RUSSELL DRYSDALE

Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney
Fine Australian and European Paintings, Sotheby's Melbourne, 19 and 20 August 1996, lot 215
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above

Seventy Years of Australian Painting, Knox Grammar School, Wahroonga, 9-12 July 1970, no. 47
Russell Drysdale 1912-1981, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, National Tour December 1997 - November 1998, cat. 67 (illus.)

Geoffrey Dutton, Russell Drysdale, Thames and Hudson, London, 1964, p. 93, pp. 163, 165 (illus.) (rev. ed. 1969, fig. 137)
Robert Hughes, Russell Drysdale, London Magazine, December 1964, f.p. 66 (illus.)
Lou Klepac, The Life and Work of Russell Drysdale, Bay Books, Sydney, 1983, p.165 (illus.)
Geoffrey Smith, Russell Drysdale 1912 - 81, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, pp. 165-66 (illus.)

This work has fine signs of drying cracks through upper-left hand side of the hat. There is also some cracking in the upper-left in sky and a signs of a radiating crack in the lower centre edge and fine cracking along the stretcher bar line to the left of the signature. It is framed in a gold timber concave frame with beige linen slip. There is no evidence of retouching confirmed by ultraviolet inspection.
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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."

RusselI Drysdale has a particularly distinguished place in 20th century Australian art, as pioneer modernist, landscape surrealist, social documentarist and sympathetic recorder of Aboriginal traditions. But he is probably most fondly regarded for his portraits of European bush battlers, for 'his compassionate record of a people and an epoch in a limbo that is partly reality, part legend. These nostaligic "Drysdale people" are not the inhabitants of the Lucky Country; it has been built upon their very bones.'¹

The celebrated character portraits are not sentimental-nationalist fictions, but distillations of deep personal and social truths. Drysdale grew up on the land, and remebered 'men... born about 1860s... men who had shorn down the Darling and whose fathers before them reached back into the days of ticket-of-leave men, the rural workers, the nomads, the shearers, the yard-builders, all those curious strange people who had little luggage but a swag, and who travelled and made and built the ethos that we know in the back country today. And even as a boy, a young lad, I virtually was in touch with it because I was talking to old men whose memories of their fathers' stories were still extant.'²

For Drysdale, 'those are the people that are fascinating. They've got this character. They are characters. You can take your society people, however beautiful they might be, but to me they're ephemeral people. These others aren't. They just go on. They're the kind of towers that reach out. The survival thing means something.'³

In 1962 Drysdale met Patrick McCormack, a Riverina farmer then working as foreman at the Tocumwal aerodrome. McCormack was nicknamed 'Rocky', from his having spent some years with the New South Wales Railways based at The Rock, near Wagga Wagga, and Rocky McCormack would prove to be 'one ... of the artist's favourite characters like Midnight Osborne, Old Larsen, Billy the Lurk and Brandy John, who have become part of folklore.'⁴

Initially drawn literally larger than life, the portrait did not satisfy the artist, and he subsequently decided to reduce the scale. It was a slow, difficult adjustment, and the painting was not finally completed until the following year. Other factors contributed to the delay, and not just Drysdale's famous prevarication. The artist's son Tim took his own life in July 1962, and the tragedy had a devastating impact on Drysdale and his wife Bon. Inconsolable, Bon too committed suicide, in November the following year.

Despite the technical difficulty of the scaling-back and the personal trauma Drysdale suffered during this period, Rocky McCormack nevertheless presents a broad, relaxed, amiable image. In this Rocky is not unique; while many of Drysdale's outback women and children (and Aboriginal men) have blank or melancholy expressions, his male bush battlers are often jovial, whether with the vacant smile of Happy Jack (1961, private collection) or the more sardonic,under-the-moustache grins of Old Harry (1961,private collection) or The Old Boss (1967, private collection). Under a thatch of dark, unruly hair, Rocky's pushed-back, upturned hat brim has something of the comic aspect of Chad Morgan's, his crows'-feet crinkle with amusement and his broad, slightly lop-sided smile radiates good humour and goodwill. Below this friendly dial the sitter's torso comfortably occupies the full bottom of the canvas, the arms loosely folded, the rolled-up sleeves revealing the strong forearms and big hands of the archetypal bush worker.

One of only a mere handful of paintings completed during Drysdale's annus horribilis of 1962-63, and a work of unusually ambitious scale, Rocky McCormack is a beautiful, harmonious arrangement in opal red and blue, and one of the largest, most successful and most popular of the artist's justly-celebrated bush portraits.

1. 'Exhibition commentary', Art and Australia, vol. 5, no. 2, September 1967, p. 429
2. Russell Drysdale, interview with Geoffrey Dutton,Sydney, 1963, in Geoffrey Dutton (ed.) Artist's Portraits, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1992, p. 122
3. ibid p. 123
4. Lou Klepac, The Life and Work of Russell Drysdale, Bay Books, Sydney, 1983, p. 165
5. Dutton, op cit., pp. 124 - 5