ROY DE MAISTRE

Dimitri Mitrinoviæ
Trustees of the New Atlantis Foundation
Glady MacDermot; thence by descent
Private collection, Switzerland

(possibly) Roy de Maistre, Mayor Gallery, London, October-November 1934 (Mayor Gallery label on stretcher bar on reverse)
Roy de Maistre: A retrospective exhibition of paintings and drawings 1917 - 1960, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, May - June 1960, cat. 21
Francis Bacon, Tate Gallery, London, 24 May-1 July 1962, cat. 93 (as Francis Bacon's Studio, 1932, lent by Roy de Maistre). Partial Tate Gallery exhibition label attached to reverse.

John Rothenstein and Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, Thames & Hudson, London, 1964, p. 10
Mary Eagle, Australian Modern Painting Between the Wars 1914-1939, Bay Books, Sydney, 1989, p. 50 (illus.)
John Russell, Francis Bacon, Thames & Hudson, London, 1993, pp. 16-17
Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times, Crown Publishers, New York, 1993, p. 64
Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930-1968, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, pp. 24, 77, 234

This work is framed in a timber frame and is on the original stretcher. UV examination reveals a small tear (approximately 1.5 by 1cm, irregular) centre left, with a patch evident on the reverse. There is scattered re-touching below the floor boards and below the red painting lower left, at the centre of the lower margin and in the lower centre of the right hand side (approximately 1cm). There is evidence that the work has previously had some mould upper left. There is retouching in the top left of the ceiling (1.5 by 1.5cm).
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When Roy de Maistre and Francis Bacon met, the 21 year old Bacon had begun to establish himself as a fashionable furniture designer, producing severe glass and tubular-steel tables and chairs and synthetic-cubist screens and woven floor rugs. This art deco aesthetic chimed with de Maistre's own taste for geometric flat pattern, and he responded with strikingly moderne but 'topographically precise'   views of Bacon's studio: Francis Bacon's Queensbury Mews Studio (1930, collection of the late Francis Elek) and Interior (1930, Manchester City Art Gallery).

They were the first of some ten pictures of Bacon's work spaces that de Maistre would produce during the early 1930s. In addition to these two and to Still Life (1933, National Gallery of Australia) and Mr Francis Bacon's Studio, Royal Hospital Road (1934, private collection), there are no fewer than six related paintings of one of these rooms, a whitewashed attic prism with open door and pictures leaning against the walls.

The precise location depicted is uncertain. John Rothenstein maintains that these works, too, depict the studio at 71 Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea , but Heather Johnson notes that 'sketches for the work were thought to have been made circa 1932, in which case the studio represented could have been one of the many Bacon occupied after leaving his Queensbury Mews studio in 1931 and before he moved into the Royal Hospital Road studio...Bacon had studios in Fulham Road, Cromwell Place and Glebe Place during this time.'

For those with an interest in the early Bacon, the picture's key interest lies in the two curious, Picassoesque works 'carefully, irreplaceably recorded by de Maistre'.   'Against bare boards and angular white surfaces, canvases are stacked, two turned towards the painter's brush, one of a skeletal and feathered bird, another of the quartered outline of a horse or dragon – the start of a movement from geonometric abstraction towards a more organic image... these are works of transition, those of an embryo trying to flesh itself.'

The picture also has a special importance for de Maistre scholars. The original version was purchased by Gladys MacDermot, de Maistre's great supporter both in Australia and in England, and attracted the particular interest of another of MacDermot's protégés, Dmitri Mitrinovic, political and aesthetic visionary and polemicist, and founder of the journals New Britain and New Atlantis. While MacDermot's painting was destroyed during the London Blitz, Johnson records that 'Mitrinovic commissioned a version...for himself, New Atlantis... almost identical to the original work' and that 'several other versions and variations of the work were also produced: a third, smaller work done for Mitrinovic and given to a follower, Jack Murphy... a fourth work also done for Mitrinovic and presently in a private collection associated with the New Atlantis Foundation...(the present work) and a sixth work, White Figure, Art Gallery of Western Australia. All the extant works are believed to have been done circa 1933 developed from sketches de Maistre made in Bacon's studio in 1932.'

1.  Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1996, p. 51
2.  John Rothenstein and Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, Thames & Hudson, London, 1964, p. 10
3.  Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930-1968, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 77
4.  John Russell, Francis Bacon, Thames & Hudson, London, 1993, p. 16
5.  Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times, Crown Publishers, New York, 1993, p. 64
6.  Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930-1968, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 77

We are most grateful to Heather Johnson, Andrew Brighton and Elizabeth Gertsakis for their assistance in cataloguing this work.