Carrion Vulture (Vultur Bismarckii)

[Melbourne, c.1871]. Ink and wash on paper, 235 x 285 mm (sheet), signed in the image lower left ‘G G McCrae’, titled by the artist lower centre ‘Carrion Vulture (Vultur Bismarckii)’; laid down on board.

A large-scale allegorical sketch depicting Bismarck picking over the corpses of France and Liberty, by the Melbourne literary figure George Gordon McCrae (1833-1927), son of the notable early Port Phillip settler Georgiana Huntly McCrae and her husband Andrew Murison McCrae, and father of distinguished poet Hugh McCrae.

McCrae was principally a man of letters: a respected poet (he has even been dubbed the ‘Father of Victorian Poetry), he was one of the founding members of the Melbourne Yorick Club, along with such literary luminaries as Richard Hengist Horne, Henry Kendall, Adam Lindsay Gordon, and Marcus Clarke.

He was also an accomplished amateur artist, as Norman Cowper notes in his entry on McCrae in the ADB:

‘McCrae had a lively, interested, observant and romantic mind, and was impelled to commit to paper, in words or pictures, what he saw and what happened to him. Though he is not regarded as an artist, his paintings of ships were praised by Sir Oswald Brierly. Tom Roberts in a letter to Hugh McCrae mentioned ‘a pen and ink of 2 vessels beautifully done’, and the manuscript accounts of his travels and experiences are interleaved with sketches vividly illustrating the scenes and events he describes. However, he gave to writing most of his leisure before he retired and his whole time in the next thirty-four years.’

The National Library of Australia holds an album containing 406 of George Gordon McCrae’s drawings, which includes many juvenile works (PIC Volume 1008 #R7997-R8402). Individual works by him, however, have seldom appeared on the market in the last century; in fact, the AASD has no record of any works by McCrae at auction since 1969.

Provenance: Leski (Melbourne), 18 March 2025, Sale 515, lot 325; ex Joshua McClelland Print Room & Rathdowne Galleries