Roy de Maistre

The artist; thence by descent
Mrs Celia Broadbent (née Keogh), United Kingdom; thence by descent
Mrs Sally Boyles, United Kingdom

Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre, The English Years 1930 - 1968, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, pl. 1, p. 19 (illus.)

There is surface dirt across the picture plane. There are several fly spots in the lower right quadrant. This work could benefit from a light surface clean. There are numerous small retouchings generally scattered across much of the picture's surface; presumably to reduce mildew staining; confirmed by UV inspection.
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Before 1923 there were only eight pictures in the modern French paintings collection at the Tate Gallery. In the 1920s the entrepreneurial efforts of the Leicester and Lefevre Galleries and the patronage and philanthropy of Samuel Courtauld somewhat remedied the absence of the avant-garde, with exhibitions of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Neo-Impressionist, Symbolist, Fauvist and Cubist painting being staged throughout the 1920s, and the Tate Modern collection being much enlarged.

Nevertheless, as Heather Johnson has noted, 'because England was 20 years behind the times no German expressionist or constructivist works, and no works by artists such as Kandinsky, Klee, Munch, Brancusi, Léger, Laurens or Miró were shown before 1930.'¹  When Roy de Maistre arrived in London in that year, Britain was still in fact a relatively conservative artistic environment, and it was even possible for an Australian, a colonial, a provincial artist to be if not ahead of then at least at the front of the artistic pack. Having already embraced both fauvism and abstraction in his and Roland Wakelin's landmark 1919 Sydney exhibition Colour in art, and having had first-hand encounters with the European avant-garde during his 1923-1925 Society of Artists scholarship tour, de Maistre had at his disposal a considerable modernist vocabulary. He exercises it in the present work, which is quite possibly one of those included in his July 1930 exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery.²

In its overall structure, its fragmentation of the image into a mosaic of geometric shards, the work obviously owes most to the example of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque's analytic cubism, while in its facets of pink and gold and cream, in the focal engine body circle and in the heraldic-pinwheel rotations of triangles there is a particular resonance of Robert Delaunay's 'Orphic' derivative of around 1912. There are, moreover, echoes of the Italian futurists – of works such as Gino Severini's Red Cross train passing a village (1915, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) – and of the futurists' English cousins the Vorticists – Wyndham Lewis, C.R. Nevinson, David Bomberg et al – even of Russian cubo-futurism.

The synthetic character of the painting is perhaps not surprising at this transitional stage of the artist's life and work. However, Train is also indicative of de Maistre's previous and abiding interest in 'pure' abstract form. As Johnson observes, while he gives 'a surface impression of cubism', his is more 'a style concerned with the decorative elements of shape and colour.'³  In the present work we can make out the forms of boiler, wheels and guard's van, of station platform and tunnel, and of distant trees and hills, but de Maistre seems much less concerned with pictorial construction than with pattern, with establishing particular harmonies of tone and colour, angle and curve. It certainly exemplifies the 'semi-geometrical and strongly defined design'⁴ which Apollo's roundsman discerned in the artist's first London show.

1.  Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: the English years 1930-1968, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1995, p. 18
2.  The work is signed with the artist's natal spelling, 'de Mestre', which he held to throughout 1930, before changing it to 'de Maistre'.
3.  Johnson, op. cit., pp. 19, 21
4.  Herbert Furst, 'Art news and notes', Apollo, vol. XII no. 67, July 1930, p. 82