Ned Kelly and Mounted Trooper 1964

SIDNEY NOLAN (1917-1992)

Ned Kelly and Mounted Trooper 1964

oil on board
152.5 x 122.0 cm
signed with initial lower left: N
signed and dated lower right: 23 oct 1964/ nolan
signed and dated verso: 23 oct 1964/ nolan

Provenance:
Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 31 July 1990, lot 98
Private collection, Sydney
Menzies, Sydney, 22 March 2012, lot 41
Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited:
Possibly Recent Paintings (1964-65) by Sidney Nolan, jointly presented by the Australian National University and the Department of the Interior, Albert Hall, Canberra, 26 August - 8 September 1965, no. 17-24 (catalogue numbers 17-24 comprised of the 'Kelly in the Landscape' series of eight works, each measuring 5ft. x 4 ft. (152.5 x 122.0 cm), all of which were painted between October 1964 and the end of the year). Confirmed in consultation with Peter Haynes, Curator of the University of Canberra Art Collection, formerly Director of the Parliament House Art Collection and the Nolan Gallery.

Estimate: $500000 - 700000

Result Hammer: $480,000

As Australia’s foremost modernist artist Sidney Nolan has come to be almost wholly identified in the public mind with his most celebrated creation painted in Melbourne in 1946-47: his first series of paintings on the subject of Australia’s most notorious bushranger Ned Kelly. This is a group of 28 paintings, 27 of which are now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. An additional painting, First Class Marksman, completing the original series recently entered the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales after having been sold in 2010 for a record figure of $5.4 million dollars. Nolan would return to the subject of the Kelly bushranger myth in the following decades after he had left Australia in 1953 to live and work in Europe. 

The artist’s first retrospective exhibition was in London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1957, and included Kelly, Spring, painted in 1956. It was a key work from the second series painted in 1955-57, and was subsequently acquired by the Arts Council of Great Britain. While some of the initial works of this second series are virtually replicas of some earlier 1940s Kelly paintings (Nolan having lost possession of the series when he left Melbourne for good in 1947) by 1956 paintings of the order of Kelly, Spring demonstrate an altogether new set of concerns, indicating above all a clear response to the doomed and bloody uprising in Hungary at this time. As the art critic for the Sunday Times observed, ‘History…topicality of reference…has overtaken Kelly, the dangerous man in the iron mask’.1

Ned Kelly and Mounted Trooper, painted in 1964, forms part of the third key group of Kelly paintings begun during an extended sojourn back in Australia. In February of that year he returned to the Wimmera region in western Victoria, travelling with the art critic Robert Hughes back to Dimboola. Here during the war years Nolan had effectively reinvented Australian landscape painting from an unprecedented cubist perspective in a radical series of Wimmera landscapes. Having taken up a Creative Arts Fellowship at the Australian National University in December Nolan also began work on what has been described as a masterpiece, a mural-sized work on nine panels entitled Riverbend I. This immense work was exhibited for the first time in May the following year at the David Jones’ Art Gallery in Sydney, together with further Kelly paintings from this third series of 1964-65.

Ned Kelly and Mounted Trooper employs the same painting method used for the Riverbend panels, a technique in which fluid paint is scraped and rubbed back to reveal the lighter coloured ground beneath. This gives a loose impressionistic effect in delineating the scrubby bush and eucalyptus vegetation spread over a relatively featureless landscape with the two lakes at its centre. The landscape itself is less that of the hilly Kelly country of Victoria’s north west than that of the Wimmera with its dark chocolate brown earth and coloured salt lakes that the artist was also painting anew at this time. In the immediate foreground Nolan has placed a light coloured horse and its rider, a uniformed police trooper resplendent in a parade ground uniform of a blue jacket, white breeches and helmet, a carbine slung across the saddle. The bearded trooper stares directly at the viewer, the face with its fixed gaze illuminated by the light of a setting sun. 

In the darkening haze of the sky above the far distant horizon is a second figure – or at least the head and shoulders of an enormous figure, looming over the landscape and set near the centre of the even vaster space of a deep blue evening sky. There is only the merest suggestion of eyes in the white slot within the large black square of the head. However loosely painted the form, it is of course the now familiar black iron mask of the Ned Kelly helmet. As viewers we are in fact positioned high above the landscape with its horse and rider, placed on a level near the Kelly figure itself. The most striking element of this painting is, of course, this immense disparity between the size of the trooper and the looming mirage-like presence of Ned Kelly’s iconic image. One figure is palpable - an immediate and tangible physical presence occupying centre stage in this strange dream-like drama. The other, for all its overwhelming size, appears more like a dark cloud – an apparition or phantom, perhaps, or a representation of some mysterious and omnipotent mythical being.

The unprecedented and equally mysterious Riverbend I, with its nine panels (Nolan produced a second version a year later) appears at first glance to be a work not only on an altogether different scale, but with a different conception of the bushranger and the pursuing trooper when compared with Kelly and Mounted Trooper. However, at least two of its panels suggest a direct link between the two works. In the immediate foreground of one Riverbend panel the horse of a resting mounted trooper drinks from the river; in a second panel the now dead body of the trooper lies floating in the same stretch of water, having been shot by Kelly whose figure occupies the middle ground amidst the dense eucalyptus tree trunks along the bank of the river. Nolan has not, in this instance, taken any liberties with the scale of these figures. The sequential images thus offer a specific dramatic narrative absent in the more surrealist-like Kelly and Mounted Trooper. Here is an artist wholly at home with the theatrical narrative conventions of art forms such as ballet and opera – and, indeed, something of the theatre with inherent concern for psychological drama is the pervasive attribute of this third Kelly series. 

Sidney Nolan’s involvement as an artist with the theatre dates from as early as 1940 when he had been commissioned to produce set and costume designs for the de Basil production of the ballet Icare at Sydney’s Theatre Royal. In 1962 he designed the sets for Kenneth MacMillan’s production of Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring, using as the centre piece the golden disk from his radical early avant-garde painting Boy and the Moon – the immense backcloth being described as ‘a cosmic glittering disc of burnt gold foil over a deep blue background’.2 Another ballet collaboration followed in 1964 with Robert Helpmann’s highly acclaimed The Display at the Adelaide arts festival. In later years Nolan’s set designs for operatic productions in London were to receive equal praise.

The deep sense of mystery that envelops Kelly and Mounted Trooper transforms this otherwise fascinating puzzle picture into one of the Sidney Nolan’s most powerful and compelling treatments of what is unquestionably the artist’s most significant subject. The Kelly paintings of 1964 would seem to have brought the artist’s decades long obsession with the archetypal Kelly story to a final point of dramatic expression in terms of its enduring themes of struggle between outlaw and authority. Not only do these paintings demonstrate the intrinsic malleability of the Kelly myth in the hands of this most protean of artists, they also demonstrate the extent to which the artist refused to be confined by the orthodoxies of any single art form in a restless and endlessly evolving art practice. 

Footnotes

1. Clark J., Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends: a retrospective exhibition: 1937-1987, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 122

2. Pearce B., Sidney Nolan 1917-1992, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, p. 246

Literature

Clark, J., Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends: a retrospective exhibition: 1937-1987, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987

Pearce, B., Sidney Nolan 1917-1992, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007

Rosenthal, T.G., Sidney Nolan, Thames & Hudson, London, 2002

Associate Professor Ken Wach
Emeritus Principal Research Fellow and Head,
School of Creative Arts
The University of Melbourne