After 100 years of solitude, an artist and her works see the light
Twin paintings by an increasingly renowned Australian artist are on public view for the first time since 1924 when an American family acquired them in Paris and took them home to New Orleans.
Bessie Davidson’s two domestic interiors, in identical elegant frames, now hang in the Sydney viewing of Deutscher + Hackett’s Important Australian Fine Art auction scheduled for August 27 in Melbourne.
Lot 1 in the catalogue is Davidson’s (Interior with girl reading), c.1924. It’s a depiction of simple domestic harmony. A small child is engrossed in a book while sunlight filters through gauzy curtains.
Davidson lived most of her life in Paris, and the location in the painting is thought to be her studio apartment in the Rue Boissonade.
Lot 2 is Davidson’s Intérieur, c.1924, in which a woman in a striped garment is seated before an open window. The woman could be reading or sewing, and the location may also be the Rue Boissonade.
A sticker on the back of lot 2 indicates Intérieur was hung in the 1924 Salon des Tuileries, a breakaway group of which Davidson was a founding member the year before.
Although no such sticker was found on the back of lot 1, it seems logical that it, too, was hung in the Salon des Tuileries, according to Deutscher + Hackett executive director Damian Hackett.
A further indication that the two works were exhibited together is that both were acquired in Paris in 1924 by Mr and Mrs James P. Cordill of New Orleans, Louisiana. The couple eventually gifted both paintings to their daughter, Miss Shirley Cordill, who had been in Paris with her parents when they bought the two Davidson paintings..
Miss Cordill went on to become queen of the 1930 New Orleans Mardi Gras, giving her high social status in that music-crazy city between the wars.
Ownership of the two Davidson paintings then went by descent from Miss Cordill to her grandson, who emailed Deutscher + Hackett “out of the blue” to inquire about parting with the heirlooms following a century of family ownership, Hackett told Saleroom.
As for how much will they go for, the estimates are $150,000 to $200,000 for (Interior with girl reading), and $250,000 to $350,000 for Intérieur. The actual hammer price will be determined by how many people fall in love with the paintings and how that translates into bidding action on the night.
To put those estimates in perspective, Bessie Davidson’s auction record of $810,000 (including buyer’s premium) was set by Deutscher + Hackett in 2021 with the painting, Reading in the garden (Lecture au jardin), c.1935. The pre-sale estimate on that painting had been $280,000 to $350,000.
Reading in the garden (Lecture au jardin) was acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia with help from the late James and Diana Ramsay, who left a $38 million bequest to the AGSA from their estates.
Bessie Davidson was virtually forgotten for many years but has ridden the overdue wave of interest in women artists and is now, rightly, one of Australia’s most revered painters. Born in South Australia, Davidson died in Paris in 1965.
Such interest, and resulting escalating auction prices, is in contrast to that shown to their male contemporaries, who have traditionally been more highly regarded and valued. As Saleroom reported last month, a sale of works at Leonard Joel two days before the Deutscher and Hackett auction will be a key test of the market.
Unlike the adventurous Davidson, Grace Cossington Smith rarely ventured far from her Sydney home. That didn’t stop Cossington Smith from becoming a leader in forging modernism in Australian art.
The Deutscher + Hackett catalogue features a 32cm x 24cm canvas titled The reader (the school cape), c.1916, by Cossington Smith. Not sold at auction since 1989 when it fetched $93,500 including premium through Sotheby’s in Melbourne, the painting’s estimate is $400,000 to $600,000.
Art historian Bernard Smith bought The reader (the school cape) directly from Cossington Smith in 1960. The work is now being sold from a private collection in Melbourne.
The reader (the school cape) has obvious stylistic affiliations with Cossington Smith’s The sock knitter, a key modernist work in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
The cape worn by Cossington Smith’s sister, who sat for the portrait, was part of the artist’s uniform when she attended Abbotsleigh, the private school in Turramurra.
The cover lot of the Deutscher + Hackett auction is Brett Whiteley’s Champagne, 1976, featuring 19 champagne corks balanced along its upper edge.
“It was quite a party,” Hackett observed.
The highest estimate in the catalogue is $800,000 to $1.2 million on the late Howard Arkley’s New room, 1993. In May this year another (bigger) example of Arkley’s suburban eye candy titled Neapolitan Delight set his auction record at $2.5 million, including buyer’s premium.
The Deutscher + Hackett auction features 52 lots with total pre-sale estimates of $8,246,000 to $11,562,000. The Sydney viewing runs until Sunday, and will be on in Melbourne from August 21 to 26.