Lloyd Rees

Private collection, Melbourne
Savill Galleries, Sydney
Mr Basil Sellers AM, Sydney; purchased from the above in 1992

Lloyd Rees, Realities Gallery, Melbourne, 1-26 March 1982, cat. 12

Gary Catalano, 'City of light', National Times, 21 - 27 March 1982, p. 36
Robert Rooney, 'New waves for old traditions', Age, 17 March 1982, p. 10

There are no visible defects, the work has not been lined and has the original stretcher. UV inspection confirms there has been no retouching or restoration.
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The longevity and productivity of Lloyd Rees was such that Renée Free has identified two distinct 'mature styles': the first comprising the dappled and encrusted landscapes of the 1960s and 1970s – views of Tuscan hillsides, French cathedrals and the Australian Central Desert; and the second the broad, bright visions of Sydney Harbour and the Derwent estuary, where 'there is simplification to the point of universal form; there is mastery of technique to the point where it no longer matters.'¹

These late late works were an immediate critical and popular success; in 1981, the year the present work was painted, the artist was commissioned by the Sydney Morning Herald to paint a work for its sesquicentenary and was awarded the Art Gallery of New South Wales' Wynne Prize for landscape. That same year the much-beloved artist was also the subject of a retrospective exhibition (his third!), mounted by the University Gallery at the University of Melbourne.

The critics, too, were warmly appreciative. Reviewing the exhibition in which the present work was first shown, Robert Rooney described how 'in the Harbor paintings of the 70s and 80s Rees approaches his subjects with urgency and improvisation, smearing paint with his hands or letting turps-thinned oil run down the canvas ... The drawing is loose and sketchy and the color is predominantly high-keyed blues and greens, yellows, salmon pink and red accents. Confronted by the three or four large oils which line the back wall of the gallery, I have an uneasy feeling that Rees has sometimes sacrificed structure in his pursuit of atmospheric coloring and Turneresque vaguaries [sic]. However, such objections are irrelevant in the overall unity of color and form in "The Morning Ferry"...'²  Gary Catalano suggested that in these paintings 'light does not merely define of illuminate forms, it is also the substance from which the same forms are moulded,' describing the present work's 'melting ferry and pivoting yacht' as 'mere flashes of light.'³

The morning ferry is very similar in composition to Passing vision (1982, private collection), and shows the same view across Sydney Harbour from the artist's Lane Cove studio. It probably also reflects the same genesis, the same inspiration, as described by the artist himself: 'One Monday morning I went down and sat on the seat by the wharf. It was one of those mornings that I've always reacted to, everything coming through a veil, a gentle light – whitish with a touch of blue – and it was like that all the way into town. It was light and delicate, actually a prelude to a day of fog the next day. The light came through so wonderfully. I got up on the ferry and got an outer seat at the back. I looked out upon it all and suddenly I thought: I don't want to go to Heaven because it can't be as beautiful as this.'⁴

We are most grateful to Jan and Alan Rees for their assistance in cataloguing this work.

1.  Renée Free, Lloyd Rees: the last twenty years, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1990, p. 13
2.  Robert Rooney, 'New waves for old traditions', Age, 17 March 1982, p. 10
3.  Gary Catalano, 'City of light', National Times, 21 - 27 March 1982, p. 36
4.  Lloyd Rees, quoted in Free, op. cit., pp. 166 - 167