SIDNEY NOLAN

Marlborough Fine Art, London
Foundation Emile Veranneman, Kruishoutem, Belgium; purchased from the above
Private collection, Belgium; purchased from the above in the late 1960s; thence by descent to the present owner
Private collection, Belgium

This work appears to be presented in an original silver painted timber frame with dark linen mount. There are several fly spots on the picture surface. UV inspection reveals an area of retouching approximately 2.5cm to right of man and a smaller area of retouching between camel's front legs. Overall good original condition.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

'They had seen the fantastic dawn colours of the desert and had walked through country where white salt pans ran through scarlet sandhills with the cloudless sky overhead – a landscape of red, white and blue. And perhaps just as important as all this they had learned how to come to terms with the inevitable... - with the certainty of death – and had not found it too unbearable.'¹

Sidney Nolan's began painting Burke and Wills in 1948, the year after he completed the first Ned Kelly series. Inspired by travel through the implacable vastness of the Queensland outback, Nolan overlaid the landscape with another picaresque, 19^th century Irish-colonial narrative, that of the tragedy of the Victorian Exploring Expedition of 1860-61.

The Burke and Wills story was to prove every bit as sustaining as Kelly. More so, in fact. As Geoffrey Dutton observed in his article on the series: 'The variation in Nolan's Burke and Wills paintings over nearly twenty years has been one of technique, ripolin to P.V.A. and oil, rather than quality. While the later Kelly series is often inferior to the early, there are masterpieces at all dates in Nolan's absorption with the two explorers.'²

In the earliest sequence, the explorers are wide-eyed daguerrotype portraits, cyphers of history and civilization floating like Nolan's cut-out birds over the flat red-brown desert. In the 1962 paintings, it is the camels that dominate. 'Their riders [are] perched precariously on the steep rump [and] seem to have grown into the beasts, a kind of desert centaur.'³

A few years further on and the Burke-Explorer figure has dismounted (or fallen off, or been thrown). The camel, now hunched and with its head lowered, watches the desert-prophet-explorer-martyr with benevolent curiosity, both creatures perched precariously on the bottom edge of the picture, at the bottom of the world. In these 1966-67 paintings 'earth and man are the protagonists.'⁴ Burke and Wills here traverse Nolan's mid-60s mud, expressionist earthscapes such as those of Riverbend (1964-65, Australian National University) or Desert Storm (1966, Art Gallery of Western Australia). As Elwyn Lynn put it: 'Burke's world is a shifting dream, the rocks and sand coalescing into a terrain that is unfixed and melting.'⁵

1. Alan Moorehead, Sidney Nolan, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, 1965
2. Geoffrey Dutton, 'Sidney Nolan's Burke and Wills Series', Art and Australia, 1966, p. 459
3. The Critic, Perth, quoted in Jane Clark, Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
4. Dutton, op. cit
5. Elwyn Lynn, in Elwyn Lynn and Sidney Nolan, Sidney Nolan – Australia, Bay Books, Sydney, 1979