One of five pictures exhibited by Loureiro at the Centennial Exhibition (with nos 22. "Reverie", 44. "A Chef d'oeuvre", 72. "The Young Artist", and 77. "The Stockrider"), and one of three important Australian pictures loaned by Charles Raymond Staples (with no. 3. Arthur Streeton's "Settlers Camp" and 81. J. Ford Paterson's "Entrance to the Bush").

The appearance of this picture, with its provenance, suggests that the title (as 'Two Friends'), provenance ('C.R. Staples') and exhibition history (Centennial International Exhibition, Melbourne, 1888) of the similar large composition of the artist's son Vasco and his dog Baron, painted by Loureiro in 1887, was incorrectly given when it was sold at Christie's Melbourne, 4 April 1995, lot 119. The present picture, with its unbroken line of provenance from Charles Raymond Staples to the present owner, and with the sitter identified as his son Charles Staples, is clearly the work exhibited in Melbourne in 1888.

Charles Raymond Staples came to Melbourne from Sydney with his brother John Richard Staples in the 1870s. Bankrupted in 1880 after trying dairy farming outside Melbourne, they went into banking and finance, and were land boomers at the height of land speculation in Melbourne in the 1880s. They floated their bank into a public company in 1888 under the name of the Victorian Freehold Bank Ltd and then changed it to the British Bank of Australia Ltd, raising capital from London, which was pocketed by the directors and would have funded Staples's art buying spree that year. As Chairman of what became the Anglo-Australian bank, Staples, who had fled to San Francisco after his bank went into liquidation in 1891, was arrested after he returned to Sydney in 1893. He was tried and sentenced to five years in prison over a conspiracy to defraud his bank's depositors. He was released after three years, settled as far as he was able with his creditors, and became an accountant in Sydney. He filed for insolvency in 1893. For his activities in Melbourne see M. Cannon, The Land Boomers: The Complete Illustrated History, Melbourne, pp.211-15.

Post Lot Text
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