Derek Drinkwater review of Alexander Edward Gilly, James Fairfax: Portrait of a Collector in Eleven Objects

(NewSouth Publishing, 2024), 352 pp., HB $49.99, ISBN 9781761170249

There would have been more straightforward ways for the novelist and translator (and first-time biographer) Alexander Gilly to chronicle the varied life of his media magnate, art collector and philanthropist uncle, James Fairfax (1933–2017), than the hybrid one he adopts in this biography. ‘Cradle to grave’ comes most readily to mind. However, his decision to combine a chronological approach with the ‘objects’ structure pioneered by the British art gallery and museum director Neil MacGregor has proven an inspired one.¹ Against the background of the Fairfax news behemoth’s rise and demise, Gilly has produced a highly revealing, affectionate and objective study of James Fairfax by examining 11 artefacts in his collection.

When John Fairfax Holdings entered receivership in December 1990,² one of the Anglosphere’s oldest privately owned media empires passed out of family control.³ Andrea Colli has argued that the ‘dynastic’ family business managed mainly by its members remains a potent economic force in today’s world of conglomerates, though many such entities experience declining competitiveness due to a paucity of ‘dynamism and innovation’.⁴ Nevertheless, a multitude of these private companies have remained successful. So it was with the Fairfax leviathan until an extraordinary concatenation of intra-family tension and commercial miscalculation led to the company’s collapse (of which more later).⁵

None of these events were foreseeable. As heir to Fairfax, the young James’s education and career paths were largely preordained: Geelong Grammar School; the University of Sydney; Balliol College, Oxford; a period working in the family business to learn the ropes; and chairmanship of the firm when his father Sir Warwick retired. The latter’s refusal to make way prompted the Fairfax board in 1977 to replace him with his son, who held the post until 1987 (the year Sir Warwick died), when John Fairfax Holdings began to unravel due largely to family divisions arising from the determination of Sir Warwick’s third wife Mary to have their eldest son, Warwick Jr, supplant James Fairfax as chairman.

In balancing duty to the company and loyalty to his father, James Fairfax trod a difficult road for many years. However, while doing so, he benefitted from strong relationships with his mother ‘Betty’ and his first stepmother, Hanne, who encouraged his nascent interest in art. Fairfax’s (and his only sister Caroline’s) relations with Mary, Lady Fairfax were strained from the outset. Fairfax escaped from family conflict and business pressures into a private world of fine houses (his favourite being Retford Park, near Bowral, New South Wales),⁶ exquisite gardens, collecting, connoisseurship, travel and friendship.

Childhood collecting enthusiasms aside, Fairfax the collector was born during a 1947–48 visit as a teenager to Japan, where his mother and her second husband, Pierre Gilly, were then living. The cultured Gilly introduced his stepson to Asian art, which became Fairfax’s earliest collecting passion. However, Alexander Gilly’s first object, examined in his opening chapter, is one that James had been familiar with from early childhood: a Tasmanian blackwood long-case clock made by his maternal grandfather and presented to Warwick and Betty as a wedding gift in 1928. It now stands in the hall of Retford Park.

Chapter 2 explores the background to Fairfax’s 1998 purchase of a watercolour depicting the You Yang granite ridges near Geelong by his Geelong Grammar art master, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack. The You Yangs were a popular cycling destination and picnic stopover for Fairfax and his schoolmates. For many years, the painting hung in the Retford Park breakfast room, doubtless a reminder to its owner of the bullying he had endured at the school along with the excellent tuition he had received there under its renowned headmaster, J. R. (later Sir James) Darling. While at Oxford, Fairfax co-founded (1954) a dining club that celebrated the glories of pre-revolutionary France, especially the rococo, an interest reinforced during university vacations in France (and Italy). In Chapter 3, Gilly analyses Fairfax’s admiration for the art of the ancien régime, as embodied in works such as the rococo master Francois Boucher’s ‘Portrait of a Young Lady Holding a Pug Dog’, which he bought in 1970.

Fairfax acquired relatively late in life (2001) what would become his most-cherished painting, The Three Marys at the Sepulchre, by the seventeenth-century Italian artist Giovanni Francesco Romanelli. His attachment to this treasured object, which he kept by his bed at Retford Park, is discussed in Chapter 4. Gilly describes in Chapter 5 the history of The Beacon, a Robert Klippel steel sculpture commissioned by Fairfax to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the City of Sydney’s incorporation; unveiled in 1992, it sits in First Fleet Park at Sydney’s Circular Quay.

In 1974, Fairfax bought The Wedding Party by the Dutch Golden Age master Jan Steen, a ribald satirical confection whose main target is ‘the mismatched couple’. Fairfax, who would remain a contented (and childless) bachelor to his dying day, was advised often by his thrice-married father to wed and produce an heir. This painting, which adorned a wall of James’s Sydney home, was a source of much amusement to Fairfax and his friends (Chapter 6). A superbly crafted Imperial Chinese Dragon Robe in stunning yellow, purchased by Fairfax from a London dealer in 1990, is the focus of Chapter 7. Fairfax’s patience as a collector is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than in the case of Jacques Louis David’s portraits of Monsieur and Madame Ramel de Nogaret (Chapter 8). He bought Madame’s portrait in 1989 and waited six years to reunite the couple, entering a (successful) bid for Monsieur in 1995 just before undergoing major heart surgery. His first question upon awakening was: ‘Did I get Monsieur de Nogaret?’ (p. 182).

Fairfax purchased in 1981 (Chapter 9) a panel by Sir Peter Paul Rubens (one of 13 the artist sketched in 1622) of the Emperor Constantine the Great investing his son Crispus with command of the Imperial fleet. Chapter 10 discusses the reasons behind Fairfax’s acquisition of Jean-Honore Fragonard’s rococo gem, Rinaldo in the Gardens of Armida. In Chapter 11, Gilly relates with relish the genesis and execution of his eleventh (and final) object—a mural by Donald Friend, conceived with more than a nod to Francois Rabelais and Hieronymus Bosch—which is both an artistic interpretation of The Four Elements and a satirical take on Sydney society and the denizens of Australia’s art world. It dominates the Retford Park dining room.⁷

Gilly is wary of explaining his uncle’s avid collecting in psychological terms. Though intrigued by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s hypothesis set out in a 1994 essay, ‘The System of Collecting’, that collectors are impelled to do so by some sexual or other compensatory imperative, such acquisition enabling them to master their personal demons by exercising dominion over their objects—‘the sultan of a secret seraglio’ (p. 253)—Gilly concludes that Fairfax’s collecting arose simply from his love of beauty and joy in contemplating beautiful objects. Fairfax was always generous in acknowledging the help of those who had shaped his collecting, principally, the fine arts cognoscente John McDonnell (Old Master drawings and French eighteenth-century furniture) and, among several others, Gladys Penfold-Hyland (European art), his friend the gallerist Frank McDonald (Australian colonial art) and the dealer Robert Haines (Asian artefacts).

Fairfax’s collecting taste was catholic; unsurprisingly, however, for one whose choices ‘always prioritised the aesthetic over everything else’, there were limits: ‘I have drawn the line at a row of bricks or a bullock’s carcass’ (p. 284). The Art Gallery of New South Wales owes its collections of European art primarily to Fairfax’s largesse, but this collector of discrimination and acumen was also a discerning and munificent patron of art and artists, and, as it turned out, a benefactor to Australian art (and architecture) in another sphere. Fairfax’s final act of such patronage was Retford Park—his ‘well-ordered aesthetic retreat’ (p. 261), which he made over to the National Trust of Australia’s New South Wales Division with a generous endowment in April 2016—the largest single donation ever received by that organisation.

This is a handsome piece of bookmaking—elegantly designed, sumptuously illustrated and reasonably priced. Gilly has a considerable gift for biographical pen portraiture, one he has deployed to good effect in telling this dynastic story, which teems with a rich mixture of leading actors and supporting players. The biography benefits from wide-ranging interviews with its subject, a fascinating collection of family correspondence (chiefly that between Fairfax and his mother) and skilful recourse to secondary sources on painting, art collecting and the motives driving collectors. There is a comprehensive notes section and a detailed index.

Gilly is meticulous in telling readers how and when Fairfax obtained and parted with his treasures, except in the case of the Fragonard drawing (Chapter 10). When did Fairfax acquire this work, which he donated to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1993 (pp. 232, 246)? The book has been well edited, although some errors have crept through: as a knight’s wife (or widow), it should be ‘Lady Fairfax’ or ‘Mary, Lady Fairfax’ not ‘Lady Mary Fairfax’ (‘Lady Mary’ only if she had been born the daughter of a duke, a marquess or an earl, or to distinguish her from another Lady Fairfax); James’s Dorset home Stanbridge Mill is correctly described on p. 299 but incorrectly referred to as ‘Stamford Mill’ on the verso of the title page; and a 1998 letter informing Fairfax of the recent death of his closest Oxford friend (and homosexual soulmate) was written by the man’s widow not his wife (p. 302).

As a collector, Fairfax was indefatigable in pursuit of his quarry, while remaining more clear headed than many. The collector Pierre Le-Tan has described the ‘nausea’ provoked by his own ‘uninterrupted accumulation’.⁸ Such obsessiveness never bedevilled Fairfax’s collecting. There was much more to him than the impulse to acquire. His purchases encompassed many cultures and eras in the fine and the decorative arts, though this patrician-aesthete derived most pleasure from his sizeable collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European portraits and landscapes. He reflected that his longstanding close proximity to the portraits, in particular, had allowed him to renew acquaintance with them regularly, an experience akin to catching up with old friends (p. 294). Among this book’s many strengths is Alexander Gilly’s flair for enabling readers to share some of James Fairfax’s enjoyment as an art collector and patron. He is to be congratulated on a trenchantly researched, stylishly written and insightful biography of his cultivated and generous (if still somewhat enigmatic) uncle.

1. 1 Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (Allen Lane, 2010), which became an international bestseller, has had numerous imitators in history and biography. For Gilly, this method promised greater opportunities to ‘pin down’ and better understand his elusive and reticent subject. See Gilly, James Fairfax, 297.

2. 2 The firm, founded by John Fairfax in 1841, and headquartered in Broadway, Sydney, narrowly missed its sesquicentenary—149 years, 10 months, 2 days. See: Gavin Souter, Heralds and Angels: The House of Fairfax 1841–1992 (Penguin Books, 1992) (first published by Melbourne University Press, 1991); James Fairfax, My Regards to Broadway: A Memoir (Angus & Robertson, 1991).

3. 3 John Fairfax and Sons was a force in nineteenth-century newspapers well before David Syme in Melbourne, the Harmsworth and the Berry brothers in Britain, and the Ochs/Sulzberger and the Meyer/Graham families in the United States.

4. 4 Andrea Colli, The History of Family Business, 1850–2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 71, 75–6, doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511615009.

5. 5 James was a fifth-generation Fairfax. Thomas Mann’s ‘Buddenbrooks effect’ (from his 1901 novel of that name), whereby a family business declines significantly over three generations, did not apply in this case.

6. 6 ‘Broadway was business; Retford was reverie’ (Gilly, James Fairfax, 251).

7. 7 Friend painted a second, smaller mural lampooning Sir Warwick, Lady Fairfax and Warwick Jr.

8. 8 Pierre Le-Tan, ‘Introduction’, A Few Collectors (New Vessel Press, 2022).