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| Image | Sale date | Auction house | Location | Sale name | Lot No. | Estimate | Price Sold | Condition | Title |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Nov 28, 2023 | Bonhams | Sydney | Important Australian Art | 63 | $****** - ****** | Red Cyclamen and Apples I |
paintings
76 x 76 cm (29.92 x 29.92 in)
oil on board
signed lower right: "Olley"
Nevill Keating Tollmache, London
Private collection, London
Margaret Olley, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard: Still life"s and Interiors , Nevill Keating Tollmache, London, 3 - 18 March 2005, cat. 5 (illus.)
We gratefully acknowledge the kind assistance of The Olley Project, courtesy of the Margaret Olley Trust and Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, in cataloguing this work.
Margaret Olley"s still life paintings exude a calm stillness and appear as a homage to the inherent beauty of simple things. Red Cyclamon and Apples I is part of a succinct group of still life paintings from arrangements which Olley assembled atop her kitchen benches, creating still life compositions using familiar jugs and compotes to display her beloved flowers, fruits and vegetables. In these works, she sought an evenness of tone and subtle colour harmonies all bathed in a soft morning or evening light.
As her friend and admirer Edmund Capon observed of the artist, "Still-lifes and interiors are her metier, and Margaret Olley is a part of that tradition, from Vermeer in the seventeenth century to Morandi in the twentieth century - two of her most admired artists - which finds inspiration, beauty and a rich spirit of humanity in the most familiar of subject matter." 1 She was a great arranger of her renowned household "clutter", most of which was collected on her numerous painting and study trips overseas through Europe, Asia and Oceania. From such a tangle of memento and divers keepsakes she was able to pare back and edit her arrangements so that a balance and harmony was attained leaving only form, colour and light to shape the composition. Not only did she approach her subject with great sensitivity and appreciation for the unassuming beauty of the objects portrayed, she was able to capture a sense of silence and timelessness that resonates throughout her works.
1. Edmund Capon, as quoted in Barry Pearce, Margaret Olley , The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1996, p. 7
Margaret Olley (1923-2011)
Red Cyclamen and Apples I, 2004
signed lower right: "Olley"
oil on board
76.0 x 76.0cm (29 15/16 x 29 15/16in).
