Lot Essay
Painted in his studio in the Chelsea Hotel, New York, in five days at the end of 1965 and beginning of 1966, the present picture is a second version of the polyptych Riverbend 1964-5 painted exactly a year earlier and now in the Australian National University. The second version was painted for display at the Montreal Expo 67 and though widely exhibited, has remained in the collection of the artist. It was most recently hung by Nolan himself at The Rodd in August 1992.
The subject of the picture is ostensibly the murder of Constable Scanlon by Ned Kelly at Stringybark Creek in the Wombat Ranges of North-eastern Victoria in October 1878. Scanlon was one of three policemen killed by the Kelly Gang of bushrangers at Stringybark Creek in the incident which would culminate in the Gang's apprehension two years later at Glenrowan and Kelly's trial and execution. The subject is a second reprise for Nolan of his first Kelly pictures of 1946-7 which had made his reputation at home and abroad as a leading and radical modern painter in post-war Australia.
Riverbend is as perfect an expression of Nolan in middle-age as the first Kelly series was of Nolan in youth. The hard bright enamel
Ripolin of the first series gives way to more painterly oil. The
prominent figure of Kelly which had dominated the landscape and action now recedes into the bush. The episodic structure of the first series is replaced by a single frieze in which the narrative is taken over by the river landscape: three brief moments in the death of Constable Scanlon, which now appear simultaneously, barely register in the context of this timeless landscape.
If the 40's panels with Kelly in high profile were driven by the young Nolan's emotional identification with his subject, the later Riverbend is conjured from Nolan's memory and imagination. Away from Australia, it is the landscape which lingers and consumes him ('[Riverbend] is a combination (in my mind) of the Goulburn River, at Shepparton where I spent my boyhood holidays, and the Murray... I can still evoke in myself, in my studio on the Thames, the river that I saw as a boy. A big long river, with the sun coming through the leaves, the vertical leaves of the gum trees. I've never seen it anywhere else...' (Nolan interviewed in London, The Listener, 13 Nov. 1969)) just as it consumes and stretches beyond his now outlived alter ego: 'In the Riverbend sequence, the figures of Ned Kelly and a policeman are as inconspicuous as St. Anthony being tempted in a Brueghel landscape. It's a violent enough incident, in which the pursuer is waylaid and killed, but they are diminished by their setting, and treated like small animals camouflaged against larger predators, taking their colour from the pallid trunks of the gum trees. Four panels along, they vanish altogether, like time past, and an immeasurably older past of gums and gunmetal water stretches silently into the future' (Robert Melville in the 1968 exhibition catalogue).
The two Riverbend sequences are part of a group of ambitious polyptychs produced by Nolan in the mid-60s. Most of these rework the heroic themes first tackled in the 40s and now summarise their subjects in single extended panoramas. Technique as well as format changes with a distinct shift to a more painterly treatment: 'The loosening up of his pictorial style was the direct result of this habit on imagination. The painterliness was there from the beginning but constrained by the press (sic) to fashion the experience into this sharp and memorable image' (Patrick McCaughey in the Introduction to the 1987 Retrospective).
Without this urgency and now at a physical and emotional remove from his subject, this painterliness produces the lyrical and epic panoramas of Nolan's prime: 'the tour de force of this series was the thirty-six-foot-long 'Riverbend' in nine panels, where a teeming gum forest formed a frieze behind a placid, shimmering fawn-mauve river. The tall trees, some slightly off-vertical and coloured patchily or streakily in purple fawns and tawny roses, shut out the world's light but are suffused with their own soft and flickering incandescence. The air is uncannily still, and the awe with which Nolan gazed upon Greece and Antarctica possesses him in the bushlands; his Kelly recalls Altdorfer's Knight on the edge of the alien, oppressive forest. Kelly, elusive and flitting like the light itself, haunts the river's edge, and in a series of separate actions in the panels that have a pre-Renaissance simultaneity in storytelling, Kelly stalks and shoots the trooper. While the forest rings with the shot the river in the concluding panels bends into the landscape and floats on as serene and majestic as Matthew Arnold's Oxus' (E. Lynn, loc. cit.)
This heroic landscape was already perceived as the implicit subject of the first Kelly pictures of 1946-7 by John Reed in his article in the 1967 issue of Art and Australia. His commentary reads as well alongside Riverbend where the implied subject of the first Kelly pictures is now explicit: '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)
The subject of the picture is ostensibly the murder of Constable Scanlon by Ned Kelly at Stringybark Creek in the Wombat Ranges of North-eastern Victoria in October 1878. Scanlon was one of three policemen killed by the Kelly Gang of bushrangers at Stringybark Creek in the incident which would culminate in the Gang's apprehension two years later at Glenrowan and Kelly's trial and execution. The subject is a second reprise for Nolan of his first Kelly pictures of 1946-7 which had made his reputation at home and abroad as a leading and radical modern painter in post-war Australia.
Riverbend is as perfect an expression of Nolan in middle-age as the first Kelly series was of Nolan in youth. The hard bright enamel
Ripolin of the first series gives way to more painterly oil. The
prominent figure of Kelly which had dominated the landscape and action now recedes into the bush. The episodic structure of the first series is replaced by a single frieze in which the narrative is taken over by the river landscape: three brief moments in the death of Constable Scanlon, which now appear simultaneously, barely register in the context of this timeless landscape.
If the 40's panels with Kelly in high profile were driven by the young Nolan's emotional identification with his subject, the later Riverbend is conjured from Nolan's memory and imagination. Away from Australia, it is the landscape which lingers and consumes him ('[Riverbend] is a combination (in my mind) of the Goulburn River, at Shepparton where I spent my boyhood holidays, and the Murray... I can still evoke in myself, in my studio on the Thames, the river that I saw as a boy. A big long river, with the sun coming through the leaves, the vertical leaves of the gum trees. I've never seen it anywhere else...' (Nolan interviewed in London, The Listener, 13 Nov. 1969)) just as it consumes and stretches beyond his now outlived alter ego: 'In the Riverbend sequence, the figures of Ned Kelly and a policeman are as inconspicuous as St. Anthony being tempted in a Brueghel landscape. It's a violent enough incident, in which the pursuer is waylaid and killed, but they are diminished by their setting, and treated like small animals camouflaged against larger predators, taking their colour from the pallid trunks of the gum trees. Four panels along, they vanish altogether, like time past, and an immeasurably older past of gums and gunmetal water stretches silently into the future' (Robert Melville in the 1968 exhibition catalogue).
The two Riverbend sequences are part of a group of ambitious polyptychs produced by Nolan in the mid-60s. Most of these rework the heroic themes first tackled in the 40s and now summarise their subjects in single extended panoramas. Technique as well as format changes with a distinct shift to a more painterly treatment: 'The loosening up of his pictorial style was the direct result of this habit on imagination. The painterliness was there from the beginning but constrained by the press (sic) to fashion the experience into this sharp and memorable image' (Patrick McCaughey in the Introduction to the 1987 Retrospective).
Without this urgency and now at a physical and emotional remove from his subject, this painterliness produces the lyrical and epic panoramas of Nolan's prime: 'the tour de force of this series was the thirty-six-foot-long 'Riverbend' in nine panels, where a teeming gum forest formed a frieze behind a placid, shimmering fawn-mauve river. The tall trees, some slightly off-vertical and coloured patchily or streakily in purple fawns and tawny roses, shut out the world's light but are suffused with their own soft and flickering incandescence. The air is uncannily still, and the awe with which Nolan gazed upon Greece and Antarctica possesses him in the bushlands; his Kelly recalls Altdorfer's Knight on the edge of the alien, oppressive forest. Kelly, elusive and flitting like the light itself, haunts the river's edge, and in a series of separate actions in the panels that have a pre-Renaissance simultaneity in storytelling, Kelly stalks and shoots the trooper. While the forest rings with the shot the river in the concluding panels bends into the landscape and floats on as serene and majestic as Matthew Arnold's Oxus' (E. Lynn, loc. cit.)
This heroic landscape was already perceived as the implicit subject of the first Kelly pictures of 1946-7 by John Reed in his article in the 1967 issue of Art and Australia. His commentary reads as well alongside Riverbend where the implied subject of the first Kelly pictures is now explicit: '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)