Eric Thake

(1904-1982)

Set of 35 Christmas cards 1941-75 dimensions variable, approximately 12.0 x 18.0 cm (4 3/4 x 7 1/16in) each

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Private collection, Melbourne
19th and 20th century Australian paintings, sculpture and work on paper, Deutscher-Menzies, Melbourne, 20 April 1998, lot 203 (illus. selected individual cards)
The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Collection, acquired in 1998


Wartime shortages prompted the Melbourne artist and illustrator Eric Thake to print his own Christmas card in 1941. It was deliberately amusing because he wanted to cheer up family and friends after a harrowing year when Japanese invasion seemed imminent. The responses lead to a repeat effort the next festive season, and the next. By 1948 Thake's annual Christmas cards had a following. The number of recipients ballooned as artists he knew slightly sent him greetings hoping for one of his cards in return. Eventually he was commissioned to produce several cards.

Printed in linocut using black ink on white card, Thake's cards were inventive exercises in graphic concision. The stylish images were executed with a clean economy of form where edges were often denoted by slicing hair-thin white lines across dark masses. But technical mastery explains only part of the appeal of cards that avoided Christmas subjects. What artists and collectors savoured about those cards was a dry wit, the intention always being to stir hearty laughter. In this Thake's visual humour was reminiscent of the New Yorker cartoonists James Thurber and Saul Steinberg, although his cards always had an Australian twang.

Several themes recurred. There was rural imagery distilled from the artist's intermittent country trips, as well as holidays outback. He had a taste for Australian natural history, representing animals, birds and lizards he had seen that sparked his imagination. There were also glimpses of country hotels and bars — the most accomplished being his view of a blue heeler contrasted with the heels of drinkers — masculine subjects that Thake repeatedly explored in his paintings and drawings. 1 Concealed amidst these rural pieces can be self-images, Thake concealing caricatures of his own face into an ant hill, a camel and a rocky outcrop.

Then there are the blunt comic images — three hippopotami sunning themselves, nuns in a car seen from behind, dishes in a drying rack resembling Sydney's Opera House (note the blowfly), and the hilarious Roadside bunyip, two glowing roadworks lamps sitting on steel drums picked up by his car's headlights.

Several of the most accomplished cards are art-scene gags made at the expense of the National Gallery of Victoria. 'This way to Phar Lap' is an affectionate portrait of Daryl Lindsay, the gallery's director, handling the visitors' question that drove him to distraction. 'Mr Picasso', which shows a cubist tribal sculpture and Picassoid harlequin asking a guard about the modern art, on the gallery steps beneath Fremiet's statue of Joan of Arc, was inspired by inquiries about the absence of modern art by overseas visitors during the Melbourne Olympics. Likewise 'Epstein, Einstein' jokes about a seeming disinterest in modern art and ideas at the NGV. But the most telling, and probably cryptic card, Comparisons, has a gallery visitor looking at an Easter Island statue while a Melanesian native strikes an admiring pose as he views the latest model Volkswagen.

A labour of love, Eric Thake kept up making cards for nearly forty years, ceasing only when it became too much for his declining energy.

Dr Christopher Heathcote

1 Margaret Rich, Eric Thake: Pubs and Bars, exh. cat., Geelong Art Gallery, Geelong, 1976