ROY DE MAISTRE

Australian and International Art, Deutscher-Menzies, Melbourne, 24 November 1999, lot 29
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above

Work in good, original condition.
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Discussing De Maistre's penchant for revisiting or repeating particular paintings over time, Heather Johnson suggests that he 'did some variations of works in slightly different colour schemes and tones for his own interest and information. Others were made as a series of steps from a realistic version of a subject to a core abstracted one...' ¹

The present work is one of at least five versions of the subject,²  which began with a quite naturalistic ink sketch inscribed 'Note for figure Composition' and dated 27 December 1942. The drawing shows a group of carol singers in a domestic interior: four women seated and standing around a man at the piano, with a window behind. In the new year De Maistre began to work intensively with this formal structure, taking it through a number of variations. In the paintings, the image is refracted through synthetic cubist faceting, through the use of different colour schemes and through the addition of decorative (wallpaper) patterning. The sequence culminated in a large, flat fantasia of purple and red, white and gold, now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Gift of Patrick White, 1974).

The present work, with its more modest scale, more monochrome palette and more urgent brushwork, is probably the first painting in this important series. The face of the left-hand singer is here still relatively naturalistic (if heavily shadowed and expressionist), while in the other three versions it becomes and remains an abstracted, chequerboard mask.

1. Heather Johnson, Roy De Maistre: The English Years 1930-1968, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 52
2.  Details and reproductions of the other four are reproduced in Johnson, op. cit., pp. 53-56, fig. 8 and plates 23-25