SIDNEY NOLAN

Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne
Lord Alistair McAlpine Collection, November 1986 (label on the reverse)
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; a gift from the above in 1995 

Janet Morse, 'The Short Sighted Explorer', Link, April 1999, pp. 16 - 17

the work has had a slight surface clean since photographed for the catalogue. overall very good condition with no visable defects or retouching. UV inspection confirms the above.
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One interpretation of Sidney Nolan's Sturt on the river bank is that it presents an image of explorers in general rather than a portrait of this particular great explorer. His attire is modern, making him an image of the present and for all time. The river is biographical, referring to Sturt's heroic journeys of exploration along the Murray-Darling system. In the best traditions of Western portraiture, Sturt towers over the landscape, the noble figure, Gulliver-like to the Lilliputian gums at his feet. The painting, however, once had another title and identification - (Man with swag), the person being Nolan himself. Melbourne art dealer Lauraine Diggins acquired it directly from the artist, Nolan telling her at the time that it was the first work he painted after he fled Heide for Sydney and the north. Sid was on the run and the river is thought to be the Murrumbidgee, the painting being about crossing the waters into a new land. Myths often have a way with works of art, and this painting may be no exception. Sometime in its later life it acquired the Sturt association.

Given whatever reasons may lie behind that, it is perhaps fair today that it lay claim to both interpretations. The first is the biographical self portrait , of the artist-explorer crossing his Rubicon, taking that irreversible step of cutting himself off from Heide and all its associations, heading eventually into Central Australia in search of new lands to paint. The second is of the inland explorer Sturt in a setting baked brown and the sky coloured by heat. Captain Charles Sturt was a major figure in the nineteenth century European exploration of Australia - of the westward flowing rivers and looking for the fabled inland sea. In 1829 Sturt and his party travelled down the Murrumbidgee River, reaching its confluence with a larger river he named the Murray. They continued down the Murray to where it is joined by the Darling, and in February of 1830 reached a large body of water, which Sturt named Lake Alexandrina. The return journey was daunting, rowing up river against the current in the middle of summer. The privations they suffered caused Sturt to experience blindness for several months, his health never fully recovering. The river system they explored must have seemed never ending. Nolan, in Sturt on the river bank, suggests this endless flow by stretching the river across the painting, limited only by the very edges of the picture itself. In (Man with swag) Nolan also had a connection with the Murrumbidgee, his Rubicon. Throughout his life he too was an inveterate traveller, a kind of artist-explorer, his journeys beginning once he crossed that river. The identification of the one with the other is understandable.