Dame Eileen Rosemary Mayo DBE (1906-1994)
"Circular Quay Sydney" (1964)
Signed, mixed media, 43cm by 61.5cm (unframed)

Provenance: Riverhouse Galleries, Brisbane, Australia
Literature: "Shifting Boundries, The Art of Eileen Mayo", thesis, by Margaret Jillian Cassidy, no.154

We are grateful to Peter Vangioni, Curator, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, New Zealand for his assistance in catagloguing this piece.

Dame Eileen Mayo was a multi-talented artist; a printmaker, painter, illustrator, designer and author whose long career spanned the globe from England to Australasia, yet she never lost the primary focus of her creativity - depicting the natural world.

As a young artist, she began establishing herself in London, and after training supplemented her income by modelling for notable British artists such as Duncan Grant, Dod Procter, Vanessa Bell and Laura Knight who helped her secure her first commissions. Indeed, one of Knight’s extraordinary portraits of her, “The Maiden”, sold at Tennants in 2015 for £33,000. With such illustrious friends and mentors, Mayo soon made a name for herself, particularly as a print maker, and became a significant part of the British art scene in the 1930s and 1940s.

However, a divorce in 1952 sparked a major change for the artist. Following her father’s death in 1921, Mayo’s mother and sister had emigrated to New Zealand, and by the early 1950s her sister was living in Sydney. After her divorce, Mayo emigrated to Sydney, where she became a key member in Australia’s artistic reinvigoration. With a pressing need for money, Mayo taught at the National Art School and focused on commercial commissions, producing a body of work that included an iconic set of poster designs for the Australian National Travel Association and sets of stamps featuring the country’s flora and fauna.

In 1962 Mayo moved to New Zealand. As she settled into her new home, she worked on a painting, "Warehouses, Sydney" (1963), based on drawings she had made of the old sandstone warehouses along the eastern side of Sydney Cove. The painting was later reproduced as a card for the Australian Mutual Provident Society (AMP), whose headquarters were in one of the new modern buildings that sprung up around the quay in the 1960s. According to a record in the National Library, Wellington, Mayo also designed the front cover of the AMP’s 1964 magazine which depicted four warehouses on Circular Quay, which had been demolished to make way for the building of a tower for the British Tobacco Co. (Australia) Ltd.

The present work, “Circular Quay, Sydney” (1964) was sold by the Riverhouse Galleries in Brisbane but its whereabouts was lost, and it was listed in Margaret Jillian Cassidy’s thesis "Shifting Boundaries, The Art of Eileen Mayo" as location unknown.

Sydney Cove was the site of the landing of the First Fleet in 1788 and was the point from which Sydney grew. The first wharfs were built in 1792, and Circular Quay (originally called Semi-Circular Quay) was constructed between 1837 and 1844 to become the central port for the city. As the city outgrew the cove, it was converted to a passenger ferry hub, and from the 1950s the stone warehouses were replaced with modernist buildings and the first skyscrapers in Sydney.

In 1965 Mayo moved to Christchurch, where she would live for the rest of her life. She taught at the University of Canterbury, and served on the Print Council of New Zealand, all the while producing work that combined her sense of colour harmony, eye for design and in-depth research into her subject. Mayo had devoted her life to art, and continued to work until 1985, when arthritis overcame her. She was made a Dame in 1994 for services to art, just days before her death. Today, Mayo’s work is once more coming to prominence, and a major exhibition of her work was held in 2019 at the Christchurch Art Gallery.