WILLIAM DOBELL Australian, 1899-1970

Purchased in 1948 by John Dunne as a 25th wedding anniversary present for his wife Bessie (label on the reverse)

Private collection, Sydney; thence by descent

Dobell’s solid academic training – in Sydney and during ten years Europe – found him a following with both conservative and progressive art collectors on his return to Australia in 1939. However, after the personal and professional trauma of the court case over his Archibald Prize portrait of Joshua Smith in 1943-44, Dobell retreated frequently to Wangi Wangi on the central coast of New South Wales. There he was nursed by his sister Alice at the family’s weekender on the foreshore of Lake Macquarie and landscape painting became a solace and restorative. Suzanne and goldfish was probably completed at Wangi before Dobell returned to Sydney in mid 1948.  Later that year he won the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s Wynne Prize for landscape and a second Archibald Prize for his portrait of Margaret Olley.

Suzanne and goldfish combines portraiture with landscape painting and a delightful suggestion of narrative. It is painted with great delicacy, an exquisite compilation of pictures within pictures. The sunlit landscape is twice framed by the verandah: to the left a homestead, to the right a passing horse and driver framed yet again by white woodwork. Three darting fish are enclosed in their own transparent world; while the child in her wicker pram is as quiet and self-contained as a china doll.  According to a note on the back of the painting, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh considered purchasing Suzanne and goldfish when they were in Sydney in July 1948 during their much-reported Australian tour with the Old Vic theatre company. Apparently the Oliviers quibbled over Dobell’s asking price of 100 guineas and took a small Wangi landscape back to London instead.¹  Interestingly Vivien Leigh also acquired a work by Russell Drysdale not long afterwards – his watercolour Study for ‘The Rabbiters’ (Sotheby’s, November 2000, lot 22).

1. Adams, B., Portrait of an Artist, a Biography of William Dobell, Hutchinson, Melbourne, 1983, p. 239.