Sidney Nolan

(1917-1992)

Nhill - Wimmera, 1943

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Sir Sidney Nolan, United Kingdom, until 1992
Lady Mary Nolan, United Kingdom, until 1997
Private collection, United Kingdom, gifted from the above

EXHIBITED
Sidney Nolan, Contemporary Art Society Studio Exhibition, Melbourne, 3 August 1943, cat. 6


Robert Hughes wrote of Nolan's Wimmera paintings in his ground-breaking book Art of Australia: 'Nolan rescued Australian landscape, at one stroke, from the blue-and-gold limbo into which it had fallen, and his paintings exhale that magical sense of first-time confrontation one sees in an early Streeton or Roberts'. The Wimmera series is widely acknowledged as the first major shift in Australian landscape painting since the Heidelberg School of the 1880s. It was Nolan's first major body of work.

Nolan was living with his patrons John and Sunday Reed at their house, Heide, when he was conscripted in April 1942. He was posted to a unit guarding supplies in the Wimmera district of Western Victoria in May and served there until February 1944. The first six months in the army allowed him little time or space to paint other than to fill small sketch books. From late 1942, while stationed at Dimboola and later in nearby Nhill, he was able to paint on a larger scale and produced a concise group of oil paintings depicting these isolated townships and the vast wheatbelt surrounding them. Nolan's greatest difficulty, however, was obtaining paint and canvas during the wartime restrictions. The breakthrough that revolutionised Nolan's art - most famously in his Ned Kelly series of 1945-47 - came at the start of 1943 when Sunday Reed, unearthed a batch of Ripolin enamel, Picasso's paint of choice. Its intense colours and rapid drying time were perfect for Nolan's technique.

From February to April 1943 Nolan produced some of his most iconic images, almost all of which are now held in public collections. As paintings were completed, they were sent to Heide where Sunday recorded their arrival in a notebook (Reed Papers, Ms 13186). The present work arrived on 14 April and was described by her as 'Canvas 30 x 25 [inches] Ripolin - 'Nhill' dated April 43'. It depicts two children, or perhaps an adult and child, seen from above and behind walking past the municipal water tower which contemporary photographs show was one of the town's most prominent features. The figures' path to their right is blocked by buildings and separate them from the golden wheat paddocks beyond that stretch to the high horizon. The painting's companion piece, Railway Yards, Dimboola, 1943, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, painted a few days earlier includes a similar pair of figures seen from behind looking down from a footbridge over railway lines towards a silo and the surrounding country.

Nolan deserted from the army in 1944 and went into hiding. No commercial exhibition of his Wimmera oils was therefore held at the time and the series remained with the artist, or the Reeds, and one or two close friends. In 1983, Nolan gave all but a couple of the major works to the National Gallery of Victoria and the Reeds donated or sold theirs to major public collections. The present work is the most significant large Wimmera oil to be offered in the past fifty years.