IAN FAIRWEATHER Australian, 1891-1974

M. Shearman Collection, London

Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane; purchased by the present owner

Private collection, Sydney

Ian Fairweather, Redfern Gallery, London, 9 January - 1 February 1936, cat. 32

M. Shearman Collection of French and English Pictures, Redfern Gallery, London, 1940, cat. 126

Ian Fairweather, Paintings of China and the Philippines, Redfern Gallery, London, 15 October - 7 November 1942, cat. 37

Ian Fairweather, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, 18 May - 14 June 1984, cat. 35

Since the publication of Murray Bail’s authorative monograph and catalogue, Ian Fairweather, in 1981, a small number of the artist’s early works have come to light, some of the most beautiful and important of which – including Philippine child - were exhibited at Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, in 1984. The restricted palette, predominantly warm pinks and flesh tones, the lively pencil underdrawing and the figure’s rounded limbs, all reveal Fairweather’s training in London at the Slade School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in the early 1920s. However Fairweather’s singular and deeply personal vision is also clearly revealed in this gentle image.

Fairweather had been a great favourite of the Slade Professor, Henry Tonks, who saw him as one of the most promising students at the school; but increasingly the young artist became disenchanted with  strict tuition. Tonks recognised his need for absolute independence, helping him find a patron in the mid 1920s and later, in 1934 on his second visit to Australia, recommending him to Daryl Lindsay, then director at the National Gallery of Victoria. Fairweather arrived in Melbourne in late February and almost immediately showed a collection of his Balinese and Chinese paintings at Cynthia Reed’s Gallery in Little Collins Street. He was befriended by George Bell, William ‘Jock’ Frater and Arnold Shore and was influenced by their enthusiasm for post-impressionism and especially Cézanne. Essentially though, Fairweather was a loner. After six months work on a mural commission that he never completed, he left Melbourne for Sydney, Brisbane, and on to Davao on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. Philippine child was painted before he left Davao in mid December that year.

As Murray Bail has observed, the open dabbed parallel strokes seen here, thinly applied in parts, are indebted to Cézanne, as is the method of ‘here and there leaving the surface bare to suggest depth, contour or light’. ¹ The child’s legs and arms are carefully modelled in golden brown paint, with a strong sense of sculpture, while the hands suggest liveliness ‘and that special spirit of adventure often observed in children. Moving up the picture plane to the child’s hat, colour and form echo each other. The colour of the edging to the hat brim is reinforced by the heavy impastoed edge which forms its own textural pattern and shape’. ²

At first Fairweather – always in search of the perfect place - was entranced by Davao, where he lived in a stilt house on the beach surrounded by ‘chickens and pigs and boats, babies and land crabs’. ³ However, his health soon deteriorated and he departed for China, sending Philippine child and a small group of other Philippine paintings to London for exhibition at the Redfern Gallery. The exhibition, his first one-person show, opened in January 1936 and was reviewed by eleven magazines and newspapers. Almost every critic admired the artist’s novel use of colour, the plasticity of his style and an approach to his subject matter that was at once unsentimental and sensitive. ⁴

As is well known, Fairweather returned to both the Philippines and Australia. Finally, in 1953 he settled on Bribie Island, off the Queensland coast, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. He is regarded as one of Australia’s most original and important twentieth-century artists.


1.  Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, p. 39.
2.  Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, 1984, pp. 14-15.
3.  Letter to H. S. Ede, in Abbott-Smith, N., Ian Fairweather, Profile of an Artist, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1978, p. 57.
4. Bail, op.cit., 1981, p. 249.