Saplings, Poets Lane II 1959

FRED WILLIAMS (1927-1982)

Saplings, Poets Lane II 1959

oil on board
39.0 x 42.5 cm
estate stamp verso

Provenance:
Estate of the artist (estate no. 481)
Niagara Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso)
Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited:
Fred Williams - Landscapes 1957-60, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 5 February - 13 March 2013, cat.16 (illus.)

Reference:
Mollison, J., A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1989, p.45 (illus.)
Fred Williams - Landscapes 1957-60, exhibition catalogue, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 2013, cat.16 (illus.)

Related Works:
Saplings, Poets Lane I, 1959, oil on composition board, 43.0 x 38.5 cm, illus. in Fred Williams - Landscapes 1957-60, exhibition catalogue, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 2013, cat.15

Estimate: $55000 - 70000

The paintings produced by Fred Williams in the period 1958-59 play an important role in his artistic development as well as providing us with a valuable guide to the process by which he arrived at his mature work. These paintings, which in many respects more closely resemble his mature works than much of the work he produced in the early 1960s, are prescient of the work for which the artist is best known by several years. 

Williams had spent the greatest part of the early 1950s in London. As well as examining the old masters and visiting museums, he concentrated his own painting efforts on figure compositions, many based on Music Hall subjects, as well as devoting much of his energy to printmaking. His interest in landscape painting flagged, so that although Turner and Constable played an important part in his work while he was in England, as spiritual mentors they were rejected. It was French art and in particular the example of Cézanne that formed the notion in Williams’ mind that the Australian landscape was different and would require a different technique to paint it. He also knew that the subject would provide a means to exercise his own intellectual impetus. The realisation coincided with the landfall of his return to Australia late in 1956. 

‘I stepped off the ship (in Fremantle) and it struck me… I just thought I would like to paint some pictures of it and set about doing it.’1 The years spent in London provided Williams with the emotional and intellectual momentum to do what the Great European masters had done: to set about the interpretation and representation of this unique subject in an individual way. 

Williams saw the Australian Bush as an artistic nut that needed to be cracked. He knew that what he was attempting was quixotic if not subversive. For his trouble, Williams was regarded by some of his peers as a crank or misguided. A famous exchange between the newly returned Fred Williams and his old friend and colleague the painter John Brack:

Brack: Well Freddy, what are you going to do?
Williams: I am going to paint the gum tree.
Brack: You can’t do that. Everybody’s done that.
Williams: Well it’s just what I’m going to do.2

Williams recognised that there was a process that was needed to be undergone, an ordeal, including a requisite time in the wilderness, but it was it seems from his statements and recorded thoughts that he saw that he could do something important and that achieving it would be an inevitable outcome of his own effort and his character. All of his work to date, as well as the work to come would be devoted to the effort. Experimentation, following leads, backing up from one-way streets, and pushing on became the order of these days. From 1956 through to 1964 Williams’ work changed, hesitated, progressed and eventually crystallised to become his signature style. It was this work, the synthesis of all of his experiences and investigations through the 1950s and early 1960s that became the basis of Williams’ national and international reputation. 

Footnotes

1. Fred Williams, quoted in Mollison, J, A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams, Australian National Gallery/Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p.35

2. ibid

Timothy Abdallah BA (Hons)