Sea idyll
(c. 1891)

• Rupert BUNNY

This highly refined, essentially classical revival, frame uses an unusually deep scotia and linear relief (reeding) along the leading edge. The frame is almost certainly a copy of the frame on J. W. Waterhouse’s Ulysses and the sirens, 1891 (p.396.3-1), which entered the collection in 1891, the year before the Bunny. The Whitehead frame has reduced the depth of the scotia and uses a shallower angle to the reeded leading edge. It is a somewhat simplified version of the Waterhouse frame.²  The frame was removed from Sea idyll and sold in a job lot in 1941. It was recovered from the monastery of The Benedictine Community of New Norcia Inc in Western Australia in 1998 and refitted to the painting.

Notes

1 At this date Isaac Whitehead’s son ran the business. (See Anna Maria Espinoza, ‘A Framemaker of Colonial Melbourne: Isaac Whitehead c. 1819–1881’, in vol. 1, Frames, Melbourne Journal of Technical Studies in Art, University of Melbourne Conservation Service, 1999. pp. 33–48.)

2 The maker of the Waterhouse frame has not been identified.

The frame uses water gilded gold leaf on a softwood chassis. The major profile has been cut from a solid section laminated from two pieces of wood. A simple timber moulding has been added at the working edge. A shallow scotia section, cut from a single piece of wood, provides the first step toward the slip.