WILLIAM DOBELL

Elder Smith Goldsborough Mort Limited, Adelaide; transferred to Elders IXL in 1985; transferred to The Foster's Collection, Melbourne 

James Gleeson, William Dobell (rev. ed.), Thames & Hudson, London, 1969, p. 203, ill. 133
Portrait of Australia: Elders IXL Collection (Supplement to the Handbook), Elders IXL , Melbourne, 1987, illus.

During the late 1960s Dobell enjoyed a warm friendship with the former Governor-General Lord Casey and his wife Maie,  an accomplished amateur artist and former student of George Bell. On visits to the Caseys at Admiralty House, Kirribilli, Dobell made a number of sketches of the Sydney Opera House, which was then (slowly) taking shape on the opposite shore of the Harbour. These studies eventually led to two paintings, of which the present work is the larger version.

Opera House, Sydney Harbour is one of the late works the artist himself referred to as 'white drawings', in which 'the subject...is conjured out of a network of fine white lines. The brush hovers and darts about the subject like a silver-pointed pencil and evokes the form through the accumulation of a hundred brisk and nervous strokes.' ¹ Fully three quarters of the picture's surface is a bruised mist of sky, an undifferentiated field of blue-grey-green. The steps and sails of the Opera House, the edge of the water, the fins of Sydney's office blocks and the two Golgotha cranes are scored through the paint and into the support along the edge of a rule.

Brett Whiteley's treatment of Jorn Utzon's architectural masterpiece (sold by Sotheby's in May 2007) presented the Opera House as a hard edge, white enamel pop trade mark. Dobell's interpretation is equally iconic but altogether quieter, a mature artist's recognition of the hubris and inconsequence of human endeavour against the blue eternity of sky and sea.

1. Gleeson, J., William Dobell (rev. ed.), Thames & Hudson, London, 1969, p. 203