SIDNEY NOLAN

Dr David Sands, Sydney
Mrs E.C. Dyason, London
The artist, purchased from the above
Lord McAlpine. Broome
Multiplex Limited, Perth

Sidney Nolan: Exhibition of Queensland outback paintings, David Jones' Art Gallery, Sydney, 8-22 March 1949, cat. no. 8 (as Bird)
Sidney Nolan: catalogue of an exhibition of paintings from 1947 to 1957, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 13 June-July 1957, cat. no. 7 (as Bird in landscape)
Sidney Nolan: an exhibition of paintings, Arts Council of Great Britain (touring exhibition to Brighton, Nottingham, Barnsley, Exeter, Southampton and Cambridge), September 1957-February 1958, cat. no. 2
Sidney Nolan: Retrospective Exhibition, The Arts Centre, New Metropole, Folkestone, 21 February-18 April 1970, cat. no. 24
The Cynthia Nolan collection of paintings by Sidney Nolan, David Jones' Art Gallery, Sydney, 7-26 July 1975, cat. no. 7
Sir Sidney Nolan: Paintings, Broome Art Gallery, 29 July-12 August 1983
Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and legends, a retrospective exhibition 1937-1987, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (cat. not numbered, illus. p. 97)

Images of flight recur throughout Nolan's oeuvre, beginning with the Icarus stage designs of 1940 and the Wimmera landscapes with their RAAF training planes droning above Dimboola.  Weird, over-sized, unspecied waterbirds fly above the hapless explorers Burke and Wills in paintings such as Burke at Coopers Creek, Evening Camp and In Menindee, while Italian-influenced angels, devils and Christs populate the skies of the religious subjects of 1951.  The Zeus-Swan ravishes rather than rises in the Leda paintings, while in the Antarctic series an albatross drifts over a blue icescape (Bird, 1964).  White swans fly across his Chinese landscapes of the 1980s. In 1985 he presented an entire exhibition of bird studies at the Nolan Gallery, Lanyon.  

Perhaps the most popular of all these avian inventions are the over-sized, surreal and faintly comic eponyms of works like Pretty Polly Mine and The Dog and Duck Hotel.  As Geoffrey Smith has noted: 'His paintings of proprietors standing in front of their premises in country towns, with the occasional bird flying upside down in the sky, distilled an innovative and quirky vision of the relationship between European Australians and the landscape.'¹  Painted in the late 1940s, they reflect both the impact of the Queensland landscape and its wildlife, and the artist's keen ornithological interests.  They may also allude to his recent flight from Melbourne, from the cloying atmosphere of Heide to the relatively fresh, open environment of Sydney and the bush. 

These works were particularly important to Nolan's career.  They were a major element of his 1948 David Jones' Gallery exhibition, the success of which funded his Northern Territory expedition the following year.  Critical response was also positive; Harry Tatlock Miller in particular was effusive in his praise of the 'creatures of the air... [flying] gaudily, unreal, over desert, swamp, rock and river.'²  Pretty Polly Mine was purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the first work by the artist to enter a public collection. Just as importantly, the bird paintings were the works in progress at Cynthia's Wahroonga Cottage when the British art historian Sir Kenneth Clark paid a studio visit in 1949; they helped to get this significant life-long professional friendship off the ground. 

The subject of the present work is typical of Nolan's 'stiffly posed and wiry-legged birds... direct descendants of those specimens in early colonial orthonology by Gould or Watling - cross-bred, of course, with Nolan's wit.'³  It is 'not only floating in the sky, but upon the surface of the painting itself.^'4  It is a strange but potent picture; the bird hanging wingless and insect-like from the paintings right hand edge, while below the desert environment contracts to a smudgy horizon and a feathery nest of foliage. It is, in the words of Elwyn Lynn, 'as odd as the landscape, exotic, [its] lonely presence stilling the vastness and providing a focal point that [denies] the infinite immensity of the blue skies.' ⁵

1. Geoffrey Smith, Desert and drought (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2003, p. 14
2. Harry Tatlock Miller, 'XXX', The Sun, Sydney, 8th March 1949, p. XXX
3. Jane Clark, Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends a Retrospective Exhibition: 1937 - 1987, (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 96
4. ibid., p. 113
5. Elwyn Lynn, 'Nolan's birds', in Birds: Sidney Nolan (exhibition catalogue, Lanyon Gallery