Russell Drysdale

Australian Paintings, James R. Lawson's, Sydney, 24 October 1978, lot 22
Savill Galleries, Sydney
Mr Basil Sellers AM, Sydney; purchased from the above in 1988

Paintings and drawings by Russell Drysdale, Leicester Galleries, London, 16 June - 15 July 1972, cat. 26
Spring exhibition 1977: recent acquisitions, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 19 October - 3 November 1977

Wonder of childhood: the 1975 UNICEF calendar, New York: United Nations, 1974

There are some stress cracks in the background above the children approximately 14cm length, and some more minor stress cracks in the sky in the upper quarter of the picture. There are several minor drying cracks to both the tree stumps and some stable fine drying cracks to the left hand tree stump. This work has not been lined and has the original stretcher. UV inspection confirms there has been no retouching or restoration.
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Russell Drysdale's Leicester Galleries exhibition in 1972 represented something of an emergence from darkness: from the idea of the big mourning subject (A country funeral or Burial at Bungowannah) which had preoccupied him for some 20 years, and to which he was now planning to return; and from the more literal darkness of the effect of a cataract. With his eye successfully operated on, with the move to a bright, new-built studio at Bouddi Farm and with the pressure of a forthcoming London show, Drysdale produced a surprisingly bright collection, an exhibition of a dozen glowing jewels. The present work, from that 1972 exhibition, has the typical warm, subtly-modulated red-gold glow of Drysdale's desert pictures, that deep space the artist conjured from ochre and sun and dust. Within its infinity, however, is a close-up, intimate and charming subject: three children playing on an 'aeroplane' they have built from farmyard detritus and imagination.

A countryman himself, and an inveterate traveller through rural Australia, Drysdale was a connoisseur of wreckage and salvage. In works such as Bushfire (1944, Queensland Art Gallery), Deserted outstation (1945, John Fairfax Limited) and Emus in a landscape (1950, National Gallery of Australia), corrugated iron and collapsed house beams are at once setting and subject, their bent and blackened, torn and twisted shapes taking the forms of rocks and trees. Drysdale was also familiar with the outback tradition of 'making do'; The crow trap (1941, Newcastle Region Art Gallery) is an improvised, surreal machine. This inventive (re-) use of rubbish and nothing is a particular gift of childhood perception, and Drysdale is always alert to the tender sensitivities of children and their joy in play. In fact, the present work could be regarded as a 20 years on reprise of the delightful Children in a bath (1950, private collection), 'with its transposed imagery that seems fantastic but is in fact logical, as children are, with the bath serving as the boat of the desert, the old curtain as a sail, with broken posts and sheets of corrugated iron hanging around like masts and sails.'¹

Here the mode of transport is more contemporary (and perhaps more relevant to an air-supplied remote property), but the spirit of the picture and its image of childhood innocence is continuous with the earlier painting. The three siblings, scruffy, barefoot and toyless, are nevertheless totally absorbed in their home-made fantasy, the big brother concentrating on his duties as pilot, the sister helping the wobbly youngest get on at the back. It is not at all surprising that this painting should have been selected as one of the images for the United Nations' Children's Fund calendar for 1975, titled 'Wonder of childhood.'

1.    Geoffrey Dutton, Russell Drysdale: a biographical and critical study, London: Angus and Robertson, 1981, p.  89