Sir Sidney Nolan AC OM CBE, among the most original and inventive Australian artist of the post-war decades, was one of the few Australian artists to achieve an international reputation in the twentieth century. After becoming associated with the modernist art patrons John and Sunday Reed, he made the complex series of paintings of Ned Kelly for which he is best known at their home Heide between 1945 and 1947. From 1950 Nolan lived abroad, but returned to Australia at regular intervals and continued to explore Australian themes and landscapes. A major retrospective of his work, Sidney Nolan – A New Retrospective, held at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2007, brought together more than 100 of his works.
Nolan painted a number of self portraits, beginning early in his career. The merged inky blues, pinks and subtle greys of this example are characteristic of the artist's late style. While there is a trace of a satisfied smile, the face is elusive, hazy, veiled, with the head apparently oscillating between profile and three-quarter view. Ultimately, the painting is ambiguous, seeming, like all Nolan's self portraits, to allude simultaneously to his public persona and his internal imagination – to both the mask, and the inner poetry of the artist.
Gift of Hon RL Hunter KC 2006. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program.
© Sidney Nolan/Copyright Agency, 2024
A self portrait of artist Sidney Nolan, created in 1988. Oil on composition board measuring 121 centimetres in height and 91 centimetres in length.
The frame is a warm gold with soft pink textured strokes worked in. The portrait focuses on Nolan’s head and upper torso and the use of colour with blue tones, blushing pinks and subtle greys unifies the background and figure. Large brush marks create texture in the otherwise flat blue and grey toned background. This contrasts with the figure where the artist has applied the paint with his fingers, and the white surface of the board is revealed in sections.
Nolan is unclothed, painted in an abstract style with colours alternating between fleshy pink tones and a bruisy blue. His head is a bulbous oval, the back of the head carries the shape of his mid-length wispy hair and is rendered in smudged finger marks. His face is ambiguous, with a sense of being both in profile and in three-quarter view. A set of round glasses perch on the bridge of his nose which is in profile. Playing around with perspective, the glasses are shown in three-quarter view as if he was turning towards us. His left eye is blurred, disguised by the frames. His lips are in profile view, stained a deep blue and heavily smudged with finger marks dragged through the paint.
Trailing from his neck in the profile view is a wobbly striped blue and orange tie. His body is cropped at the chest and shoulders by the frame.
The artist signature, ‘nolan’ above the numbers ‘88’, are painted in small orange letters in the bottom right-hand corner.
Audio description written by Alana Sivell and voiced by Molly Desmond
Sidney Nolan (age 71 in 1988)
Hon. R L. Hunter KC (1 portrait)
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
1 May 2014
In Persuasion (1818), a long walk on a fine autumn day affords Anne Elliot an opportunity to ruminate wistfully and at great length upon declining happiness, youth and hope.
Works by Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan bring the desert, the misty seashore and the hot Monaro plains to exhibition Open Air: Portraits in the landscape.
