Lot 30

This work presents well overall. The work has been recently treated by a conservator to stabilise and clean the work. Full conservator's report can be made available upon request, but most important is their comment: "The vertical cracking which runs with the grain of the upper ply is considered stable and inherent to the materials."
A photograph of the back of the ply can be provided upon request.
Well framed with a new mount, overall size measuring 64 x 49cm.
(LEONARD JOEL CONTACTLESS DELIVERY $88 within 20km of Melbourne premises)



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Private collection, Melbourne
Thence by descent

Apart from a brief exploration with abstraction in the 1950s, Herbert Badham remained first and foremost a realist painter. His subject was the everyday. Along with many other key artists of his generation including William Dobell, Charles Meere, and Rah Fizelle, Badham studied at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney. His teachers maintained a traditional perspective of art, with draughtsmanship and truth to nature of utmost importance.

With influences coming from England, Badham gave great importance to form, tone, and light from an early age. Rather than following the Heidelberg School's favouritism of pastoral landscapes, Badham and his peers instead focused on the urban landscape and interior scenes whilst remaining within the acceptable conservative space that their English counterparts proposed. The aesthetic experiments that artists of this period conducted were done with typically mundane objects - vases, food, cups, bottles and other domestic debris. No longer was still life painting tied to allegorical meaning, the modern still life was a study of everyday existence.

Such an aesthetic experimentation is seen in Herbert Badham's Still Life with Butter and Apples c.1930. Badham's academic training is abundantly clear, with front-on perspective and a focus on form and shadowing of these carefully arranged objects. The colour palette and subjects draw parallels to Cezanne whilst the formal proportions and perspective remain academically realist.

Still Life with Butter and Apples c.1930 is one of Herbert Badham's few known still life studies although objects of the domestic interior form a key part of many of his most recognised paintings. In 1932, Herbert Badham was recognised as the runner up to William Dobell in the New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship. Four years later, Badham completed one of his most recognised paintings, Breakfast Piece 1936, now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In this particular realist painting, the objects appear as props, theatrically posed in perfect design just as Badham preferred. His wife sits front and centre amongst the arrangement of objects, amidst a simplified colour palette of fresh blues, whites, and yellows.

Still Life with Butter and Apples c.1930 is similarly limited in colour palette, with greys, purples and reds favoured by Badham. The knife, too, is resting near the clean cut butter waiting to be spread. These rather simple objects are given great importance within the composition, perhaps indicative of the value of such products after the war. Both paintings portray a domestic tranquility where objects typically seen as mundane create a stylised portrayal of Badham's everyday life.

Much of Herbert Badham's career was spent teaching at East Sydney Technical college where he influenced and shaped many of Australia's most respected artists. Badham produced two books; one, titled A Study of Australian Art, became particularly relevant in the dialogue of Australian Art, although mostly in relation to the Sydney painters.
Badham was one of a number of figurative painters in Sydney between the wars whose work typified an aspect of Sydney modernism that addressed contemporary subjects through predominantly English realist traditions. Whilst art history tends to applaud those who introduced great change, Herbert Badham is a timely reminder that there is more than one way to be modern.
Olivia Fuller / Head of Art