Roy de Maistre

Roy de Maistre was born Leroy Livingstone de Mestre on 27 March 1894 at Bowral, New South Wales, and was educated by tutors and governesses at his family's home near Sutton Forest. In 1913 he moved to Sydney to study music, taking violin and viola at the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music and playing viola in the Sydney Orchestra. He studied painting concurrently at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales under Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo and Norman Carter from 1913 to 1916, then at the Sydney Art School under Julian Ashton in 1916. He first exhibited that year alongside Roland Wakelin and Grace Cossington Smith.

Around 1918 to 1919, de Maistre and Wakelin developed and exhibited a theory of "colour music," mapping musical scales onto colour relationships, work now regarded as among the earliest Australian moves toward abstraction. In 1923 he received a Sydney Society of Artists travelling scholarship and spent time in London, Paris, and St Jean de Luz, where he absorbed European modernism. He later changed the spelling of his surname from de Mestre to de Maistre.

De Maistre settled in London by the early 1930s and became a close friend of Francis Bacon; biographical accounts, including material published by the Francis Bacon estate, credit him as an early influence on Bacon's development as a painter. After converting to Catholicism, de Maistre was commissioned to paint a Stations of the Cross series that hangs permanently in Westminster Cathedral, London. The Whitechapel Art Gallery gave him a major retrospective in 1960, and he was appointed CBE in 1962 for his services to art. He died on 1 March 1968 at his home on Eccleston Street, Westminster, London. The Art Gallery of New South Wales held a posthumous retrospective in 1976.

De Maistre is treated in Australian art history as a pioneer of colour-based abstraction, with his 1918 to 1919 colour-music collaboration with Roland Wakelin cited as one of the country's earliest experiments in pure abstraction. In Britain, his critical standing rests substantially on accounts of his friendship with and early influence on Francis Bacon, a relationship the Francis Bacon estate itself documents as formative for Bacon's development as a painter. Institutional recognition, the 1960 Whitechapel retrospective, the 1976 Art Gallery of New South Wales retrospective, and the CBE in 1962, has kept his reputation intact, and recent scholarship, including work cataloguing queer Australian artists, has renewed attention to his biography alongside his painting.

De Maistre's auction market is small and heavily weighted toward Australia, reflecting a reputation built more on institutional and art-historical standing than on sustained international trading. His auction record is AUD 630,000 for New Atlantis, sold at Sotheby's, Sydney, in April 2006, a price that has stood for two decades. The Australian Art Sales Digest records roughly 780 lots by the artist offered since 1971, with about 526, or two out of every three, finding a buyer, consistent with a market that is thin but steady rather than deep.

No catalogue raisonne has been confirmed for Roy de Maistre, so provenance and studio or estate documentation carry extra weight; his works have historically passed through Australian dealers such as Joseph Brown Gallery, Rudy Komon Gallery, and Philip Bacon Galleries, and no single gallery currently appears to hold exclusive representation of the estate. His market is small relative to his art-historical importance, is concentrated in Australian auction houses, and has been anchored by a single price point, the 2006 result for New Atlantis, for two decades. Collectors should treat any individual sale as a data point in a thin market rather than as evidence of a smooth price trend, and should weigh his deep museum presence in Australia and at the Tate as the more durable signal of his standing.