HANS HEYSEN

Collection of Sir Tom Barr Smith; thence by descent
Private collection, Sydney

Hans Heysen, Royal South Australian Society of Arts Gallery, Adelaide, October 1937, cat. 1
Loan Exhibition of Paintings, Australian Red Cross, Adelaide, March 1958 (label on the reverse)  
Adelaide Festival of Arts, 1974, cat. 49 (label on the reverse)

This work appears not to be laid down - backing board obscures inspection. Stress cracks in the sky radiating from top centre. Small shrinkage cracks centre left and bottom centre. This work is framed under glass.
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Hans Heysen's exhibition at the Royal South Australian Society of Arts Gallery, Adelaide in October 1937 was his first major commercial exhibition in Australia for some time. In 1935 there had been both a big loan exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and a successful show (of watercolours) at Colnaghi's in London, but 1936 was a somewhat unsettled year, and Heysen's only substantial exposure was at the N.S.W. Society of Artists and Victorian Artists Society annual exhibitions. Well compensating for this hiatus, the 1937 show was an impressive affair: it contained a total of 65 works, and while most were watercolours - including the celebrated Bronzewings and saplings (1921, Art Gallery of South Australia) - there were also ten oils, amongst them the present work. No. 1 in the catalogue and at 200 guineas the most expensive picture in the show, it was evidently regarded by the artist as a work of some importance.

The Hillside, Glen Osmond is an uncompromising, even modernistically inflected composition, dominated by the triangle of the eponymous subject at the right, a slab of yellow bleached grass tinged with green and terraced with faceted strata of exposed rock. This bold gold form is balanced on the left by a pink and mauve-shadowed eroded gully, and the strong lines of the geology are softened by clumps and straggles of gum trees moving up to the central, distant horizon. The angle of the sun is still low and the shadows long - it is morning. In combination with the bright, enamel-hard sky, this oblique lighting gives the work a particular frosty sparkle, further enhanced by the silver shards of the dead and fallen foreground trees.

A large, handsome and characteristically fluent work, The Hillside, Glen Osmond has the additional interest of an important and distinguished provenance. Throughout his career Heysen enjoyed the patronage of Adelaide's Barr Smith family, beginning with Robert Barr Smith's purchase of two watercolours in 1897, and his subsequent sponsorship of the young artist's schooling at the South Australian School of Design. The family maintained the friendship and continued to acquire Heysen's work on a regular basis. When the South Australian Society of Arts organised a loan exhibition of his work in 1931, Mrs T.E. Barr Smith lent no fewer than five pictures of various dates and subjects, from 1915 to 1930, from still lifes to Flinders Ranges landscapes, while Carrick Hill holds another, later Barr Smith collection painting, White Gums (1935). The Hillside, Glen Osmond has a Barr Smith connection in its subject as well as its history; the family's house, 'Birksgate', was located not far from the site of the painting, at the foot of the Adelaide Hills.