FRED WILLIAMS

Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney
Collection of Raymond and Diana Kidd; purchased from the above in October 1984

Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney, 1984
A Private Collection, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, April 1992, cat. 120

Patrick McCaughey, Fred Williams, Bay Books Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1980, pp. 30, 31 (illus.), fig. 17

The work is framed in a gold timber traditional style frame. There are areas of cracking through the green background and areas of drying cracks on the figures.
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In 1946 the young Fred Williams was persuaded by his National Gallery School friend Ian Armstrong to join him at George Bell's Saturday afternoon classes. In contrast to the Gallery School's diet of tonal realism, Bell's regimen was a disciplined post-impressionist modernism – 'enclosing the mass by line was [his] essential message.'¹

The present work, with its simple formula of three nudes in a pyramidal composition, has the characteristic marks of a Bell School 'homework' – pictorial design problems Bell would set for his student to complete between classes, tasks such as 'still life – flat pattern' or (perhaps) 'three nudes – triangular arrangement'. However, this striking, well-developed study also shows the young Williams's other, Old Master explorations: there is something of Rembrandt in the combination of delicate glazes and raw impasto; the torsion of the figures and the rhythm of their connected arms seem to come from Tintoretto (Williams owned a copy of Hans Tietze's monograph on the artist); and critic Alan McCulloch also identified the influence of Daumier.²

Reviewing the first exhibition by the 'Three Musketeers' - Ian Armstrong, Harry Rosengrave and Fred Williams - in February of 1951, The Age perceptively noted both Williams's 'forcefulness of execution' and his 'promise of future development'.³ Early compositions such as the present work are important precursors of the inventive figure paintings and prints Williams made in London in the early 1950s.

1. Patrick McCaughey, Fred Williams 1927-1982 (rev. ed.), Murdoch Books, Sydney, 1996, p. 30
2. 'Décor catches true spirit of "The Barber"', The Herald, 27 February 1951, p. 10
3. 'Exhilarating work by Young Artists', The Age, 27 February 1951, p. 2