Landscape with Figures
Robert Dickerson
Details
- Artist
- Robert Dickerson
- Title
- Landscape with Figures
- Year
- 1946
- Medium
- enamel paint on composition board
- Size
- 76 x 91 cm
- Details
signed lower right: Dickerson 11/10/46
Reproduced courtesy the copyright holder.
- Stock Number
- 213112
Provenance
Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney
Lauraine Diggins Gallery, Melbourne
David Bremer, Melbourne
Deutscher Fine Art, Carlton
John and Marita McIntosh, Melbourne
The Collection of John and Marita McIntosh, Mossgreen, Melbourne, 15 October 2013, lot 11 as Landscape with Figures
Private collection, Melbourne
Further Information
Dickerson was a self-taught artist, visiting the National Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Australian Museum as a boy, closely examining different artists’ techniques. He enlisted and served in the Royal Australian Air Force and when the Second World War ended was in Morotai (a Dutch Island in the East Indies, now Malaysia).
“Waiting many months in the islands to be demobbed after the war was over, could have been a time of great tedium... Bob began to draw and paint the children of Morotai. ‘They used to pose for me and sit playing while I drew them. ... That feeling about kids persisted in my work because I felt strongly about the children of the whole bloody world as a matter of fact, not the fat complacent little creeps, but the hungry ones.’ ”¹
On his return to Australia, he began to paint, working with a limited palette and often using enamel on cardboard. He held his first exhibition at Blaxland Gallery, Sydney in 1949 and his reputation as an artist was established during the 1950s with the support of John Reed and Rudy Komon with whom he exhibited from 1959. His figurative work portrays individuals in both urban and rural settings with an overriding emotional mood and psychological insight, all conveyed in Dickerson’s unique and recognisable visual language, one he continued with throughout his artistic practice.
¹. Jenny Dickerson, Robert Dickerson: Against the Tide, Pandanus Press, 1994, pp32-33