Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Sir Sidney Nolan, United Kingdom, until 1992
Lady Nolan, United Kingdom, until 2016
The Estate of Lady Nolan, United Kingdom

EXHIBITED
Exhibition of Paintings of Antarctica by Sidney Nolan, R.G. Menzies Library, Australian National University, Canberra, 17 - 26 June 1965
Sidney Nolan, Australian Galleries, Melbourne 21 September - 1 October 1965, cat. 24

LITERATURE
ANU Open Research Library, photograph, 1965, the present painting is visible at the opening of Sidney Nolan's Paintings of Antarctica exhibition held in the RG Menzies Building of the ANU Library
Rodney James, Sidney Nolan - Antarctic Journey, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria, 2006, cat. 53, p. 78, as Explorer

RELATED WORKS
Explorer, September 1964, oil on composition board, 121.9 x 121.9cm (NGA 2017.227); and Explorer, 18 September 1964, oil on composition board, 121.9 x 121.9cm (NGA 2017.231), both in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2017 from the estate of Lady Nolan

The presence of the great explorers was central to the Antarctic series. The imagery of the hooded and goggled men encrusted in ice was inspired by photographs taken by Herbert Ponting during the Scott expedition and Frank Hurley who accompanied the Mawson and Shackleton expeditions. Nolan had used historic photographs before as source material for both the Kelly and Burke and Wills series. However, in the case of the Antarctic explorers his diary reveals other visual references too as diverse as Byzantine saints and Aboriginal carvings.

At the first exhibitions of the Antarctic series in New York, London, Canberra and Melbourne in 1965 the paintings of the explorers were displayed interspersed among the landscapes. As Allan Moorhead wrote in his introduction to the New York and London catalogues, 'The polar explorer is an embattled figure with staring goggled eyes and a swirl of protective covering round his head and body... He is a static object, it is the landscape that moves: the drifting iceberg, the circling sun and the mirage towering up and dissolving on the heights above.'
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For other important works from this series see lots 113, 156 and 193.