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Bacon himself sold an oil on board titled Sunday Flowers in 1977 for $925 (roughly $6000 in today’s money). In the new exhibition, the same painting is listed at $125,000.
Works on sale span Olley’s entire career, from a 1944 nude and 1950s landscape drawings completed in Venice and the south of France, to a still life of banksias completed in her last year alive.
Compotier and Basket of Mandarins, a 1966 oil on board, is in the exhibition and has been acquired by the Margaret Olley Art Centre at Tweed Regional Gallery, which holds the largest collection of the artist’s work.Credit: Philip Bacon Galleries
Born in Lismore in 1923, Olley grew up in Tully, Northern Queensland, and by the Tweed River.
While boarding at Somerville House in Brisbane she came under the influence of a talented teacher and artist, Caroline Barker.
Olley studied art at Brisbane Central Technical College during the war and then moved to Sydney to attend East Sydney Technical College.
Olley (right) with Marjorie Johnstone at the Johnstone Gallery in the basement of the Brisbane Arcade in 1960.
Counting Australian artists such as William Dobell, Margaret Cilento and Russell Drysdale as close friends, she burst onto public consciousness in 1948 as the subject of an Archibald-winning portrait by Dobell.
“She loved the painting, but she hated what it did to her,” Bacon recalls. “She’d walk past it quickly and cast a sort of a sidelong glance at it.”
Olley soon became famous for her own art and is now regarded by many as Australia’s greatest still life painter.
“Thank God there’s an artist like Olley to paint Australia’s uncharted interior,” Barry Humphries once quipped – meaning the interiors of rooms and houses, as opposed to its overexposed gum trees and sheep.
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“She dedicated her life to the genre of still life painting over the course of 50 years, and her vision didn’t change despite trends in art changing around her,” says Ingrid Hedgecock, director of the Tweed Regional Gallery and the Margaret Olley Art Centre.
“She had her first sellout show in the early ’60s and she doubled the previous sales records of any Australian [woman] artist. It’s an incredible story of success.”
Bacon befriended Olley in the late 1960s and first exhibited her work in 1975. Prior to that first show at Bacon’s now 50-year-old gallery Olley declared she hated the white walls and enlisted Bacon into helping her paint them pink.
“She had very strong opinions, very firmly held,” Bacon laughs.
While she spent most of her life in Sydney, Olley always felt that Brisbane was home, her dealer says.
“Her family house was here, her mum was here.
“When I used to pick her up at the airport, she’d wind the windows down have a big draw on her cigarette and then she’d suck the air in from outside and she say, ‘Oh, I’m home, I can smell Brisbane, the frangipani and the jasmine.’”
Margaret Olley shows at Philip Bacon Galleries from April 29 to May 24.
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