Beschreibung:

Sidney Nolan (1917-1992)Jerilderie, 1956
initialled lower right: 'N.'
inscribed verso: 'Backcloth. / JERILDERIE / for / BANK / + / ROYAL HOTEL'
ripolin enamel on board
30.5 x 43.0cm (12 x 16 15/16in).FootnotesPROVENANCE
Mr John Sumner, CBE, AO (1924-2013) Melbourne, a gift from the artist
Ms Desmonde Florence Downing (1920-1975), a gift from the above
The Fred and Elinor Wrobel Collection, Sydney
EXHIBITED
Sidney Nolan, Landscapes and Legends: a retrospective exhibition: 1937-1987, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 3 June - 26 July 1987; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 11 August - 27 September 1987; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 21 October - 29 November 1987; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 15 December 1987 - 31 January 1988 (label attached verso)
Larrikins in London : an Australian presence in 1960's London, Ivan Doherty Gallery, University of New South Wales, 4 September - 11 October 2003
LITERATURE
Jane Clark, Sidney Nolan Landscapes and Legends, National Gallery of Victoria, Cambridge University Press and International Cultural Corporation of Australia Limited, 1987, p. 122
T. G. Rosenthal, Sidney Nolan Thames & Hudson, London, 2002, p. 257 (illus.)
RELATED WORKS
Ned Kelly, 1956, enamel paint and collage on composition board, 28.0 x 40.5cm, see Sotheby's Australia, 20 April 2010, lot 58
Bush for Kelly Camp, Sherritt's Hut, Glenrowan Hotel, 1956, enamel paint on composition board, 31.7 x 44.5cm, see Sotheby's Australia, 20 April 2010, lot 59
In 1940 at just 22 years old, Sidney Nolan was commissioned to create the stage sets for Serge Lifar's Icare, followed by the University of Sydney Dramatic Society's production of Jean Cocteau's Orphee in 1948. His contribution to the performing arts only intensified once he moved to London, with such triumphs as his costume and set designs for Kenneth McMillan's modern interpretation of Stravinsky's ballet, The Rite of Spring, at the Royal Opera House, Convent Garden in 1962. 'It was inevitable, of course, that in 1956, Nolan should have been involved in the staging of Douglas Stewart's play, Ned Kelly. The Jerilderie Backloth for act I (the present work) is not only typical of Nolan's swashbuckling stage designs but also archetypal Kelly Imagery.'1
Initially created by Stewart as a radio play for the ABC in 1942, Ned Kelly was modified into a stage play by producer John Sumner, performed by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust in 1956. Stewart noted in the programme his rationale behind the drive to bring the enigmatic bushranger to life: 'The Greek and Elizabethan playwrights had wicked Kings and Queens to analyse. Here in Australia, with royalty remote and constitutional, we have to look about for a different kind of symbolic figure: and that is where Ned Kelly comes in. He is symbolic, a national legend, because in his best aspects he typifies some of the virtues of our early colonial period – courage, dashing horsemanship, resistance to tyranny, a passion for freedom – and he is humanly interesting for his failings' - a shared sentiment that led Nolan to consistently weave narratives of the celebrated outlaw throughout his oeuvre.
Nolan's subconscious connection with the 19th century bushranger had begun much earlier. The 'first series' of paintings (dated between 1946-47) which were given to the National Gallery of Australia by Sunday Reed in 1977, depict a narrative-based sequence. Each work depicts different episodes of the story of the Kelly Gang, from the shooting at Stringybark Creek, the siege at Glenrowan, to the trial and the subsequent hanging of Kelly, and is renowned to this day as one of the greatest series of Australian paintings of the 20th century, becoming as legendary as Kelly himself.
The present work belongs to a small group of curtain or backcloth studies designed in response to his successful Redfern exhibition of the 'second series' in 1955. Nolan depicts Kelly mounted on horseback, fused with his iconic centaur-like silhouette striding in to Jerilderie, the location of the infamous bank heist in 1879. This small prized work, marries iconography from both his first and second series, integrating motifs from such masterpieces as Ned Kelly, 1946, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and The Glenrowan Siege, 1955, in the Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth.
Alex Clark
1. T.G. Rosenthal, Sidney Nolan Thames & Hudson, London, 2002, p. 25