Lot 9
  • 9

SAM FULLBROOK

Estimate
25,000 - 35,000 AUD
bidding is closed

Description

  • Sam Fullbrook
  • BELLE OF THE CANEFIELDS
  • Signed lower left; bears title and date 1949 on the reverse
  • Oil on composition board
  • 64.5 by 34 cm

Provenance

Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney (label on the reverse)
Collection of the late John Lockhart AO QC, Sydney

Exhibited

Sam Fullbrook: Racing Colours, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 7 - 24 July 1995, cat. 2 

Literature

Felicity St John Moore, Sam Fullbrook: Racing Colours, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1995, cat. 2, illus. p. 17 

Condition

Good condition. UV inspection reveals reoutching to area of head (right) and to upper left.
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Catalogue Note

Although born in Sydney and first trained as an artist under the Commonwealth Rehabilitation students scheme after service in the Second World War, Sam Fullbrook is probably best known for his Queensland subjects.  After returning from Melbourne to Sydney in 1947, where he associated with members of the Studio of Realist Art, he travelled to north Queensland in 1949-50 to work as a cane cutter. He took his painting gear with him and executed a number of landscapes and sugar-cane farming subjects. Felicity St John Moore suggests that The Belle of the Canefields may have been completed back in Sydney. Important early works by Fullbrook are rare, although he exhibited successfully and regularly, mainly in Sydney and Queensland between 1948 and 1971, for most of his own collection was lost in a studio fire.

This beautiful and very thoughtful painting, with its translucent layering of pigment, is a poetic realization of a young Australian girl - daughter of the Basque family with whom Fullbrook worked as a cane cutter in 1949-50.  As Felicity St John Moore observes, 'Her southern European beauty and the Crucifix around her neck seem to have sparked the idea of the Virgin Mary, as signified perhaps by her "heavenly" blue dress and demure pose. Holding her token of virginity - a single white flower - she gazes watchfully'. 1 There are echoes of Renaissance art in both subject and composition: Raphael's dreamy Madonnas, for example. Fullbrook's interest in international precedent is also evident in the figure of the cane cutter in the distance: an archetypal rural worker reminiscent of those in the French naturalist Jean-François Millet's Man with the Hoe or The Angelus; and, interestingly but perhaps coincidentally, the American Winslow Homer's post-Civil War The Veteran in a New Field of 1865.2 However the setting here is clearly tropical - north of Capricorn. The landscape is lush and the atmosphere warm.

1. See Felicity St John Moore, Sam Fullbrook: Racing Colours, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1995, p. 17.
2. The references are to Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), The Man with the Hoe, 1860-62, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and The Angelus, 1857-9, Musée d'Orsay, Paris; Winslow Homer (1836-1910), The Veteran in a New Field, 1865, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. All of these would have been well known in reproduction during the 1940s.