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Lot Essay
Saddleback Mountain is located near the town of Kiama which is on the south coast of New South Wales, approximately one and a half hours drive from Sydney. Rees first began painting in this area in the early 1940s, with his acquisition of a holiday house at Werri Beach which lies to the south of Kiama. Saddleback Mountain is a well-known tourist attraction with a lookout from which approximately two hundred and fifty kilometres of coastline is visible.
In the catalogue essay for the 1969 Lloyd Rees Retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Renee Free discussed Rees's earlier Illawarra coast paintings, dating from 1942 - 1956 in the following extract:
"Gerringong - the hills, Mt. Saddleback, Werri Beach, the slopes near Berry, the coast of Kiama became his Campagna. Too green to be the ideal country, neverthless the simple shapes of the landscape were an inspiration, at evening Mt Saddleback had a sombre grandeur. The divided zones, the small facets of broken colour, change to sweeping curves unifying the space and overall colour with tonal changes... Rees's landscapes acquire associations by their generalized forms, and their suggestions of another period. These hill landscapes are the product of meditation on motif over a long period, reminding us of Cézanne's struggle with Mont St. Victoire." (R Free, Lloyd Rees Retrospective, Sydney, 1969, pp.9-10)
This work was exhibited in the first exhibition of Rees's work to be held in London.
In the catalogue essay for the 1969 Lloyd Rees Retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Renee Free discussed Rees's earlier Illawarra coast paintings, dating from 1942 - 1956 in the following extract:
"Gerringong - the hills, Mt. Saddleback, Werri Beach, the slopes near Berry, the coast of Kiama became his Campagna. Too green to be the ideal country, neverthless the simple shapes of the landscape were an inspiration, at evening Mt Saddleback had a sombre grandeur. The divided zones, the small facets of broken colour, change to sweeping curves unifying the space and overall colour with tonal changes... Rees's landscapes acquire associations by their generalized forms, and their suggestions of another period. These hill landscapes are the product of meditation on motif over a long period, reminding us of Cézanne's struggle with Mont St. Victoire." (R Free, Lloyd Rees Retrospective, Sydney, 1969, pp.9-10)
This work was exhibited in the first exhibition of Rees's work to be held in London.