Lot Essay
In the 1960s Nolan's painting makes a distinct shift from the hard edged and assertive images which had dominated in the 1940s and 1950s towards a series of gentler and more painterly images in which his subjects begin to appear consumed by or submerged within the landscape. In the African paintings which followed his visit to Africa in late 1962 the idea of unity of the subject and its environment predominates: 'After his journey to Africa in autumn 1962, Nolan said 'I feel there's a kind of painting to be done with animals and natural camouflage that would be, in a sense, a non-painting; there would be a total disappearance of the image - but if you stared at the painting long enough, the image would eventually waft up.' The idea of dissolving the image and letting it assert itself so that the whole painting was itself the image had been implied in previous work; this was not an impressionistic method ... nor was it a case of rendering objects by presenting their essential features simultaneously as in Cubism; he wanted to obtain a relation between the object and its environment of now-you-see-it-now-you-don't. He developed his penchant for the fluid, dashing and diaphanous and sometimes gave an elusive permanence to transience, even with an elephant lumbering across the grassland.' (E. Lynn, Sidney Nolan, myth and imagery, London, 1967, p. 41.)