Lot 6: HUGH RAMSAY 1877-1906

PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN IN WHITE

MEASUREMENTS

71 by 54 cm

Oil on canvas
Signed lower left
Painted c. 1902-3

PROVENANCE
Mr and Mrs D. Connelly (inscribed on the reverse 'Mrs D. Connelly')
Dr J. V. Duhig, Brisbane
Mr J. de Bauvey Private collection, Queensland
Tom Silver Gallery, Melbourne, 1984
Private collection, Melbourne

REFERENCE
Fullerton, P., Hugh Ramsay: his Life and Work, Hudson, Melbourne, 1988, p. 208, cat. 161, illus., as 'Portrait of a Woman - seated in white hat and dress'
In 1902 the 24-year-old Hugh Ramsay was honoured as no other Australian artist had been - with four paintings hung 'on the line' at the Paris Salon, at eye-level, an honour generally reserved for members or associates of the Société des Artistes Français. (1) As a student in Melbourne from 1894 to 1899, Ramsay had been considered the star pupil at the National Gallery School and won numerous prizes. Somewhat surprisingly (and controversially) he failed to win the Gallery's Travelling Scholarship in 1899: he was runner-up to Max Meldrum. However, the following year he departed for Europe independently and enrolled, together with George Lambert, at Colarossi's teaching academy.
Ramsay's work was very well received by the Paris critics and in the spring of 1902 he decided to try his fortunes in London also. With an introduction to Dame Nellie Melba and an invitation to paint her full-length portrait, his entree into London was not difficult. John Longstaff offered him accommodation in fashionable St John's Wood; Melba herself held a banquet in Ramsay's honour; he was poised for international success. Then with tragic irony, just as he was beginning sketches for Melba's commission, he was diagnosed with incipient tuberculosis and forced to return home to Melbourne.
The sitter for the present portrait, now unidentified, was thus a member of society either in London or in Melbourne - where Ramsay painted compulsively and brilliantly, despite his doctor's orders, during his final years. In January 1903, after the successful one-man exhibition organised for him by Melba at 'Myoora', the Toorak house she leased during her Australian tour, Ramsay wrote to his brother: 'I'm quite before the public now, Hal; I can scent some commissions not far off too'. (2) However, Ramsay's subjects here are texture, reflected light and bravura brushwork as much as portraiture.
Like many of his Edwardian generation, Ramsay was enormously impressed by Velasquez. He also admired Van Dyck, Manet and Whistler; but in Portrait of a woman in white the impact of John Singer Sargent is most apparent. As in Ramsay's great Sargent-esque double portrait The Sisters (Two girls in white), in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the present work revels in the depiction of white-on-white in a warm, a rich interior: 'a wide range of textures in broad but subtle orchestrations of golds, creams and whites'. (3)
Hugh Ramsay's paintings very rarely appear in the market. Very few were sold or given away during his sadly short lifetime and most of his important works have been generously presented to public galleries or retained by his family.
(1) Fullerton, P., Hugh Ramsay 1877-1906, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1992, p. 9.
(2) 2 January 1903 to Harry Ramsay; quoted in Fullerton, P., Hugh Ramsay, His Life and Work, Hudson, Melbourne, 1988, p. 110.
(3) Op. cit., p. 120.