Jeffrey Smart's Tamarama back after 50-year US sojourn
Michaella Boland, Jeffrey Smart’s Tamarama back after 50-year US sojourn, The Australian, Tuesday 28 April 2015.
A rare Jeffrey Smart oil painting missing for almost 50 years has been consigned for auction in Melbourne with expectations that it will sell for more than $200,000.
The beach scene Tamarama was painted on composition board in 1954, eight years before Smart made what was to become his most famous picture, another Sydney scene, Cahill Expressway. The painting was bought by a collector from the Geoff Gray gallery Sydney in 1968 and then went with the collector, who wishes to remain anonymous, to the US, where he worked for many years at the World Bank.
Auctioneer Damian Hackett saw it at the collector’s house after he returned to Sydney and was confused by the inscription on the back, “G. Smart, Beach Houses”. No such painting was known but Hackett found a reference to a Jeffrey Smart oil from the same era called Tamarama. “Some of the early Smarts are just listed in (reference books) as a title, a date and the medium, for the picture was just oil,” Hackett said.