ROY DE MAISTRE

Collection of John Young, Sydney
Collection of Clarice Thomas, thence by descent to the present owner
Private collection, New South Wales

Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre, The Australian Years 1894-1930, Craftsman House, Sydney, p. 85, plate 40

Original timber frame. The work appears in good original condition.
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A brief article on De Maistre published in Art in Australia  in 1929 mentions that 'since his last exhibition [at the Macquarie Galleries in July 1928] he has painted several portraits which are larger and more constructively painted than any attempted before, and... also several figure compositions.'¹ 

The present work would appear to one of these 'constructively painted' portraits. It clearly demonstrates the artist's affinity with the post-impressionism of London's Camden Town group, which he had encountered and admired during his European sojourn of 1923-26. While not positing any direct connection, Heather Johnson points out the striking similarity between this painting and Harold Gilman's Interior with the Artist's Mother (1917-18, Manchester City Art Gallery). There is certainly a suggestive resemblance in the semi-recumbent pose, the dark body, the sharp facial profile, the background pattern and the choppy brushwork of De Maistre's painting.²

Johnson also notes two further, indirect influences on De Maistre's work at this time: his interior design work – he was deeply involved with the 1929 Antique and Modern Interior Design Exhibition at Burdekin House – and his collaboration with Harold Cazneaux on a series of 'new idea portraits' entitled Fair Women and Modern Design for the fashionable magazine The Home. In these photographs the subject is posed against grounds of wallpaper or soft furnishing fabric, with her face, her individual identity reduced to a small island within an ocean of pattern.³

Similarly, in this painting the bold abstract floral design of the sitter's dress, the more lightly articulated decoration of the embroidered pillowcase and the curtain behind, even the weave of the cane chair provide the work's fundamental structure and visual interest, with the (unidentified) sitter simply providing a 'natural' focus, a human centre.

The present work was probably shown at the Macquarie Galleries; possibly in the artist's 1928 show, or perhaps in the Group of 7 exhibition of 1930. Whatever its early history, at some point it came into the hands of the Macquarie's founder-director and Sydney modernism's great champion, John Young.

1.  'Contemporary Group of Australian Artists', Art in Australia, 3rd series, no. 29, September 1929
2.  Heather Johnson, Roy De Maistre: The Australian Years, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, pp. 82, 85
3.  ibid., pp. 82-3, 86-7