Painter and illustrator Samuel Johnson Woolf was born in New York and studied there at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design. During the First World War he spent four months in France with the American Expeditionary Forces, creating frank visual accounts of trench warfare from firsthand experience. Woolf served as an artist-correspondent again during the Second World War having become highly regarded in the interwar years for his portraits and for his ability to extract confidences from his sitters as he worked. He drew some of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century, among them Franklin D Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gertrude Stein, Henry Ford and Walt Disney, as well as international figures including Leon Trotsky and King George V.
Woolf made this drawing of the Australian pastoralist Sir Sidney Kidman (1857–1935) to accompany an article that appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on 3 July 1932. The article described the cattleman as 'a friendly Australian of little personal pretense, who … started out from scratch in South Australia's back of the beyond and in fifty years has amassed one of the world’s most incredible fortunes'.
Purchased 2009
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Sir Sidney Kidman (1857-1935) is inscribed in Australian legend as the ‘Cattle King’.
Encompassing the 1820s to the 2020s, Time and Line showcases the depth and extent of our drawing collection.
