SIDNEY NOLAN Australian, 1917-1992

Collection of the artist; until purchased by the present owner from The Estate of Sir Sidney Nolan, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 16 September, 2001, lot 69

Private collection, New South Wales

Sidney Nolan, African Journey, Marlborough Fine Art, London, May-June 1963, cat. 15, illus.

Probably in Sidney Nolan - African Journey, Nolan Gallery, 'Lanyon', Canberra, 19 November 1986 - 1 February 1987

David Storey, review of Nolan’s African exhibition, New Statesman, 31 May 1963

T. G. Rosenthal, Sidney Nolan, Thames & Hudson, London, 2002, p. 179

Nolan travelled to Africa in the autumn of 1962, visiting Harar in Ethiopia in the footsteps of the nineteenth-century poet Arthur Rimbaud, and then the Serengeti National Park in Kenya. The important series of animal paintings he completed the following year are worked in oil paint on primed hardboard, scuffed and polished with a cloth. Details were touched in with strokes from a more heavily loaded brush.

Nolan’s passion for African wildlife was genuine and deeply felt. Young Monkey embodies the artist’s sense of the creature’s individuality, but also of the fragility and potential impermanence of the natural world as a whole. The animal’s form emerges quite dramatically from swirls of translucent pigment. As he explained at the time, 'I feel there's a kind of painting to be done with animals and natural camouflage that would be in a sense a no-painting; there would be a total disappearance of the image - but if you stared at the painting long enough the image would eventually waft up… These animals have a message for us in that they are unique’.¹ When the African series was first exhibited at Marlborough Fine Art in London, some critics remarked on parallels between Nolan’s monkeys and the powerful portraits and figure subjects by his British contemporary Francis Bacon. Bacon himself is said to have been complimentary about Nolan’s use of colour in the exhibition.² Two paintings from the African series were purchased for the Royal Collection.

1. Queen, London, 24 April 1963; he explained his technique in Time, 26 April 1963.

2. Adams, B., Sidney Nolan: such is life, Hutchinson, Melbourne, 1997, p. 165.