Returning to Australia in December 1964 after several months in Europe, Fred Williams embarked on a sequence of works that would cement his reputation as Australia’s most accomplished landscape painter in the post-war era. The Upwey series of 1964-66 stands as Williams’ central artistic achievement, representing what Patrick McCaughey has described as ‘“classic” Williams.’¹  

The Upwey landscapes were inspired by the straggling bushland and scrub of the Dandenong ranges east of Melbourne, where Fred and Lyn Williams purchased a house and two acres of land in 1963.  Williams was already familiar with the surrounding area, having painted the dense eucalypt forests of Sherbrook a couple of years beforehand.  The artist responded to the landscape at Upwey with rigorous enthusiasm, spending days at a time sketching and painting in gouache en plein air before working with oil on large canvases in the studio. In the Upwey paintings Williams presented an authoritative vision of the Australian landscape characterised by a strong horizon line, rich tonal palette and robust, tactile surfaces.

Appearing at auction for the first time, Landscape in Upwey is one of the most important gouaches of the series and a consummate example of the Upwey ‘type’.² The landscape is starkly delineated into bands of milky sky and muddy ground, with a total absence of any ‘constructed focal point’.³ Vegetation is depicted en masse through a series of deliberate marks.  Williams’ loose circular brushwork is punctuated by the splintery lines of tree trunks, which form a calligraphic pattern across the picture plane.   This distinctive method of mark-making simultaneously captures the most expansive and intimate features of the landscape; ‘the formal, flat structured outline … contrasted with a precious complexity, irregularity and intricacy of detail.’⁴ 

Landscape in Upwey was first exhibited alongside other major works from the Upwey series at Sydney’s Rudy Komon Art Gallery in October 1966.  In the weeks preceding the exhibition Williams was filled with trepidation, conscious that he was ‘putting on the line two years of new, hard-won work’ that differed substantially from the character of his last solo exhibition two years earlier.⁵ The show was a critical and commercial triumph, confirming Williams’ pre-eminence in contemporary landscape painting.  As Elwyn Lynn wrote in a review for The Bulletin, ‘It’s not so much the superb skill with which Fred Williams distills the spirit of Australia’s ancient hills, black dams, graceless foliage, and awkward ashen tree-trunks that astonishes, but his creative acceptance of what others find inhibiting: our landscape’s monotonous drabness, infinite repetitiveness, and predictability … he is undoubtedly a most significant artist.’⁶

Footnotes:

1. McCaughey, P., Fred Williams: 1927-1982, Bay Books, Sydney, 1987, p.168
2. Ibid.
3. Grishin, S., Australian Art: A History, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne 2013, p.431
4. Ibid., p.433
5. McCaughey, P., Fred Williams: 1927-1982, p.172
6. Lynn, E., ‘Poetic Bushland,’ The Bulletin, Sydney, vol.88, no.4520, 22 October 1966, pp.54, 56

Catherine Baxendale