Roy De Maistre

(1894-1968)

Magnolia, 1928

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Macquarie Galleries, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1928
thence by descent
Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED
R. De Mestre, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 11 - 21 July 1928, cat. 28

LITERATURE
'Oil Paintings and Drawings, Roy de Mestre's Exhibition', Sydney Mail, Sydney, Wednesday 25 July 1928, p. 2


In 1919 a young Roy De Maistre expounded a theory of colour and music which drew on his simultaneous training at the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music and the Royal Art Society of New South Wales. Although it did not develop as fully as he had hoped, his work on 'colour-music' provided a foundation for experiments in abstraction that became the first known examples of abstract art in Australia and ensured his later reputation as one of the era's most important artists.

This work was one of a number of still life paintings (or 'flower pieces' as de Maistre referred to them) the artist painted between 1925 and 1930. The artist's primary interest was not however in the subject matter as much as it was in composition and colour, both being important elements of the new Modernism then stirring up the Sydney art scene. De Maistre had seen much of this new style for himself after three years spent in London and Europe on a Society of Artists' travelling scholarship, news of which he brought back with him on his return in 1926. De Maistre set himself up in a studio at Burdekin House, where he also taught, and set about painting works for his first solo show.

Exhibited at the Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, in July 1928, the painting attracted the attention of the unconventional art and film critic, Beatrice Tildesley, who wrote a long review of the exhibition for the Sydney Mail.

The exhibition was, she wrote, 'extraordinarily stimulating', though she did not doubt that it would once again provoke an argument between those who carped that Australian art was twenty years behind that of Europe, and those who maintained Cezanne could not, or would not, draw. In this show, Tildesley continued, young Roy De Maistre (then still spelling his name as 'de Mestre') demonstrated the principles of the new art through a simplified sense of pattern and design, intensified by the use of strong colour and a drier than normal paint. 'Magnolia' had, she wrote, a 'joyous lightness' in which the planes of creamy white blooms, blue jar and carpet and green wall, all played off one another. The 'deliberate distortion of the angle of the carpet against the stained floor' was a justifiable 'liberty' used to strengthen and embolden the design. This is enhanced even further by the original cream frame which pulls the pale petals of the magnolia to the very edges of the canvas.

Candice Bruce