Lot Essay
'Robbed 1947' belongs to Nolan's first series of paintings on the subject of the Victorian bushranger Ned Kelly. Painted between March 1946 and May 1947, all in ripolin enamel on masonite (except for one on plywood) and all measuring three feet by four feet, a core group of twenty-six from the series was first exhibited at the Velasquez Gallery in Melbourne in 1948, and would go on to make Nolan's reputation as the most radical artist at work in post-war Australia. All but one of this group are now in the Australian National Gallery.
Nolan was already thinking deeply about Kelly when he was producing his Wimmera and St. Kilda pictures in Melbourne and a handful of preliminary Kelly subjects emerged in 1945. He toured the Kelly country of north-eastern Victoria with Max Harris in 1946 and researched the history of the Kelly gang before embarking on the series proper in early 1946.
The series of pictures all record historical incidents from the Kelly saga, from the pursuit of the gang by police patrols in Victoria (the present picture probably shows Sergeants Kennedy and McIntyre fleeing Kelly after their patrol had been surprised in camp near Stringybark Creek in 1878) to Kelly's eventual capture, trial and execution in Melbourne in 1880.
Nolan's emotional identification with his subject appears to have driven the first Kelly series. Kelly himself appears to dominate the landscape and action. Nevertheless the subject becomes a means for the artist to approach the Australian landscape and re-invent it with an orginality that had not been seen on the continent since the 1880s: 'Nolan's urge to paint Australian landscape was nevertheless undiminished. Hitch-hiking with Max Harris through the Kelly country of north-eastern Victoria - a rough scrubby landscape 'gone back to Genesis' - he felt that the bush was 'the most real aspect of life, because of the smell and the light and everything else.' The Kelly story was thus 'a way of showing the Australian bush ... One is always trying to put something in front of the bush.'' (J. Clark, Sidney Nolan, Landscapes and Legends, Melbourne, 1987, p. 71). The landscape itself was already perceived as the implicit subject of the Kelly pictures of 1946-7 by John Reed in his article in the 1967 issue of Art and Australia, and which illustrated the present picture in colour: 'Actually the majority of these paintings can be appreciated as pure landscapes, into which figures, no matter how striking, imperceptibly merge, and we come to realize that we have never before seen - and perhaps have not since seen - such an inspired realization of the Australian bush. Here we find all those strange qualities - the apparent monotony, the apparent harshness, the apparent rejection of man - which have so disturbed Australians, and to some extent alienated them from their own land (or, rather from the land they have failed to make their own); but at the same time Nolan has penetrated beneath this first vision and revealed the deep, soft beauty of the bush, with all its subtleties. Finally, we understand why we are so attached to it, why it means so much to us; and for many who have experienced these paintings fully there comes, perhaps for the first time, a complete realization of themselves as Australians, as part of a unique country which gives them qualities recognizably different from others and of special value.' (J. Reed, Nolan's Kelly Paintings, Art and Australia (Nolan Issue), September 1967, p. 443)
Nolan was already thinking deeply about Kelly when he was producing his Wimmera and St. Kilda pictures in Melbourne and a handful of preliminary Kelly subjects emerged in 1945. He toured the Kelly country of north-eastern Victoria with Max Harris in 1946 and researched the history of the Kelly gang before embarking on the series proper in early 1946.
The series of pictures all record historical incidents from the Kelly saga, from the pursuit of the gang by police patrols in Victoria (the present picture probably shows Sergeants Kennedy and McIntyre fleeing Kelly after their patrol had been surprised in camp near Stringybark Creek in 1878) to Kelly's eventual capture, trial and execution in Melbourne in 1880.
Nolan's emotional identification with his subject appears to have driven the first Kelly series. Kelly himself appears to dominate the landscape and action. Nevertheless the subject becomes a means for the artist to approach the Australian landscape and re-invent it with an orginality that had not been seen on the continent since the 1880s: 'Nolan's urge to paint Australian landscape was nevertheless undiminished. Hitch-hiking with Max Harris through the Kelly country of north-eastern Victoria - a rough scrubby landscape 'gone back to Genesis' - he felt that the bush was 'the most real aspect of life, because of the smell and the light and everything else.' The Kelly story was thus 'a way of showing the Australian bush ... One is always trying to put something in front of the bush.'' (J. Clark, Sidney Nolan, Landscapes and Legends, Melbourne, 1987, p. 71). The landscape itself was already perceived as the implicit subject of the Kelly pictures of 1946-7 by John Reed in his article in the 1967 issue of Art and Australia, and which illustrated the present picture in colour: 'Actually the majority of these paintings can be appreciated as pure landscapes, into which figures, no matter how striking, imperceptibly merge, and we come to realize that we have never before seen - and perhaps have not since seen - such an inspired realization of the Australian bush. Here we find all those strange qualities - the apparent monotony, the apparent harshness, the apparent rejection of man - which have so disturbed Australians, and to some extent alienated them from their own land (or, rather from the land they have failed to make their own); but at the same time Nolan has penetrated beneath this first vision and revealed the deep, soft beauty of the bush, with all its subtleties. Finally, we understand why we are so attached to it, why it means so much to us; and for many who have experienced these paintings fully there comes, perhaps for the first time, a complete realization of themselves as Australians, as part of a unique country which gives them qualities recognizably different from others and of special value.' (J. Reed, Nolan's Kelly Paintings, Art and Australia (Nolan Issue), September 1967, p. 443)