Sothebys, Fine Australian Paintings and Books, Melbourne 23/8/1992, Lot 225.
Private collection, Melbourne

Australian galleries, Melbourne;

Private collection, Melbourne, then by descent;

Private collection, Sydney

Collection of the artist;
Private collection, Queensland

A magical feeling for the spirit of place combines with a grand vision of the ocean and adjacent landscape in this large scale, light-filled work. Here the artist, as expressed in his own words, invites the viewer ‘…to live in the vision itself.’ The Robinsons purchased a retreat near Byron Bay in 2005 and the paintings from this area are both rare and among the artist’s finest.

The beautifully detailed foreground foliage in the present picture demonstrates aptly William Robinson’s exceptional skills as a colourist, and in the rendering of the ocean his ability to capture extraordinary effects with clarity of light.

Of his solo exhibition at the Ray Hughes Gallery in 1994, critic John MacDonald stated ’Robinson is the only non-Aboriginal artist since Fred Williams and John Olsen to give… an entirely new view on the Australian landscape’.

William Robinson is represented widely in public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia; Australian university collections; Parliament House, Canberra; many Australian regional galleries; Artbank; Museum of Brisbane and State Library Queensland; all Australian mainland state collections; and internationally in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Vatican Museum, Vatican City; the Auckland Art Gallery and Waikato Art Museum, Hamilton in New Zealand.

Dr Sinclair Gillies, purchased from Dr. S.A. Smith, through J. Brackenberg (300 gns), Private collection, Sydney

Deutscher and Hackett, 13 September 2016, Lot 7

This work was created in the same year that Kentridge produced the opera, Lulu. The opera is centred around the protagonist, a woman who during the course of the performance encounters many lovers and several husbands each time remaining faithful, not to the men but to her own desires. Lulu can’t be the woman the men imagine her to be. She can never reconcile her desires as the femme fatal nor as the faithful quiet wife. ‘Struggle for a good heart’ as seen in this work, speaks to that inner struggle.

Private collection, London

Agnew’s Gallery, London, 2011

Private collection, Sydney

Nicholas Harding, Theo Waddington Fine Art, London, 6 February – 4 March 1997

London to Sydney, Agnew’s Gallery, London with Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 8 – 19 November 2011

Nicholas Harding is recognised as one of Australia’s pre-eminent contemporary landscape painters. His skill as a draughtsman underlies the strength of composition, line and rhythm in his work and Burwood (1996) is a fine example of his renderings in ink on paper. His technique of gouging the paper’s surface to create texture imparts a sense of vigour to the finished artwork, while the movement and speed of the railway is cleverly evoked through the strong lines of his train station landscape. The dark verticals of the light post and station architecture in the foreground echo the central telegraph pole at the base of the stairs, towards which the viewer’s eye is led by the white diagonal lines that draw us downwards to the heart of the composition. A sense of dynamism is heightened by the receding, echoed forms of the railway power lines that take the eye from this central point on a journey to the horizon, carrying the viewer off to a place of their own imagining.

In praise of Harding’s 2010 exhibition Nicholas Harding: Drawn to Paint, held at the S. H. Ervin Gallery (16-March 7 January 2010), Sydney Morning Herald art critic John McDonald wrote:

“There are some artists, such as Russell Drysdale, who can only be seen in their entirety when drawings are exhibited alongside paintings. Harding is in the same category and this has been recognised by curator, Stephen Alderton, who has included a large variety of pieces, from small notebook sketches made with marker pen, to elaborate, large-scale works in charcoal. We see the artist as a compulsive sketcher who views everything as a potential subject. His larger drawings are labour-intensive exercises in which he has dampened the paper then worked and reworked areas until the surface becomes scarred. These works are claustrophobic but wonderfully expressive. There is nothing quite like them in Australian art.”[i]

Harding is also highly acclaimed for his portraiture and among his many awards are the Archibald Prize, of which he was recipient in 2001, the Dobell Drawing Prize (2001), the Kedumba Drawing Award (1994) and the Mosman Art Prize (1993). He has also been awarded a Cité Internationale des Arts residency in Paris, 2013.

His work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, The National Portrait Gallery, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Newcastle Region Art Gallery, The Maitland Regional Gallery, The Tweed River Regional Art Gallery, The University of Sydney Union Art Collection, The University of New South Wales Art Collection, the collection of Opera Australia and important private and corporate collections in Australia, Asia, Europe and the USA.

[i] John McDonald, ‘Nicholas Harding, Jeff Mincham’ in Spectrum, The Sydney Morning Herald, January 30, 2010.