IAN FAIRWEATHER

Modern British and Irish Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, Sotheby's, London, 19 July 1989, lot 492
Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above in February 1996

Paintings by Ian Fairweather, Redfern Galleries, London 1948, cat. 34

Two areas of paint loss through the brown gouache lower left near mount and similiar area lower centre right. Paper apprears to have discoloured consistent with the works age. This work is under glass and has not been viewed out its frame.
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Throughout the late 1930s and 1940s, while living in the Philippines, Singapore, India, Queensland and finally Melbourne, Ian Fairweather continued to paint pictures of his beloved China.  The present work, which probably dates to circa 1945 - 47, is in fact a looser, wetter and more calligraphic version of a much larger post-impressionist oil painted in the Philippines: Boats at Soochow Creek (1938, private collection). 

When he sent this latter work from Manila to Jock Frater in Melbourne in 1938, Fairweather wrote: 'It is like the view from my window on Soochow Street.'1  On his first visit to China in 1929, Fairweather had lived in the International Settlement in the former American concession. Situated opposite Shanghai's General Post Office, at 235 Sichuan Road, his top floor apartment overlooked Suzhou Creek, which despite its designation was a substantial waterway, choked with river traffic.  Every day Fairweather would have enjoyed this vision, and the 'hectic pattern of sampans on straw-coloured water... remained in his memory.  In the Philippines five years later, he painted Boats at Soochow Creek - a painting of life and light and commere.'2

While such sinophile subject matter remained a constant - the composition of the Suzhou creek pictures is virtually identical - Fairweather's style, technique and mood were in constant flux.  As a comparison of the two works shows, the dry-brushed post-impressionism of the 1930s gave way in the war years to a more fluid, more oriental approach, with repeated patterns, looser gestures, more areas left open, and a more vertical perspective.  While in Calcutta, possibly in response to Indian folk art manifestations of Krishna's blue, Fairweather introduced ultramarine into his palette, a handsome compliment to the existing vocabulary of brick reds and browns.  Finally, both in India and at Lina Bryans' Darebin Bridge House studio collective, he developed the habit of light-toned, light-touch overpainting, with flashes of the underlying colour visible at the edges of the loose-brushed forms. 

The time Fairweather spent in Melbourne in 1945 - 47 was one of the most settled (one cannot ever rightly say 'happy') of the first part of his career.  It allowed him time and peace to consolidate his ideas, leading to a more consistent production. And it resulted in calm, free drawings such as the present work, which guaranteed the success of his 1948 Redfern Gallery exhibition. 

1. Murray Bail, Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, p. 234
2. ibid., pp. 19 - 20