Deutscher and Hackett

We are grateful to Brenda Martin Thomas, wife of the late David Thomas AM, for kindly allowing us to reproduce David’s writing in this catalogue entry.

John Perceval's art is strikingly individual, seen equally in those night paintings of the forties as in his later Gaffney's Creek and Williamstown series. Nowhere is such originality more apparent than Boats and Moons, 1943 with its pulsating rhythms and idiosyncratic images. The youngest of those pioneering Melbourne artists of the 1940s – Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Danila Vassilieff and others – the passionate involvement of Perceval and his contemporaries in the urban life around them completely changed the direction of Australian art. It was wartime. Perceval, Boyd and Nolan were uncomfortably in uniform, and the streets of Melbourne were packed with soldiers, especially American. John Reed evoked the mood:

‘At night, and particularly around Flinders Street station, the scene was something to remember, with thousands of people, mostly in uniform, and with a fair sprinkling of the inevitable camp-followers, all aimlessly milling around, with nothing much to do and only too ready to be entertained with any drama or comedy which might eventuate.’¹

Reed saw Perceval ‘having the time of his life’, noting that he was ‘drawn to people where a certain atmosphere exists’, to ‘the tension of a crowd, or the particular air of an hotel or bar.’² It was this feeling of integration that Reed rightly saw as being a distinguishing feature of Perceval’s art. Moreover, he took the lead in his painted experiences of the city at night, preceding those of Tucker’s Images of Modern Evil. Masterpieces from this period include Negroes at Night, 1944, housed in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and Flinders Street at Night, 1943 – 44 (private collection) which, featuring a female dancer with a death mask and two trumpet players all united in erotic frenzy, offers a macabre commentary upon the slaughter of human life and distorted social relations produced by the war.

A major work from this period, Boats and Moons is closely related to Railway by Night, 1943 (Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art) in which Perceval introduced the State Theatre as the architectural background. As in this latter composition from the same year with its motif of the crescent moon-come-sail-come-boat, the scene in Boats and Moons is nearby Flinders Street station. The gothic tower and spire complete with grotesque gargoyle refer to St Paul’s Cathedral and the arched bridge to Princes Bridge across the Yarra River. The rest is pure fantasy – the repeated shapes of the descending crescent moon transformed into boats, sails, and a gondola of grand proportions and colour. The touch of Venice and its Carnivale culminates in the costumed foreground figures, masked, yet revealing in their revels. Perceval’s early attachment to scenes bubbling with life and bobbing boats was later to be richly realised in the fullness of maritime busyness in his great Williamstown series of paintings.

1. Reed, J., ‘John Perceval’, Art and Australia, Sydney, vol. 5, no. 1, June 1967, pp. 354, 358
2. ibid., p. 358

DAVID THOMAS