Lot 4: ALEXANDER SCHRAMM C. 1814-1864 ADELAIDE, A TRIBE OF NATIVES ON THE BANKS OF THE RIVER TORRENS

Oil on canvas Signed and dated 'Adelaide 1.50' lower right
Provenance Chard & Rabbitts, Adelaide; purchased by Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort Limited, 16 December 1966; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985 Portrait of Australia Collection,Foster's Group Limited Exhibited The Australian Aboriginal portrayed in Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 8 March - 7 April 1974 Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 34, illus. Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, national tour, 1985-1988, cat. 1, illus. Treasures from Private Collections, National Gallery Women's Association, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 5-12 September 1993 Reference Ron Appleyard, 'Alexander Schramm, painter', Bulletin of the Art Gallery of South Australia, vol. 37, 1979, pp. 26-41 Geoffrey Dutton, White on Black, the Australian Aboriginal portrayed in Art, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1974, pl. XVII Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 15, cat. 34, illus. Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Elders IXL, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 6-7, illus. pl. 1 Although Alexander Schramm had studied at Berlin Academy of Art, worked in Italy and Poland and exhibited successfully in Germany, he decided in 1849 to try his fortune as an emigrant to South Australia. Perhaps the move was for his health; or due to the political unrest in Berlin in 1848. During his fifteen years in Adelaide he seems to have lived very humbly -- possibly working as a mattress-maker as well as a painter. He won prizes at the South Australian Society of Arts, received a number of commissions and is also known to have produced sculpture and lithographs. However, as his first biographer related in 1898, he often parted with paintings for 'far beneath their real value'. He was 'an artist by nature and training, small in stature, dark, and somewhat retiring in disposition, he made but few intimates'. He died of tuberculosis in 1864, a pauper with no family, aged only fifty.(1) Schramm's life story is a sad one but his contribution to Australian art was unique. Schramm was the first professional artist to depict the dry local landscape and sparsely foliaged gum trees of his adopted South Australian homeland. Indeed, at the Society of Arts' sixth annual exhibition, one reviewer wrote that his depictions of Australian scenery were better than those of any other artist. Of the very few of his paintings that survive, the Foster's Adelaide Tribe of Natives is among the finest and is the largest depicting Aborigines in their natural setting. Here Schramm has recorded, with great sympathy, a quite extensive encampment of the Kaurna Tribe who, in the 1850s, still inhabited the Adelaide Plains. Historians have observed that such a large congregation of the Tribe would have been unusual -- perhaps even unlikely -- for family groups were mostly small and formed sporadic camps. However, this is not a nostalgic depiction of Aboriginal life before European settlement -- such as John Glover's Arcadian scenes. Rather, Schramm tellingly portrays the contemporary interrelationship between white and black. A group of settlers has arrived on horseback. Several of the Aboriginal people wear European clothing and smoke tobacco; one woman is looking at a mirror; and their numerous dogs are a wide variety of introduced mixed breeds. These people appear peaceful, even contented, but their existence is totally circumscribed and Schramm shows clearly that their indigenous way of life has gone for ever. Schramm's work is now almost all held in public collections and is not only rare but often fragile -- perhaps due to his poverty whilst in South Australia. One painting in the Art Gallery of South Australia, now entitled A scene in South Australia, shows a cheerful encounter between settlers at a thatched cottage and the original inhabitants of the district. Other recorded titles suggest an element of narrative: for example, Bushing It, Civilization versus Nature, and Aborigines with Dogs on the Tramp. His paintings are only extremely rarely seen in the market. (1) Mary Overbury, 'Early Colonial Art and Artists', Adelaide Observer, 12 November 1898, is quoted by Ron Appleyard in Joan Kerr (ed.), The Dictionary of Australian Artists to 1870, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992,pp. 700-2. We are much indebted to the research of Mr Appleyard, formerly Deputy Director at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

86.7 by 130.2 cm