LLOYD REES

Colonel Aubrey Gibson, Melbourne
Private collection, Sydney 

Contemporary Group, Sydney, 1947 (illustrated in catalogue)
Lloyd Rees Retrospective, touring exhibtion; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, State Galleries and Newcastle City Gallery, October 1969 - 1970, cat. 33 (label on the reverse)  
100 paintings in the collection of Col. Aubrey Gibson, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, July-September 1969, cat. 81 (as 'Gerringong Landscape'), illus.

Sydney Ure Smith (ed.), Present Day Art in Australia (rev. ed.) , Ure Smith Pty. Ltd., Sydney, 1949, p. 25, illus.
Ren¿e Free, Lloyd Rees, Lansdowne, Melbourne, 1972, cat. no. 0110

Gold painted timber frame with white mount. UV inspection reveals no evidence of re-touching. Good condition
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From the early 1940s, Lloyd Rees would often take his family on holidays to the beach at Werri near Gerringong in the Illawarra district of New South Wales, and here he produced some of his finest paintings. Indeed, noting the artist's debts to Claude Lorrain and to Paul C¿zanne, Ren¿e Free has described the Kiama hills as Rees's Campagna, and Mount Saddleback as his Mont St Victoire^{. 1}

Executed in delicate transparent glazes, these works blend red and green and mauve in a rich Venetian glow. The result is a poetic, romantic and at the same time domestic vision of the Australian landscape, 'a feeling of a warm earth regretfully saying farewell to an evening sky'. ² At the same time, the Gerringong paintings have an almost monumental formal strength, and even a latent sexuality; it is hardly surprising that their swelling, writhing curves were so admired by Brett Whiteley.

The present work was executed in the same year as one of the artist's best loved pictures, The Road to Berry, 1947, (Art Gallery of New South Wales) and the two are clearly related. Their topographies and incidents - the tree crested curve of the mountain, the red roofed farm building, the cursive sweeps of fences and road - are closely comparable, as is the general mood of calm and pause.

1. Free, R., Lloyd Rees, Lansdowne, Melbourne, 1972, pp. 51, 61
2. Olsen, J., 'The Road to Berry', Art and Australia, vol. 5, no. 3, December 1957, p. 544