SIDNEY NOLAN Australian, 1917-1992

Collection of Joseph Brender

Corporate collection; until Australian and European Paintings, Lawson's, Sydney, 19 November 1996, lot 275, p. 37, illus.

Eva Breuer Art Dealer, Sydney

Private collection, United Kingdom

Nolan painted a number of major series imaging the Ned Kelly story. The first series, painted famously at ‘Heide’ in 1946 and 1947 is in the Australian National Gallery (except for one painting now on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Victoria). The second, painted in the 1950s, was conceived after Nolan had left John and Sunday Reed and settled in London. 

The 1950s series includes just a few paintings based very closely on the 1940s group, such as Kelly 1954/5 (Sotheby’s, 26 April 1999, lot 98) and Death of Constable Scanlon 1954, formerly in the Harold E. Mertz Collection (Christie’s, 28 June 2000, lot 40). However, other Kelly paintings from the 1950s are highly imaginative extrapolations from Nolan’s original historical source in Australian bush lore. In his own words, these were ‘a more universal application of Kelly’. His After Glenrowan Siege, painted in 1955, was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York the following year. Death of a Poet (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) identifies the bushranger as a ‘man of sorrows’; and Kelly, Spring (Arts Council of Great Britain) was inspired by the abortive Hungarian uprising of 1956. ¹ The present painting, titled simply Kelly, is dated 1955.

Here is Kelly the outlaw, on the run, hiding out in the ‘Kelly Country’ of north-east Victoria that he proudly called his ‘own native land’. ² As though one with his armour and iconic helmet, he rises in and of the landscape like a rocky outcrop. He has become a genius loci – a ‘spirit of the place’.

Nolan identified personally with the story of Ned Kelly. As he once explained, ‘Most of us have heard it, in one way or another, during our childhood… It is a story arising out of the bush and ending in the bush’. ³ He had heard first-hand tales from his own grandfather, a police officer who had chased the Kelly Gang; and in 1944 he went absent without leave from army and was on the run himself.  Here in Kelly, Nolan gives the square profile of the bushranger’s helmet a very human face, lending the work a powerful emotional intensity. The dark eye-slits are animated with what might equally be tears, or flowers, and the landscape seems verdant with new life in the face of the outlaw’s impending capture and death.

London critics were full of praise for Nolan’s 1950s Kelly paintings. ‘It may even be that he understands more about Australia when viewed from a distance’, said Studio magazine. David Sylvester, in The Listener, also considered this second series Nolan’s most successful, with a ‘breadth and luminousness and complete conviction [that would] establish him among the half-dozen best painters under forty in the world’. ⁴ ‘In the new Kelly series of 1954-55, the “naïve” style has gone, and the invented shapes are intellectually more coherent and plastically more ingenious: the colours… are luminous, rich and varied; while the presentation of the Kelly myth has gained a new magic and imaginative power. Nolan has given the hero his metallic face and body as he rides and strides through the enormous Bush, striking terror and constantly facing it. The mood of these pictures is sardonic, brutal, sad and tender. The story unfolds itself painfully and poetically in the successive episodes, and all the loss and sorrow of a rare young life thrown on to the scrap-heap are dignified, ennobled, and redeemed’. ⁵

1.  See Clark, J., Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and legends 1937-1987, ICCA and Cambridge University Press, Sydney, 1987, pp. 120-21.
2.  In his manuscript ‘Jerilderie Letter’ of 1879, now in the State Library of Victoria.
3.  In The Australian Artist, 4 July 1948.
4.  September 1955; 12 May 1955, p. 854.
5.  Colin MacInnes in Clark, K. et al., Sidney Nolan, Thames & Hudson, London, 1961, p. 31.