Sidney Nolan valuation
Painted Ned Kelly as a black helmet with a slot in it, and made Australia's defining image.
Sidney Nolan was born in Melbourne in 1917, worked in a hat factory, and deserted from the Australian army in 1944 — which is part of why the outlaw suited him.
What a work by Sidney Nolan is worth
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Bio
Sidney Nolan was born in Melbourne in 1917, worked in a hat factory, and deserted from the Australian army in 1944 — which is part of why the outlaw suited him. The first Ned Kelly series, twenty-seven paintings made in 1946 and 1947 in Ripolin enamel on hardboard, reduces Kelly to a flat black armoured helmet with a rectangular slot against the flat ochre of the bush, and remains the most recognisable image in Australian art. He also painted Burke and Wills, Gallipoli, the drought carcasses and Leda. He settled in Britain, was knighted, and died in 1992.
This is principally an Australian market, though Nolan's long British residence gives it a London component. The first Kelly series is in the National Gallery of Australia; later Kelly paintings, of which there are many across four decades, form the core of what trades and are valued by date and quality rather than by subject alone. Ripolin enamel on hardboard is the recurring condition problem — the board warps and the enamel cracks and lifts. Works on paper and prints are numerous, and forgeries of the Kelly images exist.
At a glance
- Born
- 22 April 1917, Carlton
- Died
- 28 November 1992, London
- Movement
- Angry Penguins
Heide, the Whitechapel and The Rodd
Nolan painted the first Kelly series while living at Heide, the Melbourne home of the patrons John and Sunday Reed, and was part of the circle around the magazine Angry Penguins. He settled in Britain in the 1950s, had a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1957, was knighted in 1981 and died in London in 1992.
His last home, The Rodd, near Presteigne on the Welsh border, is the base of the Sidney Nolan Trust, which keeps a collection and archive. A history through his London dealers or the Trust is worth setting out in full.
Ern Malley, the Reed gift and the Eureka mural
Nolan painted the cover for the Ern Malley issue of Angry Penguins in June 1944, and later said the hoax poems gave him the nerve to set a strange object against the Australian bush. Sunday Reed kept twenty-five of the first Kelly paintings when he left Heide and gave them to the National Gallery of Australia in 1977. Works from a second Kelly series of the mid-1950s went to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and to the Tate.
In Paris he studied engraving with S. W. Hayter, and he designed the dust jackets of more than seventy books. In 1961 he painted more than 250 works on Auschwitz in response to the Eichmann trial, first shown by the Sidney Nolan Trust at Presteigne in 2021. The Eureka Stockade mural of 1965, twenty metres of enamel on copper, is at the Reserve Bank of Australia in Melbourne, and Paradise Garden, made between 1968 and 1970, comprises 1,320 floral panels in crayon and dye.
Best auction results
- First-class Marksman A$5.4m
- Enamel on board, 1946 · Sydney · March 2010
- Publicly reported
- Including the buyer's premium. The only painting from the first Kelly series held by neither the National Gallery of Australia nor Heide, bought by the Art Gallery of New South Wales; a record for Australian art at auction at the time.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
