Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Niagara Galleries
Mrs Ruth Prowse, Canberra
thence by descent
Private collection, Melbourne

EXHIBITED
Ruth Prowse: Thirty years of Collecting, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 1 April - 16 May 2004
Blue Chip XX: The Collectors Exhibition, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 6 March - 7 April 2018, cat. 33 (label attached verso)

LITERATURE
Ruth Prowse: Thirty years of Collecting, exhibition catalogue, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 2004, pp. 29 (illus.), 35


Anne Langridge, discusses the present work in the exhibition catalogue for Ruth Prowse: Thirty years of collecting:

'For many, Fred Williams is the painter who gave expression to a distinctive perception of space in the Australian landscape. However, the works in this exhibition recall any earlier phase in Williams' development, a time when figure and group figure compositions were more central to his interest.

The small painting and three prints in this exhibition date from the years between 1951-1957 when Williams was living in London. Poor, remote from his Melbourne student companions, he spent much of his time making visual notes of the life he found in street, park and music hall. Williams' academic art training emphasised solid construction of form and draughtsmanship. He also learnt much from pioneers of Modernism such as Cezanne, the cubists and Matisse that would eventually feed a more radical pictorial vision. However, with Untitled (the present work) we discern the unexpected influence of the French social satirist, Honore Daumier. According to Patrick McCaughey, what impressed Williams was Daumier's ability to find originality in the ordinary subject and the way Daumier searched: '... always for the fullest plastic means to render his vision...'

This sensibility is manifest in Untitled. The sketchy figures constitute a monumental grouping against an indeterminate outdoors background. The occasion could be a family picnic... The figures are anonymous, generalised with features of a mask-like blankness. Their clothes are bulky and shapeless and lack any detail that could help identify them with a particular era. Perhaps that was what the artist aimed for, ordinariness that transcends everydayness and topicality, in order to create an image of timeless and melancholy grandeur.'