Sunday Reed: Difference between revisions

Sunday Reed (15 October 1905 - 15 December 1981) was notable for supporting and collecting Australian art with her husband John Reed.

Personal history

Lelda Sunday Baillieu was born on 15 October 1905 to Arthur Sydney Baillieu (1872-1943), estate agent and his wife Ethel Mary née Ham (1875-1932) who married in 1899.^[1] She was a niece of William Baillieu, one of Australia's richest men, one Melbourne's Baillieu family. She was brought up in the family's mansions in Toorak and Sorrento. She was mostly educated by governesses, but she attended St Catherine's School, Toorak for two years from when she was 15.

She married an Irish-American Catholic, Leonard Quinn, on 31 December 1926, who gave her gonorrhea during their three year marriage, leaving her infertile. She married John Reed on 13 January 1932.^[2]

In the 1930s, after her marriage to Reed, Sunday studied art under George Bell in the Bourke Street Studio School in Melbourne. However, her only remaining work is a landscape drawing, showing her skill with colour and form.^[3]

Patron of the arts

In 1934, the Reeds purchased a former dairy farm on the Yarra River floodplain at Bulleen, a suburb of Melbourne, which became known as Heide. A number of modernist artists, known as the Heide Circle, came to live and work at Heide at various times during the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and it became the place where many of the most famous works of the period were painted. Sam Atyeo, Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester, John Perceval, Laurence Hope among others, all worked at Heide. Nolan painting his famous series of Ned Kelly works in the living room there.

The Heide Circle is well known for the intertwined personal and professional lives of the people involved. Sunday Reed conducted affairs with a number of them, with the knowledge of her husband.

Art historian Janine Burke has suggested that Sunday Reed and Nolan had a close collaborative and inspiring relationship. She writes that Sunday helped Nolan to find his artistic voice and in the process she developed from being a studio assistant to painting sections of the works, in particular the red and white squares in The Trial. "The Kellys are Sunday and Nolan's swansong," Burke writes, "the last brilliant burst of their creative duet." Burke's evidence is convincing because she discovered, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art at Heide, a small watercolour by Nolan, dedicated to Sunday, that reads, "For the one who paints such beautiful squares" (c.1946-1947). Kendrah Morgan, curator at Heide MoMA, recently confirmed Burke's thesis in the progamme Can We Help? (ABCTV, July 2009).

Nolan left the famous 1946-47 series of 27 Ned Kelly pictures at Heide, when he left it in emotionally-charged circumstances. Although he once wrote to Sunday Reed to tell her to take what she wanted, he subsequently demanded all his works back. Sunday Reed returned 284 other paintings and drawings to Nolan, but she refused to give up the 25 remaining Kellys, partly because she saw the works as fundamental to the proposed Heide Museum of Modern Art.^[4] She gave them to the National Gallery of Australia in 1977, which resolved the dispute.

In the 1950s, Heide was once again the centre of a brilliant circle of younger artists and poets. Friends from that period include Charles Blackman, Robert Dickerson, Judith Wright, Barrett Reid, Charles Osborne, Laurence Hope and Nadine Amadio. Sunday was the first person to extensively buy Blackman's work. In the 1960s, Sweeney Reed, Joy Hester's son, whom Sunday and John had adopted, was a young gallery director. He invited his circle of artist and poet friends to Heide who included Les Kossatz, Allan Mitelman, Shelton Lea and Russell Deeble.

Famous Namesake

Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban named their daughter, Sunday Rose, born on July 7 2008, after Sunday Reed. Dr Anthony Kidman, Nicole's father, who suggested the name, explained, "[Sunday] was a prominent patron of the arts in Victoria." New Idea, July, 2008, p.13.

Notes

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