Sidney Nolan

David Jones' Art Gallery, Sydney
Mrs Errol Williams, Sydney; purchased from the above in April 1950
Dr R. M. Crookston, Sydney; thence by descent
The estate of the Late Jacqueline Crookston, Sydney

Sidney Nolan: Exhibition of Central Australian Landscapes, David Jones' Art Gallery, Sydney, 31 March - 14 April 1950, cat. 42
First Loan Exhibition: Contemporary Australian Paintings Selected from Private Collections in Sydney, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 28 September - 19 October 1955, cat. 72
Sidney Nolan: Desert and Drought, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 6 June - 17 August 2003, cat. 21 (bears label on reverse)

Geoffrey Smith, Sidney Nolan: Desert and Drought, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2003, pp. 43 (illus.), 147

This work has some rubbing along the frame rebate (top left) approximately 8cm in length and (top right) approx 14cm. Overall there are no viisble defects. UV inspection confirms there has been no retouching or restoration. This work is in good original condition.
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Aside from the iconic Kelly paintings, Sidney Nolan's outback pictures of 1949-53 are possibly his most original and important extended sequence.¹  Working in a thematic 'tradition' initiated by colonial expedition artists, subsequently extended by Hans Heysen, Albert Namatjira and Russell Drysdale and widely popularised in the pages of the Walkabout pictorial magazine. In his desert paintings Nolan forged a personal vision of the Australian landscape which still resonates strongly today. Nolan's outback is 'transparent and at the same time impenetrable',² a place haunted by frontier history, a place of harsh, dessicated beauty.

The works have their origins in Sidney and Cynthia Nolan's journeys through Queensland in 1947 and Central Australia and the Kimberley in 1949, supplemented by a 1952 commission from the Brisbane Courier Mail to record the devastating northern drought of that year. The first public exposure of these paintings was in a David Jones' Art Gallery exhibition in 1950, a show which was heralded by the artist and critic James Gleeson as '... one of the most important events in the history of Australian painting. It is a superb and overwhelming experience, and it may not be too fanciful to imagine that future art historians will date the birth of a predominantly Australian idiom from this exhibition.'³  The exhibition included landscapes of Western Queensland, the Macdonnell Ranges and the Kimberleys, subjects seen from the road and from the air, all combined in a singular, epic vision of outback desert and mountains. Indeed, as hung in David Jones' gallery, 'many of the pictures shared a common horizon line.'⁴  In this curious compression, this synthesis of disparate locations, we can see clearly the artist's poetic intention, his aim to present 'composite impressions',⁵  'the actuality of the landscape ... intensified to the point of a dream.'⁶ 

The present work is generalised in just this way. Within boundless, rippling folds of red, gold and pink earth sits a scatter of a few more than a dozen buildings and a straggle of ghostly trees – an archetypal inland settlement. The white man's white, tin-roofed buildings shine against the ochre like flecks of micah. The narrow, purple-black shadows of their verandahs are like eyes squinting against the sun, or even like the slit in Ned Kelly's helmet. Nolan shows the typical desert town as unpeopled, silent, forgotten, nameless.

It is nevertheless possible that Inland town represents a particular place: Hall's Creek, in the Kimberley, where the Nolans spent a few days on their 1949 odyssey. Cynthia wrote that 'the township, which faced a wandering wide earth road and dry creek bed beyond, consisted of one hotel, an Australian Inland Mission hospital of a few beds, a police station, post office, four stores, and a couple of houses and shacks. All were built on a slope which was bare save for broken bottles, empty tins and petrol drums; beyond were dry spinifex hills. It was a lonely, shabby, and somewhat terrifying sight. I heard even Sidney muttering, "My God!"...'⁷ 

Whether actual, synthetic or imaginary, Nolan's township serves largely to highlight the vast expanse of the desert landscape and the richness of its worn, mottled, rutted surface. Indeed, in many ways the real subject of the work is the quality of the paint surface, the play between solidity and liquidity. Nolan described the 'process of putting on layers of colour and then burnishing them off with the stocking until I get the translucent quality I want'⁸, and here 'the white priming undercoat shows through... thinly painted hills and valleys - worked with a semi-dry bristle brush and some finger-painting.'⁹  Through such technical virtuosity, Nolan here creates a vision of the Kimberley in which (in the words of the journalist Norman Bartlett) 'the blaze of reddish-brown hits you like a ton of real red earth.'¹⁰

1.  See Geoffrey Smith, Sidney Nolan: Desert and Drought, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2003
2.  Sidney Nolan, diary notes, Alice Springs, 28 June 1949, Jinx Nolan papers, quoted ibid., p. 16
3.  James Gleeson, 'Landscapes triumph for Aust. Artist', Sun, 31 March 1950, p. 19
4.  Jane Clark, Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1987, p. 111
5.  ibid., p. 109
6.  Sidney Nolan, letter to Geoffrey Dutton, quoted in 'Sidney Nolan's Burke and Wills Series', Art and Australia, vol. 5 no. 2, September 1967, p. 459
7.  Cynthia Nolan, Outback and beyond: the travels of Cynthia and Sidney Nolan, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1994, p. 129
8.  Sidney Nolan, Time, 26 April 1963, cited in Nancy Underhill (ed.), Nolan on Nolan: Sidney Nolan in his own words, Camberwell: Viking, 2007, p. 278
9.  Clark, op. cit., p. 111
10.  Norman Bartlett, 'Nolan: An Australian artist grows up', Daily Telegraph, 7 April 1950, p. 8