Lot 139
Sidney Nolan(1917-1992)Drought, 1962
2 December 2025, 19:30 AEDT
SydneyAU$70,000 - AU$90,000
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Sidney Nolan (1917-1992)
Drought, 1962
signed and dated lower right: 'NOLAN. 62'
signed and dated verso: 'NOLAN / 12 AUG 1962'
oil on board
90.5 x 124.0cm (35 5/8 x 48 13/16in).
signed and dated lower right: 'NOLAN. 62'
signed and dated verso: 'NOLAN / 12 AUG 1962'
oil on board
90.5 x 124.0cm (35 5/8 x 48 13/16in).
Footnotes
PROVENANCE
Collection of the artist
The Collection of Mascot Industries Ltd
Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 7 July 1982, lot 1222
Barry Stern Galleries, Sydney
Private collection, United Kingdom, acquired from the above in 1982
LITERATURE
Sandra McGrath and John Olsen, The Artist and the Desert, Bay Books, Sydney and London, 1981, p. 66-67 (illus.)
Drought encapsulates the vastness and remoteness that characterised Nolan's vision of the Australian outback. Between June and September of 1949 Nolan embarked on a journey through Central Australia - the Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia with his new wife Cynthia, née Reed, and her daughter Jinx. The tour, which took three months, marked the beginning of Nolan's fascination with the central Australian landscape, a fascination that weaved through several series over the following decades, producing sequenced works dedicated to the drought as well as the infamous Burke and Wills story and their epic struggle for survival in the outback.
Cynthia Nolan also wrote a novel of the experience describing the journey with considerable insight, simply titled 'Outback' and published in London in 1962, the same year the present work was painted. Nolan took numerous photographs, especially from the aeroplanes they charted to the more remote communities. These photographs fused with a rich memory bank of images he stored in his mind, Nolan created a superb body of work which captured the isolation and expanse of the arid outback.
In a letter of March 1953, Nolan described his Drought series as it evolved to friend and fellow artist, Albert Tucker, 'The trip brought me in touch with the atmosphere of drought and this, added to the experiences of the previous trip that Cynthia and I made through the Northern Territory, has set me painting a big series of dead animals, the dried carcasses of horses, cattle, camels etc. It is a grim subject, but it has got me by the short hairs and I seem able to get a good deal of controlled tension into the paintings. I hope for an exhibition towards the end of the year.'
After a well-received exhibition of the series, leading interior designer Marion Hall Best selected one of the works for her display in the inaugural Society of Interior Designers exhibition in Woollahra that September.
Art historian, Sandra McGrath discussed with Nolan the drought series in The Artist and the Desert in which the present work is illustrated, 'A carcass is a riveting desert image which not only symbolises the terrifying aspects of this arid world but which has interesting formal potentials... Nolan places the carcass in a landscape in which the decaying body seems as much a part of the environment as the rocks, the sand or the mulga bush.'