SIDNEY NOLAN Australian, 1917-1992

Marlborough Fine Art, London

Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 1994

Private collection, Sydney

In 1964 Nolan returned to the theme of Ned Kelly – which he had made his own in the 1940s. The 1960s Kelly series, including Ghost Kelly, was his third on the theme. Although several of these new paintings were based on images from the 1940s Kelly series, they are technically very different: dramatically worked in oil over white-primed Masonite, rather than the bright Ripolin enamel colours of the first group. They were exhibited in London to considerable acclaim.

The composition of Ghost Kelly closely follows that of Nolan’s Kelly and Sergeant Kennedy of 1945, given by the artist to the Nolan Gallery at ‘Lanyon’ near Canberra in 1974.¹ That much smaller painting, 63.6 by 76.4 cm, is painted in Ripolin with an almost whimsical photo-collage for the policeman’s face and figure. It is Nolan’s earliest dated work on the Kelly theme in a public collection, painted while he was intensively researching the story in preparation for his envisaged narrative series and before he had explored the ‘Kelly country’of northeast Victoria. The Irish Sergeant Michael Kennedy, shot and savagely mutilated by the Kelly gang at Stringybark Creek on 26 October 1878, was aged thirty-six, a father of five, with a reputation as a first-class police officer according to contemporary reports that Nolan read.

Nolan himself once remarked, ‘I have used Kelly in all sorts of moods, sometimes as a defeated fugitive; sometimes as hero and sometimes as a ghost’. When he painted Ghost Kelly, the earlier painting was still in his own collection and he would have referred back to it directly. However, in 1964 the new technique and much increased scale completely transformed the mood of the work. Both figures are insubstantial. Ned Kelly, with his characteristic square-helmet, is as translucent as a wraith. Sergeant Kennedy seems to hover in the bush, a diminutive, almost puppet-like form and no apparent threat. The painting relates closely in both technique and mood to Nolan’s great nine-panel Ned Kelly polyptych Riverbend, begun late the same year. ²

1. See Clark, J., Sidney Nolan, landscapes and legends 1937-1987, ICCA and Cambridge University Press, Sydney, 1987, p. 75_^.
2. Illustrated and discussed in op. cit., pp. 148-151.