Brett Whiteley
Painted Sydney Harbour in ultramarine, and burned through a very short life doing it.
Brett Whiteley was born in Sydney in 1939, won a scholarship to Italy at twenty and was bought by the Tate at twenty-two — the youngest artist in its collection at the time. He painted the Christie murders in London, spent time in New York among the Chelsea Hotel circle, and returned to Australia in 1969. The Lavender Bay paintings of Sydney Harbour, in a saturated ultramarine that has become inseparable from his name, are the best-loved work. He won the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes in the same year, struggled with heroin addiction for two decades, and died of an overdose in 1992 at fifty-three.
The leading name in the modern Australian market, and one with a serious and well-publicised forgery problem: a criminal trial concerned fakes of the Lavender Bay pictures, and provenance to a documented exhibition or a first-hand purchase is essential. Harbour subjects lead. Whiteley worked in mixed media, frequently combining oil, collage, sculpture elements and objects attached to the canvas, which creates real condition issues. Drawings and the prints are numerous and the drawings are heavily faked.
If you own a work by Brett Whiteley
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.