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| Image | Sale date | Auction house | Location | Sale name | Lot No. | Estimate | Price Sold | Condition | Title |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Aug 27, 2024 | Bonhams | Sydney | The Morgan Collection | 19 | $****** - ****** | Boys Playing | |||
Mar 15, 2006 | Deutscher-Menzies | Malvern | Fine Art | 14 | $****** - ****** | Boys playing |
Works on Paper
36.5 x 49.5 cm (14.37 x 19.49 in)
gouache on card
initialled lower right: "IF"
Macquarie Galleries, Sydney
Barry Stern Galleries, Sydney
Mr Kevin Charles (Pro) Hart MBE, New South Wales
Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 15 March 2006, lot 14
The Morgan Collection, Perth
Ian Fairweather , Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 4 - 16 May 1955, cat. 14
Contemporary Australian Painting, Pacific Loan Exhibition , on board Orient Line, SS Orcades, 1956, cat. 26
Mixed Exhibition , Barry Stern Galleries, Sydney, November 1965, cat. 6, as The Basketball Game
Drawings of Ian Fairweather , National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 21 June - 24 August 1997, and touring, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 17 October - 7 December 1997, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 7 February - 29 March 1998 (label attached verso)
Tim Fisher, The Drawings of Ian Fairweather , National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997, pp. 16, 56 (illus.)
Murray Bail, Fairweather , Murdoch Books, Sydney, 2009, cat. 115, pl. 89, pp. 112-113 (illus.), 253
Claire Roberts and John Thompson (eds), Ian Fairweather: A Life in Letters , Text, Melbourne, 2019, pp. 141-164
When Ian Fairweather returned from England to Australia in 1953, he was homeless and broke. He headed north to the warmth but harassed by the police for sleeping in a public park, he went to Bribie Island and squatted on Crown land a mile away from the local village. After a bushfire destroyed his tent and clothes, he built a shack made from she-oaks and ti-tree and kept warm by cutting up some old sacks. In his letters, he described his solitary life with the animals and birds (possums, wallabies, echidnas, magpies, butcher birds) who were his companions. He painted at night to the light of a kerosene lamp and worked on his Chinese translation. After a while he became something of a curiosity to "the boys and girls from the local village" and though he quite enjoyed their visits, he lamented their dogs which killed the native fauna and the encroachment of houses and little gardens. He felt old and befuddled, he wrote, a bit of a Robinson Crusoe.
Having developed an allergy to oil paints, Fairweather used gouache with well-sized cardboard. He favoured a palette of soft greys, muted brown and dusty blacks and liked dry, chalky, multi-layered surfaces. ("The sand in Bribie being full of soot from bushfires - everything gets sooted up in no time," he wrote in June 1954.) The human figure was his main subject, particularly group compositions that depicted activities and rituals, whether drawn from the immediate world around him or from memory. Line and form were defined and powerful, drawing on his deep knowledge of Chinese calligraphy and informed by Cubism.
From 1954 to 1965 Fairweather exhibited every year with the Macquarie Galleries, sending regular bundles of works (though often poorly packed) down to the Misses Smith and Swanton. Their genteel manners and respectful, slightly old-fashioned way of dealing with Fairweather suited him perfectly. As he disliked thinking up titles for his paintings, many were conferred by the gallery and were brief. Here, the simple title belies what is portrayed. Arms and legs jostle for the ball but the abstracted hands and fingers are exaggerated and seem more like pitchforks than anything human. The action is chaotic with an overtone of aggression. Faces are ghoulish - without mouths or noses - and the vertical of the basketball pole in the centre is as menacing as a hangman"s gallows. This is combat, not a game played for fun.
Dr Candice Bruce
Ian Fairweather (1891-1974)
Boys Playing, 1955
initialled lower right: "IF"
gouache on card
36.5 x 49.5cm (14 3/8 x 19 1/2in).
