SIDNEY NOLAN 1917-1992

Oil on composition board Signed lower right; signed and inscribed with title on the reverse

Painted c. 1972 Provenance Purchased from John Buckley Contemporary Art, Melbourne, by Elders IXL, 20 April 1988 Exhibited Sidney Nolan, Paintings, Marlborough Fine Art, London, December 1972, cat. 29 Probably Sidney Nolan Retrospective Exhibition, Royal Society, Ballsbridge, Dublin, 19 June - 5 July 1973, cat. 88 Probably Paintings and Tapestries by Sidney Nolan, David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney, 6-21 November 1973 Reference Larry Boys, 'Nolan's London Triumph', The Australian Women's Weekly, 31 January 1973, illus., p. 47 Brian Adams, Sidney Nolan: Such is Life, Hutchinson, Melbourne, 1987, illus. opp. p. 152 In 1972, after a visit to Mount Tom Price in the Hammersley Ranges of north Western Australia, Nolan completed an extraordinarily forceful series of portraits entitled 'Miners'. In fact, he once explained, they were construction workers at the iron ore mines, whom he met and conversed with after their long hard shifts. When works from the series were shown in London in December that year, the critic Robert Melville called these figures 'the Aborigines of a new Australian outback, harsher and uglier than Nature could ever invent...Their tribal markings are formed by sweat and purple dust..They looked like the damned who passed through the bodies of medieval devils...yet they are individualists to a man and they have congregated in hell for the high pay'.(1) The theme of mining had interested Nolan since the 1940s - as incidental narrative in the great 'Ned Kelly' series, at Eureka and in whimsical outback landscapes such as Pretty Polly Mine (Art Gallery of New South Wales). However, Mount Tom Price offered him a totally new vision of Australia. The Miners of 1972 are like characters from some Dante-esque Inferno, portrayed with both compassion and a raw energy that powerfully conveys the harshness of their lives. The present work is one of only two in the series - the largest - to include the mine workings in the landscape background. (1) Marlborough catalogue, quoted in Tom Rosenthal, Sidney Nolan, Thames & Hudson, London, 2002, in which a section is devoted to this important series, pp. 195-7.