SIDNEY NOLAN Australian, 1917-1992

Savill Galleries, Sydney (label on the reverse)

Private collection, New Caledonia

Sidney Nolan was the most internationally recognized and most honoured Australian artist of his generation. Born in Melbourne in 1917, his most celebrated series of paintings are the first ‘Ned Kelly’ group that he completed in the 1940s. Throughout his career, he preferred to work in series, often on themes from history or mythology that he took and transformed as his own. From the mid 1950s he worked intensively on the theme of the Gallipoli campaign: inspired by a range of influences ranging from First World War documents to the legends of Ancient Troy, to the death of his own brother whilst in the army, and his own memories of military service as a conscript.

Hatted Man Smoking is one of a small group of paintings dating from 1977 in which the idea of Gallipoli is present but not paramount. In another from this series, Young Soldier, 1977, in the Australian War Memorial, the subject wears a slouch hat and his military character is more overt. As Tom Rosenthal observes, the 1970s paintings present a much tougher, less romantic view than the earlier series.¹ The Hatted Man Smoking appears to be wearing the same uniform, in the same muted khaki tones, as Young Soldier, but he has a more independent – perhaps senior – air about him. Significantly, it would seem that soldiers and more generally the concepts of rank and subordination, were much in Nolan's mind that year when he made a gift of some 252 Gallipoli paintings to the War Memorial in memory of his brother Raymond’s never fully explained death by drowning.

Over the years he painted a number of series of striking head-and-shoulders 'portraits', often essentially anonymous and quite often given no more title than the descriptive yet enigmatic 'Head'.

1. Rosenthal, T., Sidney Nolan, Thames & Hudson, London, 2002, p. 165, illus. p. 168.

Please note this lot is subject to G.S.T.