112

RUPERT BUNNY (1864-1947)
Clair de Lune circa 1900

oil on canvas
signed with initials lower left: CRWB
48.5 x 71.5cm

PROVENANCE
Artist's estate
Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 1948 (label verso)
Mr and Mrs Alexis Albert, Sydney
Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne (label verso)
Sotheby's, Melbourne, Fine Australian and European Paintings, 28 April 1998, Lot 48
Private collection, Melbourne

EXHIBITED
Exposition Rupert Bunny, Henry Graves and Co Ltd, Paris, 3 - 18 March 1905, cat. no. 10
Rupert Bunny: Earlier Paintings, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 1 - 8 October 1945, cat. no. 10
Earlier Paintings by Rupert Bunny, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 14 January - 2 February 1948, cat. no. 1

LITERATURE
Clive Turnbull & Tristan Buesst, The Art of Rupert Bunny, Ure Smith Pty Limited, Sydney 1948, p. 70
David Thomas, Rupert Bunny, Lansdowne Press Pty Ltd, Melbourne, 1970, p. 114, cat. no. 042
Desmond MacAulay and Bettina MacAulay, Singing in the Heart: music and the art of Rupert Bunny, Rockhampton Art Gallery, 2007, p. 43
David Thomas, The Life and Art of Rupert Bunny: A Catalogue Raisonne, Thames and Hudson, Melbourne, 2017, vol. 2, pp. 27, 165, 178, 179, cat. no. O137

REFERENCE NOTES
‘French artists of the 18th century, notably Antoine Watteau, developed the fete galante (‘courtship party'), a variant on the fete champetre. Manet subverted the tradition; Renoir, who admired Watteau, painted happier versions of it.

Bunny's work from the turn of the century, ‘Clair de lune c.1900-1905, has an oblique connection with the Féte tradition. Bunny, who knew Debussy personally, and the poems of Paul Verlaine, may have based this painting (Clair de Lune, c.1900) on the third movement of Debussy's four-movement piano Suite Bergamasque which, according to the musicologist, music analyst, theorist and concert pianist Dr Siglind Bruhn, ‘was apparently inspired by Paul Verlaine's poem (by the same title) after Antoine Watteau's painting Fetes galantes'. Verlaine's poem Clair de lune, which appears in his Fetes galantes (1869);'

‘Your soul's a countryside extraordinary,
Where masks and bergomasks enchanting roam,
Playing the lute and dancing, melancholy'

An ekphrastic poem is a ‘verbal representation of a visual representation'. Serious ekphrastic poems are not, though, simply descriptive of a painting, but develop lines of thought it suggests to achieve an independent (and often apparently unrelated) poem. Debussy frequently worked through a type of ‘musical ekphrasis'... Bunny's eclectic and assimilative artistic character was also sympathetic to this approach. His Clair de lune c.1900-1905, in which a woman walks quietly behind a screen of four trees of sapling circumference sectioning the painting's breadth, echoes Debussy's musical structure, and may be read as poetically analogous to Debussy's mood.' 1

Footnotes
1. Desmond MacAulay and Bettina MacAulay, Singing in the Heart: music and the art of Rupert Bunny, Rockhampton Art Gallery, 2007, p. 43

  • Condition: The painting is housed on its original stretcher, and the frame although suitable, is not original and a much later addition. Inspection of the reverse indicates no distress to the canvas. The painted surface area is stable. Minimal paint contraction, and areas of discolouration and sporadic cracking. This painting is in good, sound condition.

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19 October 2025 14:00 AEDT
Armadale, Australia

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