JUSTIN O'BRIEN, 1917-1996

Commissioned from the artist by the present owner's parents in the late 1960s

Private collection, Adelaide

One of Australia’s best known twentieth-century expatriate artists, Justin O’Brien lived in Italy for much of his career. After an extensive period travelling in Greece and Turkey, he finally settled in Rome in 1967, living in an apartment close to the Vatican. He nevertheless always considered himself an Australian artist and returned to this country for exhibitions about every two years.

First trained as an artist in Sydney, O’Brien was called up for military service in the Second World War. In 1940 he went with the Australian Army Medical Corps to Palestine and then on to Greece. It is often assumed that his images such as Palm Sunday, with its glorious gold leaf ground and vibrant saturated colours, were inspired directly by Byzantine paintings and mosaics but in fact he saw nothing of that sort in Greece during the war. The museums and monasteries were mostly closed. O’Brien was taken prisoner in Athens in 1940,  moved to Poland at the end of 1941 and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp. It was only in 1948, in Siena, that he discovered the work of the early Renaissance master Duccio and it is this influence that transformed his art and continued on throughout his life. ¹

In 1951 O’Brien won the first Blake Prize for Religious Art with his great triptych The Virgin Enthroned, now in the National Gallery of Victoria. Although brought up as a strict Catholic, he became an agnostic in 1954. However this decision seems to have had little effect on the subject matter of his art ‘probably because, although rejecting certain doctrines, he nevertheless retained a religiosity of feeling’. He enjoyed painting religious subjects and especially incidents from the Bible because they allowed more freedom for the imagination – of both artist and viewer – than does real life. ²

The story of Palm Sunday is told in all four Gospels, of Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem in the last days of his life. Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter and the most solemn week of the Christian year, and is observed by Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christians. Additionally some Christians and Messianic Jews regard Palm Sunday as the end of the first sixty-nine week of Daniel’s Old Testament prophecy of Seventy Weeks. Here O’Brien shows Jesus riding a colt (or a donkey) from Bethany before a cheering crowd who will soon lay down their cloaks and palm branches to line his path. They cry out: Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the King of Israel! (John 12:12-13). Only a few days later some of the very same people would be among those shouting that Jesus should be executed. O’Brien presents these events within a highly stylized landscape, with the walled city of Jerusalem perched on a rocky hill and his cast of brilliantly-clad characters ranged across the foreground like participants in a Passion Play. As Kenneth Hood observed at the time of the artist’s exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1987, ‘Always carefully and formally composed, it is the colour which first overwhelms us in Justin O’Brien’s paintings. The juxtaposition of colours and tones is unexpected, even violent, yet the effect is never forced or gratuitous. Justin O’Brien’s paintings are a celebration’. ³

1.  These biographical details are indebted to Christine France in Justin O’Brien, Image and Icon, Craftsman House, Sydney, rev. edn 1997 .
2.  Op. cit., pp. 21-22.
3. In Justin O’Brien, a Birthday Tribute, National Gallery of Victoria,   Melbourne, 1987, introduction.