This five page monthly blog was put together by Terry Ingram who wrote the Saleroom column and many arts stories for the Australian Financial Review (7500 in all) from 1969 to 2006 and is a friend of the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery of the University of Leeds where he studied fine arts under Quentin Bell and graduated in 2003.
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NEWARK MUSEUM PACKS
AUSSIE PUNCH*
*or how a lucky scoop helped procure an Australian national treasure was saved for the nation
by Terry Ingram, Australian Financial Review
Aug 25 1988
The most popular postcard from New Jersey shows an oil dump and railway siding.
The postcard is, of course, a joke, the industrial State of New Jersey being the butt of many jokes.
Australiana buffs, however, may have cause to regret if they ever gave up a chance to visit the State and did not - because one of the most desirable of Australia's missing treasures has found its way there.
The "treasure" is a piece of Chinese export porcelain - a genre so called because the porcelain was made to European order and design by Chinese potters.
A Chinese export porcelain punch-bowl bearing an early view of Sydney Harbour has been the pride of the Australiana collection in the Mitchell Library since 1926 and will be shown in Canberra when the Australian National Gallery has its Bicentennial exhibition of Australiana this year.
A second export porcelain punch-bowl bearing a Sydney view was known as early as the 1930s, but has since disappeared
IT' recovery would be a coup to the dealer or collector who homed in on it. For the benefit of such fossickers, Saleroom can now disclose that the missing punch-bowl is not far from Newark and belongs to a US Government functionary.
The punch-bowl came to light when offered in the early 1930s, first to the Art Gallery of NSW (which was not interested) and then to the Mitchell Library through the National Art Collections Fund of Britain. The library rejected it because it already had one.
Even in Tim McCormick's extensively researched First Views of Australia, 1788-1825: A History of Early Sydney, published this year, the whereabouts of the second punch-bowl was described as unknown.
Given that the exhibition, unlike the book, was devoted to ceramic connoisseurs rather than historians, it also had a fuller However, the bowl was illustrated in the book, in black and white, as the Mitchell had photographs from the 1930s of this rare object.
Anyone visiting the Newark Museum between October 27, 1979, and January 6, 1980, would have been able to see the missing bowl. It was number 45 in the catalogue of "Chinese Export Porcelain", a loan exhibition from New Jersey collections.
The punch-bowl was listed as an anonymous loan and a well-informed US dealer source insists that it is still in the same anonymous New Jersey collection.
The catalogue supplies many details not in McCormick. In First Views, the bowl is described simply as "glaze on porcelain, size not known, not signed, not dated, title in enamel in blue"
The bowl was, it added, one of a pair of punch-bowls showing view
The bowl was, it added, one of a pair of punch-bowls showing views of Sydney Cove, the interior decorated with a group of Aborigines, the outer view taken
The bowl was, it added, one of a pair of punch-bowls showing views of Sydney Cove, the interior decorated with a group of Aborigines, the outer view taken from Dawes Point. Newark, of course, had the measurements, 17.1cm tall and 44.8cm in diameter.
The "missing" bowl is white glaze with polychrome famille rose and enamel decoration.
As the only existing photograph available in Australia is black-and-white, the catalogue description throws more light on the bowl's colouring.
It is described as having wide interior floral border in pink, blue and orange and white against a gilt background. The central interior is decorated with "unusual group of Australian Aborigines en grisaille with sepia spears and clubs". The exterior is stated to have a rare perspective view of Sydney. View of the Town of Sydney in New South Wales is written underneath the view in black.
If the bowl is one of a the pair and the Mitchell Library punch-bowl is its other member, the Newark punch-bowl would then be, of course, one of a harlequin pair, judging by the different descriptions of the two bowls.
No other such punch-bowl with an Australian view is known, the photographs supplied by the National Art Collections Fund in the 1930s more or less confirming that the Newark bowl was the one then offered to the Art Gallery and the Mitchell.
While many export bowls with views of Cape Town are known, this underlines the extreme rarity of the Newark piece. In any contest to secure the Newark bowl, were it to come onto the market, the bidding would have to start at$50,000 for anyone to have any hope of securing it. Most likely it would go for very much more.
Bowls with Cape Town views have made $15,000 or more, and a bowl with an early London connection and bearing the Ironmongers' Company arms was reputed to have been on the London market recently for about Sterling 25,000.
Sydney auction house James R. Lawson came close to securing the punch-bowl for sale when it sold the W.A. Little collection in the 1920s. But Mr Little recognised the importance of the bowl (previous provenance unknown) by presenting it to the Mitchell Library.
Other than a run of famous named Australian artists and the Dayes print of Sydney Cove in 1804, no Australiana jumps out of the catalogue of his collection when it went under the hammer at Lawson's.
The US owner of the bowl is an American patrician, possibly a senator, who acquired it from his parents, who had secured it in the 1930s.
PUNCH LINE
I subsequently discovered the name of the owner of the now $1 million plus bowl (Senator Rodney Frelinghuysen and Paul Hundley, a curator at the ANM or many chased him up and spent some the remains of the handsome gifts to the funds setting up the American gallery and its friends on the bowl.
The adjacent article written as a result of a trip I made to Newark in
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click PRECEDENTS ABOVE in banner for archived$1.4 million art deal
The adjacent article written as a result of a trip I made to Newark in 1988. was published in the AFR in 1988 one of 7500 articles in the Saleroom archive.
The bowl was purchased by the museum from the Senator in 2006.
see also
Local Flavour to Punch Bowl AFR
April 23 1988
and Wikipedia:"The discovery was made by Terry Ingram, a Sydney journalist specialising in antiques and art, who wrote about it in the Saleroom column, titled Newark Museum packs Aussie punch, in The Australian Financial Review on 25 August 1988
Saleroom.net.au is a commem-orative web site and quarterly blog of Terry Ingram who studied art at the University of Leeds with Quentin Bell as tutor and from1969-2008.
I also write regularly for the Australian Art Sales Digest which carried regular reviews of major art sales at Aasd.com.au
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for illustration-
click Classics in banner above
other pics are
Lonely Painter Coogee Beach
Giant Anish Kapoor sculpture busy day at Gibbs Farm NZ sculpture park
Two leading traders pace home after a good day at a Melbourne suburban auction
Regency Cat Nero at Westbury Tasmania decorator's home----------------------------------------------
THE BANNER Saleroom above above is ao a section of a painting called Blue Polls which was
one of the supposed Jackson Pollock paintings which were brought to Perth in 1973 by a dealer Bob Ledwij and which were much lauded in an Australian women's mag. After a front page article in the AFR Pollocks from out of the Blue they failed to arrive the Ivan Dougherty gallery at the Alexander Mackie College) for an exhibition of "Pollock's" to be opened by the then NSW Attorney-General, Mr Walker. Leading members of the Australian art world were at the function in Perth which launched them but said nothing.
Pollocks out of the Blue
AFR May 2 1978
Articles from Saleroom Archives
