Artwork of the Day - Nolan - Wimmera

Sir Sidney Nolan (1917-1992)
Wimmera 1942
Ripolin enamel on canvas
42 x 52 cm (sight size)
initialled and dated lower right: 11.42 N
no.8085

Provenance:
The Estate of Sir Sidney Nolan

From May 1942 until February 1944 Sidney Nolan was stationed as an army guard in the remote Wimmera district of North Western Victoria. Despite the limitations that the situation imposed on the young artist, it nonetheless gave rise to one of Nolan’s most important early series, focusing predominantly on the expansive wheat-fields dominating the region.

Painted in November 1942, when Nolan was stationed in the town of Dimboola, Wimmera arises from an especially noteworthy phase in the series. For the artist Albert Tucker in Nolan’s Dimboola paintings, “we glimpse for the first time since Roberts, McCubbin and the early Streeton, the return of an authentic national vision on a higher and more independent level.”1

The painting bears the characteristic hallmarks of Nolan’s Wimmera landscapes, in particular the vivid primary colours and flattened picture plain. In common with a number of other Wimmera works, the rapidly executed bushes in the foreground are dramatically offset by the bright blue sky and sun-drenched landscape.

In 1983 Nolan donated a large number of his Wimmera works to the National Gallery of Victoria where they are now on permanent display in the Gallery of Australian art.

DS

1 Albert Tucker, ‘Two Melbourne exhibitions of paintings’, Angry Penguins 5, September, 1943.