The Pinnacle, Mt Wellington c1969-1973

LLOYD REES (1895-1988)

The Pinnacle, Mt Wellington c1969-1973

oil on canvas on board
33.5 x 67.0 cm; 54.0 x 86.5 cm (framed)
signed and dated lower right: 73 L REES
signed, dated and inscribed on label attached verso: The Pinnacle Mount Wellington/ Painted - probably in Hobart in 1969 following/ weeks of studies made on the mountain/ Lloyd Rees/ 5.2.84

Provenance:
Private collection, Sydney, acquired c1984

Related Works:
The Summit, Mt Wellington II 1973, pen, ink, watercolour and pastel on paper, 48.0 x 62.8 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales collection, Sydney

Estimate: $35000 - 45000

Result Hammer: $32000

The long and illustrious career of Lloyd Rees – painter, printmaker and consummate draughtsman – was distinguished by his talent for reinvention.  Nowhere is this more evident than during the last two decades of Rees’ life, which saw a profound shift in the style and substance of his art.  Rees’ extended sojourn to Europe in the 1960s – where he encountered the disparate influences of Italian fresco painting, French Impressionism and J.M.W. Turner – prompted a renewed focus on the power of light.  As the artist explained:

If there is one thing I want now it is for my paintings to be light right through.  One of the great things the Impressionists did, probably not consciously, was to bring back what the great fresco schools of Italy had achieved, the sense of the painting being on a light background.  This is what I am trying to do here, to make the lightness of the canvas the dominating thing.(1) 

In the 1970s and 80s, Rees embarked upon a series of Australian landscapes that embraced light as their fundamental subject.  Adopting a high-key palette of pastel blues, greens and yellows, Rees presented ethereal visions of land, sea and sky that gestured towards the metaphysical, or what he called ‘the fact of endlessness’:

From quite an early age I was overwhelmed with the fact of endlessness … Planetary systems can blow up, but the universe is endless, and our little life is set in the midst of this, and everything in it has a beginning and an end … [This] gives to life a sense of mystery that is always with me.(2)  

The Pinnacle, Mt Wellington is one of several light-filled landscapes depicting the Derwent estuary and mountain ranges of Hobart.  Rees’ first visit to the city in 1967, following his son Alan’s appointment as Deputy Librarian at the University of Tasmania, would spark an affinity with Hobart for the remainder of his life.(3) Having grown accustomed to the intense, golden-hued light of Sydney Harbour, Rees was immediately struck by the different ambience and topography of Tasmania.  Jan Rees, the artist’s daughter-in-law, recalled: ‘We can always remember him commenting on the Tasmanian light, which was so different from the Sydney light.  He was acutely aware of light … He thought the Hobart light was perhaps like that in Europe.’(4)

The Pinnacle, Mt Wellington marks an important point of transition in Rees’ mature style, sitting between the rigorous draughtsmanship of earlier decades and his increasingly abstract, colourist works of the 1980s.  Here, the drawing still remains integral to the image.  From the summit of Mt Wellington, Rees frames a distant view of the Derwent estuary, set against the rugged outline of the mountainside.  The artist has focused his attention not on topographical detail but the prevailing atmosphere of this scene, which is bathed in a gentle, southern light.             

Footnotes:

1. Lloyd Rees, quoted in Kolenberg, H. & James, P., Lloyd Rees: Paintings, Drawings and Prints, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2013, p.18
2. Lloyd Rees, quoted in Free, R. & Rees, L., Lloyd Rees: The Last Twenty Years, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990, p.166
3. Free, R. & Rees, L., Lloyd Rees: An Artist Remembers, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1987, p.95
4. Jan Rees, in Rees, A., Rees, J. & Smith, S., Lloyd Rees: Coming Home [exhibition catalogue], Rockhampton Art Gallery, Queensland, 1999, p.46

Catherine Baxendale

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