Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

to a location in northern Queensland: the tree, Brachychiton rupestre, is characterised by its bulbous water-retaining trunk and light foliage. Although there is no conclusive documentation, this work almost certainly dates from 1950. That year was a busy one for Drysdale. In December he showed his first exhibition of paintings at the Leicester Galleries in London.8A number of the paintings shown there were first seen at the Macquarie Galleries exhibition in Sydney in August 1950 and in fact the Sydney exhibition was clearly considered as a rehearsal: a note in the catalogue states that 'these paintings form the greater part of an exhibition to be held in London this year'.9 Although Australian landscape was purchased by the Queensland National Art Gallery from the Macquarie Galleries in February 1951, it must have been a work of the previous year, given Drysdale's absence from Australia shortly before the acquisition.10Paintings of north Queensland were shown in both the Sydney and London exhibitions: notably Bottle Tree, Anthills on rocky plain and Yorkey's Nob. Australian landscape relates to these works and to travels during the earlier part of 1950 and may have been included in an exhibition 'Studies for Compositions' held during June 1950, also at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney.1 The Queensland location naturally interested the Queensland National Art Gallery. At no point in his painting of northern Australia did Drysdale show lush growth or relinquish his earth-based palette for tropical green. He persisted in seeing through to the geological base of the country, highlighting its sculptural qualities. His sensitivity to earth formations had intensified immediately before this period in the old mining country near Hill End in New South Wales where he worked from 1947 to 1949, and, earlier, by his experiences of drought. In his brief introduction to Drysdale's London exhibition, Australian art historian Bernard Smith contrasted the 'largely deciduous' beauty of Britain with Drysdale's quite different perception, which could 'widen the aesthetic frontiers of our vision'.12That exhibition was well recognised, no doubt helped by the interest of Sir Kenneth Clark who lent his Hill End painting of 1948-49, The councillor's house. The Australian countryside, particularly the inland distances, and Australian painters such as Drysdale and Nolan, were increasingly well known from 1950. In Australia as well, the particular qualities of the outback found new appreciation. For Drysdale, the shift from Hill End in inland New South Wales to the tropical country and coast of far north Queensland marks an important change in his pictorial geography. His familiarity with Queensland followed his 1947 appointment as a director of the Pioneer Sugar Refinery Russell Drysdale Australian landscape C.1950 Pen and coloured inks, with watercolour wash on buff wove paper 27.6 X 37.6cm Purchased 1951 Queensland Art Gallery located in the Burdekin area. However, Queensland works do not appear before 1950, after the period of the Hill End landscapes and figure paintings from 1947 to 1949, in which Drysdale painted in close association with Donald Friend. In the 1949 exhibition at Macquarie Galleries there were twelve paintings, all relating to Hill End, suggesting again that the first Queensland subjects belong to 1950!3 Australian landscape stands at the beginning, then, of the exploration of northern Australia to which Drysdale devoted a great deal of subsequent journeying. As he wrote to Donald Friend during a north Queensland tour: 'I am doing what I always have done... just be with people and their surroundings and absorb i t ... and make notes on the way'.14 This Queensland landscape has the fluidity, speed and grace of Drysdale's best notational work. The wide view has been quickly annotated on paper prepared with a pencil 'frame'. The configuration of distant mountains on the right-hand side and the strong shape of the foreground tree on the left is a conventional one; it is a constant format in Drysdale's work — he uses only a small range of compositional types to which he returns again and again. Black ink delineates the features of the landscape with economy — the trees, the mountains in the distance — and the watercolour washes, wet and rapid, suggest a richly coloured landscape under a strong sky. In an important lecture given in Brisbane in 1961, Bernard Smith singled out Drysdale's achievement in landscape painting, claiming that its real significance in the history of Australian culture had not been fully grasped.15In particular, he referred to the achievement of 'a hard view' of the landscape, in contrast to the pastoral tradition. As the Queensland Art Gallery works demonstrate, Drysdale reverses the painting tradition of'Australia felix'. Margaret Plant is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Visual Arts, Monash University, Melbourne. 'SILENCE REIGNS HERE': Russell Drysdale and the Australian Landscape 191