DE MAISTRE 1894-1968

Oil on canvas
Signed lower left

Painted c. 1933
PROVENANCE
Commissioned from the artist by Dimitrije Mitrinovic, c. 1933, from sketches made in Francis Bacon's studio in 1932; a gift from Mitrinovic to the present owner in 1938
Private collection, England
REFERENCE
The first version of this painting was reproduced in 'Oil Painting by Roy de Maistre', The New Atlantis, For Western Renaissance & World Socialism, vol. 1, no.1, October 1933, frontispiece; and New Britain, vol. 3, no. 57, 1934.
The present work is reproduced in: Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre, The English Years 1930-1968, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, pl. 32, pp. 75-79
Martin Harrison, In Camera, Francis Bacon, photography, film and the practice of painting, Thames & Hudson, London, 2004, pp. 30-31, fig. 29

Having grown up in New South Wales, Roy de Maistre gained something of a reputation as an Australian modern artist, especially after a joint exhibition in Sydney in 1919 with Roland Wakelin, exploring the relationships between painting and music and the psychological effects of colour. However his ambitions were for far wider appreciation and in March 1930 he left Australia permanently.

New Atlantis is the largest and most important early painting by de Maistre to become available to collectors in recent years. It documents a key moment not only in de Maistre's career -placing him within the vanguard of international modernism - but also that of Frances Bacon, now widely recognized as Britain's most important twentieth-century painter.
De Maistre was in London by at least July 1930 and within months had allied himself with the modern movement there. He soon met and befriended the younger Irish-born Bacon and they exhibited together in October. They possibly shared a studio for a short time and de Maistre painted interior studies of various premises occupied by Bacon in the early 1930s. They remained friendly for life. As de Maistre's biographer Heather Johnson points out, 'The importance of de Maistre's help in the development of Bacon's work in the early 1930s is perhaps best demonstrated in the obituaries written of Bacon in April 1992. In all of these de Maistre is given considerable credit, both as an early friend and as an influence in Bacon's learning to paint; and is the only artist mentioned in conjunction with Bacon's work'.(1)
New Atlantis certainly depicts a corner of one of Francis Bacon's studios and is believed to have been painted from sketches made in 1932. However whether this was the one in Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, is unclear, as Bacon was quite itinerant in the early '30s and was not to have settled working space for some years. Martin Harrison notes that abstract paintings probably by Bacon (since destroyed) can be seen in the corner. Heather Johnson identifies the painting with the cone form in it as a version of one by de Maistre reproduced in Herbert Read's first edition of Art Now: An Introduction to the Theory of Modern Painting and Sculpture (London: Faber & Faber, 1933, no. 96). The almost ghostly female form in the darkened doorway may have been inspired by Picasso's monumental 'classical' figures of the 1920s, and his classical line drawings, which both Bacon and de Maistre would have known. It is also reminiscent of the monumental abstracted figures painted on a three-fold screen that belonged to Bacon in the '30s but was later owned by de Maistre.(2) De Maistre was apparently fascinated by the stark spareness of Bacon's studios - very different from his own eclectic decorating style - and in Johnson's words, 'New Atlantis is a superior and fascinating abstracted pattern of the hard-edged, angled shapes skilfully devised from the corner of the room'.(3)
The first version of this composition was owned by Gladys MacDermot, a wealthy Irishwoman who had lived in