Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Farmer's Blaxland Galleries, Sydney
Collection of Rudy Komon, Sydney
Collection of the late Sir Warwick and Lady Fairfax, Sydney

EXHIBITED
12 Paintings on the Life of Edmund Campion, Farmer's Blaxland Gallery, Sydney, 1961
12 Paintings on the Life of Edmund Campion, Argus Gallery, Melbourne, 23 October - 3 November 1961, cat. 1 N.F.S.
Leonard French, Commonwealth Institute Art Gallery, Kensington, London, 21 March - 16 April 1967

LITERATURE
Vincent Buckley, Leonard French, The Campion Paintings, Grayflower Publications, Melbourne, 1962, pp. 17, 23, 41 (illus.), pl. 8
Sasha Grishin, Leonard French, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, pp. 30, 72, 73 (illus.)

In 1960, Leonard French exhibited five works based upon elements of The Book of Genesis. Richly coloured and patterned, the paintings cycled from Genesis through to The Wake and are now predominately held in public collections. Their production acted as a catalyst for French who later that year and into early 1961 created what was to become known as the Campion sequence. Taking their source from Evelyn Waugh's 1935 biography Edmund Campion: Scholar, priest, hero and martyr, the works are full of heraldic and dramatic power.

In his lavish 1962 monograph on the series, Vincent Buckley, notes, 'The Campion sequence presents with remarkable fullness and diversity, French's sense of what was really involved in Campion's dangerous mission to Elizabethan England; but it does so without attempting to illustrate the stages of his life conceived as a spiritual career. Its admitted starting point was Evelyn Waugh's biography of Campion, but the viewpoint and dimensions of Waugh's picture see, to have little to do with French's finished achievement. That achievement is based not on any attempt to provide a vade-mecum through Campion's life but on an attempt to express in a highly individual idiom and symbolism French's sense of representative significance which that life has. "It was the symbol I painted", he has said, "not the man". Perhaps it would be better to say that he has painted the man as a symbol, a symbol of certain forces deep-buried in the human condition. Campion appears now as a recognisably human figure adopting this or that recognisable stance, now as a heavily accented cross, now as a tower with only the most tenuous reference to the human shape, now as a fish in one or other posture: or torment, dying or metamorphosis. But, however obvious this conversion of human gesture and stance into non-human terms, one feels throughout that French has preserved in his symbols the reference to human destiny which plainly provided the motive-power for the paintings themselves; they act in the paintings as highly formalised representations not merely of things but also of human deeds and postures.'

Now considered to be amongst French's most powerful and transformative works, the exhibitions of the Campion sequence, along with the publication of Buckley's book and reviews in both Art and Australia and Meanjin, elevated French to a position of national regard. Works from the Campion sequence were acquired by significant private collectors including Dr Harold Hattan, Harold Holt, Mr Douglas Carnegie and the Baillieu Collection as well as public collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Mertz Collection in Texas. The Crusader was acquired at that time by Sir Warwick Fairfax and has remained in the family collection until now.

Merryn Schriever