LLOYD REES

David Sumner Galleries, Adelaide (label on the reverse)
Private collection, Adelaide
Australian and International Paintings, Christie's, Sydney, 26-27 August 2003, lot 6
Private collection, Sydney 

In contemporary white timber frame with silver rebate. UV inspection reveals diagonal and horizontal areas of flaring upper left and two areas of flaring upper centre. Work appears to be in good condition.
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In his later paintings such as Twilight in Tasmania, Lloyd Rees reaches a new height of poeticism that always distinguished his best work. Here, in this delightful nocturne, the subject of a woman in a white dress, standing in a garden before some graceful old buildings sounds but a minor note to the major chord of passing day echoing through the evening colours and gentle illusions of form. The opalescent glow of day is muted to hues of mauve and blue, a pink highlight against a yellow, all bathed in the atmosphere of calm. By contrast, the strokes of the paint laden brush are more lively, a scherzo of response to capture the scene before it fades, the movement of the brush in counterpoint to the calm.

The melody of evening, of daylight fading into dark, inspires all the arts, as much in response to the ineffable beauty of the scene as to the metaphor of departure. The softness of definition imbues the moment, as in Rees' painting, the decline of this day being filled with optimism and promise. Great masters in their late years transcend technique to create art that surpasses the merely material. Recall the peerless paintings of J.M.W. Turner or the mature Claude Monet where vision reaches beyond reality, beyond the everyday into the wonder of all things. Twilight in Tasmania was painted when Rees was in his early eighties. Long recognized as the grand old man of Australian art, his unforgettable profile was like that of a patrician of the Renaissance as once captured in bronze by Pisanello. Applauded for the gifted draughtsmanship and solid sense of form in his earlier drawings and paintings, he touched architecture and nature with an heroic splendour. His love of nature never changed. In his later paintings, especially of Tasmania where he spent many of those years, grandeur of definition gave ground to the visionary, of works luminous and majestic.