Australian Dictionary of Biography

John Perceval, in Melbourne, 1992, by Rennie Ellis

National Library of Australia

John de Burgh Perceval (1923–2000), painter and sculptor, was born Linwood Robert Stevens South on 1 February 1923 at Bruce Rock, Western Australia, younger child of Adelaide-born Robert Leslie Moncrief South, farmer, and his Perth-born wife Dorothy Ethel, née Dolton. Dorothy abandoned her marriage when John was a young child, leaving him in the care of his father and maternal grandmother. As a boy, he rejected the name Linwood, replacing it with John. After spending his early years in the regional West Australian towns of Belka and Korbel, he was reunited with his mother at the age of eleven. They moved to Melbourne, and he changed his name from that of his father, whom he feared and disliked, to that of his mother’s new husband, William de Burgh Perceval. He later formalised the change by deed poll.

Perceval’s interest in art had originated in the West Australian Wheatbelt, whose fields he often returned to as a painting subject. Through his mother’s friend Alline Rowan, who lived on a farm at Merredin and was the daughter of the biologist and art collector Sir Baldwin Spencer, he was introduced to the work of Tom Roberts, Sir Hans Heysen, Sir Arthur Streeton, and George Lambert. This association also led to an introduction to Norman Lindsay, who provided early encouragement. Spencer’s grandson, Kingsley, allowed Perceval to use his paints, which led to his first attempts at painting.

After moving to Melbourne, Perceval became a boarder at Trinity Grammar, where he gained a greater appreciation for art. In 1938, while he was in hospital recuperating from poliomyelitis—which left him with a permanent limp—he produced mature self-portraits, along with highly competent copies of works by Picasso, Modigliani, and van Gogh. He was visited by the renowned portraitist William Beckwith McInnes as well as Zelie Pimlott, a journalist who wrote favourably of his ‘discerning eye for color and design’ and ‘amazing knowledge of European painters’ (1938, 43).

Volunteering for the Citizen Military Forces in December 1941, Perceval was posted to the Army Headquarters Cartographic Company in Melbourne, since his impaired mobility made him unfit for active service. There he met painter Arthur Boyd, who was probably the most influential person in his life, though he would at times struggle to escape his shadow. After eight months, Perceval was discharged and subsequently moved into the Boyd family home at Murrumbeena, on Melbourne’s eastern outskirts. On 14 November 1944 he married Boyd’s younger sister, Mary Elizabeth Beckett Boyd, at Murrumbeena. They had four children: Matthew (1945), Tessa (1947), Celia (1951), and Alice (1959). Matthew, Tessa, and Celia developed their own landscape oeuvres in styles similar to that of their father.

With Arthur Boyd and Peter Herbst, Perceval established a pottery workshop at Murrumbeena in 1943–44. It began as a commercial enterprise, but from this experience, he learned to turn simple jugs, bowls, mugs, and teapots into ceramic angel sculptures (1957–62), sometimes with added musical instruments, that later won him many plaudits. In part, this was for their red or green glaze that was difficult to achieve in a primitive kiln without the capacity to adjust temperatures. Vivid expressions and gestures observed in his own young children were sometimes incorporated, as were those of friends, including Barry Humphries. In the 1940s Perceval became the youngest member of the Melbourne Angry Penguins group with (Sir) Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, and Albert Tucker, and produced some of his most memorable paintings, exhibiting with the Contemporary Art Society in 1942. Although an artist of prodigious talent in his own right, Perceval’s reputation benefited from his friendship with the Melbourne art patrons John and Sunday Reed who, for eighteen months in the 1940s, granted him a weekly payment of one pound.

In late 1948 the Melbourne Book Club Gallery held the first solo exhibition of Perceval’s work. The following year, he attended the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, where he produced finely worked portraits of friends and fellow students. In the same period, he and Boyd painted scenes prompted by the sixteenth-century Flemish master Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Perceval alone used the eighteenth-century British pictorial satirist and engraver William Hogarth to the same end, producing figurative paintings that were playful, anecdotal, and autobiographical.

Regardless of influence, Perceval’s aesthetic was most often inspired by memory and emotion, along with the play of vivid colour, the loaded brush, and the repetitive strokes of the post-impressionists. The looseness of his work led to its characterisation as essentially concerned with joie de vivre, a designation that was only sometimes applicable. He explained that he preferred to paint in the hours immediately before sunset: ‘I am very much concerned with the idea of broken and suspended light, and the abstract qualities of the bush itself’ (Perceval 1961). The mid-1950s signalled a shift in style, and his well-known paintings of Melbourne’s Williamstown foreshore brought new interest in his work. He was subsequently awarded the John McCaughey memorial (1958), Maude Vizard-Wholohan (1959), and Wynne (1960) art prizes. In 1959 he became a member of the Antipodeans, a group led by art historian Bernard Smith in defence of figuration. In 1963 Perceval travelled to England, returning in early 1965 as the first creative arts fellow at the Australian National University. A major retrospective exhibition of his work was held at Albert Hall, Canberra, the following year.

On 18 August 1972, after the breakdown of Perceval’s marriage to Mary—who would go on to wed Sidney Nolan in 1978—he married Melbourne artist Anne Hall. They later divorced in 1981. Suffering from years of alcoholism and schizophrenia, Perceval was admitted to Larundel Psychiatric Hospital in 1977, where he remained until 1986.

On Perceval’s emergence from hospital, he resumed painting and drawing. Though attempts were made in gallery circles to claim otherwise, his art did not possess the same complexity or power of his earlier work. It did not help that he had always been a shy man, without the confidence to promote his own work; sometimes not even attending his own exhibition openings and leaving such advocacy to his first wife, Mary. In 1988 Max Harris remembered him as a man with ‘a rich store of love in him. Confused he may have been. Prickly he was. Tenderness kept battling with rage, and I loved him for the way he fought the losing fight with a sort of lonely courage’ (1988, 21). In recognition of his contribution to Australian art, Perceval was appointed AO (1991) and was awarded a 1995–96 visual arts/craft emeritus medal from the Australia Council. John Perceval: A Retrospective Exhibition was held at the National Gallery of Australia in 1992.

Following a stroke in 1999, Perceval died of pneumonia on 15 October 2000 at Box Hill, Victoria, and was buried in the Brighton general cemetery. His four children survived him. A revised edition of a biography by Traudi Allen, first published in 1992, appeared in 2015.