ROY DE MAISTRE

After spending three years in England and France on the Society of Artists Travelling Scholarship, Roy de Maistre returned to Australia towards the end of 1925, and soon arranged an exhibition at the recently established Macquarie Galleries. The April 1926 show was opened by Lady de Chair, wife of the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Dudley de Chair. Friends of de Maistre, the de Chairs had broad cultural interests, and Lady de Chair was 'anxious to associate with modern art.' ¹ She actively patronised not only de Maistre, but also his Sydney contemporaries Grace Cossington Smith, Margaret Preston and Roland Wakelin, and at the opening of the de Maistre exhibition proclaimed that 'The 'modern' movement...has come to stay.' ²

What Lady de Chair meant was 'not the extraordinary stuff one sometimes sees in French and American magazines' ³, but something more along the lines of de Maistre's own well mannered, fastidious post-impressionism. However bright the colour, it was always harmonious; however broken the brushwork, it never compromised the form.

Many of the works in the Macquarie Galleries exhibition had been brought back from Europe: works such as the celebrated rainbow-Cézannish Boat Harbour, St Jean de Luz, 1925, (New England Regional Art Museum). Some, however, were more recent, Australian subjects, amongst them probably the present work, here identified as The Swimming Pool. In all likelihood painted over the summer of 1925-26, the work continues the momentum of de Maistre's Côte Basque paintings. The compositional device of the acutely angled tree trunk, for example, functions in the same way as that in St Jean de Luz, 1925, providing a dynamic accent to the work's vertical and horizontal divisions. More generally it could be said that the work is, like the French pictures, a kind of synthesis of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and the Nabis, albeit diluted through the influence of English painters such as Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore.

Nevertheless, The Swimming Pool is also very local, both in terms of overall content and specific incident. De Maistre's palette incorporates the smoky olive-grey-greens of the Australian bush as well as his characteristic glowing rose, while the central figure leaning against the tree in posed casualness is probably Somerset de Chair, who related in 1988 that he had posed for such a painting. The painting was singled out for special praise by the critic of the Sydney Morning Herald, who wrote: 'The influence of Cézanne is probably more closely revealed in The Swimming Pool than anywhere else. Here the artist has produced a decorative subject, in which he has sought to emphasise the mystic phases of the Australian bush in the vague, elusive treatment of the masses of foliage, and the bent trunks of the gumtrees.  It is a new and notable view of the bush; and in its design and conception Mr de Mestre [sic] has managed exceedingly well...' ⁴

We are most grateful to Heather Johnson for assistance in cataloguing this work.

1. Roy de Maistre, undated letter to John Young, cited in Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: the Australian Years, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, p. 51
2. 'Modern Art. 'Has come to stay'. Lady de Chair's views', Sydney Morning Herald, 7 April 1926, p. 12
3. ibid.
4. 'Art exhibition. Mr. de Mestre's [sic] paintings', Sydney Morning Herald, 6 April 1926, p. 12