JUSTIN O'BRIEN, 1917-1996

Marie O'Brien, the artist's sister, and thence by descent; until
Fine Australian and International Paintings, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 2 May 2000, lot 12

Private collection, Melbourne

This sensitive and highly decorative portrait of the artist’s two nieces was painted in Sydney in 1958-59. After the old Woollahra mansion ‘Merioola’ was demolished in 1950 (where O’Brien had been part of an extraordinarily lively circle of painters, writers, photographers, dancers and musicians), he moved to Elizabeth Bay. His sister Marie lived not far away with her young family, in another old house, ‘Banksia’.

O’Brien’s art was characterised by great richness of colour at this time and this portrait is quite theatrical in mood. The wonderful combinations of pattern and carefully worked out colour relationships are just what the interior designer Marion Hall Best so admired in his paintings. She noted his influence in her diary: ‘I was interested in Justin O’Brien’s technique of overlaying a light colour with a heavy one, then scraping it off to varying scales of transparency. Olive over yellows, pinks over reds. There was no end to this beautiful discovery’. ¹ Here the deep pinks, crimson, lime green and citrus yellow might conceivably have come from an interior designed by Hall Best herself.

1. Quoted by Christine France in Justin O’Brien, Image and Icon, Craftsman House, Sydney, rev. edn 1997, p. 16.