Solicitor, arts administrator and painter. The son of Robert Maund and Nina née Williams, John Williams Maund was born in Paddington, Sydney, in 1876. An accomplished rugby player in his youth, he played for the New South Wales squad and played one match for the national team. He studied law at the University of Sydney, and after his training became a Sydney based solicitor, later establishing the legal firm Maund & Kelynack.
It is not known when his interest in art began, but by the early 1920s, when he was in his mid forties, he was painting watercolours and was known as a collector of Australian art. According to Jean Campbell, Maund was a major patron of the Macquarie Galleries (established in 1925) and never missed an exhibition. In 1928 he purchased Tom Roberts’ masterpiece Bailed Up (1895/1927) from the Macquarie Galleries for 450 guineas, and it was promptly lent in his wife’s name to the National Art Gallery of New South Wales (now the Art Gallery of New South Wales – AGNSW). Five years later the family sold Bailed Up to the AGNSW for £350.
During the early 1930s, the NSW State Government appointed Maund as Honorary Commissioner to investigate 'certain complaints that had been made in regard to the conduct of the fine art classes at the [East] Sydney Technical College’. Maund’s report was delivered to the Minister of Education, Mr D.H. Drummond, in 1933, and the Sydney Morning Herald recorded Minister Drummond’s comments to Maund’s findings:
'I am more than pleased to find that generally speaking, the Commissioner, who is himself an art collector of considerable standing, and more than qualified by legal training and art research to report competently upon the work of the college, has effectively discounted in his report the continuous criticism on “wasteful expenditures, over-staffing, and ineffective control” and at the same time has said a well-deserved tribute to the class of work being produced at the college’ (4 September 1933, p 8).
Perhaps in recognition of his services as a government commissioner, Maund was appointed trustee of the AGNSW in March 1933. According to Bernard Smith, Maund was one of the most conservative members on the board of trustees during the 1940s and 50s. Despite this, the family ownership of the 'mild modernist’ works of Roland Wakelin and Elioth Gruner in the late 1930s suggest that Maund may have been more open minded to modern tendencies than previously thought.
Maund served on the board of trustees during the most unsettling period in Australian art history, a period of generational change that saw artists and supporters of modernism challenge the aging trustees’ antagonism to new forms of artistic expression. This period came to a symbolic climax with the awarding of the 1943 Archibald Prize to the modernist painter William Dobell (January 1944) for his portrait of artist Joshua Smith. At the deliberation of the Archibald Prize vote on 21 January 1944, Maund, according to the trustees’ minute book, was the first person to question the legitimacy of Dobell’s portrait:
'Mr. J.W. Maund who also spoke said he did not agree with Sir Lionel [Lindsay] and considered the work in question was not a portrait, but a caricature and therefore not eligible for the prize.’
As a trustee, Maund worked with three directors of the AGNSW: J.S. MacDonald, Will Ashton and Hal Missingham. According to Smith, Maund loathed Missingham as well as the director’s mentor, fellow trustee, Sydney Ure Smith. After Maund’s death, Missingham wrote about the frosty relationship he experienced with Maund:
'[Maund] took an instant dislike to me on my appointment. Maund would have none of what he considered the infiltration of modernism into the traditional, or rather academic art, of which he was so strong a supporter.’ (Missingham 1973, p 30).
Although appointed a life trustee, Maund was publicly critical of such extended periods of office. In a Sydney Morning Herald report during Ashton’s directorship, Maund was reported as saying that 'The appointment of trustees for life was an anomaly which should be rectified’ (5 October 1942, p 3). Despite this, Maund was a member of the trustees for twenty-two years. According to Missingham, from 1945 up to 1954 Maund fiercely opposed the granting of powers to the [modernist] director to buy works without the collective approval of the trustees. Maund formally retired from the board of trustees in January 1956 due to ill health.
The first known record of Maund’s painting appears in August 1921 when he had three works shown at the spring exhibition of the Royal Art Society of New South Wales (RAS). While Maund’s involvement with the RAS was brief, he is best known for his long association with the Australian Watercolour Institute (AWI). In February 1938 the founding President of the AWI, B.E. Minns, died. Later the same year Maund joined the AWI and was elected its second President. Maund was a regular exhibitor with the AWI from 1938 to the late 1950s. His first critical mention, in the Sydney Morning Herald commented on his works on view at the AWI’s 1939 annual exhibition:
'J.W. Maund’s pictures have a pleasant crispness. Their weakness is that they seem too large for the significance of their subject matter.’ (9 June 1939).
Despite stepping down from the AWI presidency in 1945, Maund continued his membership of the organisation until 1961. After the brief term of Hal Missingham as President of the AWI, Maund was granted life membership of the Institute in 1956, the first member to be honoured in this way.
There are five Maund watercolours in the collection of the AGNSW. Three images: She Oaks, Black Wattle Bay, and From Tomali, were donated to the gallery by the artist during his time as a member of the board of trustees. Two further works, End of the Day (1949), and Near Spencer, Hawkesbury (1950), were purchased by the Marshall Bequest Fund in the early 1950s. Despite Maund’s personal dislike towards him, Missingham, himself a notable watercolourist, reservedly praised Maund’s painting ability:
'I thought he was the most callous and insensitive man I had ever had the misfortune to meet, but curiously his watercolour paintings were strongly romantic, moody and given to sudden tonal contrast, redolent of what he considered the best of the traditional English school of Cotman and Turner.’ (Missingham 1973, p 31).
According to Meg Stewart in her biography of Margaret Coen (Autobiography of My Mother), Maund only painted on the weekends and 'deeply regretted in his later years that he hadn’t devoted his life to art rather than to the law, and he was trying to catch up’. Stewart tells that Maund had a large car and would drive artist friends to scenic spots on the northern environs of Sydney, such as Narrabeen Lakes, Ku-ring-gai Chase and Frenchs Forest. Artists that benefited from these excursions included, among others, Isabel MacKenzie, Percy Lindsay, John Young (from the Macquarie Galleries) and Margaret Coen. After World War II, Maund bought a motor boat and often toured the Hawkesbury River with Percy Lindsay and other art-loving friends. His documented friendship with several artists certainly offers balance to the unflattering comments made of Maund by Missingham.
For much of his career, Maund can be justly described as a true amateur artist as he rarely attempted to sell his work at exhibitions. His amateur status changed, however, in late life when he began to sell his work at art society exhibitions. During the 1950s Maund had two solo shows at the Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney. The first exhibition, in May 1952, was a display of thirty-six works, with prices from five to thirty guineas, and was opened by the President of the AGNSW trustees, B.J. Waterhouse. The surrealist artist and critic James Gleeson, writing in the [Sydney] Sun, reviewed the exhibition:
'John Maund’s watercolours at the Grosvenor Galleries present no problems to even the most casual gallery-goer. They are quiet, modest works, keeping within the narrow limits of an orthodox technique and expressing a conventional opinion on what constitutes the proper substance of art’ (5 May 1952).
A second Grosvenor Galleries exhibition, in March 1956, had thirty-seven works on view with prices in roughly the same range as the 1952 show. The Bulletin (14 March 1956, p 19) commented on the improvements in the artist’s technique:
'J. W. Maund’s watercolours at Sydney Grosvenor Galleries are considerably more finished than those he exhibited a year or two ago; less sketchy, warmer and clearer in color, more firmly transposed into patterns, smoother in tonal effect. In fact, though still light on drawing, he has made an admirable compromise between the smooth washes of the earlier style and the later tenuous 'impressionism’. '
An annotated copy of the two Grosvenor Galleries exhibition catalogues in the AGNSW library show that the influential trustee James McGregor purchased works at both exhibitions. John Maund died in Sydney on 16 October 1962; his marital status in late life remains unclear.
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