Still life, beetroots

While he was also active in the genres of landscape and portraiture, Leonard Appelbee remains best known as a master of still-life painting. His art primarily concentrated upon the direct portrayal of simple objects, which he invested with contemplative dignity and elemental beauty in the tradition of the Old Masters, such as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin.

From the very start of his career Appelbee preferred to paint humble still-life subjects, the fruits of shopping expeditions placed upon the unfurled wrapping paper within which they had been brought home from market; he became known among his painter friends as ‘The Fish Man’, after his numerous studies of the ocean’s bounty.¹David Buckman, ‘Obituary: Leonard Appelbee’, The Independent, 20 Jun. 2000, artist file, National Gallery of Victoria. During the war and immediate postwar years, these images acquired a new poignancy in a climate of general privation and rationing. In March 1945, for example, one of Appelbee’s loyal collectors, the retired civil servant Sir Edward Marsh, wrote of how

perhaps the best item of news is a present of ten new-laid eggs from the Appelbees, who have hens at their country cottage. Fancy ten eggs being such an event – eclipsing the [Louis] Aragon lecture!²Edward Marsh to Christopher Hassall, Mar. 1945, in Christopher Hassal (ed.), Ambrosia and Small Beer. The Record of a Correspondence Between Edward Marsh and Christopher Hassall, Longmans, London, 1964, p. 330.

Appelbee’s still-life paintings are remarkable for their sensual and arresting textures, and richly thick impasto. After his solo exhibition at London’s Leicester Galleries in 1948, one critic wrote:

Both in still life and in landscape Mr Appelbee now uses an extraordinary technique in which objects represented with extreme accuracy as to detail and accidents of texture are splintered and broken up in a way that seems to derive from cubist methods of design. The effect is almost as if a Pre-Raphaelite picture had been deliberately torn to pieces and put together again with some parts of it missing.³‘Leicester Galleries’, The Times, 16 Mar. 1948, p. 6.

Still life, beetroots, 1942, was one of two still lifes by Appelbee (the other depicted pears) that toured South America in 1943–44 in the Exposicion de Arte Britanico Contemporaneo organised by the British Council Fine Arts Committee.⁴Barbara Putt, Research Officer, Fine Arts Department, correspondence from the British Council to Annette Dixon, former Curator, National Gallery of Victoria, 16 Mar. 1988, NGV research files. In 1945, it was acquired from the artist by Daryl Lindsay, Director of the NGV at the time, who had been introduced to Applebee in London by the Gallery’s Felton Adviser Sir Kenneth Clark. Former NGV Curator Annette Dixon surmised that Lindsay purchased this picture firstly for himself, giving the NGV an option to subsequently acquire it. This is suggested by Lindsay’s letter of July 1945 to Sir Keith Murdoch, Chairman of Trustees, where he noted that ‘Clark was delighted when he heard that I had bought this, also some very good drawings that I got through his giving me an introduction to the painter’.⁵Letter from Daryl Lindsay to Sir Keith Murdoch, 9 Jul. 1945, NGV research files, Annette Dixon, former Curator, National Gallery of Victoria. One of these drawings was Caroline,⁶Caroline by Francis Macdonald is in the NGV Collection (acc. no. 1567-4). a brush, ink and pencil work by Appelbee’s wife Francis Macdonald.

Laurie Benson, Curator, International Art, and Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria