For a Scotsman, Peter McLean was proud of colonial Victoria. His monumental sideboard occupied him for thousands of hours over a period of a dozen years.
First exhibited in Melbourne at Victoria’s Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866-7, the sideboard was later shipped to England and shown in London at the International Exhibition of 1873, where McLean was awarded a bronze medal.
McLean began working on the sideboard at his residence in North Melbourne. Between exhibitions, the sideboard grew, as McLean redesigned and enlarged his masterwork.
Most of the top half – such as the two columns supporting the arch filled with inlays of coloured timbers, and the flanking panels – seems to be a later addition.
About 340 cm long , 351 cm high and 93 cm wide in its present form, the massive sideboard is constructed with an eclectic combination of architectural elements such as a plinth, mouldings, friezes, panels , columns and the arch displaying various timbers.
Many of the panels are carved, or decorated with applied mouldings carved in high relief, with allegorical figures and scenes depicting native animals, an indigenous warrior and a woman carrying a baby, John Batman and a group of settlers meeting the white man gone native William Buckley, a shearer, miners, cows, horses and more. The carvings are attributed to a Silesian woodcarver, Felix Terlecki, who died in 1869.
The narrative themes are reminiscent of the naturalistic elements also found on Australian silver and jewellery of the mid-century, and both seem to be influenced by immigrant European craftsmen, many of whom came out to seek gold. In transplanting this art from Europe to Australia, artists turned to the depiction of our distinctive native animals and birds, while the historical scenes of the rapid growth of the colony of Victoria reflect the pride that the new settlers had in its progress.
Though McLean held on to his masterpiece, the gold found from 1851 onwards generated the wealth, and led to a huge increase in population, that might have provided a potential buyer for such an impressive piece of furniture,
Exhibition pieces are usually designed as a tour de force. This one was even compared to a famous contemporary example of British furniture, the ‘Kenilworth Buffet’, an elaborately carved sideboard exhibited at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, and now in Warwick Castle.
No other Australian colony could have produced a piece of furniture as grand, as confident in the past and as certain of the future as this. With its cacophony of carving, it encapsulates the exuberant spirit of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, and precedes by ten years those ostentatious Boom Style houses so typical of inner Melbourne.
McLean’s family held onto the sideboard until 1927, when it was sold to James Wright Ferguson. Three articles appeared about it over the next decade, then it disappeared. In the heritage conscious 1980s, Melbourne antique dealer Juliana Hooper asked ‘Where is this masterpiece?” in The Age. Finally, after 65 years of being ‘lost’, it has re-emerged.
The sideboard stayed in the McLean family until 1927, when James Wright Ferguson, a Melbourne councillor, bought it and installed it in his home at 90 The Avenue, Parkville. It stayed with the house when sold to Elias Baitz, a Russian who arrived in Australia in 1915 and had applied for naturalisation in 1919. It probably stayed in the house until 1944 (in 1945 the house was the residence of a Polish Jewish immigrant, Binem Warszawski). In 1944, the sideboard was acquired privately and held in Melbourne for 65 years, and is now being sold as a consequence of the death of the long-standing owner, who had maintained it exceptionally well.
This is probably the largest and most exuberant example of Australian furniture in existence. Against the current minimalist fashion, it will not appeal to everyone. But it is such an important document of 19th-century taste, and such a concrete expression of the aspirations of Victoria’s colonists, that it truly deserves a good home, an appreciative audience, and someone to research its significance more fully.
High prices for Australian colonial furniture have been hard to achieve, as our market has not developed to the same extent as the US market.
Top bid at Sotheby’s sale of Dr Okey’s collection in May 2010 was $320,000 for a James Oatley clock, another example of which was sold by Bonhams & Goodman in 2009 for $336,000.
Top price for a piece of furniture, clocks excepted, would probably be the $310,800 paid in November 2005 for an unrestored Tasmanian sofa, later given to the Tasmanian Museum, but that sale was an aberration.
Dr Okey’s early 19th-century six-legged sideboard made $204,000, topping the $200,393 paid in 2008 at a Mossgreen auction in Tasmania for what is described as a cedar secretaire bookcase c. 1822, now displayed at the National Gallery of Australia.
James Lumsden’s Tasmanian Huon pine table, exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851, fetched $146,250 at Tullochs in July this year.
McLean’s sideboard appears to be in excellent condition and as its maker intended, without later modifications, unlike many pieces of early Australian furniture.
Expect a price comparable to a Victoria Cross, about half a million dollars.