Lot 55: NAPIER WALLER , NAPIER WALLER Australian 1894 - 1972 STEELMAKING AT THE B.H.P. - DESIGN FOR MURAL, AUSTRALIA HOUSE, LONDON Watercolour, gouache and pencil on paper

Watercolour, gouache and pencil on paper

49.5 by 66cm

M. Napier Waller 1894-1972, Jan Taylor Galleries, Sydney, 1979, cat. 33

The artist's estate
Jan Taylor Galleries, Sydney
Private collection; purchased from the above

Mervyn Napier Waller was a distinguished watercolourist and printmaker, well-known in the 1920s for late Pre-Raphaelite or Symbolist confections featuring classical, Christian, pagan and medieval imagery. However, his posthumous reputation rests substantially on his large-scale public art projects, mostly in and around Melbourne. The artist stated in 1931:

'I gradually came to realise that modern painting is disconnected with life - that it exists in an artificial hot-house. It is in effect purely artificial - I sought for something that should touch life intimately, belonging to the age in which we live, part of its warp and woof, reflex of the social and economic phenomena we are experiencing... mural art is a unit of architecture which, more than any other sort of art, reflects and is definitely linked to the life of the people.'υ1

Amongst his best-known commissions are murals at the Melbourne Town Hall, the State Library of Victoria, the T & G Life Assurance Building, and the Mural Hall at the Myer Bourke Street store. His architectural mosaics include the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial and the celebrated 'I'll put a girdle round about the earth' at Newspaper House, Collins Street, while his stained glass windows are found in dozens of Victorian church, school and university settings.

The present work is one of a number of sketches of murals for Australia House, home of the Australian High Commission, London. There is another steelworks watercolour (of pourers with a ladle) in the collection of the National Library of Australia, and the artist's estate also included two goldmining subjects featuring the Eureka Stockade. Such a program is in keeping with the scheme adopted at Australia House, although in the event the Art Advisory Board of the Commonwealth Government selected Sydney artist Tom Thompson (b. 1923) for the project, possibly in view of Waller's then current (and substantial) commitment to the War Memorial. Thompson's rotunda murals, installed in the late 1950s, feature scenes of the steel industry, mining and agriculture, with smaller panels devoted to science and the arts.

The present work is typical of Waller's public art style in its casual incongruity, its combination of the everyday and the mythological, the human and the divine. Here, two mid-twentieth century steelworkers in hard hats and protective gloves tend molten metal in a modern manufacturing facility; in front and to the right, dressed only in a loincloth and sandals, sits their avatar, the figure of Haphaestos/Vulcan, Greek/Roman god of fire and smithery, holding sledgehammer and forged axehead.

1. Napier Waller, cited in Nicholas Draffin, The Art of M. Napier Waller, Sun Books, South Melbourne, 1978, p. 5