ROBERT DICKERSON Australian, B. 1924

The Collection of Benno C. Schmidt, Esperance, Western Australia and New York; until Fine Australian Paintings, Benno C. Schmidt Collection, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 30 April 1995, lot 87

Savill Galleries

Private collection, Sydney

A Homage to Breughel... Renoir by Robert Dickerson, The Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 22 June - 5 July 1969, cat. 11

After a period of factory work, four years as a professional boxer and service with the RAAF, Dickerson turned seriously to painting in the 1950s. He first came to popular and critical attention with exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and Design in Melbourne. Although born in Sydney and based there for most of his life, his powerful figurative expressionism drew him naturally to the Antipodeans in 1959. Together with Arthur and David Boyd, Charles Blackman, John Brack, John Perceval and Clifton Pugh, he joined with the art-historian-artist, Bernard Smith, to exhibit as a group and to present a written manifesto for contemporary figurative art in the face of abstraction. Dickerson has remained steadfastly a figurative painter and is now  one of Australia's most respected senior artists.

In 1969, Dickerson held an exhibition at the Johnstone Gallery in Brisbane, which paid homage to a number of famous artists throughout history. This included thirteen racecourse subjects, among them At the Starting Barrier, after Edgar Degas.

As he told the critic, Laurie Thomas, ‘I just woke up to myself and found that the only way I could paint pictures was by working at it… and also discovering that there’s no such thing as original art, that painters like Goya, Daumier, Manet, people like that – their paintings are so much of today – today’s scene – the things that they painted are as contemporary as today. So I decided to use their subject matter and I also made the remarkable discovery that Picasso has done this – translating it into his terms – and I’d like to be able to do the same thing. Rembrandt, van Gogh, they all did it’.¹


1.  The Australian, 11 January 1969.

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