Nolan’s Adelaide ladies: from English soil and Adelaide

Hats were the trigger for Sidney’s Adelaide Ladies. The first half of this group clearly owes its existence to the accessory, a peculiar collision of images imprinted from the Adelaide Festival, the writings of Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick White and the shadow-lines of Rembrandt.

In his youth Sidney did work for Fayrefield Hat Factory in Melbourne, and assisted commercial artists on a variety of projects. Many featured headshots of models wearing Fayrefield hats set against painted backgrounds. These experiences are immediately recognisable from ‘Woman bouquet’ (no.1) through to ‘Portrait of a lady’ (no.8).

You may also recognise, in this first group, the sprawling images conjured up by Patrick White’s bitter women in ‘Riders in the Chariot’.

Patrick was quick to lay claim to Sidney’s Ladies origins, enthusing in a letter on the 12th June 1964, the day after the last painting was dated, “I hear quite often from the Nolans who are returning (to Australia) next year as a result of an idea I gave him for a new series of paintings”²

From the 29th of April to the 6th of May, hats flicker frequently, like a faulty neon sign, then suddenly burn bright again in the group that follows on May12th.

I have deemed April 27th 1964 as my ‘official’ start of the series – after Sidney’s birthday on the 22nd, ANZAC day on the 25th and his 26th diary entry. Although there are earlier references to the Adelaide Ladies, it was from April 27th that they begin to promenade proudly from the studio, continuing on an almost daily basis for 46 days.

Sidney first found his mood in ‘Head bouquet’ (no. 1) and ‘Head in profile’ (no. 2) with their sideways looks and rich colours. He followed with a lightning strike of bitterness in ‘Woman cat eyes’ (no. 3) and a more tempered sourness in the narrow eyes and wrinkled skin of ‘Suburb’ (no. 4). Mid-century ‘Englishness’ arrived in ‘Woman hand on hat’ (no. 5) and continued through to ‘Portrait of a lady’ (no. 8) with embellished hats, shadowed eyes locked in disapproving gazes and crimped lips. In ‘Woman with spiked hat’ (no. 6), ‘Woman pink flower hat’ (no. 7) and ‘Portrait of a lady’ (no. 8) it is also easy to see Rembrandt’s influence in the shadows cast across the eyes, a gentle precursor to some of Sidney’s later hat-wearing Gallipoli heads.

Sidney’s opening salvo of flowers, spikes, felt and feathers faithfully reflects his belief that the middle class English culture he saw at the Adelaide Festival was still firmly rooted in Australian consciousness – “that is their culture and that is what they have inherited”, he said “they’ve got Keats and Shakespeare; that’s what they’ve been taught at school and that’s what they’ve got to deal with as much as possible…they tend to come back to what they know, what came out of the ships”.³

Then from ‘Girl and the moon’ (no. 9) on April 29th through to ‘Head untitled’ (no. 14) on May 5th, the characters stumble, temporarily losing their hats and their geography, in the same way Patrick White stumbled with the geography of the town of Sarsaparilla from “Riders in the Chariot”. Patrick said he hadn’t located the novel in rural Australia “Nor can one say it takes place in a suburban town. Rather it converges on Sydney and the suburban outskirts from England, the north of Germany and somewhere in the north of this state”.⁴

When, on May 6th, the Ladies don headwear once again and dress in richer, deeper colours, they shift from aloof England to the stoic look of the “Fatherland” and the two works that follow, ‘Woman red hat’ (no. 15) and ‘Woman white flowers’ (no. 16) were a likely commentary on the identity of Indigenous Australians.

The last painting from this group is titled ‘Woman laughing’ (no. 17). She is the prelude to the second major group in the series and heralds an important change in Sidney’s style. Dated May 12th, she belongs to the same date as all six works categorised in Group 2, but she follows firmly in the style of her Group 1 predecessors. Her orange and green hat, dissolving face and red lips open a window to the make-up of distinctive faces on dark backgrounds and hats in irregular patches of light that follow the same day.

There were certain days, Sidney said, “if the moment is right you start to work away quite consciously and the paint itself, which is just an intractable material, actually begins to spread itself into forms”.⁵

It appears that after a halting start, May 12th and the second group turned out to be one of those days for Sidney.

“Nolan often seemed to lose himself…drifting into a sort of weightless trance while the images continued to build to their conclusion”.

Brian Adams⁶

 

121 x 121cm, oil on hardboard.

Exhibited

• ‘Nolan’, David Jones’ Art Gallery, Sydney, May 1965 (one of nos.19-22, all 121 x 121cm and all entitled ‘Head’)
• Possibly ‘Sidney Nolan Recent Paintings’, Albert Hall, Canberra, 26 Aug – 8 Sep 1965, nos.25-39, titled “Heads, Faces and Hats”1964

Literature

• ‘Exhibition by Nolan’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6th May 1965, p.9 (illus) Film & Television
• ABC news segment Ref 438389 ‘Painter Nolan attends opening of exhibition’, May 1965

Provenance

• Location unknown

Sidney was well known for repeating formally satisfying motifs and ‘Girl and the moon’ is the first image of the series to draw thematically from his own work (also see Ned Kelly on p.128-131). ‘Boy and the moon’ painted in 1939-40 was an abstract work Sidney described as looking “like a human being with a neck on it”. Surrounded by controversy, the highly original image helped to establish his career and he repeated it several times – on the roof of Heide in 1942 (where Air Force Intelligence thought he was signalling Japanese bombers), in 1962 when he painted it 10m wide as a backdrop for Covent Garden’s production of ‘The Rite of Spring,’⁸ and here among the Adelaide Ladies, where the face and the crescent moon combine to create the same abstract shape.

IMAGE CREDITS

All images of Sidney Nolan paintings are © The Sidney Nolan Trust / Bridgeman Art Gallery.