JACQUELINE HICK Australian, 1919-2004

Purchased by the present owner from Ivanyi Galleries, South Yarra

Private collection, Melbourne

Jacqueline Hick, who died in 2004 at the age of 84, was among Australia’s most significant twentieth-century women painters. She studied life drawing under Ivor Hele and Marie Tuck and landscape painting under Dorrit Black. In the words of John Neylon, writing in The Adelaide Review, ‘Hick was not only one of the best figurative artists South Australia has seen but one of most incisive of social observers’.¹ She achieved modest success for figurative paintings from the mid-1940s to the late-1950s, and spent some time around 1950 in Europe. However it was the 1960s series of allegorical outback subjects, particularly of groups of Aboriginal people, that attracted national attention. Breakaway Country is a beautiful example of her technique of glazing and wiping pigment across a white-primed hardboard panel.

‘Breakaway Country’ is the name given to the arid South Australian landscape of the Arckaringa Hills, north of Coober Pedy. The term comes from the area’s geological origins as an ancient inland sea bed, weathered and eroded over eons of time until its encrusted surface breaks away and layers of richly coloured rock strata are revealed.

1. Obituary, June 2004.