The record-setting John Olsen is still painting with the excitement of a child in awe of Sydney Harbour, writes Lyndall Crisp.

An American collector who'd never heard of John Olsen and had seen only an image of his work in an email attachment has paid a record price for a painting sold through an Australian commercial gallery.

The prominent Washington art lover, acting on advise from an agent, paid $750,000 for 'Spring Tide', a 200 x 400cm oil on board by Olsen. The agent said that painting would be worth millions of dollars had it been done by an American. Another painting, 'Summer at Campy', sold for $650,000.

Both murals sold well before the scheduled opening of the exhibition in Sydney on November 13.
They choose to remain anonymous, these connoisseurs of art, but there's no shortage of them.
Tim Olsen, son of John and owner of the Paddington gallery featuring the 15 works, said he had a permanent waiting list. Several other paintings worth $2 million had reserve stickers on them and they were not even framed yet.

'There's always a shortage of Olsens and those who have them don't want to sell them.'

Poppa Olsen, nudging 80 and one of Australia's greatest living painters, began life in Newcastle but spent most of his youth at Watson's Bay and Bondi before moving to Dural, then South Australia, on to Bathurst, NSW and now, Bowral, where he and wife Katharine live on a 14.1 hectare horse stud.
He works almost every day out of two studios, one for works on paper and one for painting.

All the works in this exhibition are dated 2007 although they represent a year's hard slog and have never been on public show before. These new works, Tim Olsen said, created as much hype among collectors as old works for sale at auctions.

'He's painting with as much excitement as a child, and with the hand of a master,' said Mr Olsen, who was surprised anyone might suggest it was his father's last exhibition.

The grand old master of Australian painting, as Art Gallery of NSW director Edmund Capon calls John Olsen, is not sad to see his works leave the studio. He said he developed a relationship with each one, they spoke to him, and the image he started with in his mind wasn't always [what] ended up on canvas.
He works on one painting at a time and for this exhibition was greatly inspired by Sydney, its harbour and beaches which he knows so well from childhood.

'It's a curious thing,' he said, sipping a flute of French champagne at a lunch in his honour being filmed by an ABC crew for a 'Dynasty' series to go to air next year. 'It gets down to the geography of the harbour … You've got the hills that surrounds it and what happens to the light', he said, 'It's kind of a bath and it's one of the reasons why there's such a radiant light. If you think of Melbourne and Port Phillip Bay, there's not the same light. There's a magic in [Sydney Harbour]. One can understand the excitement of Streeton, Condor and Roberts when they came up from Melbourne, they were absolutely enraptured with the harbour.'