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Lot Essay
Presumably signed and dated in August 1986 when Perceval sold the present picture, along with Nativity No. 1 (1947) and The Butcher's Shop (1948) to the present owner (for which see Christie's, Melbourne, 19 April 2005, lots 129 and 35). As noted by Traudi Allen, '... doubt may generally be cast on the dates shown on the 1943-44 works, even if a month is given, as a number were dated later.' (T. Allen, John Perceval, Melbourne, 1992, p.47)
A self-taught artist, Perceval joined the Australian Army Survey Corps in 1939 until his demob in March 1944. His powerful surrealistic work had attracted attention in Contemporary Art Society exhibitions (from 1942), and would be reproduced by John Reed in Angry Penguins in December 1943. He shared a studio with Arthur Boyd in 1943 and married Arthur's sister Mary in 1944, his painting supported by a stipend of £1 a week from the Reeds. 'Both Boyd and Perceval paint images where the effects of war spill over into the street. Again, as with Tucker, Perceval dramatizes this experience of uncertainty, ambiguity and yet fascination and fear in the visible world. ... At their best Perceval's paintings ... release an extraordinary energy of the imaginative force of fantasy, breaking up the rational order of the senses and the material forms of the visible world. All becomes animated, manic in its excess and expenditure.' (C. Merewether, 'Modernism from the lower depths' in the exhibition catalogue Angry Penguins and Realist Painting in Melbourne in the 1940s, Hayward Gallery, London, 1988, p.75)
A self-taught artist, Perceval joined the Australian Army Survey Corps in 1939 until his demob in March 1944. His powerful surrealistic work had attracted attention in Contemporary Art Society exhibitions (from 1942), and would be reproduced by John Reed in Angry Penguins in December 1943. He shared a studio with Arthur Boyd in 1943 and married Arthur's sister Mary in 1944, his painting supported by a stipend of £1 a week from the Reeds. 'Both Boyd and Perceval paint images where the effects of war spill over into the street. Again, as with Tucker, Perceval dramatizes this experience of uncertainty, ambiguity and yet fascination and fear in the visible world. ... At their best Perceval's paintings ... release an extraordinary energy of the imaginative force of fantasy, breaking up the rational order of the senses and the material forms of the visible world. All becomes animated, manic in its excess and expenditure.' (C. Merewether, 'Modernism from the lower depths' in the exhibition catalogue Angry Penguins and Realist Painting in Melbourne in the 1940s, Hayward Gallery, London, 1988, p.75)