WHYTE'S IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART 29 MAY 2023 AT 6PM

64 39 Sir Sidney Robert Nolan OM AC (Australian, 1917–1992) NED KELLY LANDSCAPE, c.1968 crayon and gouache signed centre right; titled on label on reverse 20.50 by 30in. (52.1 by 76.2cm) Frame Size: 27 by 36.5in. (68.6 by 92.7cm) Provenance: Purchased directly from the artist by a previous owner; Unknown auction, 2 March 1988, lot 357; The Guinness Gallery, Foxrock, Dublin; Whence purchased by the previous owner; Thence by descent One of Australia’s leading 20th century artists, Sidney Nolan was of Irish descent. A painter of remarkable facility, adept in a wide range of media, he established his reputation at home and internationally in the post-SecondWorldWar years with his first series of works on the theme of Ned Kelly. At the heart of Nolan’s approach was the outlaw’s unwieldy suit of homemade “armour”. The son of a transported Irish father and an immigrant Irish mother, Kelly gained notoriety and became a folk hero. He saw a political dimension in his lawlessness, and that view was echoed by the general, impoverished population familiar with the callous brutality of the colonial regime. Nolan was drawn to narrative and myth, and Kelly’s story was ideally suited to his talents. Rather than opt for the pomposity of conventional academic history painting, he told the tale in a popular vernacular, with almost comic-book or childlike iconography. The silhouette of Kelly’s armour, and particularly the helmet with its postbox slit, stood in for the man himself, and became an immediately recognisable symbol in Australian art. Nolan’s various series of works on the subject dealt with all known aspects of the story. To some extent he had a personal stake in the tale, as his own grandfather had been one of the numerous policemen brought in to pursue the hapless Kelly. He was captured after being grievously wounded, and was only 25 when he was hanged by the authorities. The vast Australian landscape is central to Nolan’s treatment of the subject, and he was a superb painter of that landscape, often evoking the punishing, sunburnt terrain by scraping away as much as by applying paint - here gouache - and using the resist properties of wax crayon. There was a major retrospective at the RDS in Dublin in 1973. Most recently, his series of spray paintings, the Celtic Image, was shown at the Burren College of Art in 2018. He first visited the Burren in the early 1970s, knowing his antecedents had lived there. In their memory, he donated a body of six works on the theme of the Wild Geese to the IMMA collection. Aidan Dunne, May 2023 €15,000-€20,000 (£13,160-£17,540 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot39