page_title: Alfred Tipper
section_title: Art
hierarchical_section_title: Alfred Tipper / Art
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph Australian artist Joy Hester nursing her son Sweeney. In the background can be seen a painting by 'Professor' Henry Tipper (Harold Deering), a trick cyclist and amateur painter whose work was discovered and promoted by Albert Tucker.
context_page_description: Alfred Henry Tipper, also known by the pseudonyms Professor Tipper and H.D., was an Australian showman, competitive and endurance cyclist, and outsider artist. His combined interests in mechanics, fitness and entertainment led to a long career as a trick cyclist and builder of miniature bicycles. Following his death, Tipper's artistic abilities were recognised by the Australian painter Albert Tucker, who promoted Tipper's paintings in the modernist art and literary magazine Angry Penguins.
context_section_description: Tipper produced several postcards and oil paintings documenting his cycling achievements. After he died, five of his paintings were salvaged and displayed in the window of a bicycle shop on Swanston Street. They were spotted by the young Melbourne modernist painter Albert Tucker, who greatly admired the works' naïve boldness, painterly qualities, and unique treatment of the Australian countryside. Tucker acquired one of the large unframed canvases (signed "H.D.") and pinned it up in his East Melbourne terrace house. In the December 1944 issue of Angry Penguins, Tucker wrote that H.D.'s paintings bore "the unmistakable mark of the natural artist ... a startling sense of life expressed through an unfaltering sense of form, pattern, texture and colour, with the anecdotal eye of the traditional "primitive"". Tucker, a self-taught artist (like other Angry Penguins members such as Sidney Nolan and John Perceval), saw H.D. as an example of an artist who hadn't the "disadvantage of training in some socially endorsed art style".
  Only after the publication of H.D.'s work in Angry Penguins and inclusion in group exhibitions run by the Contemporary Art Society was the artist's true identity discovered. Tipper's paintings are now held in major galleries including the National Gallery of Australia and Heide Museum of Modern Art, and his art formed part of the 2005 touring exhibition Raw and Compelling: Australian Naïve Art.
caption: Photograph by Tucker of Joy Hester nursing their son Sweeney. A Tipper painting can be seen in the background.
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