By Terry Ingram

A painting sold overseas recently by the Art Gallery of NSW because it was thought to be a lemon may have been a Mellon.

Sotheby's cataloguing of the picture suggests that it could well have been at home in the collection of British art put together by the US magnate Paul Mellon.

The sale was made in an effort to fund the acquisition earlier this year of a Kandin sky watercolour, whose main claim to fame is the fact that it is a study for a work in another art gallery, the Guggenheim in New York.

Is the gallery then, trading lemons for Mellons, which, as Perth art renegade Lou Klepac once suggested, was the history of collecting in Australia? The gallery is adamant that it isn't.

Director Edmund Capon pointed out that the painting looked far better in the catalogue reproduction than in reality. Nor does the work fit easily into the new ideas for the gallery's collection, with the emphasis on oriental art.But the painting is an interesting work by any standard.

The price received for the `Mellon', which was painted by the pioneer 17th century sporting painter Francis Barlow, was £11,000, a little more than the presale estimate, but not an excessive sum, making the loss all that more disappointing.

There are few areas of the international art market where good buys can still be made. Paul Mellon found this out some time ago, as has the buyer of the picture, a woman collector from Hong Kong.

Mellon has been a stalwart buyer in the area of 17th and 18th century British art, liking, in particular, British life as seen in British art. The Barlow Portrait of a Huntsman. A Coachman and a Keeper, with Hounds and a Fox in a Landscape, is very much in this idiom.

But Mellon has a fine Barlow.

One consolation for the gallery, which seldom hung the picture and did not know what it was until it received the S6theby's sale catalogue, was the sizeable profit on the sale.

The painting, which joins Stubbs Foxhounds in a Landscape as another potentially notable sporting picture loss to Australia, was bought at Bonham's, London, in 1961 for £69.

The painting was then only considered to be 'English school'. So much, the cynic might say, for junk days at the gallery (every Thursday the public is invited to take pictures along to the gallery for an informed opinion).

But then the painting was not signed!

Sotheby's unhesitatingly catalogued the painting, a handsome size at 133cm by 168cm, as the work of Barlow.

The cataloguer noted: "Edward Hodnett records in Francis Barlow the First Master of English Book Illustration a number of oil paintings, mostly of animals, most noticeably the group painted for Lord Onslow and which are now at Clandon.

He also mentions a small group of portraits, including that of General Monck, and a full length of A Bay and His Groom (Tyrwhitt-Drake collection.)

"This painting is close in style to both the latter and The Serving Man Carrying Faggots at Clandon. Sotheby's also showed its confidence in the work by reproducing it in colour.

The doyen of writers on English sporting art, Shaw Sparrow, heaps accolades on Barlow in both British Sporting Artists from Walter Barlow to Herring and in A Book of Sporting Painting.

He says: "Francis Barlow was the English pioneer among country life painters of a decorative simplicity, as in his cardinal masterpiece The Southern Hounds dating from around 1656. He was followed variously by Wootton and Stubbs, Rowlandson, Gilpin and Reinagle, who handed on a liking for breadth and mass to Ben Marshall, another pioneer.

And again, according Sparrow: "He is not a Rubens or a Snyders in hunting scenes, for example. But the gifts are versatile and very fine, and John Evelyn's admiration shows what 17th century Englishmen thought of Barlow's paintings."

Shaw Sparrow points out that British art has many reasons to be grateful towards Barlow's 'brave pioneering'. His Flemish contemporaries, Jan Fyt and Snyders, had the benefit of the atmosphere created by Rubens and the Antwerp school "while poor Barlow was mainly self-taught. He had to grow trees before he could make his own ladder."

Sparrow also says that Barlow survived the political uncertainties of the times which were not always conducive to art (for example, during the Commonwealth). Barlow's admirers ranged from the great Puritan general George Monet to many leading Royalists.

Sparrow wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, but the importance attached by others to his work is reflected in the subsequent publication by Hodnett. It has not been possible to trace a copy of Hodnett in Australia, nor another Barlow, which may help explain the picture's disparaging treatment by the gallery.

The gallery claims to be selling duplicates; yet it does not have another Barlow, so even if this is a secondary work it surely has a place. Neither the National Gallery of Victoria nor the Art Gallery of South Australia, the most likely other Australian homes for his work, have works by this master.

No library or museum in Australia has an Oil painting of his, despite the fact his work might have been at home in such institutions because of his importance to book illustration and English porcelain decoration. His illustrations to Aesop's Fables were important in English china painting.

But Barlow is represented in the Paul Mellon collection (Ducks and other Birds about a Stream in an Italian Landscape), Cecil Higgins Museum (Bedford), the Royal collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Witt, the Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery, Preston Historical Museum and Art Gallery, the Tyrwhitt-Drake collection, and Lord Onslow's collection.

Moreover, the British Museum has 52 of his original works, mostly relating to book illustration.

Scholars have noted the debt owed by English porcelain decorators to his work, particularly   those at the Chelsea factory. Presumably the National. Gallery of Victoria, which is holding a big Chelsea exhibition next year, will be able to borrow back the painting from its new owner.

Had the gallery retained the painting, and been sufficiently on the ball to have secured the Stubbs lost in the 1970s, (A Couple of Foxhounds sat in a Sydney antique dealer's shop window unappreciated until, after various vicissitudes, it ended up in the Tate Gallery), it could have mounted a fairly presentable introduction to English sporting painting from Barlow to Munnings.

Unfortunately this opportunity has been reduced further by the gallery's sale of a fine early Munnings, Shade, in the same rationalisation.

Shade was illustrated in a picture book published by the gallery in the 1930s as one of the gems of the collection. The gallery still has a Munnings, but instead of the fine early work has retained one of the slick later examples.

It is hard to argue with Mr Capon's contention that the Barlow looked far better in the catalogue than in the flesh because few people have ever seen it. Had the picture ended up with a leading London dealer, the decision to sell might have been most disconcerting. Saleroom's under-standing is that the trade considers the painting of some importance, even if it wasn't very attractive, and that it fetched a reasonable price.

The painting appears to be a tremendously interesting social document, which like so many Mellons big and small, have been allowed to slip through our fingers.

MOONEE Ponds was put on the world map of good taste recently when Christie's and Edmiston's held a sale in their Glasgow rooms.

Roger Leask, who is opening an antique shop in that suburb, was a buyer travelling to the sale after reports of its imminence appeared in the Melbourne press, the news item evidently being that the Scots were afraid some of the items might leave the country.

The furniture on offer came from the royal residence, Holyrood House. Mr Leask secured two 17th century items, described as a gateleg table and a carved 'buffet', for £3,300.

Australians may be an egalitarian lot, but the antique trade appears to like royalty.

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