FRED WILLIAMS Australian, 1927-1982

Collection of the artist

Collection of Mrs Lyn Williams, Melbourne, inventory no. LW616

Private collection, New South Wales; purchased from Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 2000

Private collection, Sydney

Fred Williams, a Retrospective, Australian National Gallery, Canberra and tour to state galleries, 1987-88, cat. 152

Fred Williams: Major Paintings and Etchings from the Estate of the Artist, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 2000 

Always conscious of the traditions of Australian landscape painting, Williams was also well aware of the rich heritage of international art.  He worked from reality, often seeking out landscapes that might seem unexceptional to a casual observer and, in so doing, created an entirely original vision of rich colour, subtle texture and powerful abstracted form. Born in Melbourne, trained as an artist there and in London, he returned to Australia to take his place as one of the greatest Australian painters of his generation. He became one of the leading figures in Rudy Komon’s celebrated ‘stable’ of artists and his work is now comprehensively represented in the national and all state art galleries in Australia, as well in the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and the Tate Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum and British Museum in London.

Pond at Wollert III is one of a series of only three paintings that Williams completed – on the spot – during painting excursions to the northernmost fringe of Melbourne in April and May 1975. He was then also working on his larger ‘Kew Billabong’ series. Like the Kew Billabong, the pond at Wollert was for Williams an enclosed, private world. As Patrick McCaughey has written, ‘Perhaps it was this quality that allowed Williams to paint so close to Monet’. ¹

James Mollison observes that in the Wollert Pond paintings ‘the artist pushes his subject to an extreme reminiscent of Claude Monet’s late paintings of his garden at Giverny’. ² However Williams refused to adopt the touches of broken colour of the French impressionists. He certainly shares their bright colour, light and sparkle, but his technique is his own: here the tranquil pool of water is a shimmering plane of blue pigment punctuated by flickering gold and lilac colour accents.

Williams retained Pond at Wollert III in his own collection and it was first exhibited in the national touring retrospective exhibition of his work in 1987-88. We are most grateful to Mrs Lyn Williams for assistance in its cataloguing.


1.  Fred Williams 1927-1982, Murdoch Books, Sydney, rev. edn 1996, p. 286.
2.  Mollison, J., A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams, Australian National Gallery, Canberra and Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p. 203.