Charles Blackman

Private collection, Sydney

Charles Blackman, Bonython Art Gallery, Sydney, July 1969

Nadine Amadio, Charles Blackman: the lost domains, Sydney: Reed, 1980, p. 81
James Gleeson, 'Master of the figurative', Sun, 9 July 1969, p. 47
Sandra Hall, 'Blackman - ten years after the Antipodean affair', Bulletin, 5 July 1969, p. 32
John Henshaw, 'Large and luxurious', Australian, 12 July 1969, p. 21
Felicity St John Moore, Charles Blackman: schoolgirls and angels, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1993, pp. 104-105
Tony Morphett,  'Charles Blackman offers the flowers of solitude', Sydney Morning Herald (Weekend Magazine), 5 July 1969, p. 17

This work is on its original stretcher and is not lined. There are small areas of stable paint loss in the centre of the work above the cat. There is a faint scratch to the lower centre of the work to the right of the cat. The work is otherwise in good original condition.
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Aside from the brobdignagian Evening at Ettalong, the three largest and most impressive pictures in Charles Blackman's 1969 Bonython Art Gallery exhibition were the three White cat's garden paintings: White cat's garden at afternoon, White cat's garden at evening and White cat's garden at night. Painted in the artist's vast, bright new Sydney studio overlooking a neighbour's garden, the trio have been described as his 'best-known garden images,'¹ and as 'a summation of the fairytale aspect of his work.'²

The White cat's garden pictures were initially inspired by Claude Monet's late waterlily series, particularly those groups of paintings which depict the same view but at different times of day. There is certainly an echo of the celebrated Nymphéas in these works' japoniste flatness, in their passages of brushy fluidity and in their small, scattered detonations of floral colour. The grand scale of Monet's late paintings may also have had an effect; the three White cat's garden paintings are indeed, as the Australian's subeditor summarised the show, 'large and luxurious.'

However, beyond their sequence, scale and sensuality, the pictures' intentions and effects are a long way from Monet's. As Blackman himself said: 'I started with that idea, but because I'm a very different sort of painter from Monet – he was a painter of light and I'm not – it became very different.'³  Indeed, they are in many ways the opposite of Impressionist. Reviewing the exhibition for the Sun, James Gleeson wrote: 'Defying the normal order of things, he has painted the afternoon garden with the least precision and definition, and as the light fades, the details in the succeeding paintings become increasingly sharp and definite, until, in the night garden, the flowers blaze in the darkness with knife-sharp edges and with a brilliance that would almost put the sun to shame. With the fading light he has moved from observation to imagination, from a perceptual approach to a conceptual approach – and these two different approaches often mingle together in the one painting.'⁴

This lunar refulgence, this nocturnal fluorescence, heightens the symbolist and expressionist character of White cat's garden at night, its dream-like, magical quality. As the artist explained in an interview, 'I was trying deliberately to create a sense of unreality, of it being the cat's garden with no human being in it. A world shut off from everything else. It's funny, while I was working on it, my daughter Christabel came home from the library with a book, and started reading me a story about a cat stepping into a wardrobe and out into his own garden. The wardrobe was the only possible entrance. I don't say I'm psychic or anything, but the two did coincide.'⁵

James Gleeson praised the 1969 exhibition as 'the works of an artist at the top of his powers,'⁶ and the White cat's garden pictures were a highlight of that show. Popularised and democratised through a series of six rich, 16-colour screenprints made in collaboration with printmaker Charles Bannon, they remain among the artist's most widely admired as well as his most lyrical and most joyous images. Of the two surviving oils, White cat's garden at night is the more mysterious and the more romantic, in the way it arouses 'feelings to which mere intellect has no access.'⁷

1.  Nadine Amadio, Charles Backman: the lost domains, Sydney: Reed, 1980, p. 81
2.  Sandra Hall, 'Blackman - ten years after the Antipodean affair', Bulletin, 5 July 1969, p. 32
3.  Natalie Scott, 'Charles Blackman – elfish giant of the painting world', Australian, 5 July 1969, p. 9B ('Sydney Scene' supplement)
4.  James Gleeson, 'Master of the figurative', Sun,  9 July 1969, p. 47
5.  Hall, op. cit. There was even a darker magic. White cat's garden at night and White cat's garden at afternoon are the only two survivors of this seminal sequence, the evening picture having been consumed in a house fire after two miraculous escapes. Nadine Amadio's identification of the afternoon picture as the one destroyed is incorrect.
6.  Gleeson, op. cit.
7.  John Henshaw, 'Large and luxurious', Australian, 12 July 1969, p. 21